I've been sitting on my library copy of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari for weeks, trying to figure out a way I could review it that will do justice to all the facts and ideas it gave me to chew over. Well, after three renewals and exactly zero words written, the book is due back tomorrow, and it's officially time to get down to business. Cue the listicle! (My god, Blogger recognizes "listicle" as a word now. These times we live in...)

In just under 400 pages including endnotes and citations, London-based journalist Hari weaves together the origins of the American war on drugs with the stories of dealers, police officers and doctors forced to operate under the often draconian (and, even more often, implicitly racist) laws borne by it. He also explores how other countries—including Canada, Switzerland and Portugal—regulate substances and how they deal with addiction and recovery.

Like I said, there is so much to discuss here, but, instead of trying to summarize all of it, I'm going to leave you with three of the most interesting (and infuriating, and disheartening...) facts I learned while reading.

1. The racist impetus of changing gun laws.

In the 1920s, police forces in the Southern states increased the caliber of their guns because "[c]ocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching" (pg. 27).

This is not the first book I've read that discusses how drug law enforcement is disproportionately focused on people (especially men) of color due to political/media fearmongering (e.g., The New Jim Crow, Just Mercy), but this particular example of a racist falsehood giving birth to new legislation stopped me in my tracks early on in the book.

2. The follow-up experiment no one knows about.

3. Surprise! The father of the drug war "dealt drugs" and became an addict himself.

Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the man behind the earliest calls for action against "the marihuana evil" (pg. 16) and the menace of the drug-addicted black man, ensured that an influential (white) member of Congress had access to his drug of choice: heroin. "The bureau even picked up the tab until the day the congressman died" (pg. 297-298) and blocked journalists that attempted to break the story. Toward the end of his life, Anslinger became addicted to morphine to treat his angina.

I can't even attempt to swallow the amount of hypocrisy here.

If you have any interest in learning about the long, sordid history of the war on drugs, the impact drug laws are still having today, and the ways other countries navigate drug regulation, I implore you to pick up this book.