Life Uncut - PART 2 - The Truth About Addiction Uncut with Johann Hari

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's personal journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times. Johann Hari is a best selling author of many books like Chasing the Scream, the War on Drugs, Lost Connections, Stolen Focus, and Magic Pill - The extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of new weight loss drugs.”We previously released an episode with Kate DeAraugo about her personal experiences with addiction and today we wanted to look at addiction a bit more broadly and unpack how it comes about and why so many of our loved ones are battling with addiction or substance abuse issues. We spoke about: The difficult narrative of loving an addict and not knowing what to do to help The story of what causes addiction isn’t accurate Why blaming it all on biology isn’t helpful, nor is blaming it all on personal choices Policies based on shame and punishment make addiction worse How much control we actually have over our own willpower People with ‘addictive’ personalities The money-happiness trap; the hedonic effect You can find all of Johann’s books and further information at his website. You can follow Johann on Instagram  You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! Xx  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany and today we have an interview that I'm very excited for, mainly because he's been on the podcast twice. This will be his third time. You will be the Second person in Life Uncut history to have made three appearances on Life Uncut, Johan. Oh, my God. Who was the other one? Terry Cole.

Terry Cole. Do you know Terry? No, I have no idea who that was. I did that facial expression because I thought it would be rude not to, but I have no idea who Terry Cole is. She's incredible. An incredible psychotherapist. That is the Terry Cole.

Oh, interesting. Right. Okay. Now, because of that, I would like to think you are a man that doesn't need an introduction, but there are probably some new people here who don't know who you are. Sorry. Johan Hari is a bestselling author of many books like Lost Connections, which is about anxiety, depression, stolen focus on why we can't pay attention. And one earlier that Laura and

Keisha spoke to you this year, The Magic Peel, which is all about a Zempic, the pros and cons, your experience in itself. We're going to talk today about your other book, Chasing the Scream, the first and last days on the war on drugs. We previously released an episode just recently with Kate DeRouge about her experiences with addiction. But today we wanted to look at addiction a bit more broadly, speak about how it comes, why so many of our loved ones are battling with addiction. and maybe squash some of the misconceptions that I think we all have about addiction. Before we get into that, though, Johan, you have had two of the most brilliant, accidentally unfiltered, embarrassing stories on this podcast in podcast history.

Just to remind you all what they were. One story was around how the Dalai Lama called Johan fat. He's a fucking bitch. He was supposed to be above it, but he wasn't. Yeah, and then you fat shamed him back. That was the best part. I did. I did say, well, you're quite fat as well.

You really showed him, didn't you? It was not my finest moment in journalism. Did you hand him some Ozempic? Yeah, I should send him a little pen now, huh? They're getting on, eh? The other one was how you got a Christmas card from your chicken shop, which really, once again, drives home the Ozempic story, doesn't it? It was underscored that maybe the Dalai Lama had a point, to be fair.

Do you have an accent on filter that can top that? I do. So in 2018, I spent three months completely off the internet for my book, Stolen Focus. And so I didn't have my phone. I was in this place in Cape Cod called Provincetown, and my phone was with my friend in boston and when i got my phone back i turned it on and there were loads of voice messages right and there were a few that were like unknown number so i almost

didn't bother checking them and after about a week i checked them on one of them it just it was it was a message that said i've still got it stored on my phone said hi johan this is oprah immediately it was like this is someone taking the piss out of me because they know that i'm like obsessed with oprah right literally obsessed like from when i was like six me and my grandmother every day we'll watch the April Winfrey show and it like completely shaped my well-being and she said I read your book Lost Connections and I really loved it and I wanted to just say maybe you'd like to come and visit me at my house and it just goes on and on for like a few minutes to talk about how much you love my book right and then she goes but you don't have an answer machine I can't do

the American accent real you don't have an answer machine message so I'm not going to leave my number but I'll call you back right and this was like she'd left this message two months before and I was like simultaneously like buzzing thinking is it someone taking the piss out of me ghosted Oprah exactly but also I was like well how do I now get in touch with her right like because I just ruined your chairs so I literally waited one and a half months and I'm about to go I was in London I was about to go in to see play and I see an unknown number and again I almost didn't answer it and I answered it and she's like hi Johan it's Oprah and I'm sort of mouthing to my friend we're about to go and I'm like I'm gonna miss this fucking play I don't care right

I was like it's Oprah it's Oprah right he knows that I hate opera and he bought the tickets he's like no it's a play it's not opera so i just walk off right and he brought it on his own and anyway she's like do you want to come to my house i was like i had no idea where her house was i just said yes so like a few months later i went to my house i was in la and her house one of the houses is in montecito which is about two hours out of la so they send a car and the guy drives me and we get to like this gate and the driver says like a little security code which i tried to memorize but I couldn't and there's this like stunning house right and he says you just go up there so I went up to the house and I and I'm standing there but there's no doorbell or anything

so I'm just sort of standing there and no one comes and I'm just like this is weird so I go back to the driver and I said oh there's there's no doorbell what do I do and he said oh just let yourself in and I said I'm sure I'm not meant to just let myself into Oprah's house I'll get shot right this is a really he's like oh no no you're meant to just let yourself in so i come to the house i sort of very tentatively i like open the door and i can see there's a sort of little seating area so i sit down and directly opposite the seating area there's a photo of oprah with barack and michelle obama the night of the presidential election when he won a photo of oprah with maya angelou and a photo of oprah with nelson mandela right so i am shitting myself as i wait

and i'm literally there for like 40 minutes and then someone just appears and goes oh hi johan i'm here to take you to oprah and i was like oh great right so we're walking through this house and i said isn't oprah's house like incredible it's stunning and she said what do you mean and i said oh it's so beautiful she said this isn't oprah's house and i said where are we she said this is the guards hut for oprah's house we go out and in the distance there's a fucking palace that makes fucking a palace look like a homeless person's shoe she's like that's oprah's house and I was like, oh, okay. There's nothing more humbling, is there?

I thought the guard's hut was like the palatial like heaven and it was like, oh no. I have so many questions and that's not what this episode is about. We have loved speaking to you over the last couple of years and it's interesting because so much, there's been multiple books, but so much of it comes back to a similar and core messaging and there's this current thread that kind of weaves through it all. And even when we spoke about people's use of mobile phones, we talked about addiction. When we talked about a Zen pick and we talked about how people can use it, we talked about the impacts that it can have on diet culture and potential addiction. What is it about addiction

that you became fascinated with? Because unless it's something that you've experienced yourself and you feel as though addiction is something that's permeated your life, like what was it about that that made you want to research this? For me, addiction was something that was there really all my life. My earliest memory, one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was too young then to understand why. But as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, several members of my family, we still do. when I started researching the subject a long time ago now 13 years ago I think like everyone in that position everyone who's got someone they love has got an addiction problem I was a real

mixture of feelings because part of me looked at the people I loved and could see that they were really suffering and felt really compassionate and wanted to help them but also nothing I was doing seemed to help I think also if I'm honest there was a bit of me that was really angry right that was like well why can't you just stop right yeah i was never a supporter of the drug war or kind of criminal punishment but i had those voices in my head right because i'd seen this so much and because it was so close to me and because i really wanted to help the people that i loved for my book chasing the scream i and just for myself really more importantly i ended up going on this really big journey all over the world i traveled over 30 000 miles i wanted to meet people

with really different perspectives drugs addiction the war on drugs and i got to know like a crazy mixture of people who really changed my life and changed how i think from a trans crack dealer in brooklyn called chino harding who is one of the wisest people i know to a hitman for the deadliest mexican drug cartel called rosalia reta he's not one of the smartest people i know the only country that's decriminalized all drugs with incredible results i'm sure we'll talk about and what i learned is like it's such a weird thing to say because I had seen this all my life and I realized I had profoundly misunderstood what I had been watching since I was a kid right drugs are not what we think they are addiction is not what we think it is the war on drugs is not what we think

it is the alternatives to the way we treat people with addiction problems are not what we think they are it really screws with your head at first when you realize how much we've got wrong about this but the reason why I think it's worth going on that journey into learning about what we've got wrong is because then you start to see the places that have understood what's really going on and start to put in place approaches that actually do work in helping people survive, helping people recover. And the evidence on that is really clear. So the whole thing was a really profound journey for me. What was it about your childhood and growing up that made you think, okay, not only am I going to dedicate my life to this research, but I want to go and

experience it myself. I want to meet these people in the flesh. I don't want to sit back and take the easy route i think it was a combination of things it was love for for them but also i wanted to make sense of it for myself never forgotten chino one of the people i just mentioned chino had a mother with a very bad addiction problem he grew up in brownsville in brooklyn he said this very painful line to me once he said the reason he started in his case it was he started smoking crack he said i wanted to know what my mother chose over me and i think if you've had those addiction experiences as a child you want to make sense of it for yourself as well as for them and then there was also I could see one of the younger members of my family was having issues

in this area and I think that was also really decisive for me it was like okay I've got to make sense of this and there were so many things that I learned but probably the most challenging and ultimately the most freeing was to realize I had actually misunderstood what addiction is so if you had asked me 13 years ago before I started doing this research Johan what causes heroin addiction let's choose that because it was close to me right I think I would have looked to you like you're an idiot and i would have said well the clue's in the name obviously heroin causes heroin addiction we've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense right it's certainly part of mine so we think you know we're sitting here in

north sydney if we kidnap the next 20 people to walk past this studio and like a villain in a saw movie we injected them all with heroin three times a day for a month at the end of that month they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason there's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave if they had that long an exposure that's a one reason why in English another word for being addicted is being hooked right first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something wrong with that story now chemical hooks are definitely real but it turns out they're a very small part of what's going on with addiction it's when it was explained to me by Dr. Gabor Marte who I think you probably know his work a friend of mine

brilliant Canadian doctor Gabor said to me in Britain where I'm from if you step out into the street and you get hit by a car and you break your hip, you'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given a lot of a drug called diamorphine, right? Diamorphine is heroin. It's medically pure heroin. It's much better than the shit you could score in King's Cross, right? It's the good stuff, right? If you're in a British hospital with broken hip, for example, you'll often be given that heroin for quite a long period of time. If anyone listening, if you've got a British grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation, your nan's taken a lot of heroin, right? If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely by exposure to

the chemical hooks what should be happening to all these people in british hospitals being given heroin for quite long periods of time they should be leaving and trying to score on the streets all our grannies should be heroin addicts yeah or at least some of them right but isn't the case for the fact that if it's being administered in hospital that it's a considered dosage it's i mean within a reasonable amount like aren't there then limitations on how that drug is administered that might affect someone becoming quote-unquote hooked on it there's some limitations but actually often people in hospitals are using it more than people out on the streets right so i remember when i learned that and looking at that evidence just thinking well that can't be true

right how could it be that you've got someone in a hospital bed being given quite a lot of medically pure heroin they don't become addicted you've got someone shooting up in the alleyway outside actually often shooting up less and a weaker form of the drug and they do become addicted i just thought that can't be right and i only began to understand it when i went to vancouver and interviewed an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that's really transformed how we understand addiction all over the world. So Bruce, Professor Alexander explained to me, the story we have in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks in the drug comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in

the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your listeners can try them at home if they feel a little bit sadistic. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine and what happens when you do that is the rat tries both bottles it doesn't know what's in it and it prefers the drug water almost always and it almost always kills itself within a couple of weeks right so there you go that's our story right the rat tries the drugs once it's tried them it wants more and more of them and then it kills itself but in the 70s bruce came along and said well hang on a minute. You put the rat alone in an empty cage. It's got nothing that makes life

meaningful for rats. It's got nothing that meets the rat's needs psychologically. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a rat cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends. They've got loads of cheese. They've got loads of colored balls. Everything a rat likes in life is there that can have loads of sex. It's got everything that meets the rat's needs, right? And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water this is the fascinating thing in rat park they don't like the drug water they don't use it very much none of them use it compulsively none of them overdose so you go from heavy compulsive use of overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living

to no compulsive use of overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living now there's lots of human examples of this and i'm sure we're going to talk about lots of evidence this also applies to humans but i never forget the day i first met bruce it was on a place called the downtown east side which is an area a bit like the old king's cross here in sydney kind of area with notoriously a lot of drug use kind of street scene and i went to a little place called pigeon park there were a lot of people shooting up around me and stuff and sitting there and thinking huh so what he means is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety important though that is to many people the opposite of addiction is connection right everyone knows they have natural

physical needs right you need food you need water you need shelter if i took those things away from knew you'd be in trouble really quickly. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel people see you and value you. You need to feel that you've got safety. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And our culture is good at lots of things, but we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And so what we need is a connection to getting those deeper needs met when you discovered this and i i asked this question when you know that this is

something that has permeated your family is that not a really hard realization because it's almost easier to be like drug addiction is selfish drug addiction is you know it's a choice that's being made that i don't have control over that someone else is doing and it's a selfish choice but when you know that it comes down to and in the research that you've done this idea that it's a lack of connection it's a lack of belonging that there's many other things that are attributing to this when you go, but I'm in this family and we're in this family and we're all here trying to be supportive of you. We're all here trying to connect with you, but yet you're still making these decisions that are inherently selfish. Where is the line with this? And I do ask this

question and I'm very conscious about inserting myself into this conversation as well. My stepdad was a heroin addict. It's something that was all throughout my childhood. And some parts of me almost feels like a bit of resentment when I hear it because I'm like I know that it's the truth but also I'm like you had everything but yet you still chose the drug and it's hard to reconcile that I guess without ruling it out as being just a selfish choice that was made I think there's so much wisdom in your question and I think the answer is complicated I had to think through that thing that you've just said as well we go there's all sorts of layers in what you just said that are really interesting so one is but this person's still making a selfish choice in the way which

is definitely how i had the thought about it or part of me had thought about it and then actually you look at it and go when you understand the insights that flow from rat park and lots of other evidence around addiction what you begin to realize is all addiction is an attempt to solve a problem it's a really challenging thing you know marianne faithful the great singer she's most famous having gone out with mick jagger which really pisses me off because she's much better than mick jagger and mick jagger is pretty fucking great so marianne had a heron addiction when she was in in the 60s when she was much younger and she nearly died with it she was homeless and she was in a terrible state and in her memoir she writes this line that i found really challenging

she said heroin saved my life because if it wasn't for heroin i would have killed myself at that point marianne is obviously not saying that heroin is a good solution to despair right for all the obvious reasons that no one needs me to explain right but it's the best solution anyone offered her at that point in her life and when you look at it and go it's not your this selfish person doing this self-destructive thing you're actually trying to save yourself right you're actually trying like she says you're trying to solve a problem if the problem is you're in unbearable pain yeah and you can't get through the day and there's this thing that for a moment will take or more than a moment will take away your pain it reframes how you look at person also that's

very important for so much of how we're taught to respond to people with addiction problems in this culture and indeed how the government responds to people with addiction problems mostly is we think, oh, you're indulging yourself. So we need to punish you and inflict pain on you to give you an incentive to stop. But once you understand this different way of thinking about it, actually pain is the cause of addiction, right? Addiction is an attempt to solve that problem of pain. Suddenly you realize, oh, this thing that we're saying is a solution is actually making the problem worse, right? A question that I ask is not because, and I don't want anyone to misconstrue it in terms of like, that this is how I now feel,

But I also understand that there are kids who have had parents who are addicts who feel as though, why wasn't I enough? If it comes down to connection, why as the child wasn't I enough? Or people who are partners who have husbands or wives who are addicts, why is what we have not enough? And I think for myself, it's been a great learning that it's not about me. It's not about what I could provide to that relationship. Do you want to say, you are totally allowed to feel that, right? Because I know that we're all living in this world where we're double guessing how people on social media will misconstrue what we're saying and attack us. So I get why you're cautious about saying it. But you are totally allowed to feel what you just said. And the way I think about it is, again, because the way we think about these problems, some people hear what I'm saying, and they think totally understandably, the only form of connection that they can then picture is interpersonal individual connection, right so like you said well why wasn't i good enough i loved my relative who was addicted i

had a very strong connection with them and yet they chose x drug over me or gambling or whatever it might be right porn whatever they might be addicted to and i think we need to understand addiction this is partly what my book lost connections is about we need to understand connection in a much deeper way than just interpersonal connection interpersonal connection is really really important it's unbelievably valuable and necessary for human beings but there's loads of forms of connection i go through nine in in lost connections connection to meaningful work which has been completely stripped away if you look at places in australia that have the highest addiction rates they're places where they've got real economic problems often right

there's connection to meaningful values you've got to have a sense of values spiritual values i don't mean that in a religious sense necessarily but you know spiritual values something greater than yourself exactly you've got to have connection to a sense of security you've got to have i think one of the cruelest things we do with addiction with depression with so many of these things is we put the job of solving it solely onto the addicted person and their family we don't let's think about car accidents we don't do that with car accidents we don't say if you're mangled in a horrible car wreck and get horribly you know we get seriously injured we don't then say it's your job to enforce the speed limits and reduce car accidents right the whole society works to

reduce car accidents we have seat belts we have speed limits we have all sorts of things where everyone reduces that problem together right i would argue we need to do the same with addiction and i went to places that have done it like portugal i suspect we'll talk about so there's all sorts of levels to that so absolutely interpersonal connection is important and i do think once you learn these things it begins to flip a lot of the things that we're told on our heads let's we're told for example if someone you love is addicted cut them off because that'll make them hit rock bottom and then they'll you know somehow get better right actually i think the evidence is pretty clear while people certainly should impose boundaries to protect themselves

there's no point sacrificing you know if you're going to destroy yourself to help someone that's actually helps neither of you of course i believe in sensible boundaries for people but the idea that automatically cutting someone off or threatening them makes them better is not true right and for a lot of people rock bottom will be death something that you did just brush over as you were saying that this is nine points of connection but i find it fascinating in your research that you say there's only two of those nine that are biological yeah there's three kinds of cause when it comes to depression anxiety addiction attention problems obesity a whole range of things that i write about in my different books there's three kinds of cause of these

problems there's biological causes like your genes and real brain changes that happen as you become addicted or obese there's psychological causes like trauma for example would be an obvious one and then there are social causes like if you're very financially insecure would be one but there's workloads, right? And the kind of fancy term for this is the biopsychosocial model. All these things have biopsychosocial causes, biological causes, psychological causes, social causes. And to some degree, all of those factors play out for everyone who's got one of those problems, right? The way I began to think about it is almost like a kind of, think about it as a bathtub with three taps. So some people will have a very strong biological tap and a strong psychological tap and

a low social tap. Some people have a very low biological tap, but it all swirls into the same bathtub that makes up you right you are the product of all of these factors but what we've done as a culture very often with these problems is we just tell a biological story but anyone listening if you go to a meeting of gamblers anonymous tonight wherever you are those people are just as addicted as the people in the narcotics anonymous room up the corridor right and yet we all know you don't snort a roulette wheel you don't inject a pack of cards there's no chemical hook involved in gambling if you can have all of the addiction but no chemical hook that tells you something that doesn't mean chemical hooks don't also contribute to it we

actually know this about chemical hooks we know how much they contribute there's an experiment that actually loads people listening will have taken part in related to cigarettes so i think we might have talked about this before but my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day there's an amazing photo of me and her when i'm a baby where she's breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach and when i discovered this i thought she'd feel guilty i showed it to her she said you were a fucking difficult baby i needed that cigarette she was totally unrepentant but i I also don't think you're alone in the fact of being of that generation where your parents smoked while we're having fun.

That was totally normal, right? It's so normal. Wild, right? I wanted to put the photo in one of my books. She said, you're not putting my tits in your fucking book. She's from Glasgow, isn't she? She's militantly Scottish. No, I'm not just doing a weird voice.

So you think about cigarettes, right? So we know when you smoke, if you smoke cigarettes, you smoke tobacco cigarettes, after a while you will start to crave the chemical hook in tobacco, which is nicotine, right? There's loads of evidence on this. No one disputes it. In the late 80s, early 90s,

scientists figured out a way that you could give people who are addicted to cigarettes all of the nicotine that they're addicted to but without them having to smoke nicotine patches right so at the time they thought oh if you're addicted to cigarettes that is an addiction to the chemical hook nicotine so when we give you the patch you're just going to stop right and then it was rolled out and as we know the u.s surgeon general did a big report on it 17 percent of smokers won seven percent if you give them nicotine patches stop smoking now that is not nothing that's a lot of people right that's that's a big deal that saved a conservative estimate hundreds of thousands of people's lives but that leaves 83 percent of the addiction that has to be explained in some other

way which is more about stress anxiety lost connections all these things that we're talking about but also the addiction to the habit totally 100 you've spoken about a little bit and we've brought it up a couple of times saying we'll get there but i think we're there now portugal has decriminalized drug use and i mean overarching they've decriminalized what we in australia still see as illegal drugs i think that there's been many conversations had as to whether that's going to be impactful beneficial or whether it's going to just turn into like everyone rampant doing heroin on the streets and that was kind of the debate that was happening here in australia what was the impact in portugal when they decriminalized drug use essentially when i

was researching this i put off going for a while because i i think i was afraid about what if it didn't work right but the evidence on the ground in portugal and the scientific evidence is really unambiguous so in the year 2000 portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the world one percent of the population was addicted to heroin which is staggering and every year they tried the american way the way that we follow not quite as bad as the americans but punishment you know yeah our primary response is arrest people punish them shame them give them criminal records prison also monetary fines which it's like usually when people have severe addiction issues money is something that is also a problem so it's like having a fine for an addiction issue doesn't

really help the cause exactly in fact it makes it worse absolutely the i think you're totally right but that was the way they did in portugal that was the way pretty much everyone in the world did it until finally one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they said look we can't go on like this with ever more people becoming addicted to terror and what can we do so they decided to set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man i got to know named dr shawal gulow and they said to this panel you guys go away figure out what would genuinely solve this problem and we've agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend so the goal was just take it out of politics it'd be like if peter darton and anthony albanese just

agreed we'll do whatever a panel recommends right so the panel went away for a couple of years they looked at all the evidence including rat park loads of stuff like that and they came back and said okay here's what we're going to do we're going to decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack everything but and this is the crucial next step we're going to take all the money we currently spend on screwing people up shaming them imprisoning them punishing them and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around and interestingly it was not what we think of as drug treatment in britain and australia so they do some residential rehab that has value but the biggest thing they did was a huge program of housing support and job creation

they'll go to say you used to be a mechanic and you got an addiction problem they'll go to a garage and they'll say if you employ this guy for a year we'll pay half his wages the goal was to say to every person with an addiction problem in Portugal we love you we value you we're on your side we want you back we're here to help exactly and you deserve help and by the time I went to Portugal it was 13 years into that and the results were completely unambiguous so at the time there were 27 members of the European Union there's 26 now because my country went crazy but put that to one side 20 to 27 members of the European Union Portugal went from having the worst problems in the European Union to almost having the lowest addiction was massively down HIV transmission

was massively down overdose deaths were massively down people will look at these figures they're in the book but also the British Journal of Criminology did a really good detailed study of all of this and one of the ways you know it works so well is that almost no one in portugal wants to go back i went and interviewed a guy called joel figuera who was the top drug cop in portugal at the time of the decriminalization and he said at the time what lots of people totally understandably say when they hear this idea he said decriminalizing all drugs this is madness we'll have an explosion in children using drugs we'll have an explosion in drug tourism we can't do this and he said to me everything I said would happen didn't happen and everything the other side said would happen did

and he said he felt really ashamed that he spent so many years arresting and shaming and punishing people when he could have been helping them turn their lives around and this is something I saw all over the world that have moved beyond the drug war from Vancouver to Uruguay to Switzerland to Portugal policies based on shame and punishment make the problem worse policies based on love and compassion over time reduce these problems well we've said the word a few times but I would love to kind of focus in on a little bit shame as a byproduct of drug addiction and drug use especially in this country how is the shame and the stigma that's surrounding it making it so much worse there's so many ways but there's a story that I learned really helped me to think about this and

helped me to think about the shame I was directing towards the people I love yeah I opened the book we're chasing the screen with this story and i think at first some people are like why is he beginning a book about the war on drugs like an addiction with this story but bear with me and you begin to see so in 1939 in a hotel in midtown manhattan the great jazz singer billy holiday walked onto a stage and she sang a song called strange fruit which is a song most people will know it but it's a song about lynching it's the idea that in the south there's this strange fruit that hangs from the trees and it's the bodies of black men who've been murdered by white mobs and her goddaughter lorraine feather said to me you've got to understand how explosive

this was this was not a time when people have political songs right so to stand in front of a mixed audience and sing this song is explosive years later malcolm x called it the the musical starting gun for the civil rights movement and that night billy got a warning from the agents of a man named harry anslinger and they basically said stop singing this song so harry anslinger is a really important person he was a big government bureaucrat who took over the department of alcohol prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending in the u.s so the u.s had a war on alcohol and alcohol won right and he wanted to keep it going keep keep his department going and at that time most drugs were legal so he invented the modern war on drugs he's the first person to ever use

the phrase war on drugs and he he builds the war on drugs around criminalizing certain drugs and around two groups he really hated the first group was people with addiction problems he'd had a bad experience when he was a kid he really hated addicts and the second group he hated was black people and he was so crazily racist he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s which was not easy to do right yeah he used the n-word so often in official memos at the time his own senator said he should have to resign and to harry anslinger billy holiday was the symbol of everything he hated right she's a black woman standing up to racism and she had an addiction problem we know why billy had an addiction problem she grew up in a very poor part of baltimore that was known as

pig town and one day when she was 11 a man 42 year old man named wilbur rich came to her and said oh your mother sent me to get you you've got to come with me i'm going to take you to your mother and he took her and he raped her and wilbur rich was punished he was sent to prison for a year and a half billy holiday was punished much worse she was sent to a convent the nuns told her these obviously words i would not use it's the words they used that she was a whore that she'd made the man do it she'd let him on it was her fault and and even as a child billy holiday was like no i didn't and they punished her in escalating ways including locking her in overnight with dead bodies because they had a funeral parlor next to this convent and billy holiday ran away to find

her mother and her mother was working in a brothel in harlem so billy went to find her mother and she started kind of working in inverted commas alongside her mother i'm putting working in inverted commas because she was a child so she's being raped for money by strangers day after day after day after day at one point the police raid the brothel instead of rescuing billy they she's 15 years old they send her to prison and in this situation billy develops a quite severe addiction to alcohol and later to heroin but billy holiday also becomes one of the great geniuses of the 20th century she reinvents singing uh people as different as frank sinatra and jay-z so that she transformed how they sang she becomes a staggering genius when harry

anslinger's agents tell her to stop singing this song she says in effect fuck you i'm an american citizen i'll sing what i damn well please and at that point anslinger resolves to destroy her and he employs a guy called jimmy fletcher so anslinger hated employing black agents but you couldn't really employ a white guy to follow billy holiday everywhere around harlem it'd be kind of obvious so he employed jimmy fletcher and he said to him follow billy everywhere she goes document her drug use document the drug use of all the jazz singers we're going to bust them all so jimmy follows billy holiday around for a year and a half he dances with her he gets to know her really well and when you read the surviving interview with jimmy it's pretty clear that he she was so amazing

he fell in love with her and his whole life he felt really ashamed of what he'd done he arrested her she was put on trial the trial was called the united states versus billy holiday which is the name of the film that got made out of my book she said you know the trial was called the united states versus billy holiday and that's how it fucking felt she was sent to prison she didn't sing a word in prison but the cruelest thing is what happened next so when she got out of prison you needed at that time anywhere where alcohol was served something called a cabaret performer's license and they were answering and make sure she doesn't get it one of another one of her god children said to me what is the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing

they love take away their soul exactly and in that situation entirely predictably billy relapses one day she collapsed in new york not very far from where she'd sunk strange fruit that night the first hospital she was taken to refused to take her because she had an addiction problem second hospital agreed to take her but billy was convinced that anslinger's men weren't finished with her she said to her friend maylie they're gonna kill me in there don't let them she wasn't wrong so in the hospital she was diagnosed with quite advanced liver cancer anslinger's men come and they arrested her on a hospital bed. They handcuffed her to a hospital bed.

I interviewed the last surviving person who'd been in that room, an amazing man named the Reverend Eugene Callender, who walked out of the hospital and led protests outside saying that they were killing her. She started to go into withdrawal, which is very dangerous

when you're as weak as she was. And mainly her friend managed to insist that she was given methadone. She began to recover. Ten days later, they cut off her methadone and she died the next day. One of her friends said to the BBC that she looked like she had been

violently wrenched from life and the reason i mentioned that story in relation to shame and the shame i felt is there's so many things about that story that are so important the first is that it tells you about the war we're fighting now right we're basically still singing harry anslinger's song not billy's right at every stage you know when she's put on trial she said i just want someone to help me right at every stage in that story think about when she was 11 years old and she was raped when we could have said that wasn't your fault you didn't deserve it when she's 15 years old and the police raid that brothel and she could have been rescued and instead they shame her at every stage of her addiction instead of being helped she's punished

and shamed by the way you want to think about racism my god there are points in this country where every single young person in custody in the northern territory i know is aboriginal every single one right you look at the enforcement of the drug laws in this country if you are a wealthy person in north sydney a wealthy white person you will never be arrested quite rightly and that's how it should be we all know that it's not true people in indigenous communities figures on this are staggering so partly you can see what we're doing now but actually in terms of shame when it comes to addiction there's one heroic story we tell in our culture which is that sometimes people recover from their addiction and that is indeed a heroic story and there'll be lots of people

listening in that position and you should be incredibly proud of yourself that is not the only heroic story about addiction billy holiday never recovered from addiction she died with her addiction she was still a fucking hero no matter what they did to her she would always find somewhere where she could perform she would go to the worst parts of the deep south and she would perform that song and you know we're never going to forget Billie Holiday's music like I said she was one of the transformative geniuses of the 20th century but we need to also remember the incredible moral vision of what Billie Holiday stood for and at some point we have to start following the vision of Billie Holiday and not the vision of Harry Anslinger. We have to get to

that point. For a hundred years, we've been singing war songs about people with addiction problems when we should have been singing love songs to them all along. I think it also highlights the extreme link between addiction and childhood trauma. Totally. And we've got loads of evidence about that. What do you think your research on addiction has taught you about willpower? Whenever I think about willpower, I always think about someone who's based here in Australia, who i interviewed it was the most i think the most depressing interview i've ever done in my whole life he's called professor roy baumeister he's a he wrote a book called willpower you should

have him on it's really interesting imagine being described as that i've done a lot of fucking depressing interviews you just said it's the worst interview i've had you should have him on he is a really good and interesting and insightful person but it was a really sobering moment so he wrote a book called willpower he's done loads of research over 30 years on willpower he's done a huge amount on this really important scientist and thinker he's based in queensland he's at the university there i went to interview him when i was starting working on stolen focus my book about why we can't pay attention how we can get our brains back i sat down with him and i was like um the exact words are in the book i'm not going to remember them exactly but i said to

him something like you know so i'm writing about why we're struggling to focus and pay attention really interested in your research love to you know what what can we learn from you and all the work you've done on willpower about how we can get our attention back and he said something like oh it's really interesting you asked me that because i've noticed i can't really pay attention very much anymore i play candy crush a lot on my phone i've been we're all the same and i was like it was like you know the moment at the end of invasion of the body snatchers when the person realizes everyone's been fucking body snatchers like i want to go but wait a minute didn't you write a book called willpower aren't you the leading expert on willpower in the whole

world and you're sitting there exactly i'm like you're sitting there telling me you play fucking candy crush all day but i realized so willpower is real it's a real thing the evidence is very we will have all exercised willpower at some point in our lives like before i came on here i nearly had a third cup of coffee but i thought no i'll get too buzzy i'll get too manic right like you had it didn't you you drank the third cup i would have injected it into my veins if i could i swear well i used to think jet lag was a myth now i'm 45 when i land in australia it's real i'm basically like joe biden in that presidential debate i'm like what's happening why is anyone asking me a question where am i yeah so i need but i exercise my willpower i only had two cups of coffee because

that's why i'm talking at this speed and not talking even faster right so willpower is real but willpower is a limited tool right the way i think about if you go back to the biopsychosocial model biological causes psychological causes social causes willpower is one little sliver of those psychological causes so it's real and we shouldn't use it and there are things you can do to improve your willpower that i talk about in all my books and i'm it's really important to not devalue that but it's also not important to overstate the role that individual willpower can play because the truth is a lot of us are in environments that are systematically undermining our willpower when it comes to food yeah and everything's working drugs phones exactly so

it's like running up a down escalator right how much do you think is nature verse nurture when we come to addiction because you hear this like i think of my mom for example she has such an addictive personality that's what we say about her all the time i'm not talking about drugs i'm just talking about candy crush that's what made me think about um she does a food that she starts to eat she she does one thing and then she just sticks to it and does it over and over and over and over again whereas like you know the rest of the family don't have that addictive personality how much of that do you think is like biochemical or nature versus nurture i would come back to that analogy of the bathtub with three taps like biological tap psychological tap social tap

all the evidence is clear that nature and nurture interact right so think about for example we all know some people who find it really easy to gain weight and some people who just no matter what they can't gain weight right i fucking hate those people but whatever so you know obviously there is when it comes to weight a biological component but equally that interacts with the environment right obesity has exploded in our lifetimes massively blown up that's not because everyone suddenly lacked willpower that's because all sorts of changes in the environment right so i would say it's not like there's like some people who've got these biological factors and some people have got psychological factors and some people have got social factors

we all have all of them but some people one tap is stronger than the other does that make sense absolutely that's one of those things you can't help no well you can yeah you can so even if you've got and this actually i think it's really important you just said that because that's a really natural follow-on thought which is that oh if i've got one of the problems with telling an overly biological story is it makes people trapped it may or can make feel trapped i'll give you an example when i was a teenager and i went to my doctor i was very depressed i now realize in retrospect because partly because of a lot of childhood trauma and lots of other things of course and my doctor who's a lovely person told me a really oversimplified story my doctor said oh we know why people get

depressed some people are just lacking a chemical in their brains all you need to do is drug yourself right so i took some drugs they made me a little bit better gave me a lot of side effects over time didn't do that much good for me it's a band-aid yeah there were different people some people it massively helps them other people it actually harms them anyone listening who's benefiting from chemical antidepressants my advice is to carry on but the evidence is clear that you know it's limited right for a lot of people i don't have an issue with the drugs my issue my issue is with the story that overly biological story that my doctor told me because what it does is it produces exactly the result that you naturally had just then britney that i that i had

firstly if the problem was just in your biology the first thing it's saying to you is all this pain that you're experiencing doesn't actually mean anything it's like a glitch in a computer a program right that your pain is meaningless it's a malfunction but the evidence is really clear from people like the world health organization your pain makes sense you feel distressful reasons your pain is telling you something and instead of insulting that pain by saying it's purely a biological malfunction or that it's a sign of weakness which is the other mistaken story we tell or oversimplified story we tell we say to people right we need to listen to this pain, which is very hard to do. You need to do it in a supportive environment. But yeah,

we're stuck in this very simplistic division. Those things happen in much wider contexts that we need to think about and that we can heal together. Johan, it is honestly such a pleasure to interview you. And I know we've had the privilege of doing so through the screens twice now, but being able to have the conversation with you in real life, in the flesh and understanding the compassion of which you come to the conversations of addiction with is something that is so compelling. And for anyone who listened to the last episode that we did with Kate, she spoke about addiction from her personal experience as an addict. So it's really interesting to join the personal experience with the research. We live in a machine that is designed

to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? We're bombarded with messaging and machinery designed to get us to crave those likes to buy work harder to buy shit we don't need to display it on instagram to make people go omg so jealous we've all been there right yeah then we go take out our bank loan to pay for it exactly which makes us feel worse but we're in this dysfunctional model of values which so yeah this system of values we need to break with that obviously i go through in the book how we can do that i went to places that begun to do it i talk about very practical ways we can all do that and things that i've done in my own life to try to break with that although it's it's difficult right we live in this environment that's constantly

besieging us I can see why we've had you on three times Johan and to be honest I don't think this will be the last time there's so much to talk to you about to everyone listening Johan's books you can get literally anywhere they're bestsellers you can listen to him on any podcast but please listen to this one first everything's going to be in our show notes and thank you so much for giving us your time today oh thank you so much I meant to say or Hermione my publicist is in the next room will taser me that um we've talked about chasing the scream if you go to chasing the scream.com you can see where to get the audio book or ebook which is about lost connections it's the lost connections.com yeah because lost connections.com turns out to be a band

oh my god stop it yeah so i was like i didn't know that when i named the book but uh turned out buying that url would have been like insanely expensive so it's the lost connections.com we will link the correct one in the show notes thank you so much Thanks for watching!