Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Hari dedicates much of this chapter to the story of Bud Osborn, a Vancouver man who led the “first mass rebellion by drug addicts against the system built by Harry Anslinger” (188). Osborn had a traumatic childhood, which included several suicide attempts. As an adult, he became an addict, but in the 1990s, he became an activist and community organizer because so many of his friends were dying of overdoses in the Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver. Osborn knew that heroin overdoses occur for two primary reasons under the system of prohibition: First, a user has no way to know the purity of the heroin they buy on the street; and second, users must administer the drug secretly to prevent arrest, so no one is there when an overdose occurs. With fellow addicts, Osborn formed the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and they began taking actions that immediately saved lives. In one VANDU protest, the group placed thousands of wooden crosses in a park to represent all the overdose deaths there over four years. Hari explains that “these activists believed that if people knew—if they could see the addicts as human—they would care” (198).