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The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. When I first learned about this, I was puzzled.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

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