In the words of the Colombian journalist Alonso Salazar the American-led war has “created criminality and destruction of life and nature that is beyond any precedent.” What crime inevitably does follow is not drug use as such, but criminalisation, as the writer Johann Hari brilliantly shows in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

Human rights groups and the United Nations have condemned Duerte’s vigilante-style campaign that has left thousands of suspected drug dealers and users dead.Īmerica’s current top law-enforcement official, Attorney General Jaff Sessions, has also called for stricter enforcement and harsher punishment, believing, in the face of all evidence, that crime inevitably follows drug use. Duerte has boasted about personally shooting and killing at least three crime suspects. Last May, Trump congratulated Filipino President Rodrigo Duerte for a ‘great job’ in his crackdown on drugs. “And, by the way, they have much less of a drug problem that we do.” As USA Today reported, In March 2018, the president of the United States publicly approved of death sentences for drug dealers, “Some countries have a very, very tough penalty-the ultimate penalty,” Donald Trump said. The world’s richest and most influential country, where addiction rates are already the highest despite-and in large part because of-draconian policies, threatens to move toward more ostracism, more violent repression. – Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine. He is a healer to be cherished and this exciting book arrives at just the right time. Gabor Mate’s connections – between the intensely personal and the global, the spiritual and the medical, the psychological and the political – are bold, wise and deeply moral. Maté presents an eloquent case that addiction–all addiction–is in fact a case of human development gone askew. Gabor Maté, with his new book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.Ĭountering prevailing notions of addiction as either a genetic disease or an individual moral failure, Dr. It is with great pleasure that we introduce our Author of the Month for October, Dr.

Book in the realm of hungry ghosts