a review by

Jansen Estrup

Johann Hari's book, Chasing the Scream (Bloomsbury 2015), is subtitled, The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

One of the finest books published in a decade, Hari's odessey is brilliant in concept, daring in scope and epic in execution. The characters he encountered, dangers he braved and journey he documents make it an adventure of our age.

No less world-wide than other 20^th Century wars, the War on Drugs has its villains, victims and heroes, violence, waste, corruption at high and low levels and a dizzying array of dead ends from prisons to mass graves. Hari covers them all, including a convincing list of solutions to bouy our hopes.

Hari's real-life characters range from well-known, like recently convicted Sheriff Joe Arpio of Arizona, to secretive Harry Anslinger, the man who started it all back in 1900. Unlike his counterpart in the federal government, the publicity hound J. Edgar Hoover, Anslinger cringed from the public eye and built his organization in the shadows, too. But a phone call from him to almost any world leader caused high-anxiety from Amsterdam to Hong Kong.

You'll also recognize the New Orleans Black Hand, '20s gangster Arnold Rothstein and jazz icon Billie Holiday, but there are the unsung oponents of drug prohibition, Medical Doctors Henry Smith Williams and Gabor Mate, who acknowledge addiction as a health epidemic, not a criminal matter. One of them was destroyed by Anslinger, the other runs a clinic for addicts.

You'll drive into the strongholds of infamous drug kingpins, in Tijuana, Mexico and New York boroughs, learn how 13 year olds become masters of assassination and turf warfare … and die before they're twenty.

And you'll learn who profits and who pays the bill. You will understand why Richard Nixon needed to expand the drug war in the late '60s, who his administration meant to destroy and how his propaganda came to warp the attitudes of two generations.

Hopefully, some of the proven remedies will change your mind about the whole sordid mess and prompt you to action in your neighborhood and at the polls.

Highly recommended for ages 12 and above, hopefully together with parents and siblings. Make it a family affair. Read it aloud, chapter by chapter. Talk to each other. Cry together.