Antony Loewenstein

My following essay appears in Al Jazeera English:

The book launch was held in a large restaurant last weekend in the middle of the South Sudanese capital, Juba. Veteran journalist and editor of The Citizen, Victor Keri Wani, was being celebrated for his 40 years in the media business, an eternity in a country that had successfully split from its northern neighbour in 2011 to become the world’s newest nation.

After extensive introductions, the only male speakers spoke warmly about Wani’s broad career. Mentioned by nearly all of them were the absence of South Sudanese history written by locals. Let’s not wait for foreigners to do it for us, they agreed.

The lack of a local publisher made it impossible for the innumerable manuscripts by academics and intellectuals to find a home. Wani concurred and thanked the enthusiastic crowd, dressed in their Sunday best clothing, and hoped that the country wouldn’t be solely defined through its ongoing war and ethnic strife.

Challenge

This will be a challenge. Since fighting broke out in December 2013, killing tens of thousands of people in the months ahead, the nation has been torn apart by brutal conflict, the recruitment of children to fight and evidence of horrific mass rape.

Over 100,000 people continue living in protection of civilian camps in five states, some fearing for their safety. Displacement of civilians has been extensive, something I’ve witnessed in Wai in Jonglei state and Ganyiel in Unity state.

I heard from countless men, women and children who expressed anger at the inability or unwillingness of the warring factions to make peace. These relatively brazen views are growing in strength, posing a threat to the ability of the state to remain even moderately secure and contiguous.

In both Wai and Ganyiel, the United Nations and various NGOs are providing food, water and medical care. The UN says 2.5 million people are food insecure nationwide and this figure could increase to four million by the end of the year.

Peace talks have collapsed and a leaked African Union report detailed cases of war crimes committed by forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar. Last week the South Sudanese parliament extended Kiir’s term for another three years and delayed elections.

In Wai, 25,000 civilians are living mostly in the open air, fleeing areas where fighting is a daily reality. In Ganyiel, situated near swampy ground, the region is relatively peaceful but beset by threats of flooding as the rainy season approaches. Over 100,000 civilians are given food aid air-dropped by the World Food Program (WFP). It’s a miserable existence.

But it’s a mistake to presume this is all just another African war with barely discernable details.

Bulwark against China

At its birth, South Sudan was given a US stamp of approval, destined to be a reliable bulwark against China, a superpower that had spent the decade post 9/11 massively expanding its footprint on the continent.

What Washington either ignored or dismissed, according to a recent Foreign Policy feature, were vital details about reliable infrastructure and oil production, trained doctors and teachers, forces to contain corruption and sustainable agriculture.

It all collapsed so quickly that left to pick up the pieces was various UN agencies and NGOs.

Today, according to South Sudan’s UN humanitarian co-ordinator Toby Lanzer, 400,000 children are out of school and for every 100 kids who start primary school only one will finish secondary education. That’s at least one lost generation and counting.

South Sudan has become an aid-dependent entity, bringing necessary questions about the sustainability of this arrangement. The ability for states to survive principally from the support of governments, donors or corporations looking to turn a profit is doubtful.

Sustainability of aid dependence 

From the Pacific to Africa, the fate of nations is too often decided in the boardrooms of London or New York. The last years in Australia and Britain have seen a growing trend to tie aid to the profit motive, helping Australian and British businesses with possibly a few scraps coming the way of locals in developing nations.

Aid is never benign and is always tied to a richer nation hoping to gain some advantage in a poorer one, whether it’s political influence, business gain or poll position when a resource industry emerges. Like clockwork, South Sudan recentlyannounced it was open for mining business.

The need for indefinite aid in South Sudan is unquestioned and this year alone the UN needs $1.8 billion in assistance. I’ve met nobody in South Sudan who questions the necessity of gaining sovereignty in 2011 – a position echoed in South Sudanese communities from London to Sydney.

And yet with a faltering economy, a government printing more money and bundles of cash being flown into Juba in the middle of the night, 21st century independence in the heart of east Africa is faltering.

Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist based in South Sudan and best-selling author of many books, including the upcoming Disaster Capitalism (Verso).

My following story appears in today’s Guardian:

Angela has been living in the remote town of Ganyiel, in South Sudan’s Unity state, for 18 months. Trying to feed her five children has been hard.

Angela is angry with the country’s warring parties. “I pray for peace,” she says. “But if they won’t stop the conflict, I’m telling [president] Salva Kiir and [rebel leader] Riek Machar to fight each other with their own hands and stop killing our kids.”

Many internally displaced people in the area share Angela’s frustration. Their views were heard by Ertharin Cousin, the executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), and the deputy special representative of the UN secretary general in the UN mission in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, when they toured Ganyiel last weekend.

“It’s important the world recognises the crisis here,” Cousin said. “People here are victims, and without us they have nothing.” She said the WFP had a shortfall of $250m (£168m) to operate its programmes for the next six months.

Although in a rebel-held area, Ganyiel is a relatively safe village, away from the fighting that started in December 2013 after Kiir accused his vice-president, Machar, of plotting a coup. The war has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and displaced almost 2 million people. Ganyiel’s isolation is worsened by constant flooding. An estimated 110,000 people are seeking refuge in the region, tens of thousands more than a year ago. With roads barely functioning, the best way to deliver aid is by air.

According to the WFP’s head of nutrition, Darlene Raphael, 32% of children in the region are malnourished; rates above 15% are considered critical. Raphael assists locals in teaching others how to prepare food four times a day and wash their hands with soap and water.

More funding alone won’t solve the food shortages. “We have logistical limitations such as not having anywhere to land and park more planes. Furthermore, donors have limits to how much more they will fund,” said a WFP representative.

The organisation has airdropped food around Ganyiel since March 2014. This year, 10 planes are regularly delivering cooking oil, sorghum cereal and yellow split peas. Almost 70% of South Sudan is inaccessible during the rainy season and WFP is using the current dry period to prepare for the coming downpour.

According to WFP figures released in March, nationwide food distribution reached 377,000 beneficiaries in February. The UN says that 2.5 million people across the nation are food insecure, and that number could easily rise to 4 million by the end of the year.

In Ganyiel, things have improved greatly since the start of the war. One year ago the market was almost empty; today, it is filled with basic goods. There is a feeling of semi-permanence among the population. But everybody complains of regularly going hungry, despite the aid. The local commissioner, John Tap Puot, said government intimidation against journalists and civilians was ongoing and there weren’t enough medicines, doctors and water available. In 2014 the floods killed many cattle and destroyed crops, forcing locals to become dependent on the WFP and NGOs for food.

The political and economic crisis in the country is growing. A recently leaked African Union report recommended that both Kiir and Machar be barred from any future government and – more controversially – that the AU take control of the country.

Lanzer says the government is printing money to avoid financial collapse, risking hyperinflation. Officials deny they are increasing the money supply. With a 60% drop in oil production due to the war and a falling global oil price, the country recently announced it would vigorously pursue mining. But a lack of proper regulation risks profiteers exploiting untapped resources. Washington, which had hoped South Sudan would be a reliable, African success story, appears uninterested in further, serious engagement.

During a public rally for Kiir in the capital, Juba, last week, attendance was low – roughly 4,000 people turned out – and few solutions were offered to the crisis. The threat of sanctions hangs over the nation.

The latest UN figures show that 112,590 people are living in refugee camps across five states. In Ganyiel, people know about the recently collapsed peace talks. “I want the international community to force Kiir and Machar to sign a peace deal,” said Angela.

I just heard about this shocking story in South Africa and signed a statement in solidarity:

The savage attack on Zainub Dala shows the terror of the freedom to use words, and the desire to obliterate them.

On Wednesday March 18 author, Zainub Priya Dala was violently attacked as she left her hotel during the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban. A woman driving alone, she was harassed by three men who forced her off the road, cornered her, held a knife at her throat, smashed a brick in her face, and called her “Rushdie’s bitch”. The day before she had been asked about writers she admired: Salman Rushdie’s name had figured on a long list of others. People walked out in protest.

Writers do not fear difference of opinion. On the contrary, we thrive on difficulty, on complexity, on posing vexed questions and exploring unresolved ideas. We sketch characters with conflicting emotions, fraught relationships with their families, their lovers and their gods, we place them in troubled circumstances, sometimes offer them redemption. This is the stuff of good drama, of engaged fiction. We gravitate towards, not away from, debate and nuance, knowing that the more considered the idea the better the text.

But what we do not thrive on, and what we will not tolerate, is violent intimidation. Like us, Dala is a writer. She is a reader. She is both a consumer of and producer of words. She would not have avoided a conversation; she would not have shut down a debate. But debate, conversation and engagement are not possible in the face of violence.

And this type of violence – cowardly, sinister, designed to create fear in the moment and silence in the future – is the sort that simultaneously demonstrates its terror of words and its desire to obliterate them. In South Africa, our freedom of speech and movement is a fundamental right. Our Constitution insists on them. It is the same Constitution that protects the rights of those uncomfortable with or offended by Rushdie’s work.

The question of freedom of expression, of speech, has occupied South African writers for decades and is one that has changed shape over the years as we’ve moved from repression to democracy and into the troubling era of the “secrecy Bill”. As South Africans, as writers, we have not always experienced freedom but we have always known what we were fighting for, sometimes at a fatal cost.

We have always known that freedom of expression is, at its deepest, most profound level, the right to speak without fear. It is the knowledge that sharing an opinion with the public should at best be met with passionate engagement, at worst with disinterested dismissal. It is, in its simplest form, the right to speak. It is also the right to listen and to be heard.

There is no glory to be had in attacking an unarmed woman alone. There is nothing heroic about attempting to intimidate people into silence. This was an unconscionable and shameful act. Above all, it was criminal.

As writers, as South Africans, we wish to make this plain: we will not be silenced and intimidated by brutish thuggery. We stand in solidarity with Dala. She is one of us, and in the tradition of our country’s resistance and resilience, we say clearly and unanimously that an injury to one is an injury to all.

• PEN South Africa, the local chapter of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers; Njabulo Ndebele, Nadia Davids, NoViolet Bulawayo, Rustum Kozain, Mandla Langa, Margie Orford, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Imraan Coovadia, Gabeba Baderoon, Fourie Botha, Imran Garda, Kirsten Miller, Thando Mgqolozana, Ben Williams, Tshifhiwa Given Mukwevho, Dilman Dila, Siphiwo Mahala, Fiona Snyckers, Helen Moffett, Nthikeng Mohlele, Percy Zvomuya, Jacob Dlamini, Zakes Mda, Ivan Vladislavic, Elinor Sisulu, Rachel Zadok, Louis Greenberg, CA Davids, Futhi Ntshingila, Tony Eprile, Mark Winkler, Charlotte Otter, Beverley Naidoo, Elaine Proctor, Bettina Wyngaard, Sumayya Lee, Margaret von Klemperer, Hettie Scholtz, Danie Marais, Liesl Jobson, Henry Jack Cloete, Ingrid Glorie, Marita van der Vyver, Isobel Dixon, Jackie Phamotse, Lili Radloff, Adeline Radloff, Antony Loewenstein

Al Jazeera English report on wildlife suffering alongside people in war-ravaged South Sudan:

My following feature appears in the Guardian US:

In the small town of Yei, in southern South Sudan, missionary reverend Shelvis Smith-Mather closed his eyes and prayed. On a searing hot February day, wearing a yellow tie and dusty black shoes, the 35-year-old man from Atlanta, Georgia, was opening a community forum dedicated to reconciliation in a country torn by war. “We are flesh and blood,” he said. “We have flaws. But with God’s work, we can work well for peace.”

The meeting, held at the Reconcile Peace Institute near the borders with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, gathered a group of male and female adult students. Later, they were asked to imagine the community they wanted by 2030; they listed an end to tribalism and skin markings, better education and human rights, God-fearing citizens and freedom of speech.

These are ambitious targets in a country engulfed by a civil war that has killed tens of thousands, where children are being abducted to fight, and where rape is endemic. Millions also currently face severe hunger. This wasn’t the dream in 2011 when South Sudan became independent, gaining the title of the world’s newest nation. President George W Bush liked the idea of a Christian nation adjacent to Islamic Sudan after September 11, and President Barack Obama continued to uphold this vision, though with less enthusiasm.

Reconcile, which has trained hundreds of people in conflict analysis and leadership, was established in 2003 by indigenous church groups to push a faith-based vision for South Sudan, which has a population of approximately 11m people – 60% of whom are Christians, 32% holding traditional beliefs such as animism, and roughly 6% are Muslims.

Smith-Mather is Reconcile’s principal; he moved to Yei from Kenya with his wife Nancy in 2011. They live in a simple brick house with their two young children and intend to stay for another three years as employees of the Presbyterian Church USA and Reformed Church in America. Their organisation calls them “mission co-workers”, not missionaries, in an effort to show they’re collaborating with, not directing, local partners. Yei also has a leading maternity and children’s hospital run by medical missionaries from Harvesters Reaching the Nations.

Both Shelvis and Nancy are deeply aware of the historical baggage associated with missionary work. Nancy recalled being in South Sudan’s Jonglei state, where she met a black woman who told her that her white skin was more beautiful than her own. “Maybe that message came from a missionary,” she told me. “Maybe it was just from colonialism, or from the common belief that what comes from outside is somehow better than what exists here.”

She hoped that her time in Africa would allow her to break down those destructive perceptions. Shelvis agreed. “I’m often asked why in the world would you go to South Sudan and live there when there’s war and challenges?” Nancy said. “Because of my faith my response is, ‘how could I not?’ God calls us into the places of suffering.”

I asked Shelvis and Nancy about US pastors and missionary churches funding and supporting anti-gay legislation in Uganda. “It’s counter to the message of love I understand coming from faith,” Nancy argued. Shelvis, for his part, said that “many religious leaders in South Sudan would say homosexuality does not exist in the country” and “there’s a certain deference that I need to have for conversations being had here, and be respectful of those.”

However, Shelvis stressed, “regardless of an individual’s particular viewpoint on homosexuality, as Christians living in a broken world, we have to be careful to match our zeal for our faith with the same standard of compassion, love and mercy that Christ offered to those whom opposed his views.”

Hunter Farrell, World Mission director for the Presbyterian Church USA, tells me that the church pays seven missionaries in Sudan and South Sudan. It spent around $1m there in 2014 and currently prioritises the South Sudan education and peace building programme, which aims to raise $2.3m to improve education for tens of thousands of children. World Mission’s 2014 budget was $28m, and it operates around the world, from El Salvador to Sri Lanka.

But not all missionaries in Africa are as understanding as Shelvis and Nancy – something made clear when considering how belief and homosexuality collide across the continent.

Africa is by and large conservative, and many poor countries are susceptible to charity with a socially conservative agenda. It’s within this context that many US evangelical churches go to Africa to win the battles that are being lost at home. Many of them subscribe to the dominionist movement, which supports turning secular governments into Christian theocracies. They pressure NGOs not to accept Christians in same-sex marriages. Missionaries have traversed the length and breadth of Africa for centuries, so this 21st century American campaign is just the latest in a long line of foreign influence.

From gay marriage to abortion rights and birth control, the last decades have seen huge strides in the west towards minimising discrimination and encouraging equality. Hatred still exists, but public opinion has experienced a sea change towards accepting difference.

The Rev Jackson George Gabriel, the curate of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan, tells me that he welcomes outside encouragement, confirming that the American branch of his church “are telling us to stand firm against homosexuality”. In a country where President Salva Kiir has said that homosexuality will “always be condemned by everybody”, and where the public shaming of gay South Sudanese by local tabloid media is growing, his stance enjoys a lot of support.

Gabriel fears western influence is fundamentally changing African societies for the worse. “Western society is trying to destroy us,” he says. “Behaviours such as fornication, spirit of independence, gay rights, no respect for elders, abortion and birth control are being imported. African leaders must maintain our culture.” He says the archbishop of the local Episcopal church is currently directing his ministries to investigate if they receive any funds from foreign churches that back homosexual rights. “If so, they must cut all ties,” Gabriel says.

These attitudes mirror the social agenda of many US evangelicals organisations which have both charitable and ideological agendas.

Samaritan’s Purse, run by Franklin Graham, son of the Christian evangelist Billy Graham, has a large presence in Africa and been active in Sudan since 1993. Along with providing food, fishing kits, water, shelter, training, hygiene and medical supplies, the group proselytises, screens the evangelical Jesus Film to thousands of people and rebuilds churches (“People are open to the Gospel here,” says country director Brock Kreitzburg). As a global enterprise, it has also been accused of blurring the line between church and state during its emergency relief work in developing countries.

Graham is a powerful figure, having met Kiir and Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir many times to advocate for the country’s Christians. He visited South Sudan in March, prayed with Kiir and the rebel leader Riek Machar, and inaugurated an airport hangar in Kenya. Graham is also anti-gay, backing Russia’s draconian laws against sexual minorities. He told delegates at a recent Oklahoma State Evangelism Conference to “get involved in politics. [The] gays and lesbians are in politics [and] all the anti-God people are.”

Despite repeated requests, the group refused to provide details on the amount of money it currently spends in South Sudan, though its 2013 financial report said that in 2012 it had more than $2m of expenses in the nation and raised more than $376m worldwide.

•••

Part of the agenda of US evangelical churches is explored in a 2014 report by the Rev Kapya Kaoma called American Culture Warriors in Africa: A Guide to the Exporters of Homophobia and Sexism, which is endorsed by Desmond Tutu. Kaoma is an Anglican priest from Zambia now living and working in the US with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts due to threats against his life. His work paints a picture of the myriad of US groups and their African allies who, he says, are “seeking to impose their intolerant – and even theocratic – interpretations of Christianity on the rest of the world”.

This includes the American Centre for Law and Justice (ACLJ), whose founders are televangelist Pat Robertson and lawyer Jay Sekulow. The organisation has visited South Sudan’s leadership with aims to influence its political agenda. The organisation has pushed for the criminalising of abortion and homosexuality across Africa and operates in Russia, Israel and Europe. The Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush recently appointed Sekulow’s son, Jordan, to be his “liaison” with religious conservatives.

Human Life International, a far-right American Catholic group working in Nigeria and Tanzania, opposes abortion and contraception. Stephen Phelan, its director of mission communications, tells me that the problem lies with secular aid groups, not evangelicals. He condemns “wealthy governments and enormous NGOs spending billions each year to impose their culture on Africa, including values that are literally foreign to African families … At times these funds actually go to aid Africans who live in less developed parts of the continent, but a great deal more is spent on population control than on wells, roads and medicine combined.”

In Uganda, American evangelicals have partnered, and sometimes trained, local pastors and church leaders to push extreme, anti-gay legislation. Leading newspapers outed people as “top homosexuals”, such as Frank Mugisha, and gay men and women face discrimination and violence.

The documentary God Loves Uganda documents this political evolution by focusing on the American missionary organisation International House of Prayer(IHOP) and its work in Uganda. Spokesman Jono Hall, who appears in the film, tells me that the group does “not have any organisational presence in Uganda or any other part of east Africa, and we do not have any intention to”.

The film’s director Roger Ross Williams explains to the Guardian that the “only response from IHOP has been denial, denial, denial … I screened in Kansas City a number of times, and IHOP folks came and someone even stood up and said they were ashamed of their church. We also flew IHOP leaders to New York to screen the film and had a three-hour conversation with them afterwards. They said it made them think about how they spread the word. But then they continued to spread hate and even invited anti-gay pastors from Africa to Kansas City.” Williams warns that growing numbers of American churches are operating in Rwanda, Ghana, Cameroon and Malawi.

In Uganda, a key supporter of the movement to stigmatise gay citizens is the US lawyer and activist Scott Lively (who recently wrote that Obama “orchestrated a coup” in Ukraine to support the LGBT agenda). During multiple visits to Uganda since 2002, Lively has spoken of Africans resisting the “disease” of homosexuality.

Lively justifies his opinions in a way similar to Phelan. When I probed him on this, he explained that he doesn’t “want Africans to experience the same collapse of their family-centred Christian infrastructure that is still unfolding in America and Europe. I went to Uganda to warn Africans of the goals and tactics of the homosexual political movement.”

He tells me that his mission in Uganda was “to focus on prevention and rehabilitation of homosexuality. The western media know this but deliberately portray me falsely as an architect of the overly harsh and punitive law the Ugandan government eventually passed.” Lively says he currently has no plans to return to Africa but still supports a Bible school in Kenya. He believes evidence shows that Obama is gay.

His advocacy in Uganda was challenged by a lawsuit brought by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the group Sexual Minorities Uganda; they argued that Lively’s ministries constituted persecution. CCR’s lead counsel on the case, Pamela Spees, tells me that although proceedings remain in the discovery phase and the next major court date will likely be 2016, the “campaign to export discriminatory, anti-gay policies into Uganda and Africa more broadly has been remarkably successful”.

However, Spees says that the significance of the court case “cannot be overstated. For Ugandans who have been able to come to the United States for court hearings and meet activists in Massachusetts, who are also working to raise awareness about Lively’s efforts abroad, it’s an example of forging human connections, solidarity and of bringing awareness – and in some ways is its own form of accountability.”

Despite the huge challenges and growing homophobic campaigns across Africa, Kaoma is optimistic. “I can prayerfully say every tear and drop of blood of African sexual minorities is the step towards total liberation,” he says. He cites a resolution tabled in Angola in 2014 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights that condemned “acts of violence, discrimination and other human rights violations” against sexual minorities.

Bishop Senyonjo of Uganda, a rare voice in his country advocating for LGBT rights, also hopes that churches will change their ways. “Evangelicals, wherever they come from the US and elsewhere, should bring good news of inclusion and love of God rather than sowing seeds of discrimination and hate,” he tells me before adding: “The Gospel is supposed to be liberating to marginalised people.”

This week I’ve been in Adelaide for its literary festival. The events, outdoors and free, have been huge, drawing well over 1200 people per session.

I was interviewed by ABC Adelaide about my work, including my recent book Profits of Doom:

My following book review appeared in the Weekend Australian on 28 February:

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

By Johann Hari

Bloomsbury, 390pp, $29.99

The numbers are staggering. More than two million American citizens are in prison, about 25 per cent of the world’s incarcerated population. Many are African-American and Hispanic, in jail for drug offences. Race and the selective application of justice is a key theme of Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream, a stunning examination of the “war on drugs”.

Hari, a British journalist, takes a trip down memory lane, to the US of a century ago when it was possible to “go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine”. But a key instigator of the war on drugs, Federal Bureau of Narcotics head Harry Anslinger, soon found his enemy.

Singer Billie Holiday, a drug addict, was one of the most public victims of Anslinger’s zeal against black individuals who dared to question their second-class status. Holiday was a crusading woman who had been beaten, raped and abused for most of her life but her strength, and threat to the then social order, was to resist the suffocating, low expectation of her skin ­colour.

Anslinger warned the US House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations that Mexican immigrants and African-Americans were undermining social cohesion by excessively smoking marijuana. He had been informed of “coloured students at the University of Minnesota partying with female students (white) and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result? Pregnancy.”

This sounds comical today but Anslinger’s vision remains alive. Hari argues “the main reason given for banning drugs — the reason obsessing the men who launched this war — was the blacks, Mexicans and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people”. In the 21st century, it’s black Americans and Latinos who disproportionately feel the full weight of the law for often relatively minor drug offences.

The Obama administration still spends billions every year fighting a war that it knows can’t be won. Addiction is seen as a moral evil instead of a condition that should be treated compassionately.

Former policewoman Leigh Maddox, who spent years arresting and imprisoning drug offenders, tells Hari she eventually realised that “nobody ever trained me on the collateral consequences of marijuana arrests. I had no idea … It’s not something they’re made aware of. It’s go out and get numbers [arrests]. Do your job.” Today she runs a legal clinic in Baltimore, working with students to remove the arrest records of drug offenders. It’s one way to assuage her guilt for sending so many young people into a broken justice system.

Hari is an acclaimed writer who was caught plagiarising a few years ago, but this book is a redemption, and already a New York Times bestseller. It skilfully constructs a narrative around compelling, personal stories, the usually ignored or forgotten individuals who are selling or using various substances; living, avoiding or dying in the “war on drugs”.

Rosalio Reta was an American man who had killed for a Mexican drug cartel but eventually tired of his life and confessed to American officials. Hari visits the border town of Juarez, where he witnesses resistance to a US-led drug war that enriches politicians and police and causes intense suffering among a local population that is forced to flee, kill or remain silent.

He examines Portugal, a nation that ended the persecution of addicts and users in 2001. The numbers speak for themselves, a revolution in method and treatment. Drug use has dropped. “In the United States,” Hari writes, “90 per cent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 per cent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.”

Hari’s sympathies are never hidden: he’s opposed to the war on drugs. Chasing the Scream presents a persuasive argument that prohibition has not reduced drug consumption or abuse, but pushed generations into lives of misery, crime and imprisonment.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of the forthcoming book Disaster Capitalism.