Johann Hari is a confessed plagiarist and malign Wikipedia vandal. Don't give him the time of day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism_and_Wik...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism_and_Wik...
There's a pattern on the internet where as soon as someone's name is mentioned, people trot out the #1 worst meme about them and act like it ends the discussion. It's as if there's a big hash table in the sky that maps public figures' names to most-rage-inducing detail, and when a key in the hash table shows up, someone invariably rushes in with the associated value. That is a Pavolvian reflex, not thoughtful discussion. We're going for thoughtful discussion here.
But there's a case to be made that the extent of Hari's prior dramatic fabrications still hasn't been recognized, and that he still tends to embellish details in more recent work:
http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3...
(For me, a compelling excerpt from his book a few months ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919880 – seemed vague and jumbled on timelines enough for me to wonder about the trustworthiness of Hari as a narrator... even though I'm naturally sympathetic to criticisms of the drug war and drug-warriors.)
As wrong as it is to say Hari "is" inherently something bad, it should be fair to remind the unaware of what he once-upon-a-time did via his reporting, and that those who are conservative with their trust may still want to take his most poignant reporting with a grain of salt.
all of us see comments here that give us a faintly icky feeling, but it's pretty much only you who is able to put into words exactly what it is that's so icky about them. my hat is off to you, man. (absolutely no sarcasm intended, by the way.)
(Edit for extraneous 'the')
The premise of the thing is that he's taking stuff out of other peoples books anyway :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism_and_Wik...:
"He was shown to have made misleading edits on Wikipedia"
"In July 2011, both Private Eye and Damian Thompson in his Telegraph blog accused Hari of inventing an atrocity for his Orwell Prize winning article on the Central African Republic."
"The Council concluded that the article contained inaccuracies"
So not 'making up' but 'invented', 'inaccurate', and 'misleading'.
The guy's a horrible fraud and liar.
Lets spend the 21st century cleaning up the incarceration mess of the 20th, and start looking addiction from the perspective of science, rather than criminal justice.