Johann Hari on Addiction and the Quest for Happiness

viewed more than ninety million times. I'm at Middleton and this is head Game today, Joann Hari on making an impact by investigating life's biggest issues. Thank you ever so much for coming on my podcast, head Game. Fascinated with getting into an in depth conversation. You've just got a.

mum was a run away. She grew up in a very poor working class family in Scotland, you know, where life for women was not that good. And with her best friend Mary, she ran away and they met in a nightclub just off Carnaby Street when my dad spoke literally ten words of English and my mum only spoke English, and they had what my mum calls a series of one night stands, which I've tried to explain is not a concept that makes sense if there's more than one

of them, it's not a one night stand. You know, the family I grew up in, there was a lot of without going into too much detail, because it's their story, other people's story, not just mine, but it's a lot of addiction, a lot of madness. Really. I was mostly raised by my grandmother, my Scottish grandmother, and it was weird because they were you know that everyone in my family left school when they were Like my grand left when she was thirteen, most of them they were fifteen.

And it's really weird. If you watch our home videos. Even when I'm a little kid, I have this weird posh voice. I'm like Stewy from Family Guy, right, So like my mom was like, why Cheah fat Sam, And I'm like, really, mother, I find this most It's just bizarre. And I don't know what edgeway. Where I grew up, no one, no one had this weird posh voice that I have. I must have got it off the TV

because I can't think no one spoke like that. So it was this weird even when I was very young, I had this slight kind of I had a great love for the place I was from and the people I grew up with. I also had this weird kind of doubleness about it.

addiction or mental health problems or whatever. This is really amazing statistic. I can't make the exact figure, people can look it up, but something like sixty percent of the presidents and prime ministers US presidents and British prime ministers of the twentieth century grew up in a family where one of their parents either died, became disabled, or became bankrupt when they were a kid. And there's a big

debate about why that might be. Right, it's an incredibly high figure compared to the general population, right, and I think an extreme incredible You just do the prime ministers backwards, you can do it right and the presidents, and I think that must be something about if you grew up in a chaotic environment, you've got to be the grown up. You've got to be the adult very quickly, right, And it's a thing about you want to make it all okay, you know, you want to solve the problem.

a habit you can take over to other things. Right, Okay, there's this other chaotic thing going on in the world. I'm not gonna wait for someone else to solve it. What's going on here, Let's figure out what's going on. Let's figure out how we can sort it out. So I think that was very deep in me that, you know. I think the Persian poet Roomy said the wound is where the light enters you. It's something I think about

all the time, right. I'm sure it was somewhere and Leonard Cohen's heart when he wrote this famous line about there's a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in. Right. I think it's the thing about if you have very a very extreme childhood, or extreme experiences in general, you can see that as a curse and it can just fuck you, right, And of course that does have to many people, it does have terrible effects on them. Or you can say, Okay, this is not good. It's not good.

This happened. I wish it hadn't. But given that, what strength can I take from this? What have I learned from this experience that can be used to help other people or to go forward? So I think it's always you know, we talk a lot about post traumatic stress, right, which is a real of course, a real thing, But there's also a lot of scientific evidence for something called post traumatic growth. Right some people go through like for example,

you can look at survivors of plane crashes. For example, right now, no one is ever glad they've been in a plane crash, just to be clear, But some people go, oh, I was in a plane crash. It fucked me up. It was the worst thing that ever happened. I've been traumatized ever since. But a lot of people who've been in playing crashes, so you know, it was a terrible

thing that I was in that plane crash. But after I survived, I quit that job I hated, and I left the husband who was treating me like shit, and actually it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

It's like, weird, we're shortage. And this was where I lived at the time, and it's a place I really associate with that relationship. So I could tell you the map of all the dealers he went to, and there's a in a mile radius of here, but the and and I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book is every book I ever write. For me, it's because there's got got to be I'm not an

expert on anything, right, I'm a journalist. For me, it's got to be that there's a mystery that I don't understand and I want to understand, right, so I then go on this kind of journey all over the world.

just fucking stop right fuck saying put yourself together? Right?

So I ended up, I mean, it ended up being this kind of insane journey all over the world, like thirty thousand miles, ended up meeting a crazy mixture of people, from a you know, getting to know rot so right aback in the book, from a transcrack dealer in Brooklyn is one of the smartest people I know, to a hit man for the deadlist Mexican drug cartel, who actually is not one of the smartest people I know, to the only country that's decriminalized all drugs with incredible effects

we can talk about. But that actually in relation to your Christian it was just tranges think because I realized, I mean, I learned so much writing Chasing the Screen, but one of the things I learned is that actually I had profoundly misunderstood what I had seen in front of me for so long. So let's talk about let's say heroin addiction for example, right, because that's something it was close to me. So if you'd asked me thirteen years ago, when I started doing the research on this, Johan,

what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you were muppet and I would have said, well, mate, the clues in the name man right, obviously exactly. We've been told this story for one hundred years. That's become totally part of our common sense about addiction. Right when I was in this story about the earliest story about addiction that we've all been told, which has some truth

in it. Right, So we think we're sitting here in Shoreditch if we kidnapped the next twenty people to walk past this recording studio and.

why in English another word for being addicted is being hooked. Right. It turns out that is a very small part of what's going on in addiction. Right. It's some role, but it's very small. And the first thing that alured to me to the fact there's something missing in that story is when it was explained to me by lots of doctors.

If you or me, if we stepped out of this studio now and we got hit by a truck and you broke your hip or I broke my hip, we'd be taken to the Royal London Hospital of the Road, and they give us a lot of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine it's much better than the ship my ex exactly. It's medically pure heroine. It's the best heroine you can get. Right, If anyone listening, if you've got a grandmother who's ever had a hip replacement operation, your NaNs take lots of

heroin right now. If what we think about addiction is right, that is caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should be happening to all these grandmothers having hit replacement operation. They should be leaving and trying to score on the streets. Right, This has been studied very carefully. It never happens with hit replacements, right, never. Right. And you hear that, you think what I remember when I first learned this from a brilliant doctor call Gable Marte,

just saying, well, gabble, that can't be right. How could you have a situation where you've got someone in hospital bed they're be giving loads of medically pure, strong heroine. They don't become addicted. Yeah, the best grade of it really, if you put it in Layman's terms, exactly, the best shit, and you've got someone in the alleyway outside, you know, shooting up actually a weaker form of the drug, and

they do become adicted. What's going on? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and an interview an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that has really transformed how we understand addiction all over the world. See explained to me this story we've got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hook comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the twentieth century.

You take a rap, you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will try both. Almost always prefers the drug water, and it almost always kills itself by overdosing pretty quickly. Right, So there you go. That's our story. The rat tries the drug, it needs more and more of.

which is basically like fucking heaven for rats. Right, They've got loads of friends, they got loads of cheese, they got loads of colored balls. Anything a rat likes is there in rap Park. It's got its needs met, right, psychological needs. And then it gives them both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both. This is the fascinating things have fun well in rap Park. They don't like the drug water that much. Right, they don't use it compulsively. None of

them music compulsively. None of them die by overdose, because they've got The way I would think about it is everyone knows you've got physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked. But it's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You

need to got people see you and value you. You need to for your love, you feel, got a future, you understand right, And this culture we've built is good at many things. I'm glad to be alive today, but we have been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. So the reason I wouldn't put it as because you asked it totally understandably, and it's the way I used to think about it is

oh can these can you override the chemical thing? I would put it differently, The core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too big a place to be exactly right. And when you understand that, you begin to see. Firstly, for me, the first thing you see is how what we do it's a value.

what it made me realize. I never forget when I interviewed Bruce the first time, and I went and sat in a We were in this area called the downtown Eings side of Vancouver, which has a lot of chaotic street addiction, and I went and sat in a pigeon park, which is a park with loos of pigeons in it and where people are. You know, it's pretty free for all chaotic drug scene. And I remember thinking, I right, so the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite

of addiction is connection. That's what you're saying, right. I'm never get that moment because now like people put that on t shirts and things since I wrote about it and totalk on it. But but the core of it is, and it's why when when you asked, is this an addiction for me? I don't think of it as it may have elements of addiction because I do overwork, But for me, this is not a way of not being present in my life. It's actually a way of being

more present in my life. So it's a it's a healthy obsession rather than an addiction, is how I would think of it, right, if it would be an addiction, if it was actually I was avoiding being present by doing this stuff right and super present of what you do. So, yeah, there are moments like that. I massively over work. I tend to get burned out because I'm very bad at taking breaks or pacing myself. So I wouldn't want to totally rule out the kind of implicit thought in your question.

But yeah, but when you understand addiction in this different way, you understand firstly why that natural angry, why are you fucking doing this? Doesn't get us very far? Right? But also for me that the most important thing about it is you realize how what we do as a society, why it has so catastrophically failed when it comes to addiction.

The US at the moment, for example, has the biggest addiction crisis in its entire history, right, horrendous, And obviously I live after the U in the US, because what we do is we think about addiction totally differently. The theory of the War on drugs, right is, people who addicted need to have pain inflicted on them to give them an incentive to stop. Right, So we make them suffer, give them criminal records, we imprison and then but then you realize it. Then we pigeonhole them exactly and fuck

them over. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And then you realize. But once you understand that pain is the fuel, is the driver, is the cause of addiction, suddenly realize. Sometimes we go, oh, it doesn't work. It's not you know, that model doesn't work. The answer is much worse. It makes the problem worse, right, and never forget. I had a moment about this. I went to lots of places for the for the book, obviously, for you know, the killing fields in northern Mexico and

all sorts of places. But I think the place that most haunts me was there's this place called Tense City in Phoenix in Arizona, Maricopa County in Arizona. So it's right. It was at the time run by a guy called Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who we got a whole conversation about childhood trauma and Joe ol Pio. But that is a fucked up guy who was really at war with people with addiction problems, and he opened this prison where bran

in mind, this is the desert is Arizona. People were made to sleep in tents in the desert and they were deliberately maximally humiliated. He you might have heard this because Mike Tyson was sent there. I've talked to Mike about it. They make the people with the diction problems go out on chain gangs wearing t shirts saying I was a drug addict on members of the public mock them. So I went out one day with this group of women. You only have to speak to this women for five minutes.

Their lives have been fucking horrendous, right, They'd all been fucking abused in one way or another. And so we go out and they were made to literally on a chain gang and they're made to collect little while members of public mock them. Right, and what was that?

fucking sadism, they actually want to show to you. So I said, oh, we show me the isolation block. Thinking they go, no, no, that's you know, like most prisons with that, I shall come along. Yeah, yeah, So go along. And the first thing happens. So the women are in tiny, little, bare stone cells in the middle of the desert. It's unbelievably hot. They're completely on their own. They've got nothing in this cell. Literally, you're in a stone It's about

the size of this room we're in. We're in a tiny little podcast studio, right, And so they open the little flat and a woman starts immediately screaming at me, showing me that she's been cutting herself, just screaming and screaming. It's one of the worst things I've seen, right, And I looked at this woman and I thought, this is the closest you could get to a literal human replica of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats. And this is what you're doing to this poor fucking woman thinking

it will stop her being addicted. Now, Okay, that's very extreme, right, Okay, that's that's the hardest edge, the tip of the spear. But actually, most eighty percent of the money we spend in some countries, actually it's more, but eighty percent of the money we spend on drug policy is enforcement, punishing people, shaming people, fucking them up more right. The other twenty percent, by the way, about ten percent is treatment, and ten percent is the ridiculous, fucking fantasy we can keep drugs

out of the country. You know, if you want to think about how well that's going to work. We can't even keep drugs out of our prisons, where we pay people to walk around the fucking wall. The whole time, so good, like we're keeping them out of the United States with two three thousand mile borders or Britain, which is an island, ridiculous, insane fantasy.

that they belong down there. You're almost amplifying that problem tenfold, right exactly.

Give an example of Portugal. So the year two thousand, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the whole world. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind blowing right when you think

about it. Every year they tried the American way more, they arrested more people, they imprison more people, they shame more people, and every year the problem got worse, until finally the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they were like, look, we can't go on like this with ever more people dying and getting addicted.

What are we going to do? So they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done in nearly one hundred years since the War on drugs globally began. They were like, should we like ask some scientists what to do? So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing.

here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize all drugs, from cannabis to crack, the whole fucking lot. But the probably didn't say fucking can not as me, But we're going to decriminals the whole lot. But and this is the crucial next step, we're going to take all the money we currently spend on screwing people up, on shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to spend

all that money instead on turning their lives around. And what's interesting was when they did it, a lot of it was not what we think of as drug treatment in Britain, right, So it was they did a lot of a rehab, right, they did do that. But the main stuff they spent money on was housing, because you're not going to fucking sober up when you're living in a tunnel under a.

of society. And instead of that, they wanted to take all that message you and go, actually, we love you, we value you, here's a job, we're on your side, we want you back. Right. And by the time I went to Portugal it was and when was this They started the decriminalization in two thousand and one, and when I went there it was for the first time. It was twenty twelve. I must have gone there maybe twenty eleven, think twenty twelve. And the results were in best research

on it is in the British journal Criminology. They had a massive fall in addiction. They went from having the highest level of overdoses in the European Union to almost the lowest. They had a massive fall in street crime, massive fall in street prostitution, massive full in HIV transmission, and one of the ways you know it worked is that no one in Portugal wants to go back. I went and interviewed one of the leading opponents of the drug decriminalization at the time, a guy called schul Figuera.

He was the top drug cop in the country when they did it, and he said, totally understandably, he said, this is fucking madness, right, we can't decriminalize all drugs. We'll have an explosion drug use, will have an explosion in kids using drugs, We'll hav an explosion in drug tourism.

This is a nightmare. And when I met raw he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen, and everything the other side said would happen did And he said he felt really ashamed now when you look back on it, that he'd spent twenty years making people's lives worse when they could have been helping people turn it around. Now, drug decorverisation hasn't worked everywhere. Public hasn't been done on the Portuguese model. The Portuguese model was

stop punishing people. That's the first step. It's the equivalent of stopping kicking them in the head. But then crucially, take all the money we spent screwing them up and spend it.

some people are struggling to pay attention. My most recent but Magic Pill, is about these new weight loss drugs, what they're going to mean for all of us. Yeah, but with all of them, I think there's a thing about reframing what the problem is really about. If you're stuck in a mindset where you just think, I'm a fuck up, there's something wrong with and there's definitely individual responsibility,

and I'm in favor of individual responsibility passionately. But if you're stuck in a model where you just think, oh, I'm a fuck up, and it's like if you're the rat in the isolated cage, but you're not thinking about the environment. So many our problems are a combination of you know, our individual psyches, our biology, and our environments. Right, And if we're stuck in just thinking as an isolated individual, it's usually pretty fucking hard. It's not impossible. Some people

can do it. You get heroic individuals who can do it, and all credit to them, right, I've got nothing but praise for them. But actually, at the moment, we've got systems. For example, with addiction, I would argue with depression and attention as well and with wait, actually, where the system is rigged against you. Right, It's like you're having to run up and down escalator to get to be healthy. Right. Some people can do it something run up and down escalator.

I fucking can't. Yeah, there's a few. But what I would do is, let's get the escalator carrying you in the right direction. Let's make it easy for you to make the positive changes in your life, not to make it hard.

A lot of my book about Attention is about how we can get our attention back through doing these individual things as well. But I also would want to add a prong to it, which doesn't take away anything from the individual responsiblity back. Then it adds to it, which is there's another source of your power, which is you can change yourself better when you change with other people, and you change with the cage.

Her husband died when he was very young. She she had a very so she raised her kids on her own. She had job was to clean toilets. She did every job she could do. I think about my grandmother, she was just an amazing person, incredibly loving person, and you know, she'd had this fucking hard life. And then when I'm a kid, you know, she must have had a million she wanted to relax, right, and then she suddenly got these this kind of looking after these kids, I think.

I think my grandmother was a great example. I had so many teachers who were really good to me, had just so many people in my life have been really really good to me. Have been mean to me as well, obviously, But the but.

fits in. You're not going out of I can trying to bring down criminals. You're trying to say, why are these people like this? Why do people get addicted? What can we do to better? You know, the human side of it is so fucking present and obvious, but it must have something must have happened.

self obsessed. Think about yourself, to be narcissistic. Think about how you feel after half an hour looking at Instagram, right like the So we live in this culture that is constantly pushing us towards the ego and self obsession. And I'm probably more vulnerable than that to that than most people. And the truth is that will make you feel like shit, whereas moments of openness and love towards

other people will make you feel better. So in some sense, there's a kind of selfish impulse behind my desire to be compassionate because I think about this a lot in relation to this guy I interviewed a lot, amazing man. You should have a your podcast called Professor Tim Kassa. So when I think about his work, is everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right, but actually a kind of junk values

have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. Right, And Professor Kassa was the first person to really research this. So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, you know, if you think life is about money and status and showing off, you're going to feel like shit. Right. It's not an exact quote from Confucius, but it's basically what

he said, right. But weirdly, no one actually scientifically investigated it until Professor Cassio did all this amazing psychological research over forty years, and basically he proved, to give you the headline, the philosophers were right, the more you think life is about money and status and showing off and ego,

the worse you will feel. Right, And the way we began to think of it, it's almost like, just like junk food has taken over our diets, are kind of junk values have taken over our minds, right, rained to look for happiness in all the wrong places. It's like we're fed a kind of KFC for the salt. Right, Yeah, we're you know if you think about there's a really a bit interesting bit of research. It was done by lots of scientists, but one of them was Dr Brett Ford,

who I interviewed about it. Really simple research. They looked at four countries. It was the United States, Japan, Taiwan and Russia. And they want to figure out, let's imagine you deliberately wanted to make yourself happier. Right, so you said, right from now and I'm going to spend two hours a day deliberately making myself happier. Would you actually become happier? Right? I wrote about some my book Los Connections, and what

they found at first seems really weird. In the United States, if you try to make yourself happier in the main you do not become happier. But in Russia, Taiwan and Japan, if you try to make yourself happier, it works. You do become and they're like, what's weird, what's going on? So it did more research on it. I discovered was in the US. I'm sure it's true of ours in Britain and Australia as well. If you try to make yourself hap you do something for you, You work harder

to get a promotion. You buy a load of shit. You don't need to display it on Instagram to make people go OMG so jealous. You do you right, you treat yourself. So we have that. The fancy weight putting it would be we have an individualistic conception of happiness. You think your happiness stems from your ego and you doing well, you as an isolated individual. In the other places, when you try to make yourself happier, you did something

for someone else, your friends, your family, your community. Right, So they have an instinctively kind of collective idea of happiness, right, that happiness comes from being part of a group, from being part of a group that rises with you or falls with you. Right, And we've moved way too far. I'm in favor of some level of individualism. Individuals is a good thing to some degree. I don't want to

go back to them. But the village of my dad lived in where there was no room for individual expression. But we've gone so far towards that, and it trains us to look for happiness in all the wrong places. You are not to fix right totally, or even a slow fix in the wrong direction, Like you're not gonna lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes you've got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought. Right, you're going to think about moments of love and meaning

and connection in your life. But the way Professor Kassa put it to me is we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. Right, We live in a machine that is constantly pushing us towards Yeah, these these individualistic, narcissistic forms of.

You mentioned some of the companies big tech. We've got to regulate those fuckers. Right. There's all sorts of things that we can do, Like think about the fact that more three year old children know what the McDonald's m means than know their own last name. Right now, you don't put that in your head when you were three years old. I didn't put that in my head. That's a machine doing that to us. Well, some countries have banned advertising junk food to children.

a completely crazy thing. He quit his job and he went to a little place called Provincetown and he decided he was going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book about before. Right, And he was like, Okay, no one alive today is ever going to see this put into practice. I'm clearly not going to live to see it put into practice. Maybe somewhere down the line someone's going to find this fucking crazy book. Right. The idea he wrote

the first of a book advocating for was gay marriage. Right. She got a picture craze. It was, You've got two thousand years of gay people being fucking burned, imprisoned, hated, every religious text in the world, every country in the world. And he's like, no, let gave you all get married, right, And this is the height of gay people being hated. There's this paranoia about AIDS and fear about AIDS, and

so he writes this book. And when I get pessimisty, I'll try to imagine, right, Okay, tried to imagine going back in time to nineteen ninety four when Andrew's writing virtually normal and going, Okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me. But twenty six years for now, A you'll be alive. That would have fucking blow in his mind. B you'll be married to a man because that will

be legal. See, I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes this book you're writing, when it makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay marriage, and the next day you'll be invited to have dinner with the President in a white house lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and millions of other people have achieved. Oh and by the way, that president

he's going to be black. Right, it would have sounded like there was fucking crazy science fiction, right me go right, So twenty six years from now and you and me are trans Prime Minister's gonna invite us to smoke cracking downing Street where there? Right, it would have sounded not that we want that, but you see what I mean? Right,

two thousand years fucking horrific homophobia. It falls in us A generation or two is hope and so and you think about that in relation to tech, I give you know a story, right, tech is so powerful, and of course it's enormously powerful. But I'll give you example of someone I would never normally praise. Let's do the spirit of Philippo in and I'll praise someone that I fucking hate ninety percent of the time. Scott Morrison. Right. So

Scott Morrison did something really good. So, as a lot of people will know, the media is being bankrupted by these social media platforms because you know, twenty five years ago you were put an advert in the Sydney Morning Herald and now you put an advert on Facebook. So people get their news from Facebook, but the advertising money goes to Facebook, not to the Sydney Morning Herald. Right.

So they're losing their print readers and they're losing all their advertising revenue and this is happening all over the world and it's very bad for democracy if you don't have media. Right. So Scott Morrison, not manadament, only praise entirely to his credit, said to Facebook, you're going to have to give some of your advertising revenue to the Australian media. People go to your website for the news. I heard about this, you got from this, and you

remember at the time, that's a Facebook shit. The BED Australia often key functions. They cut them off completely right and what happened quietly they gave in right now. Some of that money goes to the Australian media. We are so much stronger than they are. They are really fucking unpopular, musk mat Zuckerberg. We are much stronger than they are. They want to project this image that they're you know, and there's good things and bad things about them.

We don't have to accept this. Right. It's not a force in nature, it's not inevitable to living in a modern society. It is a result of very particular, powerful forces that we can take on and change. But it requires a shift in mindset. Right. You obviously talk a lot about mindset, quite rightly. We need to realize we are not medieval peasants begging fucking Mark Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table.

We are free people. We are the free citizens of democracies. We own our own minds. We can take our minds back from these forces if we want to, but we've got to understand what's being done to them. We've got to understand it in a wider context. We've got understand the cage we've been put in, and together we can dismantle that cage. Right.