Natalie Henning

“A man named Bud Osborn, who was helped to recover from his heroin addiction by Gabor, tells me: “The childhood trauma makes you feel bad about everything. Bad about your family, bad about life,” he said. “And then when you take drugs, they make you feel good about your life, about yourself, about being in the world . . . [People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“They wanted easy answers to complex fears.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“if punishment worked to fight addiction, the condition itself couldn’t exist.”
― Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction