The One You Feed - Johann Hari

Episode Date: May 13, 2015

This week we talk to Johann Hari about battling our demonsJohann Hari is a British journalist. He has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the Nation, Slate, El Mundo, and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a lead op-ed columnist for the Independent, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, for nine years.Johann was named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’ by Amnesty International twice. He was named ‘Environmental Commentator of the Year’ at the Editorial Intelligence awards, and ‘Gay Journalist of the Year’ at the Stonewall awards. He has also won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for political writing.His latest book is called Chasing the Scream, The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs In This Interview Johann and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.The origins of the war on drugs.Is the war on drugs productive.How every culture in the world has looked for ways to become intoxicated?The % of people who use drugs who ever have a problem with it.For more show notes please visit our website Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisMaria PopovaTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's useful to try to extend your compassion to people who've done terrible things, but also it's useful to identify the similarities we all have with sadistic and cruel people as well as admirable people. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way

to the floor what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Johan Hari, a British journalist. Johan has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and more. Johan was also a columnist for The Independent for nine years. He has received many awards, including the National Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International,

Environmental Commentator of the Year at Editorial Intelligence Awards, and Gay Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards. His latest book is called Chasing the Scream, The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Hey everybody, before we get started, just a couple quick announcements. The first, and this is exciting news, is that on May 20th here in Columbus, Ohio, we will be having the first ever One You Feed party get-together, shindig, call it what you will, at the Roosevelt Coffeehouse. It'll be open to the first 15 people who sign up at oneyoufeed.eventbrite.com. Eventbrite is spelled E-V-E-N-T-B-R-I-T-E. So oneyoufeed.eventbrite.com. Sign up for the One You Feed party on May 20th at the Roosevelt

Coffeehouse. The second thing that I wanted to say is that on our website now at OneYouFeed.net, you can click and leave us a voice message. Over to the right, there'll be a little box, click on it, and you can record anything you want. Say hello, give us some feedback, tell us what you like, what you don't like, and suggest a topic for a mini episode if you want. And the final thing is I've had a couple people graduate out of the one-on-one coaching program. It's been going great. If you are interested, I've got a couple spots that have reopened. You can send an email to eric at oneufeed.net. Thanks and enjoy the show. Hi, Johan. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It's great to be with you. Thanks.

Yes. Thanks for joining us. Your book is called Chasing the Scream, The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. And I found it absolutely compelling in so many different ways. And very, very well written. So great job. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. And we will explore some areas of the book later on that I think are applicable to what we are doing here on the show. But first, I'd like to start off with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one's going to win? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life

and in the work that you do. It's an interesting question. It makes me think about a lot of the people I met on the journey that I did for this book. It's now 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and in Britain. And I started on the journey of writing this book four years ago for quite personal reason. One of my earliest memories was trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And obviously I didn't understand why when I was so small. But as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family. And I think like a lot of people who have addiction when they're young in their family. I was always drawn to addicts.

I was in a relationship with someone who had a bad drug problem. And it was a kind of weird thing because I thought of myself as someone who knew a lot about this subject. I'd written about it. I was a newspaper journalist. I'd written about it for a long time. Obviously, I'd cared about it because of my family. about it for a long time obviously i'd you know cared about it because of my family but i realized that as we were coming up to the centenary there were loads of really basic questions i just didn't know the answer to like why did we go to war against drug addicts 100 years ago why do we continue with that approach when so many people think it doesn't work what are the alternatives

actually like in practice and what really causes drug use and drug addiction and you know I read a lot about it and I kind of realized that I just didn't feel I was getting the answers that I wanted so I decided to go on the journey that really made up chasing the scream and I didn't realize it would take me so so long as it did I ended up going across nine countries and 30,000 miles and I really wanted to understand it partly through the best science and the best evidence but also partly by just sitting with people whose lives were changed by this approach and by the alternatives and it you know it took me to meet some really incredible people from you know a transsexual crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to

a homeless street addict in Vancouver who started an uprising that transformed his city, to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, to actually the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs from cannabis to crack with really amazing results. And I think one of the things I really learned, and I think the parable speaks to so many of the people I met along the way, is that almost everything we think we know about this subject is wrong. Drugs aren't what we think they are. Addiction isn't what we think it is. And, you know, the drug war isn't what we think it is. And the alternatives aren't what we think they are and i think i learned from from lots of people who were

feeding the negative and positive and positive aspects of themselves and i think one of the things i learned i think it's one of the things we're going to talk about is how the drug war really feeds the bad wolf in our nature and there are places I went to that have chosen a different way. And they really feed the good wolf in our nature. And I think I guess that's one of the things we're going to explore while we talk. Yeah, the the book is, is it's a very well, I mean, one of the things I was really impressed with was how open you were to having your mind changed, and how, how open you were to having your mind changed and how well you laid out all the different arguments for and against things in what I thought was a really impartial way, very journalistic, even though there's a clear position that comes through. But I thought you did a great job of

that. And there was a lot to learn. And as I said to you before the interview, we're not a public policy show, so we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it. But in essence, the book is a very good argument that the way we've been dealing with drugs, the war on drugs, has been not only is it not effective, it's extremely damaging and probably makes the problem worse rather than better if I had to sort of sum up the core findings of the book, which I agree with as an ex-addict myself. I've been close to a lot of these things and I agree 100%. Thanks, Eric. in the book early on, and I think it's an interesting, I think it's fundamental to us as humans. But you talk about that a lot of what happened in the early days of the drug war, and even today, is that this is a really complex problem, and that people really want easy answers. And that the answers to this aren't easy, because there is a certain part of us, and we can talk about some of the science, where there has never been a culture in history that didn't have some desire to be intoxicated in some fashion or other it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature and that trying to become comfortable with that is very different than what we've been saying about drugs

in general which is that we should eliminate all of them. Yeah, there's so many things I discovered that I learned that surprised me. One of them is, anyone listening to this, I would just ask you to stop for a second and say out loud the answer to what you think the question is. What proportion of all the drug use that's currently banned do you think is non-problematic? That means it doesn't make anyone addicted and it doesn't harm their health. What proportion of all the drugs that are currently used legally don't harm anyone? Say your answer out loud. The actual answer, according to the UN Office of Drug Control, who are the main drug war body in the world, they are the, you know, they are strong believers in the drug war. They say the answer is 90%,

90% of all currently banned drug use is non-harmful, right? That's an incredibly high number. Actually, it surprised me, but there's quite robust evidence for it. In a way, that doesn't seem weird to people if we think about it in relation to alcohol. If you picture a bar near you, you know, you go there tomorrow night, you'll know that there will be some people who have drink problems there who deserve our love and compassion whose lives are going to be really diminished. But you also know that the vast majority of people there are there because, you know, help them relax a little bit. They'll have a bit of a laugh. They'll have a nice night. They'll go home and they don't have a problem.

That is actually the reality with almost all drugs. The vast majority of people who use drugs don't have a problem. That is actually the reality with almost all drugs. The vast majority of people who use drugs don't have a problem. And this is a very, which is very surprising. And I actually had to go and interview lots of people who kept showing me the evidence before I really believed that. And it's interesting what we have to look at. Clearly, the top of our priority should be the 10% of people who are harmed. And I think the story about them that we've been told is really important. But just before we go on to that, you know, the intoxication impulse, this is really interesting. As you say, there's never been a human society where people haven't sought out intoxicants, you know, right about, in my book

about the Temple of Eleusis, which was a temple about 40 miles outside Athens, where for 2,000 years, people would go and they'd have this big revelry and they'd drink what we now know was a kind of hallucinogenic drink. It sounds an awful lot like Burning Man when you read about it. And actually, this is so deep in humans. It's not just deep in humans, but you think about a little kid, right? All children, this has been studied, all kids will spin at some point in their development will spin round and round and round and make themselves dizzy even though they know it will make themselves sick because they want a slightly altered headspace that impulse is really deep it's not just there in in humans i interviewed an absolutely fascinating scientist called ronald k siegel who spent 30 years struggling how animals use drugs. And it turns out most animal species are like us.

They just love getting intoxicated for the fun of it. You know, little birds will drink fermented berries and it'll make them drunk and they'll fly around a little bit crazy. Catnip is a drug for cats. Cows love getting out of it. Elephants love getting drunk. I can't resist the bad cow tipping joke

from here in Columbus, Ohio. Exactly. I embrace your bad pun. Yeah, you know, there's really good evidence for this. You know, actually, Ronald K. Siegel had a slightly weird experience where one time he was,

I mean, he's a really distinguished scientist at UCLA. He actually advised three American presidents. But one time he was staking out out i think it was in hawaii a cannabis field an illegally planted cannabis field because he wanted to see if mongooses got stoned and the dealers who who were in charge of this field caught him and they were like you're dea aren't you and he's like no no i'm a scientist studying whether mongooses get stoned and they're like you're definitely the dea they took him hostage for like three days because this is such a ridiculous and implausible cover story that leads into so one of the things i thought well let me back up for a second so first i think that 10 of people end up having a problem

rings very true to me just from from normal life and i think like you said it would ring true for most people if we think about it in terms of alcohol or other things is that most people simply don't have a problem with it. And there is 10% of which I happen to unfortunately be included in that, that seemed to, but when you talk about that, the, the animals have this natural tendency, you also talk about there's, there's a story in the book, two stories. One is the grieving mongoose and the traumatized water buffalo. And maybe you could talk a little bit about those. And then we can use that to segue into some of what, you know, the latest research is saying lies underneath some of the human problems with addiction.

Yeah. Ronald K. Siegel, that scientist I was talking about, he used to try to see if mongooses would like hallucinogens, right? So he'd get mongooses and he'd put them in a pen, again in Hawaii, actually, and he'd put a hallucinogenic plant in there. And the mongooses obviously wouldn't know what it was. They'd go over it, they'd munch it, and it turned out they didn't like it.

They twitched a bit and wondered about it and were obviously disorientated and then just didn't use it again. And then one day a tropical storm hit Hawaii and the pen where he kept the mongooses was kind of wrecked. And one of the mongooses died. Mongooses are apparently monogamous so they pair off. And this mongoose looked at its dead partner and went off and took loads of the hallucinogenic, chewed loads of the hallucinogenic plants kind of pretty clearly because it wanted to just not be present. It wanted to get out of it. It was distressed. There's interesting evidence about the water buffalo in Vietnam. In Vietnam, obviously, opium plants grow naturally uh did at that time prior to the the war and um the water buffalo

didn't you know the water buffalo roamed uh freely in lots of places and they just didn't eat the opium plants they'd obviously tried them at some point and didn't like them but when the bombing started when the of the american attack on vietnam began the water buffalo did start to eat huge amounts of the opium plants. They obviously were trying to kind of calm themselves down. And actually, it's partly through animal experiments that one of the things that most blew my mind in the research for the book really came to light. If you had said to me four years ago, when I started doing the research for this book, what causes, say, heroin addiction? I think I might have looked at you like you were a little

bit simple-minded and i would have said well heroin causes heroin addiction right it's pretty obvious we've been told a story for 100 years about drugs and addiction that's just become like you know our common sense right it's kind of obvious you know um we think that if you, me, and the next 20 people to walk past your studio all used heroin for 20 days, on day 21, we'd all be heroin addicts. Because there's chemical hooks in the drug that our bodies would start to physically need. And by the end of that, we would be craving the drug. And that's what addiction is. That's certainly the story I believed. the drug and that's what addiction is that's certainly the story i believed and the first thing that alerted me to the fact there might be something wrong with that story was when a doctor

an amazing canadian doctor called gabo marta explained to me you know if i if i step out of here today uh after this interview and i'm hit by a car and i break my hip i'll be taken to hospital and i'll be given a lot of diamorphine for the pain diamorphine is heroin it's much stronger heroin than i could ever buy on the streets because the stuff that drug dealers sell you is mostly contaminants whereas obviously stuff you get in hospital is medically pure anyone listening to this there's loads of people near you being given diamorphine in hospital diamorphine is heroin right it's just the medical name for heroin if what we believe about drugs and addiction is right what should happen a lot of those people should at least some of them should leave hospital as heroin addicts right that this has been studied very carefully that doesn't happen

you may have noticed your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip replacement operation right and when i learned that i thought oh that's kind of weird what's i just didn't know what to do with it like i found it so odd it seemed so contrary to the story i've been told until i went and interviewed in fact another man in vancouver an extraordinary man a professor of psychology called bruce alexander bruce explained to me that the idea of addiction that I had in my head, that most of us have in our heads, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your listeners can do them at home if they're feeling

a little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine if you do that the rat's almost always going to prefer the drugged water and almost always it'll kill itself quite quickly by overdosing you might remember there was a famous partnership for drug free america advert in the 80s that showed this experiment bruce comes along in the 70s and says hang on a, we're putting the rat in an empty cage, it's got nothing to do except use these drugs, let's do this differently. So Bruce built Rat Park, which is an alternative cage, and Rat Park is basically heaven for rats.

Everything a rat could possibly want, it's got in Rat Park. It's got cheese, it's got coloured balls, want it's got in rat park it's got cheese it's got colored balls it's got tunnels it's got loads of friends it can have loads of sex and it's got both the water bottles the drugged water and the normal water but here's the fascinating thing in rat park the rats don't like the drugged water they hardly ever drink it none of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. Now there's really important human examples of this principle that I know we'll get to, but what Bruce says is this shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is, you know, it's a moral failing. You're a hedonist, you party too hard, that's why you use. failing you're a hedonist you party too hard that's why you use the left-wing theory is your brain gets hijacked you get taken over bruce says to a much larger larger degree than we've understood

up to now addiction isn't about your morality and it isn't about your brain it's about your cage addiction is an adaptation to your environment there's a guy in in the netherlands a professor there called peter cohen who talks about how we we shouldn't even use the word addiction let's use the word bonding human beings have an innate need to bond and when we're happy and healthy we will bond with the people around us we'll form nourishing relationships with the people around us but when you can't do that because you're traumatized or beaten down by life or physically isolated or mentally isolated, you will bond with something that gives you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, but you'll bond with something that gives you some sense

of relief because human beings are creatures that need to bond and i think there's a huge number of implications that come from rat park and a huge number of human applications as well Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the wooly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What I thought was interesting is you sort of have Gabor Mate, who was talking about that he, you know, his theory was that an awful lot of

addiction was caused by childhood trauma. And I think, again, if you, you know, me spending time in communities of people who are recovering addicts, you see a, you see a fair amount of that, but not everybody's that way. And that's, and then, so then Bruce Alexander came along also to, to, to sort of add to that, which was, it which was it's also your environment around you. It's more than just childhood trauma, although that is part of it. It is the whole environment in which you live and the circumstances in which you live. I think those are related in a really interesting and complicated way. Just to tell people about Gabel, because I think he's an extraordinary man, and a particular piece of research that he highlighted and this will sound like a biographical detail that may not be relevant

it's highly relevant Gabor uh Gabor was born at the height of the holocaust and to a Jewish family in Hungary and um his mother ended up trapped in the Budapest ghetto when the Nazis were closing in at the height of the genocide. She didn't know it, but her parents had in fact already been murdered in Auschwitz. And one day she took Gabel when he was a baby and she went up to a Christian stranger who'd come into the ghetto and she said, please take my baby. Just take him. I want him to survive. I'm going to die in here, but I want him to survive i'm going to die in here but i want him to survive and the christian stranger did take gabriel many years later gabriel ended up living

on the downtown east side of vancouver which is one of the uh has one of the highest concentrations of addicts anywhere in the world um and gabriel uh started working with very very extreme addicts and he he really wanted to listen to them and he started giving them talking therapy along with other forms of support and what gabble noticed was something very striking that all the addicts who he worked with really without exception the extreme addicts had had horrific childhoods like abuse physical sexual extreme neglect and so on far more than could be like any attributed by chance right and gabble was also worried that there was a a kind of addiction within him he would actually very often or sometimes rather abandon patients in the middle looking after them like a woman in the middle of labor run out and compulsively buy

cds that he didn't even listen to just spend a fortune listening to buying them and he didn't understand why and he wanted to understand well why could why would this be why would this and why would childhood trauma be so such a strong correlation with you know the the addicts around him and he came across something called the adverse childhood experiences study it's a fascinating study basically it was actually stumbled across addiction by chance. It was a guy in Santa Barbara, a medical professor, who was studying obesity. And he wanted to understand the causes of obesity, and particularly the psychological causes. And he was looking at the correlation.

He noticed that a lot of his very obese patients had also had childhood trauma and he started to look at uh basically correlation between he started studying people what they did is they would they would ask people about 10 different traumatic things that can happen to a child right so from sexual abuse death of a parent that kind of thing and then it correlates or what how strong a correlation is there between that trauma and your odds of being obese and what it found was that odds were just it was an enormous correlation but it found that for addiction so it asked about childhood traumatic experiences and it asked about all sorts of different adult dysfunctions from extreme obesity to addiction that kind of thing

and what it found was for every traumatic event that happened to a child, you were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an injecting adult drug user. And if you'd had six of these categories of traumatic experience, you were 4,000 times more likely to grow up to be an injecting drug user than someone who'd had none of those traumatic experiences. So the correlation, I mean, it's very rare in medical science you get a correlation that high and really why and of course this helped gabble to understand his own behavior why was he behaving this addictive compulsive way he had of course had an extreme childhood trauma um i thought that was fascinating and i was trying to think about obviously i actually got to know gabble and bruce alexander who did the rat pocket experiment at the same time because they're both based in vancouver and i went there for some time to get to know Gabor and Bruce Alexander, who did the rat pocket experiment at the same time, because they're both based in Vancouver. And I went there for some time to get to know them and some other people I wrote about in my book.

And at first I thought, are these like incompatible theories? So on one hand, you've got the rat park theory, which says that addiction is caused to a significant degree by isolation and disconnection. On the other hand, you've got Gabor's theory, which talks about how it's caused by childhood trauma. But actually, I increasingly came to think of Gabor's theory as like a subset of Bruce's theory, because actually, if you think about a survivor of childhood trauma, one of the things that's true of a huge number of survivors of childhood trauma is you find it much harder to trust the world. You find it much harder to form connections. Of course, you can overcome it if you work hard, but it's harder to, you know, if the world. You find it much harder to form connections. Of course, you can overcome it if you work hard, but it's harder to, you know, if the world has treated you very badly at a very

formative age, it's harder to believe that people are going to treat you well and to trust them. So you're much more likely to be isolated. You're more likely to be socially and emotionally inside yourself, more like those rats in that first cage who were cut off, and less like those rats in Rat Park that are very bonded and connected. So I think that's where the connection between childhood trauma and isolation comes from. If isolation is a massive driver of addiction, childhood trauma means you're much more likely to grow up to be an isolated adult. Yeah, you talk about dislocation and being cut off from meaning are the main hidden cause of addiction, which I think I agree with from my personal experience. at something else. And I came across a study or a series of studies that are being done that say that oxytocin inhibits addiction. And oxytocin is obviously the chemical that our body produces

when we are bonding with people. And I just, those two things kind of hit me at the, I came across those at sort of the same moment, which is sort of another piece of data to sort of support what you're saying there. I think that's really interesting, and I think there's lots of human examples. I just talked about two, or maybe even three. One of my striking human examples actually happened at the same time as Rat Park. It's called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, about 20% of American troops were using a lot of heroin. In Vietnam, about 20% of American troops were using a lot of heroin. And if you look back at the kind of reports and newspaper reports, internal reports from

the time, they're really panicked because they thought, my God, when the war ends, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States because they believe the old theory of addiction. Actually those soldiers from Vietnam were studied. And it's really interesting 95% of them came home and just stopped didn't go to rehab didn't you know that didn't get any help they just stopped if you believe the old theory of addiction that the drug hijacks you and takes you over and makes you a slave that makes

absolutely no sense if you understand Bruce's theory of addiction it makes perfect sense because if you're taken out of a hellish pestilential jungle where you could be killed at any moment and you go back to your nice life in wichita kansas with your friends and your family your job and your meaning well of course you you don't want to stop i mean i was just anyone you know in a way i've got in front of me while we talk i've got a bottle of uh grotesquely overpriced mineral water um you know you forget that you've probably got a drink in front of you if you get the drug laws right you and i perfectly legally we could be both drinking vodka now right we could just we could just be drinking vodka you and i probably

got enough money in the bank that we could drink vodka for the next month and not you know end up on the streets right we're not doing, not because anyone's stopping us, but because we've got things we want to be present for in our lives. We've got, you know, we've got jobs we love and people we love and stuff we want to do and be present for. That really key aspect of addiction is not wanting to be present in your life, not finding your life bearable. And I think another good example of that, you can really see that when these things are changed. So I spent some time in Portugal. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing. And every year they tried the American way more, which is

arrest more people, imprison more people, isolate them, punish them, make them suffer more. And every year the problem got worse. And one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they basically said, look, we can't go on like this. We can't have 1% of our population get addicted to heroin. What are we going to do? And they decided to set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they agreed in advance that what would genuinely solve the problem and they agreed in advance that they would do whatever the panel recommended so the panel goes away studies all the evidence company led by an amazing man called hua gu excuse me but led by an amazing

man called hua gu lao and it comes back and it said decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack everything but and this is the crucial next step, take all the money we used to spend on punishing addicts and spend it instead on reconnecting them with the society. And it's interesting because that's not quite what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So some of it was like rehab and psychological support, and that does have value. But a much bigger part of it was actually something much simpler and more effective. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning.

So what they did was a huge program of job subsidy. Say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. So it's just about incentivizing employers to give jobs to addicts. They also set up a big program of microloans, so addicts could set up small businesses, things like removal firms and things. And it's been, when I went to Portugal, it had been 13, nearly 14 years since that experiment

began. And the results were pretty clear. Injecting drug use is down by 50% in Portugal, 5-0%. Deaths from overdose are massively down. Overall addiction is down. HIV transmission among addicts is massively down. And one of the ways you know it works so well is I went and interviewed a guy called Juan Figueroa, who led the opposition to the decriminalization. He was the top drug cop in Portugal. And he said a lot of the things that a lot of your listeners will totally reasonably be thinking now, which is, surely if you decriminalize all drugs, you'll have all sorts of terrible problems. And he said to me that everything he said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other side said would happen did. And he talked about how he felt ashamed that he'd spent 20 years arresting and harassing drug users. And he now saw that there was a much better way. And I think that really helps us

to understand because it shows that if you change from a policy that cuts people off and disconnects them, and you move towards a policy that helps people to reconnect you go from people getting worse to people getting better and i think that tells us that tells us a lot about the core of addiction i don't think it's enough though and i think one of the other things i learned that really fascinated me was something that bruce alexander who did who as i say created the rat park experiment said to me which is in addiction we talk a lot about individual recovery and that has some value but we need to think much more about social recovery something has gone wrong with us not just as individuals but as a group and we've created a society and a culture

where for a lot of people life looks a whole lot more like that first cage where the rats are isolated and distressed and a lot less like rat park and if we want to look at why we have for example a rising prescription drug crisis in the united states why we have a rising heroin crisis i think you've got to partly look at drug policy but you've got to look way beyond drug policy we've created a society where just lots of people don't want to be present in their lives, including some of the people I love. And I think we have to change our societies in the way we live. We live in a very unnatural way with people being massively cut off from each other, massively stressed. Gabor Marte said to me, you know, encouraged to think that the salute, we are trained from the moment we're born by advertising, by the whole culture we live in, to think the solution to

our problems comes from buying and consuming things. You know, that's the whole mentality of our culture. We are judged constantly on that basis. That's what our economies are built on making us do. And in a way, drug addiction is just a kind of misfiring of the things that we're taught the way we're taught to think about the world and also this kind of empty materialist way we're taught to think about ourselves and we're taught we're trained to seek meaning in things that we all know at some level don't give you any meaning so you've got an expensive car so you've got a big house you know we're taught to you know you've got some stupid designer label we're taught to to we're trained to valorize those things and to think they're where we

everyone knows at some level you're not going to be lying on your deathbed thinking what a great life i had i had an expensive car and I had a Versace suit, right? But we're trained for those meaningless materialist distractions to dominate our consciousness. And I think it's one of the reasons why we're so unhappy. Well, yeah. And either you end up getting those things and you realize it didn't provide what you need, or you don't get those things and you remain convinced that that's where the solution is. And I think that's, you know, part of why I thought, besides my absolute fascination with, you know, addiction and addiction law and all that, why I thought having you on the show made a lot of sense, because you're talking about a theme that comes up on the show a lot when we talk about feeding our good wolf. And it's that connection to other people.

It's a connection to meaning. It's finding things in our lives that are important to us. You know, you think about feeding the bad wolf. I went to Arizona, to Maricopa County, and I went out with a group of women who are addicts, who were made to go out on a chain gang, wearing t-shirts saying I was a drug addict and forced to dig graves and be jeered at by the public. And when I went back to the prison tent city, I said to them, there's this place place called the hole which is the kind of isolation unit that women are put in to be punished for ridiculously minor infractions and i um i asked to be shown the hole i was sure they wouldn't show it to me but the guards were

quite proud they took me and i saw these women in these tiny little stone cells where they're put for months and i suddenly thought this is the closest you could get to a literal recreation of the cage that guaranteed in animal experiments that the person would be an addict and this is what we're doing to make them stop being addicts it's just the madness of it but in terms of the bad wolf the guy who's in charge of that is a sheriff joe arpaio and i went and interviewed him. And I didn't actually put this in the book. I maybe should have done.

But I did describe interviewing him. But, you know, Joe Arpaio, if I remember the details rightly, he's the youngest of seven children. And his parents were very fervent Catholics. And when his mother was pregnant with him, she was told that she had to have an abortion because she would die in childbirth if she carried him. And she insisted on continuing. She did, in fact, die in childbirth. And if you look at the accounts of his childhood, you can see this terrible damage, just like the people Gabor treats. And you could really see in Joe Arpaio, when I spoke to him, this kind of addiction to sadism, because it really is really medieval sadism, what he does. And there was, yeah, I thought when you were reading me

that parable, it was, he was the first person I pictured, you know, there's something about feeding that, that cruelty and cruelty. And I felt sorry for him. I surprise some people when I talk about some of the people I felt sorry for in the book. I also interviewed a hitman for one of the deadliest Mexican drug cartels, a guy who is now in prison in Tyler County in Texas, but butchered or beheaded about 70 people. I felt very sorry for him as well. I've met people in lots of places who have very cauterized humanity, and they're disconnected. They're disconnected from their own humanity, and they're disconnected from their own capacity to connect.

I don't want to sound like a kind of bleeding heart liberal. Clearly, this guy, it's right that this guy's in prison, and he shouldn't be, you know, like, I'm not, don't misunderstand me here. And clearly, I give far more sympathy to the families of the people that he tortured and murdered. But I do think there's an element to which I guess we need to think about helping everyone to connect with their humanity. And we all have moments of our humanity being cauterized and we all have blocks on our compassion and we all have times when we can't connect or won't connect and i think it's a useful it's useful to try to extend your compassion to people who've done terrible things but also it's useful to identify the similarities we all have with sadistic and cruel people as well as

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, my feeling is when we're damaged, that shows up somehow. Maybe some of us tend to be more inclined to damage ourselves as a result of it, and other people seem to be more inclined to go out and damage others, but that pain tends to move on down the road

in one way or the other, if it's not dealt with and healed in some fashion. I think that's exactly right. And there's a good book, a good guy for you to interview if you haven't actually, I read it when it first came out a few years ago, called Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron Cohen, who's a professor at Cambridge University in Britain, who talks about, it's a study of psychopaths basically,

but it basically argues that psychopathy is simply the lack of empathy and i think thinking about how we inculcate empathy is is a really important part of answering addiction i also think it's very relevant to what we're saying is very relevant to a couple of other things one is um if you think about how the idea of addiction has evolved so in some ways when i talk these theories, and I've obviously been kind of all over the country and all over the US and Canada and lots of other places talking about this, at some level, people find it quite shocking, right? Sometimes people think this can't be right. But other times, it kind of fits with an evolution that's been happening in how we think about addiction over the last few years. I'll give you a trivial but I think revealing example there was an episode of cheers i haven't actually been able to track it down but i remember it quite clearly i must have been about 15 when

it was broadcast it's an episode of cheers the premise of which is the um what was the ted dancing sam ted dancing's character sam uh has been thinks he might be a sex addict right and that whole concept is presented as hilarious. And he starts going to meetings of sex and love addicts, anonymous, all of which are simply hilarious, right? Like the whole idea of sex addiction is presented as an inherently comic notion. And if I remember rightly,

the episode ends with a woman talking about actually she's a sex addict and describing this thing and Ted Danson kind of putting his arm around her and saying something like, what are you doing later tonight? Right. And that hilarious denim on to the episode of Cheers. I don't think you would get an episode of a sitcom where the idea of sex addiction in itself would be inherently ridiculous now, because I think there's been a degree to which it's same a gambling addiction. When people first talk about gambling addiction, it's kind of because people thought of gambling as people thought of addiction as something that's kind of chemically caused you know they're actually stopped being you although that precluded the idea

of addictions that were not caused by you know that were not chemical and i went as research for the book i went to a um a meeting of gamblers anonymous in vegas at the problem gambling center obviously i asked permission beforehand i didn't kind of pretend to be a gambler and they said it was fine for me to sit in and it was very striking to me that that meeting of gamblers anonymous was exactly like every meeting of narcotics anonymous i've ever been to right like it was indistinguishable um they were as much addicts as any smack addict i've ever known yep and yet no one thinks you snort a roulette wheel or inject you and you don't inject a crap you don't inject craps right it's um and so i think that tells you something about addiction if you could have

all of the addiction and none of the chemicals that tells us that we have massively overrated the role that chemicals play and massively underrated all these other factors. It's not to say that chemicals play no role. And I think that's important to stress. We actually know how much they play. There's an interesting experiment. Some of your listeners will probably be taking part in it right now. Nicotine patches. There's a very strong scientific consensus that tobacco is one of, by quite a long way one of the most addictive drugs that we chemically compelling drugs that we have access to we know

that because you can test the severity by which people feel withdrawal when they stop using it and they've isolated successfully the the chemical that your body craves when you when you're a tobacco addict it's nicotine? Which is obviously one component of tobacco. And so when nicotine patches were invented in the early 90s, there's this huge wave of optimism because they think, oh, great, a smoker's going to be able to get all of the drug they're addicted to without the filthy carcinogenic smoke. Brilliant, we're going to have a huge advance. And actually, the Surgeon General's report shows that only 17 percent of smokers are able to stop when they use nicotine patches now that's not nothing right that's a significant number

that tells you that 17 if the addiction can be met simply by meeting the 17 of addicts if you meet the chemical compulsion can simply stop that's that's great right no one should belittle that you can reduce 70 percent of smokers you will save a huge number of lives but that leaves us with 83 percent that got to be explained some other way and i think that you know that that has i think another area where we've overestimated the chemical component and underestimate the other factors is with prescription drugs so if you think about the the oxy and Percocet crisis and so on in the US, which is very real, often this is attributed to the kind of demonic power of the drug, right?

They said the drug is just so compelling. Actually, prescription opiates are milder opiates than diamorphine and the heroin that are given out in hospitals which as we saw before when they're given out medically they don't cause addiction so it can't be the case that just chemically these weaker opiates are having that effect what i think is in fact happening and is true when you speak to oxy addicts and you kind of drill down into it is they're in a lot of emotional and psychological pain well why has there been such an increase in oxy and Percocet and so on addictions in the United States since 2008? Can you think of anything that's happened in the United States since 2008 that would have caused that? Well, yeah, you've had a terrible financial crisis.

The middle classes are collapsing. People are much more stressed. They're in much more distress. They can provide for their families much less. Their access to sources of meaning is being cut off. Well, I think that's a much stronger explanation for what's happening and why you're seeing this prescription drug crisis than kind of the demonic drug argument. We all have access to drugs that could obliterate our consciousness around us the whole time.

There's no adult listening to this who can't walk into a liquor store now and buy enough alcohol that would stun them into unconsciousness within a couple of hours, right? That's not the explanation for why you see these pituitary drops. And you see this throughout history. It's very interesting. If you look at periods when there are big spikes in addiction, there are periods when there are big spikes in pain and disorientation. So you think about the 18th century here in London and in Britain, there was a gin craze, right? Where gin was presented as like the crack of its day, this demon drug that was destroying people. Well, what had happened? Huge numbers of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting, repulsive urban slums. They

lost their sources of meaning. They lost their communities. And a huge number of them just didn't want to be present in that. You think about the crack epidemic. What do you have? You have the collapse of the working American working class. You have the closure of so many factories, particularly in African-American neighborhoods. And what do you get? You get the crack epidemic. You think about the meth epidemic in rural America. What do you get? You have a huge destruction of communities in rural America following Reagan's reforms. You have a huge rise in unemployment, huge rises in conglomeration of farms, collapse of small farming. And what happens to those communities? You get a big rise in meth addiction because, again, people don't want to be present

in that environment. So I think it's important to understand how much these social factors are drivers of addiction. And if we really want to deal with addiction, there are things we can do with drug policy, like what Portugal has done. We can spend the money on helping addicts to turn their lives around instead of spending the money on making them worse but I think the overall overall we need a bigger social change I also think it has implications for how the people listening to this who have addicts in their lives might want to think about this you know one of the reasons why I think this debate is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of each of us right the drug war runs through all of us every bit of us has

a drug warrior in our hearts and a compassionate person in our hearts and you know i was always in favor of more compassionate drug policies but if i'm honest particularly when i started on this journey with the addicts in my life and the people I loved, I was really, a lot of the time I was really angry, you know, and there was a part of me that did look at them and think, I wish someone would just stop you. And if we think about the kind of, I guess the fancy way of putting it is the cultural script we're given for how to deal with addicts. I guess the best way of thinking about it would be that tv show intervention where you know what you're told you should do is uh you should you know all the people in it you should get everyone in the addict's life you

gather them you kind of tell them you know they've got to get their act together you tell them that you're gonna they've got to go to rehab which by the way is the model that doesn't work for ways we can talk about um and then you say well if you don't do this we're going to all cut you off you know what you do is you make the addict radically insecure well if you think about that in terms of what we've learned from rat park and all these other stuff we're talking about if isolation and insecurity are drivers of addiction taking an addict and making them more insecure and threatening to cut them off completely that's not going to make them better that's going to make them a whole lot worse and i think that's a really important thing for us

think about that one of the things that really helped me to know with the addicts in my life and it's very hard and i can't do it a lot of the time but what it made me determined to say to the addicts in my life is you know I'll just try and sit with you and I love you and whether you're clean or whether you're not I love you all just the same and I what it made me resolve to do was to strengthen the connections with the addicts in my life, not make them contingent or threatened. Because, you know, that's the lesson of Rat Park. That's the lesson of everything I learned. Insecurity isn't going to help anyone, you know.

Helping them to turn their lives around is going to help them. Yeah, that's such a challenging role to be in when you care about people who are addicts. Because I agree with you 100% on one hand. I think that love and compassion is what addicts need. and being one myself, is that an addict in full-blown addiction is perfectly content to, not content, but is very capable of taking that love and that compassion and misusing it. It's such a challenging problem, but one of the things I liked so much about the book is how you do present this as there's no real easy answer here. These things, these changes are big, whether they're an individual level or a societal level.

And we're nearing the end of time, but one of the things that you said near the end of the book, and I thought it was really beautiful, you said, the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. in an individual or a societal level is is a charlatan but i think there are better and worse ways and i think the thing one thing we can say for sure about the drug war approach is we gave it a fair shot right we gave it a hundred years a trillion dollars an enormous number of human

lives you know just to give you one example the main drug policy officer in the United States, the head of the DEA, Michelle Leonhart, who looks about to resign as we speak, not for this thing I'm about to name, was asked about the 60,000 people who've died in Mexico as a result of the drug war violence, which is entirely caused by the drug war. And she said, these are her exact words, as a sign of success in the war on drugs. That should be a national scandal. And that should be why she's resigning, not because of these trivial things that she's being challenged on. And that's a sign of cauterized humanity. And we shouldn't accept it. You know, we shouldn't accept it. We shouldn't accept this approach. And the one thing I would say to everyone as well is it really can change.

It's already begun to change. Colorado and Washington have taken a huge step in legalizing marijuana and showing how successful that can be. It's been a year. It's working incredibly well. There are other societies, some very conservative societies. I went to Switzerland, a very conservative society where they have legalized heroin for addicts. It's working incredibly well. Very conservative country has voted twice in referenda by 70% to keep heroin legal for addicts because they saw that compassionate approach works incredibly well.

You know, I would say to anyone listening to this, you know, I often think about 1969, right? Stonewall riots, 20 drag queens after 2000 years of gay people being persecuted in the most terrible ways say, you know what? You're not going to treat us like this anymore. And at that point in America, you know, the pro-gay position was to say that gay people aren't evil, they're just sick. Right. That was the pro-gay position. And that was a minority. Right. If you had said to those drag queens that day, 43 years from now, the president of the United States in his second inauguration address is going to name this as one of the greatest moments in American history and is going to pledge himself to gay marriage. And it will get the biggest cheer of the day. And by the way, that president will be black. I mean, it would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction. And yet some of those people lived to see that day,

right? They lived to see it happen. And if there's anyone listening to this who thinks, you know, the way we treat addicts is monstrous, the drug war is a disaster, but what can you do? I would say, think of those 20 drag queens, right? They were about the most despised people you can imagine in America. They started and they won, and they won unbelievably quickly. If you think about the long sweep of history you know and there are enormous numbers of people listening to this whose lives are radically different and unimaginably better because of what those people started and i know we don't have time to talk about it but you know i met a homeless street addict in vancouver who started an uprising in that city that transformed that city's drug policies. I met people all over the world who, you know, I met one of the most militant drug cops in Baltimore

who realized the drug war was a disaster and became one of the bravest fighters against it. I met a transsexual crack, former crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, who led a campaign that shut down the child prison that brutalized him. I met so many people who i you know i met a guy who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years in uruguay by the dictatorship emerged got elected president legalized marijuana the first president to do it jose mojica and lived in a shack while he was president and got the bus to work you know like i met the most incredible people who have joined this fight

and everyone listening to this can join that fight too. And I think we're going to win. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Johan, for coming on the show. Thank you for the book. I enjoyed it a great deal. Thank you. Can I just direct people to the website,

which is chasingthescream.com. They can find out there what other people have said about the book. They can listen to some of the interviews with people. They can listen to all the interviews with people I've talked about. They can find out the organizations they can join in their area

if they want to join the fight against this, this disastrous policy and move towards compassion for addicts. Yep, and we will have links to all that in our show notes at oneyoufeed.net. Thanks so much, Eric. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation and the book. I'm so thrilled. You can always tell in the interviews, the interviews, you have read the

book and the ones you haven't. So I really appreciate you reading the book so closely. I'm really thrilled by it. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Great. Thanks ever so much. Bye. Thanks. Bye. Thanks. Bye. You can learn more about Johan Hari and this podcast at oneufi.net slash Hari. That's H-A-R-I.