To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: “What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?” She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.

The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It.

For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad – it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war – and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications – why would governments want to fund those?

She had felt homesick. But she was at home.

Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.

I got my dad a great father’s Day present. He called to say: ‘Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.

Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers.