Johann Hari

Here is Hari’s Wikipedia.

As a student journalist, Hari is genuinely someone who gets me excited about a career in the industry, delving into and discussing controversial topics, which happen to be topics that I have been affected by. However, I have only read one of his books, Chasing the Scream, it is obvious that he is on a mission to question the way society behaves, and what has made us do things in such a particular way.

Chasing the Scream is a look into the war on drugs. The book aims to discover what the cause of addiction really is and how we can solve it. After reading this I am excited to delve into his other best sellers, Lost Connection’s, and Stolen Focus.

There is one chapter in particular about redemption. It covers the life of Bud Osborne, a heroin addict turned activist, who is the co-founder of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), which advocates that addicts should hold an opinion just as valuable as anyone else’s.

This is an excerpt from that chapter that made me cry. You should know literature doesn’t make me cry very often:

“A few years before he died, Bud went on a reading tour of high schools in British Columbia, and way up north in a town called Smithers, he read out a poem titled “When I Was Fifteen” about the time he tried to kill himself. He didn’t impose any retrospective wisdom. He tried only to describe truthfully what it had been like for him on that day. He didn’t know it yet, but there was a girl in the audience who, a few days before, had taken an overdose, and her parents had responded by telling her she couldn’t be unhappy because they gave her everything. Her teacher suggested she come to the poetry reading to take her mind off things. At the end of the meeting, the girl approached Bud. She insisted that the teacher unlock the office and run off a photocopy of the poem; she wasn’t leaving without it she said. She clutched it as she left, glowing now. And Bud thought to himself - I stayed alive long enough to keep my promise. I wrote my poem.”

204 - Chasing the Scream.