Alexander

“Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism. The English poor were driven from the land into scary, scattered cities in the eighteenth century—and glugged their way into the Gin Craze. The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line. The American rural heartlands saw their markets and subsidies wither in the 1980s and 1990s—and embarked on a meth binge.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs