Quotes from Johann Hari

Cat Among the Pigeons

João believes that addiction is an expression of despair, and the best way to deal with despair is to offer a better life, where the addict doesn't feel the need to anesthetize herself anymore. Giving rewards, rather than making threats, is the path out. Congratulate them. Give them options. Help them build a life.

Any and all errors in this book are entirely my responsibility. It's very important to me to make sure all the facts in this book are correct. If our extensive fact-checking process has missed any errors, please e-mail me at [email protected] and we'll get them corrected in later editions—go to this book's website for a full list of any I have been made aware of.

This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition, and nobody knows where it came from, even now.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

In a world that thinks there's no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It's like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

And if the standards of the culture were wrong then, I realized, they can be wrong now. You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture - but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life.

Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

We have run this historical experiment once before, they point out, and we know what one of the effects will be. When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn't rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and '80s. At

My desire for a solution that was private and personal - the psychological equivalent of a pill - was in fact a symptom of the mindset that had caused my depression and anxiety in the first place.

The stunning thing was that loneliness is not merely the result of depression," he told me. "Indeed—it leads to depression.

After California made it much easier to get marijuana from your doctor—anyone claiming a bad back was given a permit—traffic accidents fell by 8 percent,33 because lots of people made this shift, and driving when you're stoned (while a bad idea) is nowhere near as dangerous as driving drunk.

What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk to getting stoned. After California made it much easier to get marijuana from your doctor—anyone claiming a bad back was given a permit—traffic accidents fell by 8 percent, because lots of people made this shift, and driving when you're stoned (while a bad idea) is nowhere near as dangerous as driving drunk.

I had to read through these files several times before I realized the significance of this accusation. At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to—by the drug dealers themselves. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.

Why is alcohol sanctioned and smiled at, while the police crack down constantly on weed—when it seemed to him that the weed smokers cause a lot less trouble than the drinkers?

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it;s your pain.

Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering—what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably—was the opposite of attention, and that's why I felt guilty about doing it. I realized I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention—and a necessary one.

The you that exists in the present—right now—wants to pursue your deeper goals, and wants to be a better person. But you know you're fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.

It turned out pre-commitment was strikingly successful—resolving clearly to do something, and making a pledge that they'd stick to it, made the men significantly better at holding out.

This use of solitary confinement is a standard punishment in American prisons. Not long before this, a mentally disabled man in another Arizona prison called Mark Tucker was kept in solitary for so many years, with his pleas for a cellmate refused, that he eventually set himself on fire. In the hospital, with 80 percent of his body burned, he was informed that the Department of Corrections was charging him $1.8 million to pay for the medical care14 to treat his injuries.

like putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb. [When] you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let's get to the deeper problem.

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.