The Joe Rogan Experience - #1250 - Johann Hari

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. His new book “Lost Connections” is available now.

here we go five four three two one hello Johan hey Joe it's great to see you man what's happening yeah good I've just we're just saying before we went on camera that I uh I've made a note to myself that says talk slow talk American because although I spent about half the year here we british people there's a reorientation where you suddenly realize i was once in a uh an ihop in cactus arizona and i was saying to the woman right like i'll have some pancakes whatever it was and she kept looking at me going what and after about literally three minutes she goes do you speak english i was like my people fucking invented it, right? But no one was there to laugh at my sad joke because they didn't understand what the fuck I was saying.

Arizona is a strange place. I really love Arizona. There's great parts. Like Phoenix is amazing. Tucson's a great place too. But it's a wild west sort of a state. It's one of those weird holdover states that have a lot of weird old school laws. Like I think you could just walk around with a gun.

Yeah, you can. My main experience in Phoenix was, in Arizona, in fact, was going out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang wearing T-shirts saying I was a drug addict while members of the public mock them and jeer at them. Right? Because I've written this book about the war on drugs. Is that Joe Arpaio? Yeah, Sheriff Arpaio. And I wanted to show up. Yeah. Sheriff Arpaio, no longer sheriff now,

thankfully. But, uh, yeah. And it was, yeah. Arizona is a deeply weird place. It's weird.

A lot of really nice people, but it's 150,000 degrees. Yeah. Well, literally almost nobody lived there until air conditioning was invented. Right. And you see what I once made a horrendous mistake. In fact,

in Phoenix where I had to walk somewhere and I could see on the map, it was like a mile away. So I was like, Oh, just walk. It's fine. And I get like halfway there and people are literally stopping their cars going,

are you okay? Because the only reason anyone would ever walk in Phoenix was basically if your car had broken, it didn't even occur to them. I might've actually just chosen to walk. Right. Plus you're so white. I am.

You must've been like beat like a tomato. I used to go out with a Brazilian who would literally just look at my body and laugh and be like, you're so white i am like you must have been like beat like a tomato i used to go out with a brazilian who would literally just look at my body and laugh and be like you're so white how could a human be so white right i don't also i never have a nose color like i'm either this albino color or red right i never there's no rich brown hue ever none of my ancestors they're scottish and swiss so they never saw the sun right none of my ancestors my friend jamie was over my house once and he's uh not this friend jamie a different friend jamie who's uh british as well and uh my daughter who was uh at the time i think she was like 10 or something like that she goes she goes to uh my wife she goes mommy he's so white

and she and she goes yeah she goes no no like he's white like paper so from then on jamie became jamie white like paper that's a very accurate description of my lack of pigment is cruelly true it's funny that we how much we appreciate the english accent though the english accent is like one of the best tools for selling things to very gullible americans where the british people benefit from constant positive discrimination in the United States, right? It's like having a 10-inch dick, just having a British accent. People go, oh my God, you've got an accent. And it's like all humans have accents.

I've just got a slightly different one. But it's a cherished one. It makes you feel like you're more sophisticated, you're more well-read, you're more aware of the world. I mean, I just am sophisticated and well-read. Anyway, you get this constant, yeah, constantly people ascribing to you much better qualities than you actually have. But what does it work in reverse? Like in England, what is the reaction to American accents?

It's mostly disgust, right? I don't know. There's a mixture. Americans, we grow, I always think like the relationship of Britain and America

is like one of those police mirrors because we grow up constantly looking at the United States, right? We're constantly staring through. We are immersed in American culture.

Right. But when Americans look back at us, they're just seeing like a reflection of themselves. I mean, Americans watch Downton Abbey and know about like

the Queen or whatever. Right. But there isn't that two-way dialogue that there is that you need the you know the yeah so it's a slightly weird so i think we feel very american right and i spent half the year here and i you know every now and then you come up against these deep cultural differences that you're just like oh fuck okay right this is really not my culture right and it's a those moments of disorientation are really strange but give me one for an example well there's a question that americans ask all the time that i have literally never heard a european ask right it's the question what's your story right every american you can go to the most crusty right-wing person coming out of mar-a-lago or a kid in West Baltimore and you can say, what's your story?

And they'll have an answer. The only context I can imagine a British person saying, what's your story? Would be in a police interrogation. It would be an extremely hostile question. What's your story? Right. It would be you just wouldn't ever say it. Right. We don't. Americans narrativize their lives in a way I absolutely love. And as a journalist who writes books about like depression and addiction and you want people to talk about their lives it's an unbelievable gift to you right that people will tell you so i remember once being on a bus in mississippi and sitting next to a woman and within five minutes of chatting to her she told me about like her two miscarriages how her mother hated her and i thought if we were

swiss where my dad's from you wouldn't tell me this until we got married and maybe not even then right so there's a level of candor and storytelling among americans it's one of the best things about this this this you know fucked up an amazing place right that i just love and it's there's something about there's a there's a kind of narrative openness that's very different about this place than Europe, anywhere in Europe. Now, when you talk to people in England, you guys don't have the same level of social media, not social media, but of reality television. You have some, like Big Brother, but you don't have it to the extent that we have it here, right? Yeah, it hasn't.

Well, I mean, your country has literally been taken over by reality television, right? We have a reality television president. No, it hasn't well i mean your country has literally been taken over by reality television right we have a reality television president uh no it hasn't conquered the whole culture in that way well he's a reality television president but he's sort of a game show host president like that's how i used to describe myself when i was hosting fear factor they're like you host a reality show i'm like sort of it's a game show it's just a fucked up game show it's like and trump was hosting a game show essentially right it was a contest it wasn't like keeping up with the kardashians that's a true reality show because there's literally nothing going on other than these people's lives and whatever orchestrated

bullshit they put in to make it more interesting yeah i hadn't thought of it that way i think because but i think that's part of the thing that i was getting to about americans always wanted to give you their narrative they always want to give you the story of their life so when someone says what's your story they already have it ready you know because it's almost like we feel like we're in some sort of a small television show all the time or some sort of small production it's like almost a part of our who we are yeah every american thinks they're the star of their own movie right and i forget who said this but someone realized you know sometimes in life you realize you're just the extra right

you're in the corner of the shot right right and um yeah i think that's true and i think that's that's not as true of british people or i think there's certain how to put it like there's a certain kind of self-deprecation you're taught as a British person you're taught and I had to kind of unlearn it living here so what would be examples I forget where I read this story so maybe it's not true but I remember reading it years ago so we had these terrible subway bombs in 2005 I'm sure you remember four young British men go on to London Underground and murder, I think it was, over 50 people. And two weeks later, another group of jihadis tried to do the same thing.

But they hadn't built the bombs very well. So they go down into the subway and there's a loud bang, but it doesn't connect with the detonator. So there's a loud bang, but it doesn't actually blow everyone up. Obviously, people freak the fuck out, as you can imagine, right? And I forget forget maybe this isn't maybe this is a story that someone told that wasn't factually true but it's i think it reveals something very very something about our british character so if i remember rightly um three of the bombers escape on the escape on the day and are caught like a few hours later and one

of them's caught on the at the time right and someone i think it was an off-duty fire officer in the story chases after them for ages chases after the guy for ages while everyone else is running the fuck away. And he catches the guy and he throws him to the ground. And what he said to him was that the off-duty fire officer says to the attempted suicide bomber, you rude, rude man. Right. And what I love about that is like the idea that suicide bombing is just like bad manners. Right. It's like it's just impolite.

Right. Or even a better example, which is true, it was reported at the time definitely was um during the riots we had in 2011 uh in london um there was one place i forget where it is where they broke into a luxury goods store and they could only make it was a very strong window so they could only make a hole in the corner of the window and it was caught on the security cameras that the rioters formed a line to go in and loot the store right that's how deep the idea of that the rioters formed a line to go in and loot the store, right? That's how deep the idea of like queuing and making a line is in British culture.

Even in a riot, we're like, oh no, I think you were before me, right? I've got a Chilean friend, Isabel Banquet, who lives in London. And if I remember her phoning me after she read that, I'd be like, you're fucking English. You don't know how to riot. This is a riot.

You're forming a queue. What's wrong with you people, right? You guys don't have Black Friday cereals, do you? No. They've just started. Yeah, it's an unfortunate business. That might be the end of your humility. Exactly.

We're not going to make it. We survived the Nazis. We're not fucking surviving Black Friday, right? There's something about those deals. When people get that bargain and then they open that door, ready, go, and people pile through. All humanity gets tossed aside. It gives you an insight into the fucking financial desperation of ordinary americans right it's a little bit of that but it's also the competitive nature of those things

where you're trying to grab the few remaining items that are 25 off and you've been saving for this tv for six months and there it is right in front of you and you charge and people are fighting left and right it's awful it's just a terrible way for people to you know they interact with each other so what do you got here for me we're gonna talk about yeah the I was really to talk to you because we talked last time about my book about depression loss yes and one things that was just as me as we talked about the book I wrote about addiction and the war on drugs and really was that out last time yeah yeah that was a book that came out a few years but it's just come out in a new edition where there's loads of extra material particularly about the opioid crisis and it's interesting because so you added

to it yeah loads of new stuff because that book's about five years old now and um although with loads of new stuff now but you know it was something i cared about for this really like personal reason in that one of my earliest memories is trying to wake up one of my relatives and not not being able to i didn't i didn't understand why then because i was a little boy but as i got older i realized we had drug addiction in my family and it got to the point where i was writing uh chasing the scream i book about the drug war about i guess i started eight years ago and some of the people i love were in a really shitty condition terrible state and i was trying to figure out

what to do nothing i was doing was working nothing i was doing was helping and i decided right okay well there are lots of people all over the world are trying to deal with this problem i want to go and meet with them talk with them so i ended up going on this big journey it took three years i traveled over 30 000 miles i wanted to sit with um you know people who'd been through addiction it actually led to a lot of other aspects of the war on drugs which i think are as important as the what we do about addiction um i want to sit with like places that had the harshest possible policies like we mentioned arizona where i went out with a these women who are made to go out on chain gangs and are humiliated and tormented. Vietnam, where they make people with addiction problems go into literally forced labor camps. And the places that had the most compassionate possible policies like Portugal,

where they decriminalized all drugs with incredible results. Switzerland, where they legalized heroin, incredible results. And I guess I ended up just spending so much time with such a crazy mixture of people from a transgendered crack dealer in Brooklyn who ended up actually being one of the smartest people I know to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel who's definitely not one of the smartest people I know. And I learned loads of things. But I guess the heart of what I learned is just so much of what we've been told about this for so long. It's now 100 years since we started fighting the war on drugs in this country. And it was then imposed on the rest of the world. So much of what we've been told about this for so long it's now 100 years since we started fighting the war on drugs in this country and it was then imposed on the rest of the world so much of what we're told is wrong drugs aren't what we think they are addiction isn't what we think it is the war on drugs isn't what we think it is and the alternatives to the war on drugs aren't what we

think they are so in some ways it's kind of dawning to go all over the world and realize so much of what we take for granted isn't right, but that opens up this whole exciting other set of possibilities. The main reason why people assume that people do drugs is to escape reality. What do you think is the primary thing that they're running from? So you've got to separate out two things. And this surprised me because my family's experience was pretty bad and catastrophic addiction. surprised me because my family's experience was pretty bad and catastrophic addiction but most drug use even the main drug war body in the world the un officer drug control admits that 90 of all currently banned drug use is what they call non-problematic so the person isn't addicted

and it doesn't damage their health right so 90 so let's set that aside we'll come back to that okay there's like 90 that's recreational use where people use because it makes their lives better right then you've got the coffee sip of wine or or or ecstasy or a whole range of a whole range of currently cannabis a whole range of currently illegal drugs um in most cases there are some people who have addictions to cannabis um but you so you then got got to ask well what's happening with this 10 who have got a problem right what's going on and one of the things that really blew my mind in the research for chasing the scream was realizing i had deeply misunderstood what addiction is i had misunderstood the thing i thought i had been seeing in front of me since i was a kid right so most people let's think about

heroin addiction because that was close to me most people if we stop the next 20 people to walk past your you know your studio and we said to them what causes heroin addiction i think they'd look at us like we were stupid and they'd say well the clues in the name dipshit right heroin causes heroin addiction we've been told this story for 100 years it's become totally part of our our common sense right we think if we took the we took the next 20 people after that who walked past the studio and we injected them all with heroin every 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 need and we think that a lot of people think

that's what addiction is right it's this physical hunger for the chemical hook inside the drug. There is some reality to chemical hooks. They exist. They're real. But that's actually a very small part of what's going on. The first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something wrong with that story we've been told is when it was explained to me by loads of doctors in Britain, where I'm from, if you step out into the street and you get hit by a truck and you break your hip, you'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin, right? It's the medical name for heroin. It's the stuff you'll be given in hospital is much better than the shit you buy on the street because it's medically pure. It's,

you know, not contaminated. If what we think about addiction is right, that it's just caused by exposure to the drug, what should be happening to all these people in British hospitals who are being given loads of heroin, right? Anyone watching this podcast who's got a British grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taken a shit ton of heroin, right? If what we think is right, that addiction is caused primarily by exposure to the chemical hooks, loads of these people should be leaving hospital and trying to score on the streets, right? This has been studied very carefully it virtually never happens right and when i learned that it just seems so weird to me i thought it couldn't possibly be true right

how could it be you've got someone in a hospital bed who's taking loads of really potent heroin they don't become addicted and in the alleyway, you've got someone who's using actually a weaker form of the drug who becomes addicted. How can that be? What's happening here? And I only began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and met this amazing man called Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that's really transformed how we think about addiction all over the world. It's a new way of thinking and loads of new evidence. So Professor Alexander explained to me this story that we've been told right that addiction is caused by the chemical

hooks primarily comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century they're really simple experiments your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit shitty today right 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 you might 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 you might remember in the 1980s there's a famous partnership for drug free america ad that's that shows this experiment right and the rat in this cage starts to drink the it always prefers the heroin water and almost always kills itself within a week or two right so there you go go. That's our story.

You're exposed to the drug, it takes you over, and then you just die, right? But in the 70s, Professor Alexander comes along and says he was working with people with addiction problems, and he's like, well, hang on a minute. We put these rats alone in an empty cage. They've got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats, right? What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like

heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. Anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both, they don't know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the water very much. None of them ever use it compulsively. The heroin water.

Yeah, the heroin water. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and death by overdose when their lives are shitty to none when they have the things that make life meaningful there's loads of human examples i'm sure we'll we'll talk about but the the main thing i took from this is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety the opposite of addiction is connection we have to ask ourselves what are the contexts in which people become addicted because there

are some contexts where people find these drugs extremely addictive and there are some contexts where they don't become addicted at all. There's something, the drug plays a role. Chemical hooks are real. I can talk about how we know that. They play some role, but they're actually a surprisingly small role of what's going, small amount of what's going on.

We know this from, I mean, there's so many examples, but I'll give you another one. At the same time as Rat Park, there was an experiment going on that everyone listening to this would have heard of, the Vietnam War, right? In Vietnam, shitloads of American troops were using heroin, right? It was very easy to get it out there. They'd actually, insanely, they had cracked down on cannabis.

And so people have moved to heroin because sniffer dogs can't detect heroin as easily as cannabis. So cannabis was everywhere. Sorry, heroin was everywhere. Loads of American troops were using it. Cannabis was everywhere. Sorry, heroin was everywhere. Loads of American troops were using it. And if you look at what people said at the time,

the authorities, the Nixon White House, they were shitting themselves because they're like, they believe this chemical hooks theory of addiction. So they're like, fuck, when this war ends, we're going to have, you know, half a million heroin addicts on the streets of the United States. There's a really good study that followed these men home.

And it found that the vast majority of them just stopped, right? They didn't go into rehab, most of them, they didn't go into horrific withdrawal, some of them had an uncomfortable flu-like symptoms, but most of them just stopped. Now, if you believe this old theory that chemical hooks take you over, that makes no sense. But if you understand professor alexander is saying and that all the new evidence about addiction that i go through in chasing the scream it makes it makes perfect sense right you me everyone in this area if i took any of us and put us in a horrific pestilential jungle where we don't want to be and i made you kill a load of people and potentially die at any

moment you would find heroin much more appealing than you do now right if't want to be and I made you kill a load of people and potentially die at any moment, you would find heroin much more appealing than you do now, right? If we want to understand why people turn to painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in pain, right? And the core of addiction, I learned from these amazing experts all over the world, the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be and once you understand that you can see why what we've been doing is such a disaster right because the theory we have with the war on drugs think about arizona we can talk about that more but i you know like i say i went to this nightmare prison estrella prison in phoenix arizona where people are humiliated and the theory behind that

part of the theory behind the war on drugs is if you've got people who are addicted you've got to inflict pain on them to you know give them an incentive to stop right but once you understand that pain is in fact the fuel of addiction it's in fact the primary cause of addiction you can see why sometimes people say that doesn't work truth is much worse right that makes addiction worse those women i went out with and spent all that time with who were you know humiliate i remember in that prison we come back from uh being on the chain gang where they have to sometimes they have to dig graves they weren't doing that the day i was there they had to collect garbage the day i was one of the days I was there but we come back

and normally with prisons as a journalist they don't want to show you anything right like you have to kind of really finagle to get them to show you anything in this prison um it's like a pantomime of cruelty they want to show it to you the whole point is to humiliate these people right so the women I've been talking to and the men were really terrified of what they called the hole right it's the solitary block and so i said to the guards will you show me the hole i was sure they said they're like yeah sure come on we'll show you so go around to the the hole and these women who put up the most like trivial infractions like having a cigarette it's literally a hole right it's like a concrete block. You're on your own. There's nothing in it. There's a tiny window where you can see sunlight. No TV, nothing.

And I remember speaking to a woman who was in this and suddenly thinking, this is the closest you could get to an exact human recreation of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats, right? And this is what we're doing, thinking it will stop these women being addicted it's the system we've built dr gabble marty um an amazing guy said to me you know if

negative consequences stopped addiction there wouldn't be a single addict in the world right what have people with addiction problems not suffered what humiliation have they not endured so we've got this i think we've got to really shift our perspective on what addiction is. And there are places that have done this that have led to incredible results. I love that rat experiment one because that had always been parroted as this is the proof positive that these drugs are so terrible for you. But once they figured out that if you take those rats and put them in a wonderful place and they don't have addiction, it really does make you step and go okay what is exactly going on here obviously there's chemical hooks they are real like people that are on sustained prolonged use of opiates especially uh people with back injuries have a incredibly difficult time kicking them even really positive people who don't necessarily

have awful lives but um it's it's one of those things that gets in your head and then you sort of parrot it. You've heard it. You repeat it. But it's the reason why I asked you the question. It's like what is the cause? For most people, you believe it's an unfulfilled life or a painful life or a painful self-image or remorse for your past or like, what is it? Do we have like primary reasons or primary attributes that we attach to,

to these people that are drug addicted? Yeah. So this was what my more recent book, which is called lost connections, uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions is, is about. Cause I think the core of addiction is, is about trying to deal with pain right but the causes of human pain are obviously huge but what i learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of

deep despair right okay um now if you think about depression and very similar factors play out with addiction they're actually densely interconnected um phenomena but um there are real biological factors right your genes can make you more vulnerable to that just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others and there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed or addicted that can make it harder to get out right but most of the factors that are causing this despair are not factors in our biology they're factors in the way we live. I think it's a kind of, this doesn't cover all of the causes that I learned about for Lost Connections, but it covers a lot of them. Everyone watching your show knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right?

You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. Exactly. If I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked really quickly, right? 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 that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we've built is good at lots of things. And I'm really glad to be alive today for all sorts of reasons. I had to go to the dentist the other day. I'm glad to be alive now, all sorts of reasons i had to go to the dentist the other day i'm glad to be alive now not like 100 years ago but there's a lot of evidence that we've been getting less and

less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs let's think about you refer to the opioid crisis for example because i think even a lot of really good people are profoundly misunderstanding what's happening with the the opioid crisis where is the opioid crisis happening right into a lot of the epicenters of it places like monadnock in in new hampshire why is why are things so disastrous there why is there much higher uh opioid um addiction in west virginia than on the faculty of harvard right people in the faculty of harvard have much better access to opioids right everyone there has good health insurance they have much better access. What's going on? Some amazing economists, Angus Dayton and Anne Case, did a massive study of this, and they said that we need to understand the opioid deaths mainly as what they call deaths of despair,

right? It's not a coincidence that the places where opioid addiction is highest are also the places where suicide not with opioids is highest highest where antidepressant prescriptions are highest it's a whole these things are clustering together for a reason right and you don't have to spend much time in those places to see people through no fault of their own have are like the rats in that first cage right they have been deprived of the things that make life meaningful this doesn't mean chemical hooks don't play some role they do play a role but i've been to the places that have solved this and it wasn't by thinking primarily about that so i'll just talk about the reality of chemical hooks so that's right i think it's very important to understand in relation to opioids so there's a

very strong agreement among scientists that the most powerful chemical hook we know is nicotine right you smoke cigarettes like my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day you smoke cigarettes the thing you feel a physical craving for when you stop which my mother would never do is um is nicotine right that's the chemical hook um and so in the late 80s when nicotine patches were invented there's this huge wave of optimism among scientists because they're like oh right cigarette smoking is an addiction to the chemical hook nicotine now we can give people all the chemical hook they're addicted to without any of this shitty cancer causing smoke people are going to stop smoking right um so nicotine patches are introduced and the u.s surgeon general's report a couple of years later finds highly motivated people um using nicotine patches um 17 of them will stop smoking right

now it's important to say that is not nothing right that means if you meet the chemical hook for people who are addicted to cigarettes 17 of them will stop entirely that's a big deal right that saved a huge number of people's lives but obviously 17 is not 100 that leaves 83 they've got to be explained by the other things and that's really the factors that i talk about in in lost connections so i mean there's a whole range of them but you know if you are acutely lonely we are the loneliest society there's ever been right you are much more likely to be vulnerable to despair depression addiction if you are controlled and humiliated at work which most people now are to some degree you're much more vulnerable to these things

there's a whole range i go through nine of these these factors in the book but to me the most important thing in thinking about the opioid crisis and i'm i find it really frustrating that this is never discussed in the american debate is i've been to the place that solved an opioid crisis that had a disastrous opioid crisis and ended it right and they did something that's very different to what americans are being urged to do so i'm a swiss citizen because my dad's from there so i know switzerland well and by the time you get to the year 2000 switzerland is having like an opioid nightmare right um people can look up videos from the time but you know people like swiss people are obsessed with order it's not a coincidence

they invented clocks and all that shit right like in their public parks people like injecting in the neck like nightmare scenes right that'd be bad anywhere but to swiss people this is like the worst nightmare right and they try all sorts of things they try the american way arresting people punishing people shaming people and it just keeps getting worse and worse and then one day they get this this incredible woman called ruth dreyfus who i got to know later who becomes the minister of health and then the president the first ever female president of switzerland um and she explains to people i think the solution is to legalize heroin and she said i know that sounds really shocking because when you hear the word legalization what you

picture is anarchy and chaos she said what we have now is anarchy and chaos right we have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown drug users all in the dark all filled with violence disease and chaos legalization she explained is the way we restore order to this madness right so the way it works is i spent a lot of time in these places and obviously no or maybe there's some really hardcore libertarians but almost no one believes we should legalize heroin the way alcohol or cannabis are legal right no one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in cbs that's not the plan right what i did in switzerland is if you had a heroin problem you were assigned to a clinic i went spent a lot of time in the one in geneva

the former president ruth dreyfus lives opposite this clinic i think that tells you something um like across the street across the street what what what it so the way it works is she should move well but if you see the clinic i'll tell you why right so the way it works is you have to go to the clinic at seven o'clock in the morning because swiss people believe in doing things really fucking early it's a constant disagreement between me and my dad you turn up you go in they give you your heroin there they give you medically pure heroin you can't take it out with you you've got to use it there partly because they don't want you to sell it on but mainly because they want to monitor you to make sure you know you don't overdose um you use it there and then you leave to go to your job because

you're given loads of support to get housing work and therapy to figure out why you can't bear to be present in your life right so it's really important they give two things that support to bear in mind these two things because the opposite of what we're doing at the moment here give them the safest possible version of the drug and give them massive amounts of help to deal with the reasons why they need that drug now when they're giving them the drug are they injecting it in them? Yeah, no, the individual injects himself or herself. So if you were the patient, I'm the nurse, I give you the heroin and I give you a clean syringe. And one of the things that really

surprised me, at first I found really weird, is they will give you any dose of heroin that you want apart from one that would kill you. And there was never any pressure to cut back and yet i went there when it was 13 years after this had first started and there was almost nobody on the program um from the start there were like three people who'd been there the whole time almost everyone does cut back and stop over time and i remember saying to rita mangi who's the chief psychiatrist there well well how can that be because we're told the chemical hooks take you over you need more and more if you had an unlimited supply you would just carry on forever what how could how could how do you explain this and she looked at me like I was dumb and she said well we help them and their lives get better and as your life gets better you don't want to be anesthetized so much which once that's explained

to you is so obvious right but and it's worth just explaining the results of the swiss program in the 15 years now in the 15 years since this began according to the best scientific evidence people like professor ambrose uchtenhagen have shown there have been zero deaths overdose deaths on legal heroin not one person there's been a massive fall in overdose deaths outside the legal program because people transfer in because why would you carry on using expensive shitty street drugs when you could be getting you know help and given the drug for free and what is fascinating about this is swiss people are really conservative right my swiss relatives make donald trump look like oprah and yet swiss people after this had been in practice for uh five years had a referendum

on whether to get rid of it and 70 of swiss people voted to keep heroin legal not because they're so compassionate to be honest that's not they're not they're really not uh it was because crime fell so much right it's much cheaper to give some... How much did crime fall? I've got the statistics in the book. It's a few years since I wrote it. But there was, I think, something like a 50% fall in street crime. Street prostitution literally ended, right? There was no street prostitution after that.

Turns out women, you know, don't want to be on the street being fucked by random strangers for money. If they've got like an alternative, who knew? But there was an enormous fall in crime across the board. board and the police confirmed that everyone agrees with that in switzerland and all the kind of anarchy in the streets just just stopped right but but what the reason i think this is really relevant to the opioid crisis is what we're doing is the exact opposite right so they give them the safe version of the drug give them help to figure out why practical support to change their environment to get out of the isolated cage and more into a life that's more like rat park what do we do if your doctor in

this country finds out that you are using say percocet or oxy not because you've got back pain but because you've got an addiction your doctor by law has to cut you off right if they don't they can be busted as a dealer it's happened to lots of doctors and so they have to cut you off so instead of giving you the drug we stop you getting the drug most people then are not most a very large number then transfer to much more dangerous street drugs like heroin secondly far from giving you help to turn your life around we give you a criminal record we shame you we stigmatize you we put barriers between you and reconnecting the opposite of addiction is connection but what do we do we put barriers between people and reconnecting this is why that's one part of it right so there's

the drug policy part of it uh where we're doing exactly the opposite of the country that succeeded in ending its opioid epidemic but there's something i think that's even deeper than that which you really see in places like west virginia monadnock, the kind of hearts of the opioid crisis, which is we're also creating a society that is becoming harder and harder for people to be present in, especially in those places. There's an analogy I keep thinking of. In the 18th century in Britain, loads of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in like London and Manchester. And something happened that has been well documented. There was something called the gin craze, right?

Where basically shitloads of people just became alcoholics, drank gin until they died, right? There's a famous painting from the time called Gin Lane of a mother down in like a bottle of vodka while a baby like falls out the window right and things like that really were happening if you look at what people said at the time very similar to what they're saying now they said look at this evil drug gin look what it's fucking done to us if only we could get rid of this evil drug gin this problem would go away right we know now when we look back at the gin craze it can have been gin that caused it because anyone in britain who's over the age of 18 can go and buy gin right and while we still have some alcoholics to be sure we don't have mass epidemics of alcoholism we don't have babies falling out of

windows what changed wasn't the amount of availability it wasn't the availability of the drug the drug is more available now than it was then what changed was the amount of pain and distress in the society right we don't have a society we've got as profoundly disorientated i mean it's going up because we're creating more disorientation so we if you create a society where people's basic psychological needs are not met right where they have a shrinking number of friends and social connections where they're taught that life is about money and buying shit and displaying it on instagram excuse me where they spend most of their time at jobs they find unfulfilling controlling and

humiliating you're going to create growing pools of people who can't and you by the way if you're constantly insecure financially insecure half of all americans have through no fault of their own been able to set aside 500 for if an emergency comes along so you create this pervasive insecurity in the society you're going to create very large numbers of people who are going to want to feel a need to anesthetize themselves now that's not a good solution obviously i don't think heroin opioids these are not good solutions to these problems but but it's not a crazy solution either there's a line i think of all the time i don't quote it very often because people can really react against this insight but i think it's actually important you know marianne faithful

the great like 60s british singer she went out with mick jagger annoyingly that's why people remember she's much better than mick jagger um in her memoir she had a heroin addiction in the 60s she was homeless for a while she has this very challenging line that I think about a lot I'm going to phrase it slightly wrong but she said um heroin saved my life because if it wasn't for heroin I would have killed myself at that point right now Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin was a good solution to her homelessness but we've got to understand this drug use is happening because it performs a function right one of the most important things i learned for both my books for chasing scream and loss connection is that these forms of despair depression anxiety addiction they are meaningful

signals right they are telling us something the fact that they have been rising year after year after year that we're now at the point where average white male life expectancy has fallen in this country for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the united states that is a signal that is telling us something and that's because of drug addiction and and overwhelming because of drug addiction and suicide it's risen to that point and there are other factors going on like obesity but that the main drivers are um overdose and suicide and that is telling us something and what we've been doing up to now is we've been insulting that signal we've either been saying depressed people addicted people are just weak or we've been saying oh it's just a problem in

their brain that there are real things going on in their brains of course um or we've been saying you know it's just craziness um but in fact it is largely a response to the way we're living. Of course, there are other things going on as well, and we can talk about them. And once you understand that, you realize there's got to be a deeper response. And I went to places that have done that, not just Switzerland. Switzerland, what is the overall population? Five and a half million. So it's a fairly small country.

Yeah. How much money do they have to spend to keep this program going? the overall population five and a half million so it's a small country small country yeah um how much money do they have to spend to keep this program going and what is the time constraints in terms of like how long is a person who's got an addiction problem allowed to stay there and and receive treatment there's no time constraint you can stay on for your entire life if you want to in practice that doesn't happen very often they stay in the facility no no they live in apartments so they just um they just visit they just go every day or whenever they want to i mean i think you can go twice a day and it's free it's free doesn't cost anything i mean some people once they have jobs then pay health insurance and the health insurance pays for it

but if you don't have money then they pay for it um and one of the things that was fascinating is they found it wasn't and um joanne set uh did good research on or sites good research on this for she did research for the open society foundation it's actually cheaper than the police constantly harassing people putting them in prison putting them on trial those are really expensive things to do heroin is unbelievably cheap if you buy it legally right well i would think that the amount of money they would save just in street crime being radically reduced exactly it makes it makes the life of the person with addiction better it makes the lives of ordinary of other citizens who were not addicted better um and it saves money right which is why swiss people are very pragmatic they're not you know the most compassionate people

but they are very pragmatic people that's why it was so popular but let's think about another place that adopted really different drug policies right um because i think it's something we can learn from there as well so portugal around the time switzerland's having its horrific heroin crisis portugal is having a fucking nightmare right by the year 2000 one percent of the population was addicted to heroin which is incredible right and every year every year, they were like Switzerland, they were trying the American way, shame, punishment, stigma, and things just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And then one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition

got together and they're like, we can't go on like this. What are we going to do? And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the drug war began in this country 70 years before, they said, should we like ask some scientists what the best thing to do would be? So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know in Portugal called Dr. João Gulao, a totally extraordinary person. And he'd run the first ever drug treatment center in Portugal, founded after the dictatorship. And they they said to them you guys just go away look at all the evidence and figure out what the hell we can do so they go away for two years they they learn about rat park they learn loads of things and they come back and they say okay

solution is we want to decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack but and this is the crucial next step take all the money we currently spend on fucking people up, arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around. And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment here in the United States, right? So they do some residential rehab that has some value. Main thing they did was a big program of job creation for people with addiction problems. Say you used to be a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. Again, much cheaper than sending him to prison, right?

They set up a big program of small loans so people with addiction problems could set up and run businesses, the things that they thought were important. At the time, people are like, this is crazy. They're just going to spend it all on drugs, lunacy, right? By the time I went to Portugal, it was, again, 13 years since this had begun and the results were in. Addiction was down by 50%. This is by figures from the British Journal of Criminology, the best scientific study of this. Overdose deaths were massively down. HIV was massively down.

Every single indicator on problems related to drug use had fallen like a cliff right it wasn't perfect they've still got problems of course but there was a massive improvement and one of the reasons you know it worked so well is that virtually no one in portugal wants to go but i went and interviewed a great guy called joao figuera who at the time of the decriminalization was the top drug cop in the whole country and he said what i'm sure loads of your listeners are thinking right at the time which was like if we decriminalize all drugs we're gonna have an explosion in drug use we can have loads of kids using a nightmare we can't do this and when i went to see him the audio is on the chasing screen website he said something like everything i said

would happen didn't happen and everything the other side said would happen did and he talks about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalization screwing people's lives up when he could have been helping them turn their lives around and and this is something that I saw all over the world right the places that have drug policies based on shame and stigma and the fantasy that you can get rid of drug use which you can never do um they have massive really terrible and rising problems the places that you can get rid of drug use which you can never do um they have massive really terrible and rising problems the places that have policies based on okay let's restore order to the market and let's give love liberty to drug users and love and compassion and practical help for people with addiction problems have declining drug problems right again not perfect

but it was such a significant improvement that support in portugal i mean they've got five main political parties none of them want to go back right that tells you something right yeah now when they did this in switzerland what was the primary cause for this drug addiction and how did they deal with that so if they dealt with it in portugal with these loans and and and helping out businesses by paying for half the salary and all those things like that seemed like wonderful ideas What do they do in Switzerland to sort of mitigate? What are the issues whatever the issues were that were causing people to be drug addicts in the first place? So it's a combination they gave people lots of therapy. So I remember one of the people I spent some time within that clinic had been

Terribly sexually abused and there's a lot of evidence that giving survivors of sexual abuse safe places in which they can release their shame about that leads to a big fall in depression, addiction and other problems. There's a lot of evidence that that kind of abuse is a big driver of a lot of addiction for a lot of people, though clearly not everyone. Some of it was just there were people who had never been given a chance in life or had never had stable lives. It was kind of a mixture of things.

And one of the things that's really good about the Swiss system is it wasn't saying in this kind of cookie cutter way that often happens in drug treatment in the United States, although there's plenty of good examples as well. You know, you don't arrive and they say, this is your problem. We're here to tell you your problem and how to solve your problem. It's very much guided by actually the person themselves right people who are in deep pain the the core of it is you have to listen to them right if we think about this addiction depression in the way that i'm arguing that we should see them as signals that are telling us something most important thing is to listen to the signal right i remember saying i thought about a lot i had this weird experience that i kept thinking

about all the time i was writing my book lost connections about depression and it's only quite late in the day that i realized why i kept thinking about it so much i was in vietnam about five years ago now maybe a little bit less um and i did this really stupid thing i was i was in hanoi and i was really tired I was doing research for a different book that I haven't finished yet. And by the side of the road, I saw this big red apple. We've been selling it. And I'm shit haggling.

So I paid like $5 for this apple or something. And I took it back to my hotel. I was so tired. I lay on the bed and I start eating it. And it was just gross, right? It was something really, it's chemical taste. It was like how I imagined food would taste after a nuclear war when i used to watch those films in the 80s right um but i was so tired even though i knew

it was wrong i ate like half of it and threw it in the garbage and next like four days i was just like violently sick right like just in it like something from the exorcist so i'm lying there in front of cnn and occasionally projectile vomiting and it gets like forward but i'd had food poisoning before i basically lived on fried chicken in my 20s so i was not new to this rodeo and after about four days i said to huang my uh fixer and translator who was arranging i was there to interview survivors of the war the vietnam war for something i'm like look i'm only here for another three days or whatever it was i've got to go and meet these people otherwise this whole trip will have been a waste of time

So he drives me like six or seven hours into the countryside And we get there and he's lined up these people for me to interview and I'm like, oh my god I feel so bad actually I was sitting in this heart with this this woman It was an 86 year old woman who was the only person from her village that survived the Vietnam War so I'm talking to her and as she's speaking that The room starts to I've never had this feeling before i've had a thing when you're drunk when you feel the rooms move it literally felt like

the room was moving around me like like i didn't feel like i was disorientated and then while she's talking i just like explode all over her heart oh no from both ed's like fucking horror show right and so i say to huang just just take me back put me in the car take me back to hanoi right and he's this old woman's like saying something to him and i'm just like lying there and he says um she says you've got to go to the hospital you're really sick and i'm like no no i just need to go back to the hotel and he said johan this is the only woman who survived the vietnam war in this village i'm going to listen to her health advice over yours we're going to the hospital so we go to this hospital where i'm pretty sure i was the only european who'd ever been treated

they take me in and huang's like completely lying going like this is an important western it will disgrace vietnam if he dies here right and so i'm lying there and they're like jabbing me with everything and i'm like what's going on and they're asking me lots of questions and i i felt the most nauseous I've ever felt. And I kept saying to them, give me something for the nausea through Juan, because they didn't speak in English. And the doctor said to me, you need your nausea. It will tell us what's wrong with you.

And I'm even lying there thinking, that's kind of interesting. I was lying there thinking, they figured out it was the apple. And I remember having such a ridiculous thought where I thought, I'm about to die. I've been killed by an apple i'm like eve or like snow white or like alan turing and then i was like you're about to die and your last thought is that you're basically a pretentious cunt right i was like horrified by myself anyway they gave me this treatment and a few days later when i leave i'm talking to the doctor and i was discussing various things with him and i said to him what would have happened if i'd um if i had gone back to hanoi if he'd driven me back to hanoi and he said oh well what happened is my kidneys have stopped working because i

hadn't kept any water in for four days so it was like i had been in the desert for four days and the doctor said oh you would have died on the journey you wouldn't have made it and so i kept thinking about this experience which weirdly didn't actually affect my like worldview or anything it's the closest i've ever had to a near-death experience but all through researching my book about depression lost connections i kept thinking about this thing right you need your nausea it will tell us what's wrong with you and i realized all the time i had been depressed if i think about my relatives and people i love who'd had addiction problems i had seen that my depression their

addiction as a bit like that nausea right as like a kind of malfunction right saying that you should get rid of and actually what we need to do is hear it right because it will tell us what's wrong with us right it doesn't mean it's a good feeling it's awful right depression is the worst thing i've ever felt addiction is a terrible state to be in it's not saying just in some kind of you know way oh we just need to put up with it it's that if we hear the signal we can begin to find solutions and all the places i went the places that have solved depression crises that i went to for lost connections places that have solved addiction crises that i went to for chasing the screen are places that have said actually this means something right your pain makes sense you feel

these ways for reasons and we need to get down into these these deeper reasons which is really not what we've done in the united states since the drug war began you know a century ago so did they figure out in switzerland what was causing this rash of addiction and just by treating it seems like if there is some underlying condition that's causing this depression that's leading people to drug addiction they're just giving them free heroin is not gonna fix the root cause so how did they find out what the root cause was and why was such an epidemic you're totally right that so the heroin is does two things so partly as you become addicted you spiral and for people who don't have huge private resources some people do right as you become addicted you spiral and for people who don't have huge private resources some people do right as you become addicted what happens to a lot of people is you spiral into

chaotic street use right so for a lot of women that means sex work for a lot of men that means property crime right some men sex work as well but mostly not um and so what happens is actually you become you know you develop an addiction because you're dealing with this pain but then you actually move into a much more chaotic way of living right which which causes deeper pain and deeper pain obviously if you're being fucked by strangers every day and you're treating you badly you're going to want to be even more anesthetized after that right or if you're frightened of the police all the time so what happens is partly what happened in switzerland was giving people the legal heroin

ended the chaos of street use, which in itself was making addiction worse. And that's clearly not the cause because you don't start out as a street user. So it was partly that. And I think it was partly attending to people's deeper distress. And it's not like there's one cookie cutter thing

that was the answer. It was listening to different people at different stages and and and looking at they'd had some problems with unemployment but you don't want to overstate that they'd have some problems with child abuse you don't want to overstate that it was more like a kind of menu of things a more sophisticated menu of things that but but but the thing that they definitely showed in the swiss model and in portugal and lots of other places I went to is compassionate treatment reduces addiction, right? And treatment understood in the broadest sense because it reduces the pain the individual is in. Anything that reduces the shame, stigma and humiliation will over time reduce addiction for most people. Not everyone.

Some people are in such internal agony. They will always need anesthetics and this i think is a really important point and one that can be quite challenging to some people including people like me who have people they love with addiction problems so where i open chasing the screamers with this story that i think a lot of people think why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this and i think it tells you so much um so in 1939 in a hotel in midtown manhattan billy holiday the great jazz singer walked on stage and she sang for the first time a song that i'm sure all your listeners and viewers have heard it's a song called strange fruit right it's a song against lynching it's the idea that in the south the bodies of african-amerAmerican men hang from the trees and they're like a kind of strange fruit in the South.

Right. This is unbelievably challenging at that time. There are very few popular songs like that. And to have an African-American woman doing it was quite shocking. She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel. They made her go through the service elevator because she was African-American. And that night, Billie Holiday gets a warning from a man called Harry Ans anslinger from the agents of a man called harry anslinger that basically says stop singing this song right you think wait what's this got to do with the war on drugs so harry anslinger is a man uh it was a government bureaucrat i think the most influential person no one's ever heard of he's affected the lives of loads of people listening to your show

so harry anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the department of prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending so you've had this big war on alcohol it's been a shit show it's been a disaster and he takes it over and he wants to keep his government department going and he invents the modern war on drugs He's the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs. And he really builds this war on drugs around two intense hatreds he has. And Billie Holiday is the personification of both. One was a really intense hatred of African-Americans. I mean, he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s,

which gives you a sense of how racist he was he used the n-word so often in official memos his own senator said he should have to resign that's how hardcore he was right and he also had an intense hatred of people with addiction problems and billy holiday you know she grown up on the streets of baltimore a part of baltimore called pig town she when she was 10 she was horrific she was raped the man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half she was sent uh reformatory for longer than he got right she she was tormented by the nuns there they they said she was disobedient she brought it on herself they used to lock her in with dead bodies overnight to teach her a lesson she eventually ran away she tried to find her

mother her mother had gone to what's now called what roosevelt island now it wasn't called that then where she was working as a prostitute and billy holiday starts kind of working in inverted commas next to her mother in this brothel from when she's like 14 so she's being raped by men for money night after night after night she's you know and when they the police rescue break into the brothel they arrest her right and send her to prison um so billy holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that right so she starts out using loads of alcohol and then she's using loads of other stuff as well mostly heroin and when she gets this warning from harry anslinger saying stop singing this song billy holiday's attitude is fuck you i'm an american citizen i'll sing what

i fucking please right and at that point harry anslinger resolves to destroy her the first man he sent to to track her is a man called follow her around this guy called jimmy fletcher harry anslinger hated employing uh white people uh sorry hated employing african-americans but you couldn't really send a white person into harlem to follow Billie Holiday everywhere. It'd be kind of obvious. So he employed this African-American guy called Jimmy Fletcher. His job title was a bag man. So he was given the job,

follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right? He dances with her in nightclubs. He gets to know her really well. And Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her. And his whole life, he felt really ashamed of what he did. He bust her uh they when they come in to search her she she she uh makes him she pisses in

front of him and says you can look in my pussy you can see i don't have anything here um she's put on trial uh the trial was called the united states versus billy holiday and she said that's how it fucking felt she's sent to prison for 18 months she doesn't sing a word in prison but what happened to her next i think is the the cruelest thing she gets out of prison um and at that time to sing anywhere where they served alcohol you needed what was called a cabaret performer's license um and slinger make sure she doesn't get it so one of her friends yolanda bavan is also a great jazz singer said to me what's the cruelest thing you can do to a person? It's to take away the thing they love, right?

They take away singing from Billie Holiday. It's what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States, right? We give them criminal records that make it much harder to do the things that are meaningful to them, like work, for example. So in that situation, obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? She starts using a shit ton of heroin again. Obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? She starts using a shit ton of heroin again. One day in the early 50s, she collapses,

not far from where she'd first sung Strange Fruit. The first hospital won't even take her because she's got an addiction problem. They said, we're not having her. Second hospital takes her, but she says to her friend, Maile Dufty, on the way in, the Anslinger's men weren't done with her. They were going to come for her she said

they're going to kill me in there don't let them they're going to kill me she wasn't wrong so in the hospital she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer um probably related to severe alcoholism um and in the hospital she um she goes into heroin withdrawal so maylie her friend manages to insist that she's given methadone and she starts to recover a bit because heroin withdrawal is quite dangerous when you're weak right like when you're old or you've um and slingers men come they arrest her on her hospital bed they handcuff her to the hospital but i interviewed the last person who was still alive who'd been in that room a man called reverend eugene calendar who'd been a religious minister um they handcuff her to a hospital bed they don't let her friends in to see her they don't let her

even have candies outside reverend calendar led protests with signs saying let lady day live there were big protests they knew they were killing her right um then after 10 days they cut off the methadone and she died the next day. Her friend, one of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life. Right. There's loads of things about this story, which has been made into a movie. Lee Daniels is directing it. There's so many things about this story that tell us what this war on drugs is about. Right.

Firstly, it's about its effect. It's about shaming addicts and its effect as it makes addicts worse, right? You see that with Billie Holiday, you see that everywhere. Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right? At the same time that Harry Anslinger found out Billie Holiday had a heroin addiction, he found out Judy Garland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, had a heroin addiction. It changes how you watch The Wizard of Oz when you know that. And he went to the studio and he advised, said to judy garland into the studio she should take longer vacations right spot the difference

with a white woman judy garland longer vacations with billy holiday fucking destroy her right uh in fact one of the agents he sent to destroy her a man called george white who this guy tracked in the last days of her life we now know i mean he's a literally a psychopath he was a hugely obese guy was a strange guy he infiltrated a chinese drug gang when he wasn't chinese the only person to ever do that but he um he boasted in his diary about murdering people about spiking women and raping them i mean these were really deranged people that were that founded the the the drug war but the reason i say in relation to what we were just talking about is because in this culture we tell only one heroic story about people with addiction problems and that's that they sometimes recover from their addiction that is indeed a heroic story

everyone watching this who's been who's managed to do that is a hero and i massively love and congratulate them but that is not the only heroic story we should tell about people with addiction problems billy holiday never stopped using drugs she was still a fucking hero she any she never let these people stop her singing that song she would go to the places where you didn't have a license she'd go to the worst parts of the deep south she sang strange fruit she they people threw bottles at her they stubbed out cigarettes on her she never stopped singing that song right and i think about billy holiday a lot and i think about you know all over the world every day people listen to billy holiday and they feel stronger and all over the world every day we are still following the policies of harry anslinger and it makes us weaker and this conflict that begins right at the

start of the drug and i think if i'm honest i think this isn't an easy thing to say but i think one of the reasons why the debate about the drug war is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of all of us right anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem as i do there's a harry anslinger in your head, right? There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks, someone should just fucking stop you. Why are you doing this? Someone should stop you doing this. And then for most people, there's another part that's like, okay, that anger isn't useful in most cases. Actually, you're doing this for a reason. We need to understand those reasons. We need to help you to change your life, right?

But that conflict is very deep in us. And Harry Anslinger, the war he invented, and we can talk about what he did with cannabis and loads of other things, but because he invented the ban on cannabis, that war is still playing out. Does that make sense? I know that was a long answer, but sorry.

No, it does make sense. And it's a horrific story about billy holiday and i had no idea that um dorothy from the wizard of oz was also addicted now did you munchkins a lot of them as well um now harry why was harry anslinger's hate towards her so extreme so when he he was a kid, the book is called chasing the screen. Cause when he was a kid, he grew up in a place called Altoona in Pennsylvania and he, he lives in a farmhouse. His dad was actually a refugee from, well, refugee in a bit comes immigrant from Switzerland.

Um, and they grew up in this farmhouse and in the next farmhouse down, there was a, a, um, a farmer's wife who had an heroin addiction or a method sorry morphine addiction would have been her in them and harry ansting had this really haunting memory of going to that house and hearing this woman scream and scream and him being sent to take the

horse and cart i think he was 11 or something being sent to take the horse and cart into town to go to the pharmacy to get her the morphine and then bringing it back and her screams stopping the lesson he took from that is these drugs are evil and we need to destroy them especially later on he he was in europe during the first world war and he had this very keen he was a diplomat he had this very keen sense that civilization was incredibly fragile it could collapse at any moment that you only need a little bit of contamination and it would all go to shit um and and and so he yeah i call it chasing the screen because i think in a way what harry ansling is doing is like chasing this scream all over the world and i felt like what i was doing going to all these different places from the killing fields

in mexico to portugal and switzerland was like following this scream as it kind of ricocheted around and actually how he made he thinks he's stopping these screams he's actually creating far more screams in there in their in their place yeah but i still don't understand why he had this intense holiday yeah so well she's an african-american woman standing up to white supremacy who has an addiction problem but the truth is what he did to billy holiday is not particularly it's not this is what he did to african americans and to people with addiction problems billy holidays happens to be famous so i'm telling her story but this is what he did to huge numbers of people right he wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene one of the amazing things spending time in his um

archives in penn state was seeing all these memos from uh his agents so he said to them go to your local jazz club document the evil things that are happening there and the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious right there's one agent who i forget where it was but he he wrote back and like um there was a popular jazz song at the time called uh that ocean man and had a lyric that said when he gets the notion he thinks he can walk across the ocean and he's like there is going to be an epidemic of drowning across the united states as people use cannabis because they're going to believe they can walk on water so he would he was like i mean literally hilarious

he said uh you know he believed that when you smoke cannabis time slows down so a minute seems to last a thousand years like these extraordinarily heightened crazy things that he would he would say and he actually latched so at that time when he first takes over what becomes the federal bureau of narcotics you know cocaine and heroin just aren't very popular right there's just not much of a war to fight i mean they exist but they're not that popular quite they're confined to small urban scenes cannabis was more popular not as popular as it is now but and and he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful not bothered about it suddenly when he cottons on that this is the way to big build up his department he announces that cannabis is the phrase he was the most evil drug in the world

he said when frankenstein's monster bumps into a spliff on the staircase frankenstein's monster dies of fright like these extraordinarily heightened claims um and and any any she starts trying to get support for a ban on cannabis and he latches onto one case in particular it's important because i think we're hearing these again these things again now um so a kid in tampa florida called victor lycarta he was not so much a kid 21 killed his entire family with an axe, butchered them all. And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst Newspapers, Anslinger announces, this is what will happen if you use cannabis. Literally, you will kill your family with an axe. And this becomes a very famous story across the United States and cannabis is banned in its wake.

Years later, someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Lic like honda wasn't even evidence he'd ever used cannabis right his he'd had terrible problems with psychosis his family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized and they refused they kept him at home and this tragedy ensued we're hearing these these scare stories again about about cannabis there's something that anslinger said that i think could be like the motto for the entire drug war in the wake of the so anslinger introduces this ban in the us he promises drugs will disappear right you will have noticed drugs did not disappear he starts to say well that's just because evil foreign countries like mexico are flooding our country with drugs you'll notice that's come back as well um so what we need to do is force all these

other countries to ban them as well and then they'll disappear so the u.s in the wake of the second world war really has the power to do that world is in ruins um and there's one part when he goes to the new united nations and he's insisting this happens and they're basically threatening people they're saying we'll cut off your foreign aid or you won't be allowed to sell goods to the u.s market if you don't do this the the ambassador from thailand is like well you know it doesn't seem to have worked very well in your country we've actually got a long pattern of established drug use in in thailand we don't really have many problems we don't want to do this and anstinger said to her i said to him i've made up my mind don't try to confuse me with the

facts and i always feel like that's the drug war right i made up my mind don't try to confuse me with the facts well he in conjunction with uh william randolph hearst he worked with him to try to propagate these ridiculous propaganda stories about mexicans and blacks smoking this evil drug called marijuana which is really not even a real term for cannabis at the time. It was a wild Mexican tobacco, right? But then didn't Nixon do a similar thing with the sweeping Psychedelic Act of 1970? He did it so that they could infiltrate the civil rights movement because there were so many people in the civil rights movement that were using various psychedelic drugs. They could use it as an excuse

to crack down on them and lock them up and put them in jail and pit them against each other and you know have them inform on each other yeah this is really important you cannot enforce the drug laws against everyone who's broken them it is impossible half of all americans by conservative estimate have broken the drug laws right so what do you do everywhere in the world the drug laws are used to persecute groups the state wants to persecute for other reasons right yeah so uh one of the people i write about in in chasing the scream is a woman who really had a kind of epiphany about this right so lee maddox was a cop in baltimore she used to do the i-95 she would and she would very proudly bust people who even had a single joint right she? She was a real Harry Anslinger's dream girl.

And she had signed up to become a cop, which is amazing, really interesting personally. She'd signed up to become a cop for quite a personal reason. As a kid, she'd had a best friend, a kid and teenager called Lisa, who was like, they looked really similar. They shared a fake ID. They were like sisters. And one day when they were in their late teens they went to ocean city for a day out and lisa decided to hitchhike back to new jersey where she lived and uh so lisa bide to her and the next day she gets a call saying lisa had not arrived so she waits and

waits she has this terrible summer waiting to find out what happened and then they discover that lisa had been gang raped and murdered her body was found underneath a house where it had been eaten by animals um and lee becomes became convinced at that time that her that lisa had for various reasons that lisa had been killed as part of a gang initiation ceremony she's like she's like i'm gonna destroy these gangs i'm gonna dedicate my life to destroying these gangs she goes and applies to become a police officer. And for years, she's this hardline cop, right? Takes real pleasure in busting people. But Lee started to notice a few things.

First thing was, when you're a cop and you arrest a rapist, there are fewer rapes in your town the next week, right? When you are a cop and you bust a pedophile, fewer children get sexually abused. But week right when you are a cop and you bust a pedophile fewer children get sexually abused but she knows when you bust a dealer there's no fewer dealers there's someone on the corner the next day for sure right it didn't seem to be having any effect in fact what she discovered what she began to learn about this was that there was something uh even worse which was um for a funny sort of reason that she realized that she was actually creating these empowering these gangs so the best way to explain this is if you imagine obviously when you when you ban drugs they don't disappear right they're transferred from the

people who used to control them licensed legal businesses to armed criminal gangs right and these armed criminal gangs operate in a different way to to legal businesses if you imagine if you and me decided we want to go and steal now a bottle of vodka right we go into a local liquor store and that store catches us they'll call the cops the cops will come and take us away that liquor store doesn't need to be violent it doesn't need to be intimidating they've got the power of the law to uphold their property rights okay now imagine we wanted to steal a bag of coke right If we go to the guy near here, I'm sure there is someone who sells Coke and he catches us, he can't call the cops, obviously.

Cops would arrest him. He has to fight us. Now, if you're a dealer, you don't want to be having a fight every day, right? You want to establish a reputation for being so frightening that no one will dare to fuck with you, right? So you establish your place in that neighborhood

through aggression, through violence, and you maintain it through aggression and violence right legal businesses compete on cost and quality of product in illegal markets people compete on how much of a frightening fucker you're prepared to be right and as a writer called charles bowden put it um the war on drugs creates a war for drugs, right? It transfers it to these criminal gangs who have to operate through violence to protect their property rights. So Lee goes into the drug war thinking, I'm the one stopping these gangs. She realizes, shit, I'm the one enabling them, right? They control one of the biggest industries in the world because of this police action and because of this decision to prohibit these drugs and if you want to know how much of

this violence is caused by by um by the fact that we prohibited it just ask yourself where are the violent alcohol dealers right everyone knows who al capone was does the head of smirnoff go and shoot the head of budweiser in the face right does your local bar go and send a bunch of kids to go and shoot everyone in the next bar down of course not exactly that happened under alcohol prohibition when did it end it ended on the day alcohol prohibition ended because legal markets don't compete with that so lee's partly having this insight right she's realizing shit i think i'm taking down these gangs i'm actually empowering them what will really disempower them is reclaiming the market and making it legal.

But she also has another really painful realization. So early in her career as a cop, Lee had done this really brave thing. She'd gone undercover with the Klan to expose them. She'd done a really important work in breaking up parts of the Maryland Klan. She really was not a racist, right? She'd had relationships with African-American men. and clam she really was not a racist right she'd had relationships with african-american men but she noticed something that most honest cops notice which is the vast majority of people the they were sent to african-american areas to enforce the drug laws right one of her colleagues

matthew fogg once went to his superior officer and said you know this is a bit weird right we only ever seem to go to African-American neighborhoods to do all our drug busts. I'm fairly sure white people sometimes use drugs. Should we go to like a white neighborhood as well? And the supervisor said, of course, you're right. White people use drugs, but white people know journalists and lawyers and judges.

That's really, that's just a whole load of shit for us. Just go for the low hanging fruit. So Lee, who is not a racist, could see the effect of what she was doing was in fact racist right and she was very uncomfortable with that and this really came to a head for lee when lee's police partner was a guy called ed totally who she loved platonically loved um yeah he was a great champion of women police officers he was a great guy and one day she gets a call at home ed had been sent on a drug bust he was undercover and the guy had thought he was ripping him off and shot him in the head

and lee goes to see ed's body and she's like what did he die for right there are no fewer drug dealers every time we arrest a drug dealer the supply of drugs is not disrupted for one hour we are enforcing a racist war we are empowering these gangs why are we doing this so lee quit as a police officer she retrained as a lawyer she now gets the criminal records expunged whenever she can of the kind of people that she busted when she was a cop and she's a big she was part of a brilliant group called law enforcement against prohibition who are cops who argue for for ending the drug war but it's interesting to me because it's hard to be harry lee was trying to be harry anslinger it's hard to be harry anslinger if you're an honest

person with a conscience right and there are police officers all over the country who are making these these realizations now and that you know obviously it's very close to my heart what we do to people with addiction problems. But I don't, horrific and catastrophic though that is, I don't actually think that's the biggest moral issue around the war on drugs. The biggest moral issue is the violence created by prohibition, right? If I think about places I've spent time like Colombia, Ci um ciudad juarez in in northern mexico that's the biggest issue right more people have died in in latin america central and south america in the drug war violence than have died in syria right i don't know what we can do about syria we can end this violence there's a professor at harvard called jeffrey myron who i interviewed who has a

graph of the murder rate in the 20th century in the United States, massively shoots up the day alcohol is banned and falls like a stone the day alcohol is legalized, right? And massively rises again when there's an intensification of the drug war later. We can end a huge amount of this violence, right? We can do what Switzerland did. We can do what's happening here. So what's stopping us?

So I think the main thing is because this is a logical conclusion based on facts and based on cases like portugal and switzerland there's obviously data so people are aware of this so people must be confronted with this data to this day people know that the prohibition on alcohol was a massive disaster and no one would ever accept it again we're slowly starting to realize that marijuana, at least for some people, is safe and reasonable and should be used recreationally and has some massive benefits medically. So we're starting to see legalization both for recreational use

and clearly for medical use has spread. I think – what did we decide? What was it? I think it's like there's a certain amount of states where it's just fully legal recreationally and more where it's medical. But I think it's more than 18 states total now. Soon we're going to be half of the American population. It should be 100 percent, right? I mean, we all.

It is in Canada. And it should be. Yes, it is in Canada, as it should be for alcohol. is in canada as it should be for alcohol but what what is the stop what is the wall between this and legalization of all these other drugs and counseling and implementing some sort of a switzerland-like program i think gone to the really important question so there's a range of things um the public perception a big one i think you've gone to the most important right so some people say it's the vested financial interest in the existing system. That's true. If you look at who funds the no campaigns whenever they want to legalize marijuana,

you can see the interests, right? Prison guard unions, alcohol companies, because they don't want a commercial competitor, religious fundamentalist groups like Mormons, not that all Mormons are fundamentalists, but the groups that funding this are. So it's partly that, but I think you're right. I don't think that's the main thing that's going on. It's significant and real, but I don't think it's the main thing that's going on. The main thing, the main block is huge majorities of Americans,

more than 80% say the war on drugs has failed and been a disaster, and yet most people are afraid of the alternatives, right? And that's part, so I think there's two things going on. There's ignorance about what the alternatives actually mean. So one of the reasons why Chase and Scream is written as, I went to all these places, from the killing fields in Northern Mexico to Switzerland, is because way too often in this debate,

we talk like we're a philosophy seminar. People go, well, what would legalization mean? How would it work? And they go into this weird, abstract conversation. I'm like, fuck fuck that here's a plane ticket to geneva here's a plane ticket to lisbon here's a plane ticket to colorado right it's not rocket science right i've been to the places that i've tried these things we can see the results right then they're not legalization is not an app or decriminalization i can explain the difference if you want are not uh abstract what are the what's the key differences between legalization and decriminalization decriminalization, I can explain the difference if you want, are not abstract questions. What's the key differences between legalization and decriminalization?

So decriminalization is where you stop punishing users, but they still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get their drug. Legalization is where you open up some legal route for people to get their drugs. And that varies according to the drug, right? So I guess the kind of headline would be decriminalization shuts down Orange is the New Black and legalization shuts down Breaking Bad and Narcos. Right. And of course, we need to do both.

We need to decriminalize use and legalize supply. Didn't Mexico decriminalize a lot of drugs like fairly recently? Yes. They had a big Supreme Court decision. I spent a lot I spent in Mexico really often. Because it was... I've been to a lot of bad places. I've covered the war in the Congo.

I've been to Iraq. I've been to Gaza. I've never seen anything like what happened in Juarez when I was there. And I think it's worth explaining. So when you... Like I was saying, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right?

They're transferred to armed criminal gangs. If you live in a housing project in the United States where 5% of the economy of that housing project is in the hands of armed criminal gangs, that's going to be a shitty, frightening place to be, right? A place like Ciudad Juarez,

which is on the border with, Mexican side of the United States border with them, it's the other side with El Paso. By the time I went there, it was 70%, 7-0% of the economy was in the hands of these armed criminal gangs, right? So I remember going to see this guy, Rosalio Retta. I interviewed people about him in Juarez, but then I went to, he's in prison in the United States, he's in Tyler County. And Rosalio is an interesting guy, so he butchered or beheaded about 70 people between the ages of 13 and 17

I remember going into the prison actually to see him and the guard said to me on the way in well obviously I can't leave you alone with him because he's like butchered all these people I was like oh great thanks and about 5 minutes in the guard was fucking gone but um the same with rosalio talking about his life and his his story so rosalio grew up in um laredo it's on texas side of the border it's basically the same place as nueva laredo on the on the mexican side it was very easy to cross the

border at that time so he grew he was growing up in the the late 90s noughties i mean rosalio was 13 so loads the zetas were kind of famous drug gang at that time they still are uh drug cartel how the zetas were created is an insane story every taxpayer should know the u.s government decided to train an elite anti-drug force for the for the mexican government right like kind of navy seals for the anti-drug force they take them to fort bragg they spent something like 250 million dollars training them up they go back to mexico six months later they all defected en masse almost all of them and created a drug cartel the zetas great you see your tax money um so the zetas were this kind of uh glamorous in inverted commas drug gang right operating on that part of the border drug routes move around

according to where they put policing it always gets through but it moves around they call it the balloon effect imagine a balloon half full of air you push down one pace the air comes up somewhere else but at that time it was going through juarez and el paso and laredo and noruega laredo and rosalio says two stories about how rosalio gets involved with the zetas what rosalio says is he was basically kidnapped by them and forced to start killing people. I don't think that's true. If you look at the evidence, it's that he sort of volunteered, but he's 13. So I don't hold him morally responsible for that. But either way, there's one night, it all begins. He's taken on the Mexican side of the border to a warehouse where they are torturing people, burning them

alive. He's given a gun by a guy called Miguel Trevino, who later became the head of the border to a warehouse where they are torturing people burning them alive he's given a gun by a guy called miguel travinio who later became the head of the zetas and he's told to shoot someone in the head and that's the moment you're in and when you're in with the zetas you never get out right no one leaves um no one leaves alive and so they begin to train him he's sent to us in 2005 he's sent to a summer camp that's literally a camp that teaches you how to behead people and do all sorts of things and he's then sent him and his friends are then sent to um murder people he's with his friends jesse and gabriel they murder a huge number of people that they were called within the zetas call these child soldiers the expendables

because they don't give a shit if they live or die, right? As one person said to me, they prefer children because they don't understand death so well, right? Obviously, Rosado got a bit older. He understood death better. All his friends get murdered. Eventually, he tries to get back to the US. He cooperates.

He now lives in solitary confinement where he will live for the rest of his life because when they let him out of solitary, shortly before I met him, he was immediately stabbed in the neck um and again you think about this insane violence that we created right when i went to juarez it's this bizarre thing so at that time it wasn't you were told it wasn't quite rightly it wasn't safe to stay in juarez overnight so i would stay overnight in el paso and i'd walk across the bridge right through through obviously a passport I remember the customs people going why the fuck are you going into Juarez but go go in there and it's

weird on on the other side of the bridge there's this sign and it says welcome to historic downtown Juarez and it used to be a tourist site Billie Holiday got married there but um now it's just that time it was just covered with images of missing women just everywhere because this is another really important part of what this violence doesn't think it's really important we understand this is the violence caused by the system that we uphold and we imposed on mexico mexicans do not want this right so there's another story i think this was of all the stories i wrote about for Chasing the Scream along with one other one I can tell you about if you want. This was the hardest. So a woman in Juarez when the drug war violence starts to go through called Maricela Escobedo. She was a nurse.

But Maricela was incredibly hardworking. So she also would do these what you call like wood carvings basically. And she would sell them in the market on Saturdays and Sundays. She had three kids. Her youngest daughter was called ruby she was 14 at the time and they would work on this stall in the marketplace um every saturday i think maybe even sundays as well some sundays and one day a guy comes up to maricela at her stall called sergio he was a young guy he was like 21 um and he's like he's just had a baby he needs a job maricela was kind of soft-hearted she gives him a job working on her market stall and a few months

later she discovers to her horror that he's having sex with her 14 year old daughter ruby and she's like fires him immediately and goes to the police and says you need to go and question him right he's 21 she's 14 this is a crime police don't do anything she doesn't understand it what why are they not investigating this her daughter starts running away to be with with Sergio um Maricela keeps going to get her back she keeps going to the police saying this is a crime he can't live with a 14 year old go and arrest him they won't do anything right she's completely puzzled by this then Ruby gets pregnant maricela's like she's 15 by then like fuck i've got to keep her in my life so she she keeps going to see um ruby by this time

she's kind of accepted the police aren't with real rage that police aren't going to do anything and one day just after the baby was born she goes to see ruby and sergio's there with the baby and he says um oh ruby has run away with another man she's gone she's not coming back and maricela's like what and left her baby no she hasn't done i know she hasn't done that i know my daughter he's like well she's gone so maricela waits christmas comes no message new year comes no message she starts to go to the neighborhood and hand out leaflets with pictures of her daughter loads of women are going missing in Juarez at this time. I'll tell you why in a minute.

Just saying, have you seen this girl? And after a few days, she gets a call from a kid called Angel who says, I'm really frightened to tell you something. If you drive me out into the desert, I'll tell you. So she drives Angel out into the desert. I think he was 14. And he says, Sergio murdered your daughter

and he made me help him dispose of the body. And he told Maricela where the body was. It was actually a place where they dumped pig carcasses from the abattoirs. She goes and she finds the body with her son. And she goes to the police, and the police finally do something, and they arrest Sergio.

Sergio's put on trial. In the witness box, he breaks down, admits he did it and apologizes to Maricela and then a few weeks later he's acquitted of all charges and disappears and Maricela's like what the fuck is going on here so she starts to look into this and she discovers and this is the where it intersects with the drug war in a really important way that that Sergio was a member of the Zetas right now if you're a member of the zetas at that time in juarez it's different now because another drug gang has displaced them

you own the state right and you have if they control 70 of the economy you have more money than the government right so the police worked for them when i went to go into be rosario he said when i would go murder people the police would would come with me they would dispose of the body right i remember jesus christ what year are we talking about this is like six years ago i remember the the the i remember essentially because one of the things when you're in a dangerous place when you're when you're in a dangerous place one of the things you do is you read danger from how frightened the people around you are right because you don't know the place i was i mean i was there with julian cardona who's my fixer who's an amazing he's the reuters correspondent who is one of the bravest people i've ever met but it was realizing

how frightened other people were for me and julian right and i remember after i've been there for a few days julian kept introducing me by that time the killings were basically all being done by the police and i was saying you know julian this, this is important that I meet people who've been killed by the police, but I should also meet people who've been killed by the cartels more recently. And he just laughed and said, no, that's not how it works here. Now, if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay the police to do it, right? So it's this real realisation, all right, if someone comes for you, there is nowhere for you to go, right? So Maricela refuses to accept that she lives in a

country where there is no justice she decides okay they're not going to solve this i'm going to solve this she appealed loads of women are missing because it turns out if a bunch of criminals control the state they will just murder loads of women and get away with it right there are some men who just want to murder women and if they give them license to do it they'll do it that's why so many women were missing maricella gathers a load of those mothers she says some of them don't know where their daughters are some of them know their daughters are dead she's like i need your help we're going to find this guy who's done this right so maricela turns herself with these women into a detective she starts tracking sergio all over mexico wherever there are sightings. She walks everywhere. She walks

over a thousand miles, right? She walks through the desert. It becomes a media phenomenon. People follow her. She's like this symbol of the loss that's happened in Mexico. And incredibly, with her friend Berta Alicia Garcia, who I got to know later, after two years, she finds Sergio. She tracks him down. She goes to the police police she tells them where he is they tip him off and he disappears and she's devastated so she decides she's going to go to the governor's mansion in Chihuahua which is the state capital she goes there and she sets up tent outside the governor's mansion and she's like I'm not leaving here until you people go and find this man and she calls on every mother who has a daughter who's missing or who they're afraid of for to come and join her in

this fight right and it gets to christmas eve and she's preparing to just before christmas she says on christmas eve i'm gonna have this big christmas dinner here people can join me she gives this great speech and a man walks up to her and shoots her in the head in front of all the police everyone and i thought a lot about maricela i got to know her children who live here in the united states now they got a refuge here when i think about the drug war and what it does the first person i think of after billy holiday is maricela escobedo right we have created an enormous amount of violence that has nothing to do with the drug right often people hear this phrase drug related violence and what they picture

when they hear that is someone using drugs losing their shit and attacking someone right there's a really good study by a guy called professor paul goldstein that looked at everything that was classified as drug-related violence in new york city in 1986 what it found was three percent of what's called drug-related violence is someone using drugs and losing their shit that's real it happens sometimes three percent three percent another seven percent was people with an addiction problem like committing property crimes and getting caught or whatever and the vast majority was rival drug gangs and exactly the kind of violence we're talking about the war for drugs created by prohibition now we can reduce the problems associated with drug use by having these just they have in switzerland and portugal and we can end the violence caused by the war for drugs there are no violent violent alcohol gangs. Al Capone killed loads of people.

No alcohol seller anywhere in the United States today will kill a single other alcohol seller, right? That violence ended. If we banned rice, there would be violent rice sellers, right? We have to understand that what we are doing to... And there's this bullshit fucking thing that's said where they'll take these deaths on the supply route right prohibitionists and they'll say look at you evil drug users you're responsible for the deaths of these people right and to me that is so pernicious right you could have every single drug piece of drug use that happened in the united states today and none of those killings on

the supply route it is the system those people have erected and imposed and lied their way to maintain that causes this violence right and we can end this violence and i think about the rosalio right that that that you know i got asked once in an interview who do you feel most sorry for of all the people you met and obviously i met people with addiction problems all over the world everything and i surprised myself the person who came into my head was rosalio because what have we done to these people right what have well it's not we for sure yeah well as taxpayers we're responsible for it right i mean we don't what you know you and i do not support it but um as a society we we've done that and those of us who oppose it haven't done a good enough job

of persuading everyone else and it goes back to your question why does it persist right the key reason i think there's two things partly people are afraid of the alternatives for understandable reasons there are real risks in pursuing the alternatives uh i think we can understand what those risks are and deal with them but that's but hold on because it seems like those risks have been mitigated in Portugal and Switzerland. I mean, we have real evidence that those risks, they're unfounded. Exactly. You can understand it's not crazy to have that fear,

but then we can address that fear by talking about what actually happened. Well, why don't we implement some sort of a small-scale version of this? I mean, how come no one has ever tried to do this? I mean, do it in Vermontont do it in new hampshire doing a small state well there are loads of people who want to do that but the federal drug laws are federal right so federal law supersedes um but that doesn't happen with cannabis so that was a that's a big debate technically and legally the federal government could go after colorado washington now there's a political decision to not do that because cannabis legalization is popular in those places, right?

Yes. There were people, Jeff Sessions, when he was the AG, wanted to do that. It's just our good luck that actually he pissed off Trump over something else because of the Mueller inquiry and everything that Trump kind of despite Jeff Sessions. So and the federal banking laws actually mean that you know cannabis stores are operating in this weird gray area they can't have bank accounts my point is why is no one pushing this why all over the world people are pushing this i'm in america yeah so i think there are lots of people who are pushing this they're amazing groups i urge everyone to join and support the drug policy alliance on the what i'm saying is why are no politicians ever discussing this

this is never an option because those are the only ones that are going to really change policy so we're seeing a big change in public opinion that is changed on many issues so think about when bill clinton stopped being president which is you know we remember there's not that long ago 16 of americans supported legalizing cannabis today 70 of americans support legalizing cannabis it's a extraordinary transformation a very short period of time right likely brought on by the fact that the medical use of it was prohibited up until then i mean it was like 1994 right when it was passed and then california started doing it and you started having positive tax revenues from it you started seeing people that were

suffering from a lot of ailments showing that they were helped substantially by cannabis and then the attitude of it changed in popular culture it changed i mean the what's so crazy is that that reefer madness reaper reefer madness proposition or the propaganda rather was so effective that they did it in the 1930s and it carried on into the 90s into the 2000s there's still people alive today to believe some of that i think you put that really well i think there's a series of things going on partly what happened one of the major one of the major factors that make it possible for the drug war to continue is the dehumanization of people at every turn right got dehumanization of drug users

and we should talk about use as opposed to addiction but um dehumanization of drug users dehumanization of people with addiction problems dehumanization of drug dealers there's a reason why one of the most sympathetic people in my book is a transgender crack dealer called chino harden who's an amazing human being um dehumanization of people on the supply route countries you're hearing the way people are talking about mexicans now powerful people in this society and one of the reasons why chasing the scream is written as stories of people is because the solution to dehumanization is to rehumanization when i was meeting these people all over the world i kept thinking if any ordinary american could meet chino harden my friend the

transgender crap dealer who is hilarious and amazing if they could meet bud osborne the homeless street addict who started a movement in canada um if they could meet maricela they would not say that the deaths of these people mean nothing right they would not say yeah let's pursue a policy that kills them because we get some imaginary benefit further down the line right think about lee maddox the cop in baltimore it was when ed died it was when her partner died she thought what are we losing these people for it's that moment of getting people to see everyone involved as human right we're not there yet still the ways people are talking about addiction are are repellent right this is what they think of people as being weak they think of people's uh having poor willpower poor character and that's

why they're addicted they're most people i would i would say it's safe to venture aren't really fully aware of what the causes what the underlying causes of people becoming addicted to drugs in the first place are and what what leads people this great sense of despair i mean it's really about re-engineering our entire culture i mean re-engineering not just the way we treat addiction but the way we treat human beings where we treat poor neighborhoods i mean there's there's so much that needs to be done that's never addressed totally right and there's one part of this that's a funny really one thing surprises me in this debate i have found it's actually easier in the u.s to make the case for compassion for people with addiction problems than to make the case for liberty for drug users who are not addicted right so like we were saying even the main drug

war body in the world the unodc you're an office of drug control admits 90 of all currently banned drug uses what's called non-problematic right our friend professor carl hart is the head of psychology at columbia university and an extraordinary human being has done really important work explaining this to people even with what we think of as the devil drugs like heroin crack the vast majority of people who use heroin and crack do not become addicted right which i found really chat when carl first explained that to me i was like what's this guy talking about and then i looked at the scientific evidence there is very clear evidence right um that actually the ratio of people who use any drug who become addicted is pretty consistently 10 to 20 percent right slightly

higher for things like heroin but it's pretty consistently in that zone right which is not to say that there aren't other heroin depresses your breathing it can cause death that way there are other harms but we're talking about addiction right um so it's interesting there's so much i think we need to explain to people one person person here in L.A. who really helped me to understand this in the research for the book is a guy called Professor Ronald K. Siegel. You should totally have on your shows. A very interesting guy. So he was an advisor to four American presidents. He was a W.H. advisor to World Health Organization.

Really serious scientist. But he had a sideline for 30 years where he investigated animals using drugs. Right. And he's basically shown loads of species love getting intoxicated for the pleasure of it, right? Sure, elephants. Yeah, elephants. There's an amazing example he gave in Bengal

of elephants who broke into an alcohol store, got really drunk, and just fucked up the whole village, right? There's a great example he gave where if you give hash to mice, what they do is they get really horny. They try to, male mice will try to mount women but then they basically can't get it up so they just spend hours licking their own balls and

they're going cock uh so anyway loads of examples is what a guy professor seagull i remember he told me at one point that he'd spent three years investigating um grasshoppers in cannabis fields who just naturally live in cannabis fields to figure out when they eat the cannabis do they jump higher or lower and i said all right and at the end of your three years what did you discover and he said they turns out they just jumped the same height as everyone all the other grasshoppers it was like that wasn't a great use of your three years of life but he also got he had an interesting time when he was in hawaii he was investigating mongoose whether mongoose is like hallucinogens psychedelics

and he so he's like spying on these mongooses with with binoculars and he gets caught and he gets caught by a load of drug traffickers and they're like who the fuck are you and he's like oh don't worry i'm just investigating whether mongoose is like psychedelics like that is the worst fucking cover story we've ever heard they held him hostage for like two days but what he showed is something i think is really important and there's loads of other evidence for which is um it is absolutely innate to other species but especially to humans the desire to get intoxicated right there has never been a human society anywhere in the world where people didn't seek out intoxicants and enjoy using them the only society where there were no naturally occurring intoxicants was the inuit the what used to be called the eskimos in the arctic and they used to just starve themselves to get a fucked up head

steak because that's how deep it is in human beings if there is nothing in the environment yeah if you starve yourself long enough you get a kind of fucked up head state basically how far how long you gotta go for i don't know i don't think i looked into the details of it but he writes about that um but but so it's fasting yeah fasting causes an altered head state but the i've never done it but the this this intoxication impulse is as deep in human beings as the sexual impulse you even see it in small children you know when a little kid everyone will have this memory of when you're a little kid and you realize you can spin round and round and round even though you know will make you sick, you do it because you get an altered headspace. That is one of the first expressions of the kind of intoxication impulse.

A really nice example is for 2,000 years, 40 miles outside of Athens, in ancient Greece, there used to be once a year people would meet at something something a place called the temple of elusis and it was basically burning man they would all use a psychedelic together we now know what that psychedelic is yeah it was a kind of there's lots of different theories but they think it was a kind of fungus basically um i can't remember the name of it but there's been some there's been research on this i don't know i don't want to say it wrong it was some kind of some kind of psychedelic mushroom and like people like Plato and Aristotle

sometimes people say you know drugs are William Bennett the former drug czar saying drugs are an attack on the foundations of western civilization and you're like no

at the actual foundations of western civilization the people you're holding up as the icons like Plato and Aristotle were literally getting fucked up in exactly the way you say

it's an attack on them right it's this deep misunderstanding so this is a natural human impulse we are never going to get rid of it we want to get rid of it it gives people a lot of joy and pleasure and yet the oscar wilde said once i'm going to get the quote slightly wrong he said it better than this but he said puritanism is the deep and gnawing fear that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves and there's this puritanical hatred of of drug use right um now some of that is understandable fears about genuine harms uh and that's a different thing but a lot of it is just very deep puritanism and you really see it in one phrase we need to get get out of the english language is the ridiculous phrase drugs and alcohol it's like saying fruit and apples right alcohol is a drug right alcohol is easily the deadliest drug in our culture uh well after tobacco um it's a not it's like saying you

know as my friend steve rolls who's a big campaigner on this is it's like saying metal and iron right it's a meaningless phrase but it's you this distinction between alcohol and other drugs is is a way of maintaining this drug war right because the reality is the same proportion of people become addicted to alcohol has become addicted to cocaine right same proportion not same not absolute numbers can more people use alcohol obviously um risks from alcohol are very similar to risks from other drugs right actually some of them alcohol is significantly more dangerous than some drugs that are currently banned but we with alcohol and it comes back to what you're saying about why we don't change these

policies with alcohol enough people well everyone knows people who drink alcohol right and one of the reasons things changed on cannabis is because more people came out and talked about it and so you had this situation where you've got harry anslinger saying if you use cannabis you'll you know kill your family with an axe by the time we get to the 90s enough people know enough people who've used cannabis to go right well jimmy over there ain't hot jacket chopping his family to death with an axe right this is this is bullshit and i think one of the things we have to do is encourage people to talk one of the weird things is that prohibition creates a distorted picture of overall drug use right because loads of your listeners might say on facebook you know i went out on saturday night and i had you know five vodka shots and i got

hammered and had a great time you'd be pretty foolish if you put on facebook oh saturday night i went out and have five lines of coke and had a great night right you'd be never followed a lot of people i follow let me ask you this is there a culture where there's no demonized use of drugs or alcohol is there any culture that doesn't frown upon some drugs or have some forbidden categories for drugs well they've been those societies throughout history right i mean now well we've got to understand it in the context of the war that harry anslinger imposed upon the whole world right there was no country i mean if you think about what happened to mexico right so mexico had uh so the 1930s anslinger says to the mexicans you'll notice some real parallels to what's happening now.

You guys are responsible for our drug epidemic. You've got to ban drugs and have a vicious war on drugs, right? And the Mexican government are like, no, we can see the policies don't work for you. We're not going to do it. They had a drug czar, a drug minister called Leopoldo Salazar Viniegro,

who they should build fucking statues to. No man has ever been more prescient. He explained to the Americans, we don't want to ban cannabis it's not particularly harmful with other drugs we should be providing people with compassionate care and if we ban drugs the country's our country's going to be taken over by drug lords right no one has ever been more right about anything um the americans the u.s start um pressuring mexico more and more in the end they cut off so all opiates for pain relief used in hospitals were manufactured in the americas in the united states at that time

they cut off the supply of all of them people start dying in hospitals all over mexico in agony and the mexicans give in they fire this guy and they begin the drug war and the whole journey that leads to rosalia reta the guy i know from the zetas and maricela's death that that trajectory begins at that point and this is something we haven't explained i think is so important right actually really surprised me learning about the history of all this stuff at the birth of the drug war it was intensely resisted right think about here in la right in los angeles there was a doctor called henry smith williams when heroin was banned there was a deliberate loophole in the law that said, okay, you can't sell heroin,

but doctors can prescribe it to people with addiction problems, just like what happened in Switzerland, right? So here in LA, big heroin clinic prescribed. Anslinger, it drives him crazy. He wants to shut it down. So the mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of this heroin prescription clinic and says, you will not shut this down. This does does a good job for us but anslinger shuts it down when the doctors say to the there's the biggest crackdown on doctors in american history over

12 000 doctors are arrested and rounded up um when they come to the one in portland oregon the doctors say but what are we meant to do with all these vulnerable addicted people and one of the agents said go and throw them in the lake. They'll make good fish food, right? That was the attitude. So this is resisted intensely at the birth of the drug war. So you had a society really recently that had a much more mature, exactly what you're asking about, a much more mature attitude to drug use than we have now, right?

It's not that people thought all drug use is good. We should celebrate every instance of drug use. No one thinks that, right? There were problems and there is some joy thought all drug use is good. We should celebrate every instance of drug use. No one thinks that, right? There were problems and there is some joy associated with drug use. That's actually the norm. There is some pain and terrible things associated with drug use, which are mostly driven by underlying harm. But there are real harms that come from some drugs as well.

And most societies until very recently had a mature appreciation of this, right? Really? We are the outlier. Most societies have had licensed intoxicants. Now, of course, in different societies at different times, there was a czar of Russia who wanted to ban tobacco, right? And did terrible things to anyone who was found with tobacco. Different societies have had different panics at different times.

But we are the historical outliers right i mean to give you a sense just the united states imprisons two million people there has never been a society that imprisons this many of its citizens this higher proportion of its citizens anywhere ever it's overwhelmingly driven by the drug war right i mean the u.s imprisons so many people and the conditions in those prisons are so terrible that the united states is almost certainly the first society ever where more men have been raped than women that's how extreme this this war is right and what we do to people in what this what this the the conditions this war creates it's um and it's a total historical outlier we are in a freak experiment right and the one thing you can say in defense of the drug war

and i would give one bit of credit for this is we gave it a fair shot right the united states has done it for a hundred years uh this country has spent a trillion dollars on it uh we've imprisoned millions of our own citizens we've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate we've destroyed whole countries like colombia isn't the problem now that there's a gigantic business behind it all from private prisons to prison guard unions to the pharmaceutical industry that would benefit from keeping most of these drugs illegal so their profits continue to rise to law enforcement i mean down the line it's you'd be disrupting like an evil industry but an industry i think that's a real factor but i don't want to overstate it lots of policies have best interest factor what's the main factor the main factor is

most people asked do you think the drug war has failed so yes and most people asked do you want to legalize any drug other than cannabis say no very strongly so education i think it's about i won't use the word education can i give you an example of a specific person who i think showed a way to do this um so in the year 2000 in vancouver there was a homeless street addict called Bud Osborne and he lived in a notorious part of Vancouver called the downtown east side people in Vancouver people into Vancouver knew it know it it's a place particularly at that time that had um really high like nightmarish open drug scene right just again people like in

people injecting in the streets that kind of. And Bud was living homeless and he was watching his friends die all around him. At that time, there was a really big police crackdown. And so people would go and hide in dumpsters or in alleyways to shoot up. But obviously, if you're hiding and you overdose, no one sees you, you just die, right? And one day, Bud learns that one of his friends judith had died and he's like i can't just sit here and wait for my friends to die and then for me to die but as bud would

have put it then he also thought i'm a homeless junkie what the fuck am i going to do right and bud had a really simple idea he gathered together a group of the other homeless street addicts and he said um when we're not using which is most of the time even people on the streets what we should do is just drop a timetable and go and look in the places where we know people where we shoot up right and if we see someone overdosing we'll ring an ambulance no officials nothing like that just us and loads of people had descended on the downtown east side to come up with problems to solve everything and people were very skeptical but they liked bud okay we'll do it so they start going and searching and um over the next three months the downtown the death toll on the downtown east side like had a significant fall and obviously

that meant people who would have died were living which is a great thing but it also meant the addicts thought ah maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone says we are right maybe we can do something they were like what else can we do bud went to the library he learned in frankfurt in The addicts thought, ah, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone says we are, right? Maybe we can do something. They were like, what else can we do? Bud went to the library. He learned that in Frankfurt in Germany, they had opened safe injection rooms, a bit like what happened in California until they shut it down, Anslinger shut it down,

where people could go and use their drugs and be watched by doctors and nurses and that this had massively reduced deaths in Frankfurt. Nothing like this had happened in the United States since Anslinger shut it all down. But Bud's like, okay okay we'll persuade our mayor they set up a group called van do the vancouver area network of drug users okay the mayor was a conservative right-wing guy called philip owen who would be an american comparison it's not trump like mitt romney rich guy from a privileged family didn't know anything about addicts he'd run for office saying all the local drug addicts should be local to be taken and detained in the local military base in chilliwack and never let out gives you sense where he's coming from right people are

not optimistic about persuading him van do barred his friends they decide everywhere philip owen goes they're going to follow him with a coffin. And the coffin had written on it, who will die next Philip Owen before you open a safe injection site. Every time Philip Owen spoke in public, one of the homeless people with addiction problems would stand up and say, who will die next Philip Owen before you open a safe injection site. One day, Dean Wilson, one of the main people in Van Du, stood up and said, do you remember Julia who asked you recently who who would die next it turned out to be her because you haven't done it right this goes on for a long time they do loads of public actions they filled

oppenheimer park which is a big park in vancouver with a cross more than a thousand crosses each one representing someone who had died of an overdose and they wrote the names of the people on the crosses um and one day after this was going on for years eternally to his credit philip owen just said who the fuck are these people what is this and he went to meet loads of the addicts he sat with them it blew his mind he thought people with addiction problems were just people who partied too hard indulged themselves he was completely shocked he came here to the united states to meet uh milton friedman the nobel prize winning economist who'd grown up under alcohol prohibition and milton friedman explains drug prohibition to philip poet but the poem comes back to vancouver and he holds a press conference and he had the chief of police the coroner and a representative

of the addicts and he says something like i'm not going to speak again without having the addicts here with me about addiction, because they understand it better than me. We're going to open the first safe injection site in North America. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. Things are going to change around here, right? They open the safe injection site. Philip Owen's right-wing party is so horrified, they deselect him as their candidate and his whole political

career ends but a more liberal guy wins the election and the room stays open right in the 10 years that followed overdose deaths on the downtown east side fell by 80 80 right average life expectancy in that neighborhood rose by 10 years you just don't get figures like that very often and i remember the reason i say in relation to change it's you know a big part of what i argue in chasing the scream and in my other book lost connections is you know we you don't write people off right but i realized i would have written off philip owen right wing guy runs for saying we should lock them all up in the military base right you don't write off anyone you don't know who can be persuaded by a message of love and compassion and the most unlikely one of the biggest champions of my book is a conservative

evangelical christian in mississippi called christina dent who's doing incredible work with this right and i thought a lot about philip when i went to go and see philip on the downtown east side and he said to me he would sacrifice his entire political career all over again, given the chance for this cause. He said, how often do you get to save thousands of lives of the most vulnerable people? And after I got to know Bud Osborne, the guy who started this movement, he died. And I remember, you know, he was only in his early 60s, but he'd been a homeless addict during a drug war. It takes a toll on you. And they sealed off the streets of the downtown Eastside where Bud had lived as a homeless addict during a drug war it takes a toll on you and they sealed off the

streets of the downtown east side where bud had lived as a homeless person and they had this incredible memorial ceremony and there were loads of people at that ceremony who knew that they were alive because of what bud had started and because so many other people had joined them and so many people who didn't have addiction problems that opened their hearts right and i remember thinking that day you know when you get disheartened about this it's easy to get disheartened right this is a hundred year long drug war um we're up against very powerful forces everyone watching your show listening to your show is more powerful than bud was that day

right the day he started that right just by virtue of the fact they have a device on which to listen to this right bud didn't sit there thinking someone else is going to handle this he didn't sit there thinking oh this is we're up against these forces that can't be defeated he started where he stood he appealed to the people around him and it started this circle of change that you know the canadian supreme court ruled because the right-wing government of stephen harper tried to shut down this injection site um and the canadian supreme court ruled that people with addiction problems have a right to lie to live and that includes a safe place to use their drugs that will never be taken away now right that started because one but you know when you have nothing else you have a voice you have a human voice that you can use to persuade other people with love and compassion.

You can tell them stories. You can build people's love and compassion. In the middle of this catastrophe that we're seeing in this country with the addiction crisis, right? I mean, more people died last year in the opioid crisis than all the soldiers who died in the Vietnam War combined. In the middle of this catastrophe, we can carry on doing what we've been doing okay we can carry on doing that then we will continue to get the horrific results we are now getting we can continue to copy the places that have failed right at the end of a hundred year long drug war that's cost a trillion dollars we can't even keep drugs out of our prisons where we

have a wall perimeter and we pay people to walk around it the whole time so good luck keeping them out of a 3 000 mile border right that will never happen that is a ludicrous fantasy you may as well take all the money that will be spent on trying to keep drugs out that way and burn it in a pile right it's absurd there's never been such a society um or we can start to copy the places that have succeeded right portugal switzerland uruguay canada there are plenty of places that have tried the alternatives and people who were quite skeptical it's one thing that was most striking to me in all those places is that people who were initially skeptical and initially thought it was crazy very often changed their minds this is the consistent pattern before it happens people think it's the work of a bunch of fucking wackos they think what

people who want to you know get everyone to use drugs and get children to use drugs and think it's madness and then they see that that's not at all what motivates people who want reform and that's not that's not what happens in practice when you when you adopt these policies and it's not a magic bullet and they still have problems. But there's been such a significant improvement in all those places that the resistance tends to... I mean, how many people are arguing for reversing the cannabis legalization here? You don't ever hear it now, right?

I mean, there's been a little bit of a backlash in a kind of absurd book that's come out, repeating the kind of Victor Laicata style. Well, I actually had that guy on. Oh, really? Tell me about that well i had we had a debate between uh him and alex berenstein and uh dr mike hart from canada um and there's some there's some reality to the dangers of cannabis use of some people that are susceptible to schizophrenia um and i think that there's also some at least anecdotal evidence that points to the fact that some people experience these psychotic breaks and these

schizophrenic episodes probably directly as a result of large dose use of THC, whether it's through edibles or whether it's through smoking. And some people freak out. I've known people, I've known of people that have had real issues with it i mean had a comedian here a couple weeks ago talked about he doesn't smoke pot he's from brazil he smoked pot uh used a vape pen uh took a bunch of hits and was fucked up for two weeks there are there are dangers and problems yeah so it's really important the case for legalizing cannabis is not that there is no harm associated with cannabis right in the same way the case for legalizing alcohol is not there's no harm associated with alcohol this is what alex bernstein is trying to go over in his

book i don't think he did a good job for two reasons one because he's basically only making the case for it to be negative and i think there's far more evidence that cannabis has a positive influence on people it reinforces community it makes people more sensitive and kind this thought of paranoia might actually it makes people more humble um it makes sex feel better it makes food taste better there's there's creativity aspects to it that are undeniable there's a lot of very positive aspects to it for some people it's not good but it's like saying hey some people die when they eat peanuts let's outlaw peanuts i think warn your children about peanuts yeah i think everything you just said is

is absolutely right i think there's another layer that's going on at the same time kind of below that which is really important people to understand so there's this thing um so very often people will say uh you get kind of Republican politicians like Carly Fiorina saying it during one of the Republican debates in 2016, 2015 maybe. We can't legalize cannabis because it's much stronger now than it used to be. THC content has gone up, people are smoking skunk. It's really important to understand why that happened. It's because of drug prohibition. So the day before alcohol was banned in the US, the most popular drinks by far were beer and wine.

before alcohol was banned in the US, the most popular drinks by far were beer and wine, right? In the weeks after alcohol prohibition ended, most popular drinks again were beer and wine as they are today. In between, you could not get hold of beer and wine. The most popular drinks were whiskey and moonshine. You look at that and you think, well, why would that be? What's going on? It's because of a kind of slightly wonky and boring thing, but I think it's worth talking about. It's called the iron law of prohibition. If you imagine if we had to smuggle the nearest bar to here, if we had to smuggle all the alcohol for that bar in a wagon from the Canadian, from the Mexican border, right, from Tijuana. In a wagon, we fill our wagon with beer. We're going to get drink for 100 people.

If we fill it with vodka, we're going to get drink for thousands of people. Right. for 100 people if we fill it with vodka we're getting it drink for thousands of people right so when you ban a drug and it has to be smuggled around you get a premium on getting the biggest possible kick into the smallest possible space right this is why mild forms of the drug disappear before um opiates were banned in the united states most popular way of consuming it was something called mrs winslow's soothing syrup which you would buy in the pharmacy right very low level of opiates most popular way of consuming coca-based products prior to the banning was coca-cola right it's called that

for a reason uh when the ban happens heroin becomes the only form of opiates powder cocaine becomes the only form of cocaine in fact when there's a huge crackdown on powder cocaine in the 80s the iron law kicks in even more and that's when crack is invented because you can get even more of a hit into an even smaller possible space right so i think it's important to understand if you want it is not good most people who drink alcohol don't want to drink vodka and they certainly don't want to drink absinthe most of the time right most people want a mild form of their drug that's true cannabis that's true of course there's some people who want to get totally fucked up either for fun or because they have addiction problems but But most people want a mild form of the drug.

It's not good that mild forms of the drug are when they're not available. Let me stop you. I don't think that's true. It's definitely not true in California. In California, what happened was medical cannabis got passed. And once medical cannabis got passed, there was an emphasis on the strongest possible stuff because people wanted it. I mean, it was a direct result of people having higher tolerances because marijuana was so readily available.

And if you have a high tolerance and you smoke a lot of pot, you want strong pot because weak pot doesn't do anything. It's the number one complaint amongst cannabis enthusiasts is someone having weak pot. So you've got a subculture of people who are cannabis enthusiasts. Yes. You're right. Just like there's a subculture of people who are cannabis enthusiasts yes who do you're right there's a sub just like there's a subculture people who want vodka or absinthe right but i don't think it's a matter it's not the same thing like gin obviously is more potent than whiskey

or than beer rather it's easier to carry gin around you have to carry less of it with cannabis people are still buying the same quantity they're just getting more fucked up because their tolerances are so much higher. They need the stronger and stronger THC. So as you have a legal market, you can have a variety of options, right? What you have is what we'll discover, I think, as time goes by, because we know this with alcohol, is different people want cannabis to do different things. You're totally right. There's some people who want maximum THC, maximally fucked up. Well, there's still a market for for lower grade weed i mean they have

it listed at all these dispensaries they have it listed you know 20 35 they have it listed so you can choose a more mild marijuana if you like to but the og people the people that do it every day of course they want that really potent weed it's not like but i would say they're more like the people in vegas who gamble are professional gamblers versus the people who go to vegas for the weekend and just want to play a roulette there's definitely a concentrated market of very dedicated users who want to get maximally fucked up you're totally right i think that's what pushed the i mean it's also in botanists and i'm friends with a bunch of people who breed and grow these various strains but if you think about so professor david nutt has done really interesting work on this also in botanists and i'm friends with a bunch of people who breed and grow these various strains but if you think about so professor david nutt has done really interesting work on this

so if i remember rightly there's 38 active components in cannabis right so cannabinoids well there's hundreds of cannabinoids so i i think the if i remember professor nutt's work that he argues there's 38 kind of significant active components okay maybe other people yeah i think there's over a hundred uh cannabinoids i think we just discussed this right then we uh so one of the things he argues and i'm happy to be corrected on the specific number but one of the things he he argues um is you've got because you're talking about schizophrenia and psychosis and it's important to understand there is some evidence that very high exposure to THC in a small number of people can lead to psychosis, right? And that's even a small number of people where you have a very widely used drug is that's really problematic, right?

But actually, this is really interesting evidence. So why do people who are prone to psychosis and schizophrenia want cannabis, right? Because there is a lot of them who want it. It's not that people know hardly anyone wants to have a psychotic episode it's actually so thc um uh correlates with with psychosis in some people but there's a another component cannabis called cbd uh cannabidiol which actually we know there's good evidence soothes psychosis and schizophrenia right it's actually given as a treatment in some places in distilled pill form so actually it's a slightly more complex picture than cannabis causes psychosis

right very rich thc in some people will cause psychosis that's a real problem there are things we can do to prevent that and one of the good things about a legal market is you can regulate it so we can limit the amount of thc that is available just like we can limit you know you can't go and buy 70 proof alcohol but also what professor nut has been arguing is we need to be and they exist but they need to be commercialized and promoted more um or promoted in a public health way not necessarily commercially um cbd rich cannabis will actually be helpful to people with psychosis schizophrenia so it's a slightly more complicated pitch i know that you you're not saying that you're not endorsing what um the tell your kids guy what's he called again um the guy who did your debate um alex burns yeah uh i know you're not endorsing the kind of simplistic view on either side but the

the um i think it's slightly more slightly more complicated than that the other thing i think it's really worth saying though to people is there's one thing we we all do agree on which is um cannabis is bad for young teenagers right it's bad for developing brains there's one person i interviewed who really helped me to again to think about this guy called fred martins who's in i went to go see him in camden new jersey and fred was a cop he's retired now but he was a cop it was a really kind of right wing it reminded me of the clint eastwood character in Dirty Harry he's not a liberal right and he had this he wouldn't use a fancy word like this but he had an epiphany about drug legalization one day he was at a car park in Wayne New Jersey in 1971 he was staking out a dealer he's in plain clothes

obviously and a kid comes up to him like an 11 year old or something and goes hey mister um i'm not allowed to buy alcohol will you go into that liquor store and buy some for me and fred goes no get out of here so the kid walks over to the drug dealer and buy some drugs from him instead and fred has this kind of realization which is oh he wouldn't put it this way but legalization puts a regulatory barrier between kids and drugs that doesn't currently exist right this is why since they legalize cannabis in colorado there's been a don't overstate it it's not huge but there's been a significant fall in teenage cannabis use right drug dealers don't check id licensed legal businesses do they really care if they're they because they've got something to lose right so i think if sometimes it's used as the kind of

protect our kids argument is used as a case for prohibition in fact if you want to protect your kids you should be putting a big premium on getting these substances out of the hands of armed criminal gangs and into the hands of licensed legal businesses yeah i don't think anybody's going to argue that i mean i think that anybody rational rather uh i think that makes a lot of sense. I think that the number of people that have schizophrenia is fairly stable in terms of the percentage of it across the board, cannabis users or non-cannabis users. And so the argument against this idea that cannabis causes schizophrenic breaks is that these people already have schizophrenia, and it just hasn't manifested itself in a in a tangible sense so this is one of the things professor nut says so there's there's there is some evidence that uh cannabis uh in a small number of people causes psychosis there's a study in sweden that showed this with schizophrenia it's much more contested

so so psychosis versus schizophrenia what is the major distinction yeah i've not researched this in depth but um psychosis involves um they're different they're different paranoia schizophrenia is a subset of mental illness that's very specific has a significant genetic component although there can be environmental triggers for it so it could possibly trigger both it could possibly trigger psychosis and the argument against that so professor so there is evidence with psychosis the argument i want to stress it's a very small number of people but it is real um uh and there are things we can do in a legal market to counter that that are much harder to do in a prohibited market but with schizophrenia the argument against that and i've not looked into this in a huge amount of detail so i don't want to this is not

i don't say it's the same degree of confidence i've been saying the other stuff but um professor nut argues well we know that cannabis use has massively increased in britain for example i think something like 20 fold increase since 1960 in britain and yet levels of schizophrenia have remained the same if cannabis was causing schizophrenia you would expect it to vary with cannabis use at least to some degree there'd be some relationship and that doesn't seem to be the case so again that's what professor nut who's the former chief to vary with cannabis use, at least to some degree. There'd be some relationship. And that doesn't seem to be the case. So again, that's what Professor Nutt, who's the former chief scientific advisor on drugs in Britain,

says. I haven't looked into that in great detail, but he's basically right on all the things that I have looked into that he says. Hmm. Do they know what the mechanism would be that would cause someone to consume THC

and have a psychotic break have that has that been examined i don't know enough about it that would seem to be a big issue right like find out what it is that's causing this trigger and whether or not this exists in these people anyway and maybe a stressful situation a bad breakup losing their job maybe one of those things could also cause this trigger well we know with all mental health all aspects of mental health all mental health problems there are three kinds of cause right there's my book lost connections which about depression anxiety is a lot about this there are biological causes things like your genes real brain changes things like the introduction of a drug there are

psychological causes how you think about yourself and your place in the world. And then there's environmental causes like, you know, how we live with each other, things like loneliness, that sort of thing. And in all mental health phenomena, to some degree, these three sets of causes play out. So let's think about even something very, dementia. Dementia has a very, obviously has a heavy biological driver, right? Dementia is a physical

degeneration of the brain or a disease like alzheimer's um but even with dementia which has this very heavy biological driver we know there are big social and psychological effects that can mitigate it so if you're part of a strong community and have lots of social connections if you have a positive self-image if you speak other languages your dementia will develop significantly more slowly than if you don't have any of these factors, right? So with things like psychosis, there's a brilliant person called Tanya Lerman, Professor Tanya Lerman at Stanford University, who's done really interesting research on this. I haven't listened to it in great detail, but I interviewed her, who's shown, so we know recovery from psychosis and schizophrenia

is much stronger in african countries than it is in the united states right and it's not a genetic thing because africans who come to the united states end up having the american level of recovery not the african level of recovery and um again it's a while since i spoke to her and i don't want to overstate my confidence about this but there are other people there are people i think including her who argue in part what's going on is in many not all some places it's really brutal but in many parts of africa you remain part of the community even if you have these mental health problems right they have much stronger social connections it's a study that asks americans how many close friends do you have who

you could turn to in a crisis and when they started doing it years ago the most common answer was five today the most common answer is none right it's not the average but it's most common answer half of all americans asked how many people know you well say nobody right it's a huge amount of evidence loneliness is toxic for human beings lonely people as guy did a lot of experiments on this here in la lonely people exposed to the flu virus and the cold virus and the colds um are way more likely to actually get them than non-lonely people right um it's just devastating for your physical and mental health to be lonely there's other things going on so i think there's a whole range of things that are going on with all mental health problems i don't know how this relates to cannabis and psychosis i don't want to i don't know but we know with psychosis yeah there's a big debate

about this immigrants are more likely to have psychosis than non-immigrants there's a whole um lots of environmental factors playing out even in extreme mental health problems like now i want to stress it's they're not the only thing there are real biological aspects as well uh which are clearly very significant in things like schizophrenia, and play some role in things like depression for a lot of people. But yeah, does that make sense? I mean, sort of, yeah. I mean, obviously there's varying biological factors, but the cultural factors make sense.

The fact that these people in Africa are not, they're not expelled from the community. So they have a sense of bond, and maybe it's more easy to recover. And one of the things that you hear about part of the problem with mental illness is that people with mental illness are pushed away. People don't want to deal with their problem and it exacerbates whatever is causing it in the first place. What drugs have you used? I have to be slightly careful in my answer because I'm in an immigration process with the united states so i lied to me what about prescription legal drugs so i used a drug

illegally that is a prescription drug so called modafinil or provigil provigil why did you use it illegally it's pretty easy to get a prescription for no in britain so just to explain to people who don't know provigil is a drug that was developed for people with narcolepsy well it's actually developed as A performance enhancer And they just had to find a reason to use it Oh I thought it was the other way around how interesting They had to find a reason to use it And the reason to use it was to say

Oh let's give it to people with narcolepsy Let's check to see if that's true Because that's how it's been explained to me Actually by my doctor Oh that's really interesting I don't know about that but that sounds plausible to me that so i think for me do you use that a lot no so i don't use it now so for me um i think i didn't have an addiction to that what i had addiction to was working all the time right so i grew up in a um crazy and violent environment in many ways and my

way of whether it's addiction and other things and my way of coping in that environment was to read and write all the time to just not be present by just working right even when I was a small child and as I got older that was really my way of being in the world right to work all the time and I think when I got into my like late 20s i can't remember i wrote an article about modafinil so it could i could find figure out when i started taking it but the because i initially wrote a very positive article about it um i was at that point where the obsessive and compulsive work wasn't working for me right it wasn't and like a lot of people with uh addictive behavior i was doubling down on the thing that

wasn't working that well so for me modafinil was or provigil i bought it on the internet um was a way i thought initially and make it so i could work even more hours do even more right and initially when you start taking it a lot of people take it before exams for example it um it does make you feel it's not a caffeine buzz it wasn't for me anyway it's just you feel like you can just you know feeling when someone put it to me this wasn't a scientist so it could be bullshit but um so we evolved to uh we have the thing called executive focus right i've got executive focus on now i'm really concentrating on what i'm saying to you and the signals coming from you right

but obviously we can't be in a state of executive focus all the time right um but what modafinil does is it makes you much more in a state of executive focus for longer and you can see why people evolved to do that if you were i know where we evolved if you're being chased by a lion your brain just switches off all the other shit and it's like get the fuck away from the lion right and my understanding is that uh modafinil triggers that that state not a panicked state but a executive focus state which is good for a while except there are two really big downsides to that firstly you don't sleep and if you don't sleep you go fucking crazy i'd never heard that there's an issue with sleeping in modafinil i really i vigil or pro vigil in fact that's one of the positive aspects of it that you can sleep on it

oh well i mean it was designed for people who find it hard to stay awake so that's not true that's what i'm reading what are you reading that uh the guy who discovered it, Michael Jouvet, was a sleep study neurophysiologist and was working on the compound Adra or Adrafinil. And then they discovered and made Modafinil, which is a stronger version of that. Is there anything that says that it was originally developed as a performance enhancing drug? I didn't see anything like that. Fucking doctor. My experience was two problems. So firstly, I don't know how general this is.

I haven't done a huge amount of research on this drug. My experience was, firstly, not sleeping, which is really bad for you over time. And secondly, actually, if you're in that focus mode, so your mind needs time wandering. Sorry, your mind needs time to wander, right? It needs time. You know, if I just leave here

and walk out down the street, my brain will just start wandering around loads of things. And then it will go back into executive focus when I do the next interview or whatever. You need those periods when you're not in exact focus. Right, recovery time.

Exactly. Or not even recovery. Variation. Recovery is part of it. That's when your brain often has creative thoughts, right?'s when recovery is part of it that's when your brain often has creative thoughts right when you're wondering when your mind is wondering when things will come to you because that a certain amount of your mind is processing things even though you're not conscious of it right that's what i felt with new vigil that it didn't new

vigil or pro vigil they're very similar it didn't seem like there was much creativity going on that it was a more of like a a grunt tool how long did you use it for jay um i mean i i would not use it regularly i would take it like once a couple weeks once a week or so like that for how long um i think i did it for like a year a year or so and then i just stopped i haven't taken it in years right right but i liked it what did it? I got it from some guy who was a biohacker. He was the one who told me about it. And he said it was pretty easy to get a prescription for it. Got a prescription for it.

And it just gave you like this pepped up sense of focus and awareness. I felt like you can get a lot done when you're on it. But it didn't seem like it helped with those wandering creative thoughts, as you were saying. Yeah, if I was ever going to do exams again, which i will never do in my life i will i would use that but i think i think you're right and i think but again thinking about that about in relation to addiction i think often when you talk about something like work addiction right which is obviously caused by partly childhood trauma that i'd experienced there's been a real change in how we think about that as well it relates back to what we're saying right at the start about chemical hooks right so if you look at the debate about um

non-drug based addictions right you think about 20 years ago people start talking about sex addiction a guy called stanton peel who interviewed a lot first writes about love addiction also exactly gambling addiction at the time initially what people say is well this is bullshit because they believe the chemical hooks theory of addiction right right so it just seems like well that's not i mean there's an episode of cheers actually which um now would be yeah you wouldn't do this but there's an episode where the whole hilarious premise of the show is that what's the ted dunstan sam alone ted dunstan's character thinks he's a sex addict and this is like a punchline all the way through the show right this is the attitude that ends with he

goes through a meeting of sex and love addicts anonymous and like there's some woman talking about how she gets like has sex with every every man and it ends with him just putting his arm around her and that's the end of the the end of the show right that wouldn't happen in a sitcom now people people thought well it might but people people don't think the the very idea of sex addiction is ridiculous in the way they did right i don't think i think maybe they do maybe but then i think that's because there hasn't been a shift in gambling if you go to a meeting of gamblers anonymous as i have with a friend not i don't have a gambling problem but just to support someone they are as addicted as anyone in the

next room down at narcotics anonymous i've known a lot i've known a lot of gambling addicts and did you feel that they were as addicted they're they're straight up junkies and they might as well be chasing crack exactly and that tells us something really important because you don't snort a roulette wheel right you don't inject uh online poker right if you can have a professor nut said this to me if you can have all of the addiction, but none of the chemical hooks, that tells us about how we've overestimated the role of chemical addiction. Well, there is a chemical hook. There's a dopamine addiction.

Well, absolutely everything you do that you like gives you dopamine. So I think there's been this attempt to integrate it by going, oh, well, there's this pleasure in the brain. It's also a self-destructive issue. There's something about gambling. There's a lot of self-hate involved and this overwhelming feeling of failure that a lot of gambling addicts have

because they fail so often. And they're always trying to chase the dragon. They're always trying to make up for all the past things they've gone wrong with this big score. With this big score, we're going to settle it out. There's someone who talked to me about, I was just think about what you're saying in relation to him a guy called peter cohen he's a professor in the netherlands who actually didn't say this to me directly i read it um he says we shouldn't call it addiction we should call it bonding that human beings have an innate need to bond and connect, right? And when you're happy

and healthy, you'll bond and connect with like the people around you with meaningful work. But if you can't do that because you're isolated or traumatized or beaten down by life, or you haven't been taught how to do that, you will bond with something that gives you some sense of relief, right? Now, for some people that might be porn, for some people that might be gambling, for some people that might be porn for some people that might be gambling for some people might be cocaine alcohol whatever but he says if you if you only have one bond that's giving you any relief you will obsessively return to that bond right and i don't think that's a total and as he would say that's not a total explanation for what's going on but i do think that is a useful way to think about some of these behavioral addictions right so i someone i know very well um a relative of mine has a gambling addiction and this is someone who has no alternative form of joy or pleasure in their life right and gambling gives a moment

well lots of moments especially if you look at someone who's playing online poker as i've done with my relative they're not happy it's not looking at someone watching a nice movie right it's you can see i don't mean um sorry i should be someone with an addiction problem playing online poker some people have most people don't have a problem right um it's the it's the relief of just being absent from your life for a moment or for however long you play rather than... I went to this... For Lost Connections, my book about depression, I went to the first ever internet rehab centre in the United States.

It's a weird place. It's an impressive place, actually. I like the people there. It's in Spokane, just outside Spokane in Washington. It's called restart restart washington and i remember going there it really it was really interesting to think about this um i remember arriving it's a clearing in the woods right a big wooden place in the clearing of woods and i remember absolutely instinctively looking at my phone and feeling really when a

minute i got out of the car i'm feeling really pissed off that i couldn't check my email i was like oh wait you're in the right place right um and it's really interesting because they get all kinds of people in restart washington but they disproportionately get young men who are obsessed with multiplayer role-player games like then it would have been world of warcraft now it'd be fortnite and speaking to these young men i remember having this realization talking to the woman who runs it is amazing woman called dr hillary cash who said to me you've got to ask i think it relates to what you're saying about gambling you've got to ask what these young men are getting out of this game because they're

getting something out of it right and she argues that one of the things they're getting is the things they used to get from the culture but no longer get like what well a things they're getting is the things they used to get from the culture, but no longer get. Like what? Well, a feeling they're good at something. A feeling that other people see them, that they're part of a tribe. A feeling that they're moving around. You know, kids spend very little time outdoors now, right? I think there's also anticipation.

There's puzzles. There's things where you're trying to figure out whether or not something's right or wrong and how to get it. And then if you do get it, you get positive surge if you don't get i mean i think there's human reward systems that are being mirrored there in gambling as well and what psychologists call call that feeling of mastery feeling master is when you feel you are good at something that is an absolutely underlying psychological need everyone needs to feel they're good at something if you don't have a sense of mastery in your life you will be depressed and anxious right or you're much more likely to become depressed and anxious and i think again because it's very striking to

me i've got teenage nephews i've got god sons we actually don't ask anything of young men right very rarely are they actually asked to do very much they're not given responsibilities right i think um and look again i want to stress most people playing video games are not addicted it's a perfectly good form of pleasure they're very addictive i mean they're not most people playing them have a healthy relationship with them in the same way that i don't know if that's true okay maybe i yeah tell me about i think a lot of people playing them have a real problem with them they take up massive hours of their time it's a giant problem with young boys i mean the the thing is it's become an actual avenue for a career now there's e-sports careers where these young guys are making millions of dollars playing video games

it's not like the old days where you would say hey you're wasting your life now it's basically almost like practicing golf but we have a setup back here where we play video games against each other it's very addictive don't you think it's addictive sure yeah so it's like basketball when i was younger too i loved playing basketball couldn't get me to play in the rain right the basketball has movement and exercise attached to it so you get some positive benefit from that addiction i was definitely addicted to jujitsu i would even train when i was injured you know but what does that mean it means i enjoyed it more than i enjoyed not doing it. The difference between a lot of video game addictions

and particularly gambling addictions is that they tend to wreck people's lives. You know, when you had this period of jujitsu addiction, did you, because there's an interesting distinction there, were you doing it to avoid some kind of pain in your life or were you doing it because you just really deeply loved it? It's really fun. Right.

You know, so you're chasing the thrill. I mean, I'm certain I was avoiding pain with almost everything I've done in my life in some way, shape, or form. You know, there's some of it where you're trying to do something positive to mitigate the pain or the frustration or the anger or whatever it is that's bothering you. But I don't, you know, the video game thing was a real addiction, though. It was like a compulsion. How long did it last? Years. Yeah.

Several years. How did you get out of it, Jay? I quit. I just quit. Cold turkey. Stopped playing. I realized it was kind of messing up my life and my career. It was just taking up way too much time.

And I came to a realization. I was like, I've got to stop doing this. I'm just playing way too much so I just said the only way I'm just too competitive I enjoyed it too much and so the only way to do it was to stop playing it all together

and we started playing it again recently after more than shit more than 15 years of ever playing it at all you know and it's still addictive but I'm so busy now I can't really fall into the grip of it I'm actually just enjoying it for an hour here or there but that'm so busy now. I can't really fall into the grip of it. I'm actually just enjoying it for an hour here or there.

But that's so interesting in itself, isn't it? That's a bit like the Rat Park principle. It feels to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that like the more you have in your life that is meaningful, that is good and gives you pleasure or a sense of mastery, the less space there will be for these objects of obsession to come in right and i think that is a principle that's true this was the principle behind the

portuguese drug decriminalization right if we give people good lives they will not want to anesthetize themselves so much it was the swiss principle and i think we all see that in our lives to different degrees i you know the happier i am the less i want to turn to uh you know the behaviors that i developed as a child to avoid being present with like violence and aggression like i don't think of like writing as an addiction it might be a compulsion if i have a day when i don't do it i feel terrible but something that is positive and rewarding i don't think is right an addiction right something that enriches your life and is not it's a way of living life in the most fulfilling way for you obsession maybe a positive obsession yeah yeah compulsion

obsession uh a a way of being in the world right like i don't it's like sometimes i get people saying to me you know like oh am i addicted to sex and or whatever and you want to set it off and say well does it give you pleasure does it is it is it and is it a way of avoiding pain if it gives you pleasure and it's not a way of avoiding pain it's not an addiction it's just a way a happy way of being in the world right and that's the reality for and again i think this really helps us because to partly what i'm arguing in lost in lost connections and chasing scream is we need to deeply reconceptualize how we think about these forms of pain like depression and and addiction and this isn't some wacky beast it's the view of the world health organization these leading medical bodies when it comes to depression

the the yeah sorry now people that are journalists and writers often like stimulants they often like adderall adderall is a big issue for uh for for journalists how much experience do you have with adderall i've never used it it's supposed to be amazing me neither i've never used it precisely because i know I would love it. Right. Like I would, I've got a young relative who's prescribed it. And, um, there's times when I've been told, yeah,

he's, uh, yeah, he's often tried to not spike me, but like get me to join him. And, um, this is for you.

But you know, there's, I don't know. It opens up a whole other thing, right? Which is, there's what you're talking about again, which is,

I'm not against people, obviously not against people using drugs in order to enhance their lives. Look, I have, before I came here, I drank enough caffeine to kill a whole fucking field of cows, right? As viewers can probably tell. I personally limit my stimulant use because I know I can tell.

You enjoy them. Yeah. And I can tell that I could easily, a bit like what I did with the modafinil. When I started using that modafinil, I got that sense, I just used it every day for three months, right? Which was a ludicrous thing to do.

But I think in terms of stimulants, there's a whole debate that needs to be had now. I'm going to write about this at some point, but one in 10 13-year-old boys in this country is being given a stimulant drug, right? In any given year. Right, for ADD or ADHD or... I mean, that is horrifying. It's crazy.

Right? 30% of children in foster care in the United States have been given at least one psychiatric drug. Yeah. These are not children in the main who the United States have been given at least one psychiatric drug. Yeah. These are not children in the main who are, you know, have some biological insanity. These are kids who've been fucking abused and treated abysmally. And what do we do? We drug them to shut them up. Well, it's also children have a lot of energy and it's not easy to control them. And so they decide that these children have something wrong with them.

Do you know, I went to this Amish village for Lost Connect lost connections but one thing that's really interesting there are these people who argue and there needs to be more research on this but amish children don't get adhd right and this is big debate what's going on there and so there's one argument which is then obviously not exposed to digital media which may and there's some evidence of just speaking to professor stephen lee here but people are getting a lot loads of adhd when i was in school and there was nothing so exactly so that's just because i spoke to a guy at ucla professor steven he's shown there's some effect to digital media but it's not massive right um i think what's happening from the very small amount of research you're talking to the amish is you know i'd say to them do you have kids who don't want to sit still and they go yeah we

let them go off and go fishing right the amish don't want to make you sit still for eight hours a day right there's nothing in their society that i'm not idealizing the amish problems with getting a child to sit still for eight hours a day it's insane just like trying to get a puppy to sit still for eight hours a day exactly that's exactly the right analogy what we do to our children we try to deaden them and discipline them to cope and thrive in a deadened and disciplined and inverted commas economy, right? The school system was designed in the 1870s to prepare people to work in factories, right? If you're going to work in a factory in the 1870s, what do you need? You need to learn to shut the fuck up, not complain, be passive, do what you're told, right?

passive do what you're told right it this is um i think it's a guy called alfrey cone uh i think it's him who says every school has two curriculums or curricula whatever the plural is you've got the official curriculum which is like geography history whatever and then you have the hidden curriculum which is the kind of person the school is trying to make you into right and what is the school system designed to be it's designed to make people who are passive who are uh obedient who sit still and shut the fuck up right now that was never a good way to make humans right that was always wrong but it's particularly awful in the you know the culture we've created but but and this relates to one of the causes of depression that i write about in lost canations which is is, you know, there's really good, I noticed that loads of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. We talked about this last time I was on a thing. But I was like, okay, people I know, maybe they're unusual, right?

So I started to look at the evidence about this. Gallup did a really big study of people in the US and Europe. See, what do people feel about their work, right? 13% of people, 1-3%, like their work most of the u.s and europe see what do people feel about their work right 13 percent of people one three percent like their work most of the time 63 percent are what they called sleep working you don't like it you don't hate it you kind of tolerate it and 24 percent of people fucking hate and fear their jobs all right so you think about that that means 87 percent of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time. Now, that can't be far off what the figure was in the Soviet Union, right?

That's a really extreme figure. And I'm like, so I'm looking at this and thinking, OK, could this bear some relationship to our mental health crisis, right? This thing that we don't like is spreading over more and more of our day. The average person, I think, answers their first email. I think it's 7.43 a.m. and leaves work at 7 15 p.m right what and i learned this an amazing australian social scientist or went to interview called professor michael marmot who discovered the key factor that causes depression at work right if you go to it's not the only one but key factor if you go to work tomorrow and you are controlled so you have low or no control over your work you're

much more likely to become depressed and anxious i think it relates to what we've been talking about all along people have psychological needs you need to feel you're good at something you need to feel your life has meaning if you're controlled all the time you can't feel that right so when i first learned this i remember first time i went to see professor marmot like misunderstanding the implications of this because i thought he was saying wrongly i thought he was saying okay you've got this 13 of elite people at the top like you and me who get to have jobs we love and then you've got everyone else who's condemned to the shit right and i thought about my family my brother is an uber driver my my dad was a bus driver my grandmother

cleaned toilets i'm like wait are we saying they're just condemned to these miserable lives and he explained to me it's not the work that makes you depressed right it's being controlled at work and there are solutions to that there are changes we can make right um i went to interview this woman called meredith keogh in baltimore it's been part of this really interesting change and sometimes some people listening are going to think i'm going to say they should do this and they're going to think i can't do that and it's right this is an argument for something else so meredith used to go to bed every sunday night just sick with anxiety right uh she had an office job it wasn't the worst office job in the world as she would tell you she wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything but it was boring it was controlled she couldn't just stand the

thought this was going to be the next 40 years of her life so one day with her husband josh meredith did this quite bold thing. Josh, her husband had been working in bike stores since he was a kid in Baltimore, teenager. And you know, that's controlled work. It's insecure. You don't even have rights really. And one day, Josh and his colleagues in the bike store and they asked themselves, what does our boss actually do? They liked their boss. He wasn't a bad person, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money. This doesn't seem like such a good deal to me right so they decided they were going to set up a bike store that works on different principle right the place they worked before was a corporation most people listening to your show work in

corporations you know how it's a very recent human invention you know how it works as an army the boss at the top is like the little dictator you've got to obey him or leave right and sometimes he's a nice dictator and sometimes he's Kim Jong-un, but you know, you don't have much say over that, right? Josh and his colleagues decided to set up a bank store that works on a different principle. It's not a corporation. It's a democratic cooperative.

So they don't have a boss. They run the business together. They take decisions about it together. They have a meeting once every couple of weeks. In practice, they agree, but you know, sometimes they don't and then they vote they share the profits they share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks um and one thing that was so interesting to me their business is called baltimore bicycle works spending time with them

totally in line with professor marmot's findings is you know giving them back control over their work made them much less unhappy depressed and anxious right and it's not like you know, giving them back control over their work made them much less unhappy, depressed, and anxious, right? And it's not like, you know, they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right? They fixed bikes before, they fix bikes now. Difference is now they've got control over their work, right? Giving people back control over their work is a really powerful antidepressant now every corporation could be could be a democratic cooperative right that's a big change in our society but it's you know we've all lived through big changes in our society there's no reason and by the way it would be

better for the economy a study at cornell university found democratic workplaces grow on average four times faster than non-democratic workplaces because people are more committed they're bringing more of their energy and their life to it that the we've got to understand it goes back to why addiction is so bad it's we've got to understand people who are showing these signs of distress depression anxiety addiction they're doing that not because they're crazy there are some biological factors that are not rational but mostly it's just actually we've built a society that's not good for them and we should be listening to that and respecting that and like the guy doctor in vietnam said to me listen to your nausea it will tell us what's wrong with you we should be listening to their nausea and using it as a kind of fuel to

change change the way we live in ways that will make or it won't just make people who are depressed and anxious and addicted better off everyone's life will be better off if they control their work more if you go through some of the other big solutions to depression and anxiety that i write about in in lost connections now lost connections is your most recent book yeah that's the one about depression is that out yeah yeah they're both available, yeah. Now, Lost Connections, how did the two of them tie together? So I wrote Chasing the Scream because of this addiction in my family. And I go on this big journey all over the world to understand the drug war.

And I said a line in my, I did a TED talk about it called Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong. And I said a line in that, which is the opposite of addiction is connection I said earlier in our conversation based on Rat Park right and lots of people started saying to me well are you just saying it's social isolation right like loneliness and I very clearly in my mind meant no I don't think that's the lesson of Rat Park right I don't think that's just what's going on in Rat Park it's they don't have anything that makes life meaningful now rats are obviously much more much less complex than us right so i started thinking well what what is actually missing for people who are addicted depressed anxious what is driving this

crisis so i think that question that people kept asking me i could see that portugal and switzerland had dealt with some problems of disconnection but you went quite rightly to the important question which what did switzerland deal with right that i couldn't quite i didn't quite answer i didn't quite understand when i was in switzerland so i ended up again going on this big journey all over the world from a crazy mixture of places like an amish village in indiana because the amish have low levels of depression to a lab in baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to a city in brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make them feel better did it which bit banning advertising yeah yeah so that's not been properly scientifically studied but there is a science that tells us it should i can explain what that is so this is everyone knows that junk

food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick right but there's this really interesting evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick so for thousands of years philosophers have said if you think life is about money and status and how you look to other people in a kind of showing off way you're going to feel like shit right that's not an exact quote from confucius but that is the gist of what he said right but weirdly nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy i got to know called professor tim casser who's at knox college in illinois and professor casser made some really important um breakthroughs in this so there's two ways everyone listening to

your show has two kinds of motivation in their life right we're all a mixture of both so imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano it gives you joy right that would be what's called an intrinsic reason to play the piano right you're not doing it to get anything out of it that's just that's the thing you love right sounds like jujitsu was like that for you writing is like that for me everyone will have something in their life that just gives them joy as they do it right okay now imagine you played the piano not i don't know not because you love it but because your parents are massively pressuring you it's their dream for you or in a dive bar that you can't stand to pay the rent or to impress a woman right that would be what's called an extrinsic reason to play the

piano right you're not doing it because that thing gives you joy you're doing it to get something further down the line right now obviously we're all a mixture of both but professor casser showed a couple of really interesting things firstly the more you are driven by extrinsic values the more your intrinsic values are starved the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite significant amount he also showed as a culture as a society we have become much more driven by these junk values right we've become much more driven by think about how instagram makes you feel sure right we've become much more driven by this hollow external sense of think

about something as simple as i was a while ago uh i was at elton john's last night in caesar's palace right amazing thing to be at and about half the fucking room is is filming it on that isn't even looking at elton john they're just watching it through their phone now that's a small example but you can see what they're doing in order to display their life to invite envy from other people they are not living their life no one wants to watch your shitty video about them john there's a hundred it's a thousands of videos about them john that are much better than yours right why are you doing that you're never going to watch it either you're doing it to say to other people envy me right it doesn't make you feel good in that room actually makes you feel worse you're

not enjoying the experience and it makes them feel like shit because it makes you're trying to invite envy in your friends that's a small example of a much wider thing of the kind of junk values that have taken our minds so the reason that relates to what you're asking about brazil is professor casar has shown there's two sets of solutions to these junk values taken over our minds one is it's like fucking air pollution you know get the messaging out of your head more 18 month old children know what the mcdonald's m means than know their own surname their own last name right um from the moment professor casar put it to me from the moment we're born we're immersed in a machine that is designed

to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? None of your listeners will lie on their deathbeds and think about all the shit they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. They'll think about moments of meaning and connection. That's like a banal, obvious thing. But we're constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend, right? These junk values have taken over our minds so part of the solution is just fucking get rid of most of this advertising get rid of most of this you know very tightly regulated but in doing so you limit commerce you're limiting people's ability

to sell things you're you're changing the the current market that a lot of people don't have any problem with i know this is a heresy in the united states but well limiting commercial speech is fine by me yeah i think it's fascinating i think it's a fascinating discussion but it is in the in a sense it's limiting free speech as well i mean that and we have a real problem with that the problem with it is that as soon as you start to put any regulations at all and you know you say oh you shouldn't be allowed to advertising to advertise even if it's advertising honestly about a great product that people will have real issues with that so we already have advertising regulation you can't you can't put up an advert saying i've found the cure for cancer right that's what i'm saying honestly yeah so this is i would argue this is a tightening so for example in

london there was a big controversy um a couple of years back skinny billboards exactly so it was this it was a billboard of a impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man and the billboard said something like are you beach body ready right the clear implication being if you don't look like these people who you'll never fucking look like you're not ready to go to the beach and the mayor of london sadiq khan just said this you can't do this right you can still advertise your bodybuilding but that's so silly i mean this is uh it's not an unobtainable ideal you're looking at two examples of it well they're real human beings yeah but that's like i mean in a way i understand i mean i was saying that you have to be that way but if you do want to look like that man and have that body it

is a possible goal yeah i mean it's not possible for the vast majority of people right like if they don't have the time or the effort it's not but very many people have radically changed their body i'm not saying no i understand what you're saying i'm not saying you should do it but it is a possible thing to do and if you're trying to sell fitness wouldn't you sell an example of someone who's really good at it like if you're trying to sell a business course wouldn't you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari? Like this is a guy who's done really well at business. Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan.

You wouldn't show, you wouldn't say, well, that's an impossible goal. I'm going to show you a person in a middle class suburb because this is as good as you're ever going to get. I think that's a fair point. I think there's two things going on,

isn't there? There's the freedom of people to market what they want to do uh and there's um it's a nanny state issue that people have a problem with by saying that these are impossible to achieve body goals we already have regulation of these things so and people don't call that a nanny state thing i think just so you have regulation of these things but that that is not i mean this i don't think this is a good example what's a better example so professor casas said there's two sets of solutions to these junk values problems there's um get the contaminants out of the atmosphere sort of thing which he says is actually a weaker one than the second set of solutions so how do we stop people being pumped

full of bullshit junk values right educate them on what it's happening to them and make it less appealing well this is the second part and you've gone to what i think was the most important part of the research professor casar did so he was working with a guy called nathan dungan and nathan is a who interviewed nathan is a um financial advisor in minneapolis and his job was to work with uh adults who were having trouble budgeting and explain budgeting to them and help them do it right and he gets a call from a school it was kind of middle class school wasn't super rich wasn't poor it was a middle class uh where they're having a problem that the kids at this school were becoming obsessed with getting like

the latest nike sneakers or the latest iphone or whatever it was and if their parents couldn't afford it the kids were really freaking out, right? So they say to Nathan, would you come in and just explain budgeting to these kids, right? So Nathan goes in, he tries to explain budgeting and quickly realizes these kids don't give a shit about budgeting, right? There's something else going on here. They are so obsessed with getting these things. So with Professor Kasser, he designs this program that led to a really interesting breakthrough. It's something people can try at home, right? this program that led to a really interesting breakthrough. It's something people can try at home, right?

You don't have to do it in this context. So they got, and you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and their teenagers, right? They come in. It was once every couple of weeks for, I think, four months. And at first they just say, the first meeting they had, they just said, write a list of everything you have got to have. didn't define that right and people of course say like a home a car whatever but quite quickly people would say nike sneakers the parents would name expensive things and they got okay tell me how you would feel if you got these nike sneakers right and very rarely i don't think any of them were like basketball players it was like i need the jump or whatever if that's the right phrase

um it was very often i would be almost or whatever, if that's the right phrase. It was very often, I would be, almost immediately I'd be accepted by the group. People would envy me, right? These insights are just beneath the surface, right? They go, who put that idea in your head? Where did you get that idea? And of course, everyone thinks they're smarter than the ad,

but giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values were, that was the first part. Second part was much more interesting and took longer then they would have in future sessions they'd say well okay given that's not actually made you feel better what are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied happy in a flow state what are things that are meaningful to you people you know a whole range of things playing sports playing music reading whatever it was right and they said okay how could we build more of that into your life and less of these junk values how could you do more of this every week

and just meeting we don't have these conversations in our culture very often just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other and going actually i managed to play guitar for an hour every day i managed on saturday to take my kid to the beach and we went or whatever it's going to stifle materialism? What it led to, this was monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to a significant shift in people's values. They had a significant decrease in junk values and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values. And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time. The weird thing is, I sometimes feel like with both my books, Chasing Scream and Lost Connections,

I sometimes feel like I'm giving people permission to know the thing they already know. Right. Right. Like, I had this completely bizarre experience when the book first came out, where I was being, Lost Connections, the depression one, where I was being interviewed by some American interviewer, I can't remember who it was. And I talk about how loneliness causes depression right and the interviewer goes saying like well this is a very controversial theory and i'm kind of sitting there and i thought

how did we get to the point we're pointing out the most fucking obvious thing you can imagine that if you're really lonely you're much more likely to become depressed i don't think that's controversial at all i think that person's silly but i think but i think the reason it's controversial is because these biological stories which have some truth in them have dominated how when i was a teenager i went to my doctor it's only thought of as being a medical issue when i when i went to my doctor when i was a teenager and i was really depressed and i said i had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and i couldn't control it my doctor told me an entirely biological teacher said there's just a problem with your brain here and all you need to do is drug yourself right and I drugged myself

and I got some relief from the chemical antidepressants but it did not solve my depression and one of the reasons I wrote lost connections is because after 13 years of taking the maximum possible dose I was like well what's going wrong here there's something missing in this picture because i still feel depressed and every year that i've been alive i'm 40 depression and anxiety have increased in the united states in britain and across the western world there's something missing in this picture and i think the reason why that's controversial it seemed controversial to that woman even though to you and me it's crazy to think it's controversial is because these biological stories which have some basis in reality have become the whole of the picture for a lot of people right i had a completely bizarre

experience where you know peter teal have you had him on your show no but i know him yeah so peter teal people who don't know is the uh founder of paypal gazillionaire right back to the trump campaign i got an invitation from peter teal just before it was after trump had been elected but before he'd been inaugurated his people to go to a they were organizing a um conference for app developers who were trying to develop apps to deal with depression anxiety and addiction and i'm a bit like i don't think apps are really the solution but i wanted an excuse to go to san francisco anyway so I go it's a day-long conference I didn't hear every speech but some really great scientists people like Thomas Ensor who's the former head of the National

Institute of Health who's a hugely admirable man and I'm sitting there and I'm like all they're doing is looking at pictures of brain scans, right? If all you knew about depression and anxiety was this conference and addiction, you would literally think they were just things that happened inside the brain. And I'm like the last person up. I don't think this was designed this way. Maybe they did.

I'm sitting there thinking, what do I say to these people? And I thought, you know, it's like, I was trying to get metaphors. You could have a conference about obesity that just looked at scans of people's stomachs right it wouldn't be untrue it wouldn't be bad science but you'd miss the whole fucking reason why they're fat right you could you could tell the plot of romeo and juliet using like newtonian physics you could draw a diagram romeo moves this

way juliet you wouldn't understand a damn thing about why anyone does anything right it was such a deep misunderstanding or not misunderstanding such a partial truth right and I said to them so we were in San Francisco we were really near the Tenderloin which obviously people know is a place with a lot of chaotic street addiction it's like let's not discuss this let's all just walk over to the Tenderin, sit with the first person with an addiction problem we meet, listen to their life story for half an hour, and come back and tell me the main problem here is a malfunction of the amygdala. It's a bizarre misunderstanding. Is there something going on with people's amygdalas? Yes. Is it important to understand that science? Of course, right? I'm strongly in favor of brain science. I'm in favor of the science of understanding the stomach. right i'm strongly in favor of brain science i'm in favor of the science of understanding the stomach but it's a bizarre reduction of what human beings are to think that these are the main drivers of these crises right yes it's ridiculous it yeah sorry i agree we have to

wrap this up we're already after i really enjoyed the show can i just say very quickly that anyone who wants any more information publishers fucking whip me if I don't say this anyone who wants any more information about either of my books Chasing the Scream is www.chasingthescream.com you can listen to audio

of loads of the people we talked about and take a quiz to see how much you know about addiction and Lost Connections is www.thelostconnections.com and there are audio books

of both those books as well that you can get on those sites beautiful thank you very much I really enjoyed that Joe cheers thank you very much thanks hooray