Painting Fakes

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice....