100 Quotes by Johann Hari

Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?

If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.

The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.

It was only a long time into talking with these social scientists that I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

We are all born with a genetic inheritance – but your genes are activated by the environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you.

When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese – which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean – a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.

When the results came back4 and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.