Quotes from Johann Hari

The 1993 National Household Survey10 on Drug Abuse found that 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of the arrests for it.

Ironically, learning that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance made me feel unbalanced. Somebody once told me1 that giving a person a story about why they are in pain is one of the most powerful things you can ever do. Taking away the story for your pain is just as powerful: I felt like I was on a rocky ship and somebody had taken away the railings.

Irving didn't want this to be true—it contradicted his own published work—but he told me, "One thing I do pride myself on is looking at the data, and allowing my mind to be changed when the data's different than I expected.

I don't look at screens for two hours before I go to bed,

more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention.

It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics and found that "statistical analysis shows consistently that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors.

Standardized schooling too often drains learning of meaning, while progressive schooling tries to infuse it into everything. This is why the best research on this question shows that kids at more progressive schools are more likely to retain what they've learned in the long run, more likely to want to carry on learning, and more likely to be able to apply what they've learned to new problems. These, it seems to me, are among the most precious forms of attention.

The concept of "work hours" is vanishing for most people—so this thing that 87 percent of us don't enjoy is spreading over more and more of our lives.

right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger's agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war?

If there isn't a group doing what you believe needs to be done, set it up and email me at [email protected], and I'll add it to the book's website and to future editions of this book.

have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

Instead of saying our pain is an irrational spasm to be taken away with drugs, they see that we should start to listen to it and figure out what it is telling us.

There's a force that is fracturing all of us.

Joe felt like his human thoughts and insights and feelings were almost a defect.

forms of mental distress such as depression and anxiety have three kinds of cause: biological, psychological, and social.19 They are all real. This is known as the "bio-psycho-social model."20 It's simple. All three sets of factors are relevant, and to understand a person's depression and anxiety, you need to look at them all.

Are we going to stand up and fight invasive technologies or are we going to let them win by default?

When we hear about "drug-related violence," we picture somebody getting high and killing people. We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino's violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf. Professor

I would start once again to have strong recurring thoughts that said: life is pointless; everything you're doing is pointless; this whole thing is a fucking waste of time. It would be a thrum of unending anxiety.

while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.

The study found that 'technological distraction' – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can't get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs.