Johann Hari: ‘I should have to meet a higher bar’

Johann Hari, who has just published a book about the drug war that is filled with tales of redemption, doesn’t want redemptive narratives about his own career. “I deliberately didn’t think of” this book “in terms of second chances,” he says – and looks ashen at the thought.

Hari was the young, firebrand left-wing columnist for the London Independent who, in 2011, was found to have been poaching quotes from other journalists' interviews and anonymously attacking his rivals online. He was suspended that year and left the newspaper in 2012. He also returned the Orwell Prize, for political writing, that he had received in 2008.

Yet his new book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, is very good, filled with character detail, historical context and counterintuitive facts. And if anyone questions the provenance of the quotes, it's all painstakingly footnoted, and the audio from the interviews is all at chasingthescream.com. "I should have to meet a higher bar," he says. "And I think I have met a higher bar."

When talking about anything else Hari is bubbly, warm and enthusiastically curious. He asks a lot of questions about me. He speaks quickly, breaking his sentences with qualifications when he is worried that he hasn’t got a detail exactly right. As the laudatory quotes on the book cover attest, he is friendly with some famous writers. During our conversation he casually mentions three of them: Eve Ensler, Noam Chomsky (his mentor of sorts) and Richard Dawkins.

Social justice

He always wanted to be a writer, Hari says. As a child, reading and writing were how he “mediated being in the world”. His upbringing was lower middle class. His Glaswegian mother worked at a women’s refuge, and his Swiss father was a bus driver, but he was “basically raised” by working-class grandmothers, and their lives informed his sense of social justice.

“I like figuring out what the stories are from the angle of people who’re being f***ked over,” he says. “Most people learn how to not see things from” that perspective. “Chomsky calls it the process of de-education.”

Chasing the Scream begins by examining the racist origins of the drug war and recounting the harassment of the heroin-addicted singer Billie Holiday by Harry Anslinger, obsessive head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Hari goes on to interview dealers, addicts, police officers, policymakers and scientists, to explore alternatives to prohibition and to deconstruct the conventional understanding of addiction. “If you’d said, ‘What causes heroin addiction?’ a few years ago,” he says, “I’d have looked at you as if you were thick and would have said, ‘Well, heroin causes heroin addiction.’ ”

Then a Canadian physician, Gabor Maté, pointed out that many people took an even purer form of heroin during hospital procedures. "Anyone reading The Irish Times who's had a hip operation has been given loads of heroin," says Hari. He refers to UN figures that suggest "90 per cent of all currently illegal drug use is nonproblematic, doesn't cause addiction, doesn't cause overdose, doesn't cause health problems".

Traditionally in experiments, says Hari, rats offered heroin become addicted. But a Vancouver-based psychology professor, Bruce Alexander, observed that the rats in these experiments were isolated and bored. When he added company and games to the cages the rats largely ignored the heroin. So the difference, says Hari, between those who become addicted and those who don’t is largely down to social circumstances.

Hari has had personal brushes with addiction. An ex-boyfriend was a heroin addict, and his earliest memory involves being unable to wake a member of his family. He also had issues with the anti-narcolepsy drug modafinil, which is sold as Provigil. Taking it “was a subset of work addiction”, he says. “I wanted to work all the time. I wanted to be reading and writing constantly. Which is, of course, neither possible nor desirable.”

Plagiarism

Did his workaholism or drug-taking influence his plagiarism? “No,” he says. “I don’t want to say anything that sounds like I’m making excuses.” He pauses for the longest time. “When you do something that’s wrong and harmful to other people, and to yourself, it’s very important that you figure out privately why you did it, that you pay a price and that you don’t do it again,” he says.

“I think if you start talking about it publicly, inevitably you are asking people to see it from your point of view and to feel sorry for you. I don’t want to do that, because I don’t think that it’s right.

“As a public process, when you f*** up, you apologise, you pay a price – rightly, a big price. And then, I think, the public element of it is that you demonstrate that you haven’t done it again.”

Was what happened good for him? He very quickly says no. “It was an extremely painful process. Because what I did harmed other people. I think it would be really distasteful to say, ‘Oh, there’s this little morality play at the end of it where I was better off.’ I think it wouldn’t be true anyway.”

He doesn’t want to discuss what he may or may not have learned, but he suggests several times that he’s less self-obsessed than before. He talks with affection about the people in his book, like Chino Hardin, a transgender drug dealer, or Marcia Powell, a drug addict, cooked alive in the heat of an Arizona prison camp, and the late, heroin-addicted Canadian drug campaigner Bud Osborne.

“The whole drug war can only continue because of the dehumanisation of the people involved,” he says. “I realised the most valuable thing I could do . . .was rehumanise the people being destroyed by it.”

Hari is personally invested in this material. He put off going to see the countries that offer an alternative to the drug war, he says, for fear that progressive policies would have had no impact. Ultimately, though, he found his experiences in those countries “mind-blowing”.

Portugal had the worst drug problem in Europe when the government decided to decriminalise everything, in 2000. And it works, says Hari. João Figueira, who ran the campaign against decriminalisation, told him he was now ashamed of his actions. “I cried a little bit.”

Hari visited a heroin clinic in Switzerland “that looks like a branch of Toni & Guy. The programme has been running for 20 years now, and there are only a handful of people who are still on it.”

Drug addiction is, Hari says, a problem of isolation and disconnection. Bruce Alexander says that “we need to talk about social recovery, because something has gone wrong, not with us as individuals, but as a group. We live in an environment that makes authentic connection difficult.”

Hari has tried to remain connected. Since leaving the Independent he has worked with the New York campaigning group Purpose, as well as on Russell Brand's Trews YouTube channel, as a producer. "That's a bit of a fancy title for it," he says. "I'd basically say, 'Russell, I think you might want to think about this.' Fifty per cent of the time he'd say, 'You're right. I'll talk about that,' and 50 per cent of the time he'd disagree and talk about something I think is a load of rubbish. It has been alleged that I'd ghostwritten his book, but the idea that you could write in Russell's voice is bizarre."

He likes Brand. They bonded talking about their grandmothers. “He’s somebody who remembers where he’s from and thinks a lot about it . . . wants to stand up for the people where he came from.”

Would Hari ever go back to newspapers or magazines? “No. I really love the depth and speed of doing a big book about a big thing,” he says. “I think it’s a kind of healthy way to live.”

No taste for polemic

He looks back at his time as a columnist with ambivalence. He has lost his taste for polemic, he says. “There’s probably just a degree to which polemic is a young person’s way of being in the world, but I don’t think it’s actually true to the texture of how people live. The other day someone asked me, ‘What should we do about Syria?’ and my first thought was, I have absolutely no idea. If I was still a columnist I’m sure by now I’d have some strident opinion about exactly what we should do in Syria.”

Was he worried about how the book would be received, given his history? "Yeah. I deliberately didn't let myself think about it too much." His friend Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, said, "It's not actually your business what people make of your book. You write the best book you can. You put it out to the world."

He’s pleased with the way it has worked out. His main critics are “hard-core 12-step people . . . committed to the idea of addiction as a brain disease”. There are far fewer prohibitionists than there used to be, he says, and he’s thrilled by the letters from addicts who were touched to read something about addiction “that didn’t make them feel ashamed”.

“The biggest reorientation in my life, if I’m to be honest, is that the ratio between listening and talking changed dramatically,” he says. “I was talking far too much and not listening enough.”

Chasing the Scream is published by Bloomsbury