In this episode, I'm joined by my good friend and former British resident of the US, Joe Pizzi, who talks about his time in America and the weirdness of growing up in a place like Arizona, Arizona. We talk about racism, racism in America, and what it's like to grow up as a British expat in America. It's a good one, and I hope you enjoy it! This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by our super talented Ameya. We'd like to learn a little more about you to help reach advertisers that you care about. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll get back to you with the results at the end of the episode. Thank you so much for all your support, it means a lot to us and we can't wait to do more of this in the future. Peace, Blessings, Cheers. Cheers, Joe and Joe. xoxo, EJ & EJ - The Cheerios Timestamps: 5:00 - What does it mean to be British in America? 6:30 - American in Arizona? 7:40 - What is it like being British in the USA? 8:00- American in the US? 9: What's it like to be a Brit in the States? 11:15 - How does it feel like being white? 12:00, American in America ? 13: What do you think of the USA and British in general? 15:00 16:30- How do you like it? 17:20 - How did you feel about your accent? 18:15- What is your favourite country? 19:20- What are your favourite food? 21:40- What's your favourite meal? 22:00 + 20:00 Is it a good place to eat in a restaurant? 23:00 | What are you looking for? 25:00 // 22:40 26:30 27: What is the worst thing you can do in a country that's more American? 29:10 30:00 / 32:30 | How do I feel about the American experience?
00:00:15.000We were just saying before we went on camera that I 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.
00:00:25.000I was once in an IHOP in Cactus, Arizona, and I was saying to the woman, right, like, I'll have some pancakes, whatever it was.
00:00:34.000And she kept looking at me going, what?
00:01:06.000My 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.
00:01:19.000Right, because I've written this book about the war on drugs.
00:01:38.000And you see, 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.
00:02:00.000You must have been beat like, Yeah, 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!
00:02:23.000My friend Jamie was over at my house once, and he's, not this friend Jamie, a different friend Jamie, who's British as well.
00:02:30.000And my daughter, who was, at the time, I think she was like 10 or something like that, she goes to my wife, she goes, Mommy, he's so white.
00:04:13.000And I spent half the year here, and 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?
00:04:22.000And those moments of disorientation are really strange.
00:04:38.000Every 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?
00:04:59.000Americans narrativize their lives in a way I absolutely love and as a journalist who writes books about depression and addiction and you want people to talk about their lives, it's an unbelievable gift to you, right?
00:05:11.000I 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 her two miscarriages, how her mother hated her.
00:05:20.000And I thought, if we were Swiss, where my dad's from, you wouldn't tell me this until we got married.
00:06:25.000It wasn't like keeping up with the Kardashians.
00:06:28.000That'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.
00:06:39.000Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way.
00:07:31.000I forget where I read this story, so maybe it's not true, but I remember reading it years ago.
00:07:35.000So we had these terrible subway bombs in 2005. I'm sure you remember four young British men go on to the London Underground.
00:07:42.000Murder, I think it was over 50 people.
00:07:44.000And two weeks later, another group of jihadis tried to do the same thing.
00:07:48.000But 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.
00:07:56.000So there's a loud bang, but it doesn't actually blow everyone up.
00:07:58.000Obviously, people freak the fuck out, as you can imagine, right?
00:08:01.000And I forget, maybe this is a story that someone told that wasn't factually true, but I think it reveals something very...
00:08:09.000Something about our British character.
00:08:11.000So if I remember rightly, three of the bombers escape on the day in a court like a few hours later, and one of them's caught at the time, right?
00:08:18.000And 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.
00:08:26.000And he catches the guy and he throws him to the ground.
00:08:28.000And what he said to him was that the off-duty fire officer says to the attempted suicide bomber, you rude, rude man.
00:08:35.000And what I love about that is the idea that suicide bombing is just bad manners.
00:08:42.000Or even a better example, which is true, it was reported at the time definitely, was during the riots we had in 2011 in London.
00:08:50.000There was one place, I forget where it is, where they broke into a luxury goods store.
00:08:53.000And they could only make, it was a very strong window, so they could only make a hole in the corner of the window.
00:08:58.000And it was caught on the security cameras that the rioters formed a line to go in and loot the store, right?
00:09:04.000That's how deep the idea of, like, queuing and making a line is in British culture.
00:09:08.000Even in a riot, we're like, oh, no, I think you were before me, right?
00:09:13.000I've got a Chilean friend, Isabel Banquet, who lives in London, and she, like, I remember her phony, after she read that, I'd be like, you're fucking English!
00:09:44.000It gives you insight into the fucking...
00:09:46.000Financial desperation of ordinary Americans, right?
00:09:49.000It'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.
00:10:36.000Because that book's about five years old now.
00:10:38.000And although with loads of new stuff now, but...
00:10:41.000You know, it was something I cared about for this really, like, personal reason in that one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.
00:10:49.000I didn't understand why then, because I was a little boy, but as I got older I realised we had drug addiction in my family.
00:10:55.000And it got to the point where I was writing Chasing the Scream, my 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.
00:11:08.000And I was trying to figure out what to do.
00:11:24.000I wanted to sit with, you know, people who'd been through addiction.
00:11:28.000It actually led to a lot of other aspects of the war on drugs, which I think are as important as what we do about addiction.
00:11:33.000And I wanted to sit with places that had the Harshest possible policies, like we mentioned Arizona, where I went out with these women who were made to go out on chain gangs and are humiliated and tormented.
00:11:45.000Vietnam, where they make people with addiction problems go into literally forced labour camps.
00:11:49.000And the places that had the most compassionate possible policies, like Portugal, where they decriminalised all drugs with incredible results.
00:11:55.000Switzerland, where they legalised heroin, incredible results.
00:12:00.000I 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.
00:12:20.000It'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.
00:12:30.000The 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.
00:12:35.000So in some ways it's kind of dawning to go all over the world and realise so much of what we take for granted isn't right but that opens up this whole exciting other set of possibilities.
00:12:45.000The main reason why people assume that people do drugs is to escape reality.
00:12:51.000What do you think is the primary thing that they're running from?
00:12:56.000So you've got to separate out two things.
00:12:57.000And this surprised me because my family's experience was...
00:13:43.000And 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.
00:13:50.000I had misunderstood the thing I thought I had been seeing in front of me since I was a kid, right?
00:13:55.000So most people, let's think about heroin addiction because that was close to me.
00:13:59.000Most people, if we stop the next 20 people to walk past your studio and we said to them, what causes heroin addiction?
00:14:06.000I think they'd look at us like we were stupid and they'd say, well, the clue's in the name, dipshit, right?
00:14:14.000We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense, right?
00:14:19.000We think if 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.
00:14:29.000There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need.
00:14:35.000And we think that, a lot of people think that's what addiction is, right?
00:14:38.000It's this physical hunger for the chemical hook inside the drug, right?
00:14:43.000There is some reality to chemical hooks.
00:14:46.000But that's actually a very small part of what's going on.
00:14:50.000The 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...
00:15:03.000You'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine.
00:15:10.000The 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 not contaminated.
00:15:17.000If 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've been given loads of heroin, right?
00:15:27.000Anyone 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?
00:15:34.000If 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?
00:15:46.000And when I learned that It just seems so weird to me.
00:15:50.000I thought it couldn't possibly be true, right?
00:15:52.000How 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 outside, you've got someone who's using actually a weaker form of the drug who becomes addicted.
00:16:10.000When I went to Vancouver, I 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.
00:16:18.000It's a new way of thinking and loads of new evidence.
00:16:21.000So, 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.
00:17:03.000You're exposed to the drug, it takes you over, and then you just die, right?
00:17:08.000But 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.
00:17:15.000We put these rats alone In an empty cage, they've got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats, right?
00:17:23.000What would happen if we did this differently?
00:17:25.000So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right?
00:17:30.000They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex.
00:17:34.000Anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park.
00:17:37.000And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both.
00:18:11.000The opposite of addiction is connection.
00:18:12.000We have to ask ourselves, what are the contexts in which people become addicted?
00:18:16.000Because there are some contexts where people find these drugs extremely addictive, and there are some contexts where they don't become addicted at all.
00:18:49.000They'd actually, insanely, they had cracked down on cannabis, and so people had moved to heroin because sniffer dogs can't detect heroin as easily as cannabis.
00:19:00.000Loads of American troops were using it.
00:19:02.000And 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.
00:19:11.000So 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.
00:19:18.000There's a really good study that followed these men home.
00:19:22.000And it found that the vast majority of them just stopped.
00:19:26.000They didn't go to rehab, most of them.
00:19:28.000They didn't go into horrific withdrawal.
00:19:30.000Some of them had uncomfortable flu-like symptoms, but most of them just stopped.
00:19:35.000Now, if you believe this old theory that chemical hooks take you over, that makes no sense.
00:19:40.000But if you understand what Professor Alexander is saying and all the new evidence about addiction that I go through in Chasing the Scream, it makes perfect sense, right?
00:19:50.000You, 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,
00:20:33.000But I, you know, like I say, I went to this...
00:20:37.000Nightmare prison, Estrella prison in Phoenix, Arizona, where people are humiliated.
00:20:42.000And 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 give them an incentive to stop, right?
00:20:53.000But once you understand that pain is in fact the fuel of addiction, is in fact the primary cause of addiction, you can see why sometimes people say that doesn't work.
00:21:49.000They're like, yeah, sure, come on, I'll show you.
00:21:50.000So we go around to the hole, and these women who pay for the most trivial infractions, like having a cigarette, it's literally a hole, right?
00:22:07.000And 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?
00:22:19.000And this is what we're doing, thinking it will stop these women being addicted.
00:22:26.000Dr. Gabor Mate, an amazing guy, said to me, you know, if negative consequences stopped addiction, there wouldn't be a single addict in the world, right?
00:22:34.000What have people with addiction problems not suffered?
00:22:36.000What humiliation have they not endured?
00:22:40.000I 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.
00:22:46.000I 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 back and go okay what is exactly going on here?
00:23:06.000Like people that are on sustained, prolonged use of opiates, especially people with back injuries, have an incredibly difficult time kicking them.
00:23:14.000Even really positive people who don't necessarily have awful lives.
00:23:17.000But it's one of those things that gets in your head and then you sort of parrot it.
00:23:33.000For most people, you believe it's an unfulfilled life, or a painful self-image, or Remorse for your past or like, what is it?
00:23:45.000Do we have like primary reasons or primary attributes that we attach to these people that are drug addicted?
00:23:54.000Yeah, so this was what my more recent book, which is called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions is about.
00:24:01.000Because I think the core of addiction is about trying to deal with pain.
00:24:05.000But the causes of human pain are obviously huge.
00:24:09.000But what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of deep despair, right?
00:24:16.000Now, if you think about depression, very similar factors play out with addiction.
00:25:07.000You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.
00:25:10.000You need to feel that people see you and value you.
00:25:12.000You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.
00:25:15.000And 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.
00:25:19.000I had to go to the dentist the other day.
00:25:21.000I'm glad to be alive now, not like 100 years ago.
00:25:23.000But there's a lot of evidence that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs.
00:25:29.000Let's think about, you referred to the opioid crisis for example, because I think even a lot of really good people are profoundly misunderstanding what's happening with the opioid crisis.
00:26:03.000Some 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?
00:26:14.000It's not a coincidence that the places where opioid addiction is highest are also the places where suicide not with opioids is highest, where antidepressant prescriptions are highest.
00:26:25.000These things are clustering together for a reason, right?
00:26:28.000And you don't have to spend much time in those places to see.
00:26:30.000People, through no fault of their own, are like the rats in that first cage, right?
00:26:34.000They have been deprived of the things that make life meaningful.
00:26:37.000This doesn't mean chemical hooks don't play some role.
00:26:40.000But I've been to the places that have solved this, and it wasn't by thinking primarily about that.
00:26:43.000So I'll just talk about the reality of chemical hooks, if that's right, because I think it's very important to understand in relation to opioids.
00:26:49.000So there's a very strong agreement among scientists that the most powerful chemical hook we know is nicotine.
00:27:07.000And so in the late 80s, when nicotine patches were invented...
00:27:12.000There's this huge wave of optimism among scientists because they're like, oh right, cigarette smoking is an addiction to the chemical hook, nicotine.
00:27:19.000Now we can give people all the chemical hook they're addicted to without any of this shitty cancer-causing smoke.
00:27:26.000People are going to stop smoking, right?
00:27:28.000So nicotine patches are introduced and the US Surgeon General's report a couple of years later finds highly motivated people using nicotine patches.
00:28:21.000I go through nine of these factors in the book.
00:28:23.000To me, the most important thing in thinking about the opioid crisis, and 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?
00:28:37.000And they did something that's very different to what Americans are being urged to do.
00:28:42.000So I'm a Swiss citizen, because my dad's from there, so I know Switzerland well.
00:28:45.000And by the time you get to the year 2000, Switzerland is having like an opioid nightmare, right?
00:28:51.000People can look up videos from the time, but, you know, people, like, Swiss people are obsessed with order.
00:28:58.000It's not a coincidence they invented clocks and all that shit, right?
00:29:01.000Like, in their public parks, people, like, injecting in the neck, like, nightmare scenes, right?
00:29:06.000That'd be bad anywhere, but to Swiss people, this is, like, their worst nightmare, right?
00:29:12.000They try the American way, arresting people, punishing people, shaming people, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
00:29:18.000And then one day, they get 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.
00:29:30.000And she explains to people, I think the solution is to legalise heroin.
00:29:35.000And she said, I know that sounds really shocking, because when you hear the word legalisation, what you picture is anarchy and chaos.
00:29:41.000She said, what we have now is anarchy and chaos, right?
00:29:46.000We have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to Unknown drug users, all in the dark, all filled with violence, disease and chaos.
00:29:56.000Legalisation, she explained, is the way we restore order to this madness, right?
00:29:59.000So the way it works is I spent a lot of time in these places.
00:30:03.000Obviously, maybe there's some really hardcore libertarians, but almost no one believes we should legalise heroin the way alcohol or cannabis are legal, right?
00:30:10.000No one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in CVS. That's not the plan, right?
00:30:14.000What I did in Switzerland is if you had a heroin problem, you were assigned to a clinic.
00:30:17.000I spent a lot of time in the one in Geneva.
00:30:20.000The former president, Ruth Dreyfuss, lives opposite this clinic.
00:30:31.000Well, but if you see the clinic, I'll tell you why, right?
00:30:34.000So the way it works is you have to go to the clinic at 7 o'clock in the morning because Swiss people believe in doing things really fucking early.
00:30:41.000It's a constant disagreement between me and my dad.
00:30:49.000You'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 don't overdose.
00:30:57.000You 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?
00:31:09.000So it's really important they give two things.
00:31:11.000It's important to bear in mind these two things because it's the opposite of what we're doing at the moment here.
00:31:14.000Give 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.
00:31:22.000Now when they're giving them the drug, are they injecting it in them?
00:31:24.000Yeah, no, the individual injects it himself or herself.
00:31:26.000So if you were the patient, I'm the nurse, I give you the heroin and I give you a clean syringe.
00:31:32.000And 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 is never any pressure to cut back.
00:31:43.000And yet, I went there when it was 13 years after this had first started, and there was almost nobody on the programme from the start.
00:31:51.000There were like three people who'd been there the whole time.
00:31:53.000Almost everyone does cut back and stop over time.
00:31:56.000And I remember saying to Rita Mangy, who's the chief psychiatrist there, well...
00:32:31.000In the 15 years since this began, according to the best scientific evidence, people like Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen have shown, there have been...
00:32:39.000Zero deaths, overdose deaths, on legal heroin.
00:32:44.000There's been a massive fall in overdose deaths outside the legal program because people transfer in.
00:32:49.000Because why would you carry on using expensive, shitty street drugs when you could be getting, you know, help and giving the drug for free?
00:32:56.000And one thing that's fascinating about this is Swiss people are really conservative, right?
00:33:00.000My Swiss relatives make Donald Trump look like Oprah.
00:33:03.000And yet Swiss people, after this had been in practice for...
00:33:07.000Five years, had a referendum on whether to get rid of it.
00:33:10.000And 70% of Swiss people voted to keep heroin legal.
00:33:13.000Not because they're so compassionate, to be honest.
00:33:39.000But there was an enormous fall in crime across the board, and the police confirmed that.
00:33:43.000Everyone agrees with that in Switzerland.
00:33:45.000And all the kind of anarchy in the streets just stopped, right?
00:33:48.000But the reason I think this is really relevant to the opioid crisis is...
00:33:52.000What we're doing is the exact opposite, right?
00:33:55.000So, 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 that isolated cage and into a life that's more like Rat Park.
00:34:07.000If 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?
00:34:17.000If they don't, they can be busted as a dealer.
00:34:47.000So there's the drug policy part of it, where we're doing exactly the opposite of the country that succeeded in ending its opioid epidemic.
00:34:54.000But there's something I think that's even deeper than that, which you really see in places like West Virginia, Monadnock...
00:35:01.000The 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.
00:35:12.000There's an analogy I keep thinking of.
00:35:14.000In the 18th century in Britain, Loads of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in like London and Manchester.
00:35:25.000And something happened that has been well documented.
00:35:31.000There was something called the gin craze, right?
00:35:32.000Where basically shitloads of people just became alcoholics, drank gin until they died, right?
00:35:37.000There'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.
00:35:58.000We 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?
00:36:06.000And 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.
00:36:15.000It wasn't the availability of the drug.
00:36:16.000The drug is more available now than it was then.
00:36:19.000What changed was the amount of pain and distress in the society, right?
00:36:22.000We don't have a society where people are as profoundly disorientated.
00:36:25.000I mean, it's going up because we're creating more disorientation.
00:36:28.000So if you create a society where people's basic psychological needs are not met, right?
00:36:34.000Where they have a shrinking number of friends and social connections...
00:36:39.000Where 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.
00:36:51.000You're going to create growing pools of people who can't...
00:36:55.000By the way, if you're constantly insecure, financially insecure, half of all Americans through their own haven't been able to set aside $500 for if an emergency comes along.
00:37:04.000So you create this pervasive insecurity in the society.
00:37:07.000You're going to create very large numbers of people...
00:37:10.000Who are going to want to feel a need to anaesthetise themselves.
00:37:51.000Because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself at that point.
00:37:55.000Now, Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin was a good solution to her homelessness.
00:37:59.000But we've got to understand this drug use is happening because it performs a function, right?
00:38:05.000One of the most important things I learned for both my books, for Chasing the Scream and Lost Connection, is that these forms of despair, depression, anxiety, addiction, they are meaningful signals, right?
00:38:17.000The fact that they have been rising year after year after year, in fact 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.
00:38:29.000That is a signal that is telling us something.
00:39:56.000And one of the things that was fascinating is they found it was, and Joanne Sett did good research on, or cites good research on this, she did research for the Open Society Foundation.
00:40:50.000Around the time Switzerland's having its horrific heroin crisis, Portugal is having a fucking nightmare, right?
00:40:55.000By the year 2000, 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is incredible, right?
00:41:01.000And 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.
00:41:09.000And 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?
00:41:16.000And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the drug war began in this country 70 years before.
00:41:22.000They said, should we, like, ask some scientists what the best thing to do would be?
00:41:27.000So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know in Portugal called Dr. Juan Gulao, a totally extraordinary person, and he'd run the first ever drug treatment centre in Portugal, founded after the dictatorship.
00:41:40.000And they said to them, you guys just go away.
00:41:44.000Look at all the evidence and figure out what the hell we can do.
00:41:47.000So they go away for two years, they learn about Rat Park, they learn loads of things, and they come back and they say, okay, the solution is we want to decriminalise 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,
00:42:04.000arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.
00:42:10.000And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment here in the United States, right?
00:42:14.000So they do some residential rehab that has some value.
00:42:18.000Main thing they did was a big program of job creation for people with addiction problems.
00:42:23.000They go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages.
00:42:29.000Again, much cheaper than sending him to prison, right?
00:42:31.000They 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.
00:42:38.000At the time, people are like, this is crazy, they're just going to spend it all on drugs, lunacy, right?
00:42:42.000By the time I went to Portugal, it was, again, 13 years since this had begun, and the results were in.
00:42:59.000Every single indicator on problems related to drug use had fallen like a cliff, right?
00:43:04.000It wasn't perfect, they've still got problems, of course, but there was that massive improvement.
00:43:07.000And one of the reasons you know it works so well is that virtually no one in Portugal wants to go back.
00:43:12.000I went and interviewed a great guy called Joao Figuera, who at the time of the decriminalisation was the top drug cop in the whole country.
00:43:21.000And he said what I'm sure loads of your listeners are thinking, right, at the time, which was like, if we decriminalise all drugs, we're going to have an explosion in drug use, we're going to have loads of kids using drugs, it's a nightmare, we can't do this.
00:43:32.000And when I went to see him, the audio's on the Chasing the Screen website, he said something like...
00:43:38.000Everything I said would happen didn't happen.
00:43:40.000And everything the other side said would happen did.
00:43:42.000And he talks about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalisation screwing people's lives up when he could have been helping them turn their lives around.
00:43:51.000And this is something that I saw all over the world, right?
00:43:54.000The 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...
00:44:03.000They have really terrible and rising problems.
00:44:06.000The places that have policies based on, okay, let's restore order to the market and let's give liberty to drug users and love and compassion and practical help for people with addiction problems, have declining drug problems, right?
00:44:19.000Again, not perfect, but it was such a significant improvement.
00:44:30.000Now, when they did this in Switzerland, what was the primary cause for this drug addiction and how did they deal with that?
00:44:38.000So if they dealt with it in Portugal with these loans and helping out businesses by paying for half the salary and all those things, that seemed like wonderful ideas.
00:44:47.000What did they do in Switzerland to sort of mitigate whatever the issues were that were causing people to be drug addicts in the first place?
00:44:56.000So I remember one of the people I spent some time with in that clinic had been terribly sexually abused.
00:45:02.000There'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.
00:45:10.000There'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.
00:45:18.000Some of it was just there were people who had never been given a chance in life or had never had stable lives.
00:45:26.000And 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.
00:45:37.000You don't arrive and they say, this is your problem.
00:45:39.000We're here to tell you your problem and how to solve your problem.
00:45:42.000It's very much guided by actually the person themselves, right?
00:45:46.000People who are in deep pain, the core of it is you have to listen to them, right?
00:45:50.000If 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, the most important thing is to listen to the signal, right?
00:45:59.000I remember something I thought about a lot.
00:47:05.000I basically lived on fried chicken in my 20s, so I was not new to this rodeo.
00:47:08.000And after about four days, I said to Huang, my fixer and translator, who was arranging, I was there to interview survivors of the Vietnam War for something.
00:47:18.000I'm like, look, I'm only here for another three days or whatever it was.
00:47:21.000I've got to go and meet these people, otherwise this whole trip would have been a waste of time.
00:47:24.000So he drives me like six or seven hours into the countryside.
00:47:27.000And we get there and he's lined up these people for me to interview.
00:47:29.000And I'm like, oh my God, I feel so bad actually.
00:47:32.000I was sitting in this hut with this woman, who's an 86 year old woman who was the only person from her village that survived the Vietnam War.
00:49:16.000Anyway, 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.
00:49:24.000And I said to him, what would have happened if I had gone back to Hanoi, if he'd driven me back to Hanoi?
00:49:28.000And he said, oh, well, what happened is my kidneys had stopped working because I hadn't kept any water in for four days.
00:49:33.000So it was like I had been in the desert for four days.
00:49:35.000And the doctor said, oh, you would have died on the journey.
00:49:39.000So I kept thinking about this experience, which weirdly didn't actually affect my worldview or anything.
00:49:43.000It's the closest I've ever had to a near-death experience.
00:49:45.000But all through researching my book about depression and lost connections, I kept thinking about this thing, right, you need your nausea, it will tell us what's wrong with you.
00:49:53.000And I realised, 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 my depression, their addiction, as a bit like that nausea, right?
00:50:18.000Depression is the worst thing I've ever felt.
00:50:20.000Addiction is a terrible state to be in.
00:50:21.000It's not saying just in some kind of, you know, way, oh, we need to put up with it.
00:50:25.000It's that if we hear the signal, we can begin to find solutions.
00:50:29.000And 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...
00:50:37.000There are places that have said, actually this means something, right?
00:50:42.000You feel these ways for reasons, and we need to get down into 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.
00:50:54.000So did they figure out in Switzerland what was causing this rash of addiction?
00:50:58.000And 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 going to fix the root cause.
00:51:09.000So how did they find out what the root cause was and why was such an epidemic?
00:51:18.000Partly, as you become addicted, you spiral.
00:51:21.000For people who don't have huge private resources, some people do, right?
00:51:26.000As you become addicted, what happens to a lot of people is you spiral into chaotic street use, right?
00:51:31.000So for a lot of women, that means sex work.
00:51:34.000For a lot of men, that means property crime.
00:51:36.000Some men, sex work as well, but mostly not.
00:51:39.000And 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?
00:51:48.000Which causes deeper pain and deeper pain.
00:51:50.000Obviously if you're being fucked by strangers every day and they're treating you badly.
00:51:55.000You're going to want to be even more anaesthetised after that, right?
00:51:57.000Or if you're frightened of the police all the time.
00:52:00.000So 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.
00:52:09.000And that's clearly not the cause, because you don't start out as a street user.
00:53:04.000And 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.
00:53:12.000So where I open Chasing the Scream is with this story that I think a lot of people...
00:53:18.000Think, why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this?
00:53:38.000It's the idea that in the South, the bodies of African-American men hang from the trees and they're like a kind of strange fruit in the South, right?
00:53:45.000This was unbelievably challenging at that time.
00:53:47.000There were very few popular songs like that.
00:53:51.000And to have an African-American woman doing it was quite shocking.
00:53:54.000She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel.
00:53:57.000They made her go through the service elevator because she was African-American.
00:54:01.000And that night, Billie Holiday gets a warning from a man called Harry Anslinger, from the agents of a man called Harry Anslinger, that basically says, stop singing this song, right?
00:54:11.000And you think, well, wait, what's this got to do with the war on drugs?
00:54:13.000So Harry Anslinger is a man, he 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.
00:54:22.000So Harry Anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending.
00:54:29.000So you've had this big war on alcohol.
00:55:42.000Where she was working as a prostitute and Billie 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 So,
00:56:01.000Billie Holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that, right?
00:56:06.000So she starts out using loads of alcohol and then she's using loads of other stuff as well, mostly heroin.
00:56:12.000And when she gets this warning from Harry Anslinger saying, stop singing this song, Billie Holiday's attitude is, fuck you, I'm an American citizen, I'll sing what I fucking please, right?
00:56:25.000And at that point, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her.
00:56:28.000The first man he sent to track her is a man called, follow her around, is a guy called Jimmy Fletcher.
00:56:35.000Harry Anslinger hated employing white people, 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.
00:56:43.000So he employed this African-American guy called Jimmy Fletcher, whose job title was a bag man.
00:56:47.000So he was given the job, follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right?
00:58:27.000So in the hospital, she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer.
00:58:32.000Probably related to her severe alcoholism.
00:58:36.000And in the hospital, she goes into heroin withdrawal.
00:58:41.000So Maylee, 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?
00:58:54.000They handcuff her to the hospital bed.
00:58:56.000I interviewed the last person who was still alive who'd been in that room, a man called Reverend Eugene Callender, who'd been a religious minister.
00:59:42.000It's about shaming addicts and its effect is it makes addicts worse, right?
00:59:45.000You see that with Billie Holiday, you see that everywhere.
00:59:47.000Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right?
00:59:51.000At 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.
00:59:57.000It changes how you watch The Wizard of Oz when you know that.
01:00:00.000And he went to the studio and he advised...
01:00:03.000He said to Judy Garland and to the studio, she should take longer vacations.
01:00:42.000It's 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.
01:01:21.000She never stopped singing that song, right?
01:01:24.000And I think about Billie Holiday a lot, and I think about, you know, All over the world, every day, people listen to Billie Holiday and they feel stronger.
01:01:35.000And all over the world, every day, we are still following the policies of Harry Anslinger, and it makes us weaker.
01:01:41.000And this conflict that begins right at the start of the drug...
01:01:45.000And I think, if I'm honest, I think...
01:01:47.000This 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?
01:01:57.000Anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem, as I do...
01:02:02.000There's a Harry Anslinger in your head, right?
01:02:04.000There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks, someone should just fucking stop you.
01:02:30.000The 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.
01:02:43.000No, it does make sense, and it's a horrific story about Billie Holiday.
01:02:47.000And I had no idea that Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was also addicted.
01:02:52.000And the Munchkins, a lot of them as well.
01:02:55.000Now, Harry, why was Harry Anslinger's hate towards her so extreme?
01:03:01.000So when he was a kid, the book is called Chasing the Screen, because when he was a kid, he grew up in a place called Altoona in Pennsylvania, and he lives in a farmhouse.
01:03:10.000His dad was actually a refugee from, well, refugee in a bit comms, immigrant from Switzerland.
01:03:15.000And they grew up in this farmhouse, and in the next farmhouse down, there was a A farmer's wife who had a heroin addiction.
01:03:37.000Being 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 scream stopping.
01:03:43.000The lesson he took from that is these drugs are evil and we need to destroy them.
01:03:47.000Especially later on, he was in Europe during the First World War.
01:03:54.000He 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.
01:04:08.000Yeah, I call it chasing the screen because I think in a way what Harry Anselm is doing is like chasing this screen all over the world.
01:04:13.000And I felt like what I was doing, going to all these different places from the killing fields in Mexico to Portugal and Switzerland...
01:04:19.000Was like following this scream as it kind of ricocheted around and actually how he thinks he's stopping these screams is actually creating far more screams in their place.
01:04:30.000Yeah, but I still don't understand why he had this intense...
01:04:42.000This is what he did to African-Americans and to people with addiction problems.
01:04:46.000Billie Holiday just happens to be famous, so I'm telling her story.
01:04:49.000But this is what he did to huge numbers of people, right?
01:04:51.000He wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene.
01:04:54.000One of the amazing things, spending time in his...
01:04:57.000Archives in Penn State was seeing all these memos from his agents.
01:05:02.000He said to them, go to your local jazz club, document the evil things that are happening there.
01:05:06.000And the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious, right?
01:05:08.000There's one agent who, I forget where it was, but he wrote back and it's like, there was a popular jazz song at the time called That Ocean Man.
01:05:16.000And had a lyric that said, when he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean.
01:05:21.000And 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.
01:05:32.000He said, you know, he believed that...
01:05:35.000When you smoke cannabis, time slows down, so a minute seems to last a thousand years.
01:05:39.000These extraordinarily heightened, crazy things that he would say.
01:05:43.000At 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?
01:05:52.000There's just not much of a war to fight.
01:05:54.000I mean, they exist, but they're not that popular.
01:05:55.000They're confined to small urban scenes.
01:05:58.000Cannabis was more popular, not as popular as it is now, but...
01:06:01.000And he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful.
01:06:26.000And he starts trying to get support for a ban on cannabis.
01:06:29.000And he latches onto one case in particular.
01:06:32.000And it's important because I think we're hearing these things again now.
01:06:35.000So a kid in Tampa, Florida, called Victor Laikata, who was not so much a kid, 21, killed his entire family with an axe, butchered them all.
01:06:44.000And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst Newspapers, Anslinger announces, this is what will happen if you use cannabis.
01:06:53.000Literally, you will kill your family with an axe, right?
01:06:56.000And this becomes a very famous story across the United States, and cannabis is banned in its wake.
01:07:01.000Years later, someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Lycona.
01:07:04.000There wasn't even evidence he'd ever used cannabis, right?
01:07:07.000He'd had terrible problems with psychosis.
01:07:09.000His family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized, and they refused.
01:08:11.000And Anslinger said to him, I've made up my mind.
01:08:14.000Don't try to confuse me with the facts.
01:08:17.000And I always feel like, That's the drug war, right?
01:08:20.000I made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts.
01:08:23.000Well, he, in conjunction with 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.
01:08:47.000But didn't Nixon do a similar thing with the sweeping Psychedelic Act of 1970?
01:08:53.000He 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.
01:09:01.000They 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 have them inform on each other.
01:10:16.000She has this terrible summer waiting to find out what happened.
01:10:18.000And then they discover that Lisa had been gang raped and murdered.
01:10:23.000Her body was found underneath a house where it had been eaten by animals.
01:10:27.000And Lee became convinced at that time that Lisa had, for various reasons, that Lisa had been killed as part of a gang initiation ceremony.
01:10:35.000She's like, I'm going to destroy these gangs.
01:10:38.000I'm going to dedicate my life to destroying these gangs.
01:10:40.000She goes and applies to become a police officer.
01:10:42.000And for years she's this, you know, hardline cop, right?
01:10:47.000Takes real pleasure in busting people.
01:10:50.000But Lee started to notice a few things.
01:10:53.000First thing was, when you're a cop and you arrest a rapist, there are fewer rapes in your town the next week, right?
01:11:01.000When you are a cop and you bust a pedophile, fewer children get sexually abused.
01:11:05.000But she knows when you bust a dealer, There's no fewer dealers.
01:11:09.000There's someone on the corner the next day for sure, right?
01:11:11.000It didn't seem to be having any effect.
01:11:13.000In fact, what she discovered, what she began to learn about this was that there was something even worse, which was for a funny sort of reason, that she realised that she was actually creating these, empowering these gangs.
01:11:27.000So the best way to explain this is, if you imagine...
01:11:30.000Obviously, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right?
01:11:33.000They're transferred from the people who used to control them, licensed legal businesses, to armed criminal gangs, right?
01:11:39.000And these armed criminal gangs operate in a different way to legal businesses.
01:11:43.000So if you imagine, if you and me decided we want to go and steal now a bottle of vodka, right?
01:11:47.000We go into a local liquor store, and that store catches us.
01:12:13.000Now, if you're a dealer, you don't want to be having a fight every day, right?
01:12:16.000You want to establish a reputation for being so frightening that no one will dare to fuck with you, right?
01:12:21.000So you establish your place in that neighbourhood through aggression, through violence, and you maintain it through aggression and violence, right?
01:12:27.000Legal businesses compete on cost and quality of product.
01:12:31.000In illegal markets, people compete on how much of a frightening fucker you're prepared to be, right?
01:12:37.000As a writer called Charles Bowden put it, The war on drugs creates a war for drugs, right?
01:12:44.000It transfers it to these criminal gangs who have to operate through violence to protect their property rights.
01:12:50.000So Lee goes into the drug war thinking, I'm the one stopping these gangs.
01:12:55.000She realises, shit, I'm the one enabling them, right?
01:12:58.000They control one of the biggest industries in the world because of this police action and because of this decision to prohibit these drugs.
01:13:06.000And if you want to know how much of this violence is caused by...
01:13:11.000By the fact that we prohibited it, just ask yourself, where are the violent alcohol dealers, right?
01:14:00.000She'd had relationships with African-American men.
01:14:03.000But she noticed something that most honest cops notice, which is the vast majority of people, they were sent to African-American areas to enforce the drug laws, right?
01:14:13.000One of her colleagues, Matthew Fogg, once went to his superior officer and said, you know...
01:17:12.000So people must be confronted with this data.
01:17:14.000To this day, people know that the prohibition on alcohol was a massive disaster and no one would ever accept it again.
01:17:20.000We'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.
01:17:30.000So we're starting to see legalization both for recreational use and clearly for medical use is spread.
01:17:42.000There'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.
01:17:51.000Soon we're going to be half of the American population.
01:17:57.000Yes, it is in Canada, as it should be for alcohol.
01:18:00.000But 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?
01:18:11.000I think you've gone to the really important question.
01:18:23.000If you look at who funds the no campaigns whenever they want to legalize marijuana, you can see the interests, right?
01:18:29.000Prison guard unions, alcohol companies, because they don't want a commercial competitor, religious fundamentalist groups like Mormons, not all Mormons fundamentalists, but the groups that funding this are.
01:18:42.000So it's partly that, but I think you're right.
01:18:44.000I don't think that's the main thing that's going on.
01:18:45.000It's significant and real, but I don't think it's the main thing that's going on.
01:18:48.000The main thing, the main block is huge majorities of Americans, more than 80% say the war on drugs has failed and been a disaster.
01:18:57.000And yet most people are afraid of the alternatives, right?
01:19:01.000So I think there's two things going on.
01:19:02.000There's ignorance about what the alternatives actually mean.
01:19:05.000So one of the reasons why Chasing Scream is written as, I went to all these places from the killing fields in northern Mexico to Switzerland...
01:19:13.000It's because way too often in this debate, we talk like we're at a philosophy seminar.
01:19:18.000People go, well, what would legalisation mean?
01:19:36.000Legalisation is not an app, and decriminalisation, I can explain the difference if you want, are not...
01:19:42.000What's the key differences between legalization and decriminalization?
01:19:45.000So decriminalization is where you stop punishing users, but they still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get their drug.
01:19:51.000Legalization is where you open up some legal route for people to get their drugs, and that varies according to the drug, right?
01:19:57.000So 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?
01:20:04.000And of course we need to do both, right?
01:20:05.000We need to decriminalize use and legalize supply.
01:20:08.000Did Mexico decriminalize a lot of drugs, like, fairly recently?
01:20:11.000Yeah, so they had a big Supreme Court decision.
01:20:13.000I spent a lot of time in Mexico, and I... You know, I think about...
01:20:19.000I think about this time I spent in Mexico really often because it was...
01:20:26.000I mean, I've been to a lot of bad places.
01:20:37.000You know, I think it's worth explaining.
01:20:39.000So, when you, like I was saying, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right?
01:20:46.000They're transferred to armed criminal gangs.
01:20:47.000If 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?
01:20:57.000A 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.
01:21:07.000By the time I went there, it was 70%, 70% of the economy was in the hands of these armed criminal gangs, right?
01:21:13.000So, I remember going to see this guy, Rosalio Retta.
01:21:18.000I interviewed people about him in Juarez, but then I went to...
01:21:26.000So 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.
01:23:07.000If you look at the evidence, it's that he sort of volunteered.
01:23:09.000But he's 13, so I don't hold him morally responsible for that.
01:23:14.000Either way, there's one night, it all begins.
01:23:16.000He's taken on the Mexican side of the border to a warehouse where they are torturing people, burning them alive.
01:23:23.000He's given a gun by a guy called Miguel Trevino, 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.
01:23:30.000And when you're in with the Zetas, you never get out, right?
01:24:13.000Eventually, he tries to get back to the US. He cooperates.
01:24:15.000He 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.
01:24:57.000But now it's just, at that time, it was just covered with images of missing women.
01:25:04.000Just everywhere, because this is another really important part of what this violence does, and I think it's really important we understand.
01:25:11.000This is the violence caused by the system that we uphold and we imposed on Mexico.
01:25:18.000Of 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.
01:25:25.000There's a woman in Juarez, when the drug war violence starts to go through, called Maricela Escobedo.
01:25:31.000She was a nurse, but Maricela was incredibly hard-working, so she also would do these, what do you call them, like wood carvings, basically, and she would sell them in the market on Saturdays and Sundays.
01:25:53.000And one day a guy comes up to Maricela at her store called Sergio, who was a young guy, he was like 21, and he's like, he's just had a baby, he needs a job.
01:26:03.000Maricela was kind of soft-hearted, she gives him a job working on her market store.
01:26:08.000And a few months later, she discovers to her horror that he's having sex with her 14-year-old daughter, Ruby, and she, like, fires him immediately and goes to the police and says, you need to go and question him, right?
01:26:48.000By this time, she's kind of accepted the police with real rage that the police aren't going to do anything.
01:26:53.000And one day, just after the baby was born, she goes to see Ruby, and Sergio's there with the baby, and he says, oh, Ruby's run away with another man.
01:27:27.000And after a few days, she gets a call from a kid called Angel who says, I'm really frightened to tell you something.
01:27:32.000If you drive me out into the desert, I'll tell you.
01:27:34.000So she drives Angel out into the desert.
01:27:36.000I think he was 14. And he says, Sergio murdered your daughter and he made me help him dispose of the body.
01:27:44.000And he told Maricela where the body was.
01:27:46.000It was actually a place where they dumped pig carcasses from the abattoirs.
01:27:50.000She goes and she finds the body with her son.
01:27:54.000And she goes to the police and the police finally do something and they arrest Sergio.
01:27:58.000Sergio's put on trial in the witness box.
01:28:01.000He breaks down, admits he did it and apologises to Maricela.
01:28:05.000And then a few weeks later, he's acquitted of all charges and disappears.
01:28:10.000And Maricela's like, what the fuck is going on here?
01:28:13.000So she starts to look into this and she discovers, and this is where it intersects with the drug war in a really important way, that Sergio was a member of the Zetas, right?
01:28:22.000Now, 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?
01:28:31.000If they control 70% of the economy, you have more money than the government, right?
01:28:36.000So the police worked for them when I went to go interview Rosalio.
01:28:38.000He said, when I would go murder people, the police would come with me.
01:28:41.000They would dispose of the body, right?
01:29:18.000By that time, the killings were basically all being done by the police.
01:29:21.000And I was saying, you know, Julian, 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.
01:29:29.000And he just laughed and said, no, that's not how it works, Johan.
01:29:31.000Now, if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay the police to do it, right?
01:29:35.000So it's this real realisation, alright, if someone comes to you, there is nowhere for you to go, right?
01:29:40.000So, Maricela refuses to accept that she lives in a country where there is no justice.
01:29:45.000She decides, okay, they're not going to solve this, I'm going to solve this.
01:29:49.000She appealed, loads of women are missing because it turns out if...
01:29:53.000A bunch of criminals control the state.
01:29:54.000They will just murder loads of women and get away with it, right?
01:29:56.000There are some men who just want to murder women and if they give them license to do it, they'll do it.
01:30:00.000That's why so many women were missing.
01:30:02.000Maricela gathers a load of those mothers.
01:30:03.000She says some of them don't know where their daughters are.
01:30:05.000Some of them know their daughters are dead.
01:31:39.000When I think about the drug war and what it does, the first person I think of after Billie Holiday is Maricela Escobedo, right?
01:31:46.000We have created an enormous amount of violence that has nothing to do with the drug, right?
01:31:52.000Often people will 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?
01:32:00.000There'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 3% of what's called drug-related violence is someone using drugs and losing their shit.
01:33:52.000Well, as taxpayers, we're responsible for it, right?
01:33:54.000I mean, you and I do not support it, but as a society, we've done that, and those of us who oppose it haven't done a good enough job of persuading everyone else.
01:34:05.000And it goes back to your question, why does it persist, right?
01:35:05.000There were people, Jeff Sessions, when he was the AG, wanted to do that.
01:35:09.000It'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 to spite Jeff Sessions.
01:35:19.000So, and the The federal banking laws actually mean that, you know, cannabis stores are operating in this weird gray area.
01:35:32.000So I think there are lots of people who are pushing this.
01:35:35.000There are amazing groups that urge everyone to join and support the Drug Policy Alliance.
01:35:38.000What I'm saying is, why are no politicians ever discussing this?
01:35:42.000This is never an option, because those are the only ones that are going to really change policy.
01:35:45.000So we're seeing a big change in public opinion that is changing on many issues.
01:35:49.000So think about when Bill Clinton stopped being president, which is, you know, we remember this not that long ago, 16% of Americans supported legalizing cannabis.
01:35:58.000Today, 70% of Americans support legalizing cannabis.
01:36:03.000Extraordinary transformation in a very short period of time, right?
01:36:06.000Likely brought on by the fact that the medical use of it was prohibited up until then.
01:36:11.000I mean, it was like 1994, right, when it was passed?
01:36:14.000And then California started doing it and you started having Positive tax revenues from it.
01:36:20.000You started seeing people that were suffering from a lot of ailments, showing that they were helped substantially by cannabis.
01:36:27.000And then the attitude of it changed in popular culture.
01:36:29.000It changed, I mean, what's so crazy is that that 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.
01:36:43.000There's still people alive today to believe some of that.
01:36:47.000I think there's a series of things going on.
01:36:49.000Partly what happened, one of the major factors that make it possible for the drug war to continue is the dehumanisation of people at every turn, right?
01:37:03.000Dehumanisation of drug users, and we should talk about use as opposed to addiction, but...
01:37:09.000Dehumanisation of drug users, dehumanisation of people with addiction problems, dehumanisation of drug dealers.
01:37:14.000There's a reason why one of the most sympathetic people in my book is a transgender crack dealer called Chino Hardin, who's an amazing human being.
01:37:21.000Dehumanisation of people on the supply route countries.
01:37:23.000You're hearing the way people are talking about Mexicans now, powerful people in this society.
01:37:27.000And one of the reasons why Chasing the Scream is written as stories of people...
01:37:34.000It's because the solution to dehumanisation is to rehumanisation.
01:37:36.000When I was meeting these people all over the world, I kept thinking...
01:37:43.000If any ordinary American could meet Chino Hardin, my friend, the transgender crack dealer who is hilarious and amazing, if they could meet Bud Osborne, the homeless street addict who started a movement in Canada, if they could meet Maricela, they would not say that the deaths of these people mean nothing,
01:38:24.000Well, they think of people as being weak.
01:38:26.000They think of people as having poor willpower, poor character, and that's why they're addicted.
01:38:32.000Most people, I would say it's safe to venture, aren't really fully aware of what the underlying causes of people becoming addicted to drugs in the first place are, and what leads people to this great sense of despair.
01:38:46.000I mean, it's really about re-engineering our entire culture.
01:38:49.000I mean, re-engineering not just the way we treat addiction, but the way we treat human beings, the way we treat poor neighbourhoods.
01:38:55.000I mean, there's so much that needs to be done that's never addressed.
01:39:02.000And there's one part of this that's a funny...
01:39:07.000One thing that surprises me in this debate, I have found it is actually easier in the US 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?
01:39:20.000So like we were saying, even the main drug war body in the world, the UNODC, the UN Office of Drug Control, admits 90% of all currently banned drug uses, what's called non-problematic, right?
01:39:30.000Our friend, Professor Carl Hart, the head of psychology at Columbia University and an extraordinary human being, has done really important work explaining this to people.
01:39:38.000Even 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?
01:40:48.000Yeah, elephants like, 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?
01:40:55.000There's a great example he gave, if you give hash to mice, what they do is they'll, 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.
01:41:11.000Professor Siegel, I remember he told me at one point that he'd spent three years investigating 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?
01:41:27.000And I said, oh right, and at the end of your three years, what did you discover?
01:41:30.000And he said, turns out they just jumped the same height as everyone, all the other grasshoppers.
01:41:33.000I was like, that wasn't a great use of your three years of life.
01:41:36.000But he also got, he had an interesting time when he was in Hawaii, he was investigating mongoose, whether mongooses like hallucinogens, psychedelics.
01:41:44.000And so he's like spying on these mongooses with binoculars.
01:41:49.000And he gets caught by a load of drug traffickers.
01:41:54.000And they're like, who the fuck are you?
01:41:56.000I'm just investigating whether mongoose is like psychedelic.
01:41:58.000He's like, that is the worst fucking cover story we've ever heard.
01:42:01.000They've held him hostage for like two days.
01:42:03.000But what he showed is something I think is really important and there's loads of other evidence for, which is...
01:42:09.000It is absolutely innate to other species, especially to humans, the desire to get intoxicated, right?
01:42:16.000There has never been a human society anywhere in the world where people didn't seek out intoxicants and enjoy using them.
01:42:21.000The only society where there were no naturally occurring intoxicants was the Inuit, what used to be called the Eskimos in the Arctic, and they used to just starve themselves.
01:42:31.000To get a fucked up head state, because that's how deep it is in human beings.
01:42:34.000If there is nothing in the environment...
01:42:57.000You know when everyone will have this memory of when you're a little kid and you realize you can spin round and round and round?
01:43:02.000Even though you know it will make you sick, you do it because you get an altered head space.
01:43:06.000That is one of the first expressions of the kind of intoxication impulse.
01:43:11.000A 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 a place called the Temple of Eleusis.
01:43:54.000At 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?
01:44:13.000Oscar 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.
01:44:23.000And there's this puritanical hatred of drug use, right?
01:44:28.000Now, some of that is understandable fears about genuine harms, and that's a different thing.
01:44:34.000But a lot of it is just very deep Puritanism.
01:45:37.000Well, everyone knows people who drink alcohol, right?
01:45:39.000And one of the reasons things changed on cannabis is because more people came out and talked about it.
01:45:43.000And so you have this situation where you've got Harry Anslinger saying if you use cannabis you'll kill your family with an axe.
01:45:51.000By 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 chopping his family to death with an axe right?
01:46:01.000And I think one of the things we have to do is encourage people to talk.
01:46:04.000One of the weird things is that prohibition Creates a distorted picture of overall drug use, right?
01:46:11.000Because 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.
01:46:21.000You'd be pretty foolish if you put on Facebook, oh, Saturday night I went out and had five lines of coke and had a great night, right?
01:46:58.000So in 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.
01:47:05.000You've got to ban drugs and have a vicious war on drugs, right?
01:47:08.000And the Mexican government are like, no.
01:47:11.000We can see the policies don't work for you.
01:47:44.000So all opiates for pain relief used in hospitals were manufactured in the Americas and the United States at that time.
01:47:50.000They cut off the supply of all of them.
01:47:52.000People start dying in hospitals all over Mexico in agony.
01:47:56.000And the Mexicans give in, they fire this guy, and they begin the drug war.
01:48:00.000And the whole journey that leads to Rosario Reto, the guy I know from the Zetas, and Maricela's death, that trajectory begins at that point.
01:48:06.000And this is something we haven't explained that I think is so important, right?
01:48:09.000Actually, it really surprised me learning about the history of all this stuff.
01:48:13.000At the birth of the drug war, it was intensely resisted, right?
01:48:19.000In Los Angeles, there was a doctor called Henry Smith Williams.
01:48:22.000When 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?
01:48:32.000So here in LA, big heroin clinic prescribed.
01:49:06.000So this is resisted intensely at the birth of the drug war.
01:49:09.000So 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?
01:49:18.000It's not that people thought all drug use is good.
01:49:20.000We should celebrate every instance of drug use.
01:49:29.000There 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.
01:49:38.000And most societies, until very recently, had a mature appreciation of this, right?
01:50:04.000We are the historical outliers, right?
01:50:07.000I mean, to give you a sense, just the United States imprisons two million people.
01:50:12.000There has never been a society that imprisons this many of its citizens, this higher proportion of its citizens anywhere ever.
01:50:19.000It's overwhelmingly driven by the drug war, right?
01:50:21.000I mean, the US 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.
01:50:31.000That's how extreme this war is, right?
01:50:35.000And what we do to people, the conditions this war creates, it's...
01:50:49.000And the one thing you can say in defence of the drug war, and I would give one bit of credit for this, is we gave it a fair shot, right?
01:50:56.000The United States has done it for 100 years.
01:50:59.000This country has spent a trillion dollars on it.
01:51:02.000We've imprisoned Millions of our own citizens.
01:51:05.000We've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate.
01:51:09.000We've destroyed whole countries like Colombia.
01:51:11.000Isn't the problem now that there's a gigantic business behind it all?
01:51:14.000From 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.
01:51:26.000I mean, down the line, you'd be disrupting like an evil industry, but an industry.
01:51:33.000I think that's a real factor, but I don't want to overstate it.
01:51:36.000Lots of policies have vested interests.
01:52:11.000It's a place, particularly at that time, that had a really high, like, nightmarish open drug scene, right?
01:52:16.000Just, again, people in Switzerland, people injecting in the streets, that kind of thing.
01:52:20.000And Bud was living homeless, and he was watching his friends die all around him.
01:52:25.000At 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 and no one sees you, you just die, right?
01:52:39.000And 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 all my friends to die and then for me to die.
01:52:49.000But as Bud would have put it then, he also thought, I'm a homeless junkie, what the fuck am I going to do?
01:52:56.000He gathered together a group of the other homeless street addicts and he said, 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?
01:53:12.000And if we see someone overdosing, we'll ring an ambulance.
01:53:13.000No officials, nothing like that, just us.
01:53:16.000And loads of people had descended on the downtown east side to come up with problems to solve everything.
01:53:20.000And people were very sceptical, but they liked Bud.
01:53:27.000And over the next three months, the death toll on the downtown east side had a significant fall.
01:53:34.000And 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?
01:53:45.000He 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.
01:53:58.000Nothing like this had happened in the United States since Anslinger shut it all down, but Bud's like...
01:54:18.000Rich guy from a privileged family, didn't know anything about addicts.
01:54:21.000He'd run for office saying all the local drug addicts should be taken and detained in the local military base in Chilliwack and never let out.
01:54:29.000Gives you a sense of where he's coming from, right?
01:54:31.000People are not optimistic about persuading him.
01:54:34.000Vandu, Bud, his friends, they decide everywhere Philip Owen goes, they're going to follow him with a coffin.
01:54:42.000And the coffin had written on it, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injection site?
01:54:49.000Every 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?
01:55:00.000One day, Dean Wilson, one of the main people in Van Du, stood up and said, do you remember Julia, who asked you recently who would die next?
01:55:06.000It turned out to be her because you haven't done it.
01:55:12.000They 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.
01:55:20.000And they wrote the names of the people on the crosses.
01:55:24.000And one day, after this had been going on for years, eternally to his credit, Philip Owen just said, who the fuck are these people?
01:55:40.000He came here to the United States to meet Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who'd grown up under alcohol prohibition.
01:55:48.000And Milton Friedman explains drug prohibition to Philip Owen.
01:55:52.000Philip Owen 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...
01:56:01.000I'm not going to speak again without having the addicts here with me about addiction because they understand it better than me.
01:56:06.000We're going to open the first safe injection site in North America.
01:56:09.000We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America.
01:56:13.000Things are going to change around here.
01:56:17.000Philip 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?
01:56:27.000In the 10 years that followed, overdose deaths on the downtown east side fell by 80%, 80%, right?
01:56:34.000Average life expectancy in that neighbourhood rose by 10 years.
01:56:38.000You just don't get figures like that very often.
01:56:40.000And I remember, the reason I say it in relation to change, is, you know, a big part of what I argue in Chasing the Scream and in my other book, Lost Connections, is, you know, we...
01:57:01.000You don't know who can be persuaded by a message of love and compassion.
01:57:04.000And 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?
01:57:13.000And I thought a lot about Philip Owen when I went to go and see Philip Owen on the downtown east side.
01:57:18.000And he said to me he would sacrifice his entire political career All over again, given the chance for this cause.
01:57:24.000He said, how often do you get to save thousands of lives of the most vulnerable people?
01:57:28.000And after I got to know Bud Osborne, the guy who started this movement, He died.
01:57:35.000And I remember, you know, he was only in his early 60s, but he'd been a homeless addict during a drug war.
01:57:42.000And they sealed off the streets of the downtown east side where Bud had lived as a homeless person.
01:57:47.000And they had this incredible memorial ceremony.
01:57:49.000And 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 had opened their hearts, right?
01:58:35.000He 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, and the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that people with addiction problems have a right to live, and that includes a safe place to use their drugs.
01:58:51.000That will never be taken away now, right?
01:58:53.000That started because, you know, when you have nothing else, you have a voice.
01:58:59.000You have a human voice that you can use to persuade other people with love and compassion.
01:59:07.000You 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?
01:59:13.000I mean, more people died last year in the opioid crisis than all the soldiers who died in the Vietnam War combined.
01:59:20.000In the middle of this catastrophe, We can carry on doing what we've been doing.
02:00:06.000There are plenty of places that have tried the alternatives, and people who are quite sceptical, which is one of the things that was most striking to me in all those places, is that people who were initially sceptical And initially thought it was crazy, very often changed their minds.
02:01:12.000There's some reality to the dangers of cannabis use of some people that are susceptible to schizophrenia.
02:01:20.000And 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.
02:02:47.000Yeah, I think everything you just said is absolutely right.
02:02:50.000I think there's another layer that's going on at the same time, kind of below that, which is really important for people to understand.
02:02:56.000So there's this thing – so very often people will say – you get kind of Republican politicians like Karamo Carly-Fenerino saying it during one of the Republican debates in 2016, 2015 maybe.
02:03:07.000We can't legalise cannabis because it's much stronger now than it used to be.
02:03:11.000THC content has gone up, people are smoking skunk.
02:03:13.000It's really important to understand why that happened.
02:03:38.000It's because of a kind of slightly wonky and boring thing, but I think it's worth talking about.
02:03:42.000It's called the Iron Law of Prohibition.
02:03:44.000If 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 Mexican border, right, from Tijuana, In a wagon, we fill our wagon with beer, we're going to get a drink for 100 people.
02:03:59.000If we fill it with vodka, we're going to get a drink for thousands of people, right?
02:04:02.000So, 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?
02:04:10.000This is why mild forms of the drug disappear.
02:04:13.000Before opiates were banned in the United States, the most popular way of consuming it was something called Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which you would buy in the pharmacy, right?
02:04:29.000When the ban happens, heroin becomes the only form of opiates, powder cocaine becomes the only form of cocaine.
02:04:34.000In 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?
02:04:45.000I think it's important to understand, it is not good.
02:04:49.000Most people who drink alcohol don't want to drink vodka, and they certainly don't want to drink absinthe most of the time, right?
02:04:55.000Most people want a mild form of their drug.
02:05:08.000It's definitely not true in California.
02:05:10.000In 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.
02:05:22.000It was a direct result of people having higher tolerances because marijuana was so readily available.
02:05:27.000If you have a high tolerance and you smoke a lot of pot, you want strong pot because weak pot doesn't do anything.
02:05:34.000It's the number one complaint amongst cannabis enthusiasts is someone having weak pot.
02:05:39.000So you've got a subculture of people who are cannabis enthusiasts.
02:06:02.000Because 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?
02:06:11.000What you have is what we'll discover, I think, as time goes by, because we know it's with alcohol, is different people want cannabis to do different things.
02:06:41.000But I would say they're more like the people in Vegas who are professional gamblers versus the people who go to Vegas for the weekend and just want to play a roulette wheel.
02:06:49.000There's definitely a concentrated market of very dedicated users who want to get maximally fucked up.
02:07:26.000So, one of the things he argues, and I'm happy to be corrected on the specific number, but one of the things he argues...
02:07:33.000So you've got, because you were talking about schizophrenia and psychosis, I think it's important for people to understand, there is some evidence that very high exposure to THC in a small number of people can lead to psychosis, right?
02:07:46.000And even a small number of people where you have a very widely used drug, that's really problematic, right?
02:07:50.000But actually, this is really interesting evidence.
02:07:54.000Why do people who are prone to psychosis and schizophrenia want cannabis, right?
02:07:59.000Because there is a lot of them who want it.
02:08:05.000So THC correlates with psychosis in some people.
02:08:11.000But there's another component of cannabis called CBD... Cannabidiol, which actually we know there's good evidence, soothes psychosis in schizophrenia, right?
02:08:20.000It's actually given as a treatment in some places in distilled pill form.
02:08:24.000So actually it's a slightly more complex picture than cannabis causes psychosis, right?
02:08:29.000Very rich THC in some people will cause psychosis.
02:08:33.000There 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.
02:08:45.000But also, what Professor Nutt has been arguing is we need to be...
02:08:49.000And they exist, but they need to be commercialised and promoted more...
02:08:53.000Or promoted in a public health way, not necessarily commercially.
02:08:58.000CBD-rich cannabis will actually be helpful to people with psychosis and schizophrenia.
02:09:02.000So it's a slightly more complicated pitch.
02:09:14.000I know you're not endorsing the kind of simplistic view on either side, but I think it's slightly more complicated than that.
02:09:22.000The other thing I think is really worth saying, though, to people is there's one thing we all do agree on, which is cannabis is bad for young teenagers, right?
02:10:10.000So the kid walks over to the drug dealer and buys some drugs from him instead.
02:10:14.000And Fred has this kind of realisation, which is, oh, he wouldn't put it this way, but legalisation puts a regulatory barrier between kids and drugs that doesn't currently exist, right?
02:10:23.000This is why, since they legalised cannabis in Colorado, there's been a, don't want to overstate it, it's not huge, but there's been a significant fall in teenage cannabis use, right?
02:10:35.000They really care if they're, because they've got something to lose, right?
02:10:39.000So I think sometimes it's used as the kind of protect our kids argument is used as a case for prohibition.
02:10:44.000In 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.
02:10:55.000Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to argue that.
02:11:01.000I 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.
02:11:15.000And so the argument against this idea that cannabis causes schizophrenic breaks is that these people already have schizophrenia.
02:11:21.000And it just hasn't really manifested itself in a tangible sense.
02:11:25.000So this is one of the things Professor Nutt says.
02:11:27.000There is some evidence that cannabis in a small number of people causes psychosis.
02:11:32.000There's a study in Sweden that showed this.
02:11:34.000With schizophrenia, it's much more contested.
02:11:36.000So psychosis versus schizophrenia, what is the major distinction?
02:11:41.000I've not researched this in depth, but psychosis involves...
02:11:50.000Schizophrenia is a subset of mental illness that's very specific, has a significant genetic component, although there can be environmental triggers for it.
02:12:05.000I want to stress it's a very small number of people, but it is real.
02:12:09.000And there are things we can do in a legal market to counteract that that are much harder to do in a prohibited market.
02:12:14.000But 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...
02:12:19.000I don't say this with the same degree of confidence I've been saying the other stuff, but Professor Nutt 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.
02:12:35.000If 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.
02:12:44.000So again, that's what Professor Nart, who's the former Chief Scientific Advisor on Drugs in Britain, says.
02:12:49.000I 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.
02:12:57.000Do they know what the mechanism would be that would cause someone to consume THC and have a psychotic break?
02:13:06.000That would seem to be a big issue, right?
02:13:08.000Like, 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.
02:13:19.000Well, we know with all mental health, all aspects of mental health, All mental health problems.
02:13:26.000There are three kinds of cause, right?
02:13:29.000There's my book Lost Connections, which is about depression and anxiety, there's a lot about this.
02:13:33.000There are biological causes, things like your genes, real brain changes, things like the introduction of a drug.
02:13:39.000There are psychological causes, which are 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.
02:13:49.000And in all mental health phenomena, to some degree, these three sets of causes play out.
02:13:55.000So let's think about even something very...
02:13:58.000Dementia has a very, obviously, has a heavy biological driver, right?
02:14:02.000Dementia is a physical degeneration of the brain or a disease like Alzheimer's.
02:14:07.000But even with dementia, which has this very heavy biological driver, We know there are big social and psychological effects that can mitigate it.
02:14:14.000So 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?
02:14:25.000So 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.
02:14:34.000I haven't looked into it in great detail, but I interviewed her.
02:14:38.000So we know recovery from psychosis and schizophrenia is much stronger in African countries than it is in the United States, right?
02:14:46.000And 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.
02:14:53.000And again, it's a while since I spoke to her, and I don't want to overstate my confidence about this, but 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,
02:15:38.000Lonely 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 are way more likely to actually get them than non-lonely people.
02:18:03.000Whether it's addiction and other things...
02:18:05.000And 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.
02:18:13.000And as I got older, that was really my way of being in the world, right, to work all the time.
02:18:20.000And I think when I got into my, like, late 20s, I can't remember, I wrote an article about Modafinil, so I could figure out when I started taking it, but the Because I initially wrote a very positive article about it.
02:18:32.000I was at that point where the obsessive and compulsive work wasn't working for me, right?
02:22:29.000But again, thinking about that in relation to addiction, I think often when you talk about something like work addiction, 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.
02:22:46.000It relates back to what we were saying right at the start about chemical hooks, right?
02:22:49.000So if you look at the debate about non-drug-based addictions, right?
02:22:54.000You think about 20 years ago, people started talking about sex addiction, a guy called Stanton Peel, who I interviewed a lot, first writes about love addiction, all sorts of...
02:23:20.000Ted Dunstan's character thinks he's a sex addict, and this is like a punchline all the way through the show, right?
02:23:25.000This is the attitude that ends with he goes through a meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and there's some woman talking about how she has sex with every man, and it ends with him just putting his arm around her, and that's the end of the show, right?
02:23:49.000But then I think that's because there hasn't been a shift in gambling.
02:23:54.000If you go to a meeting at Gamblers Anonymous, as I have with a friend, 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.
02:24:43.000There'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.
02:24:54.000And they're always trying to chase the dragon.
02:24:56.000They're always trying to make up for all the past things they've gone wrong.
02:25:18.000That human beings have an innate need to bond and connect, right?
02:25:22.000And when you're happy and healthy, you'll bond and connect with, like, the people around you with meaningful work.
02:25:28.000But 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?
02:25:39.000Now for some people that might be porn, for some people that might be gambling, for some people it might be cocaine, alcohol, whatever.
02:25:45.000But he says if you only have one bond that's giving you any relief, you will obsessively return to that bond, right?
02:25:52.000And I don't think that's a total, as he would say, that's not a total explanation for what's going on.
02:25:57.000But I do think that is a useful way to think about some of these behavioural addictions, right?
02:26:01.000So I, someone I know very well, a relative of mine has a gambling addiction, and this is someone who has...
02:26:09.000There's no alternative form of joy or pleasure in their life, right?
02:26:14.000And gambling gives a moment, well, lots of moments.
02:26:21.000Especially if you look at someone who's playing online poker, as I've done with my relative, they're not happy.
02:26:26.000It's not looking at someone watching a nice movie, right?
02:26:29.000It's, you can see, I don't mean, sorry, someone with an addiction problem playing online poker.
02:26:34.000Some people have, most people don't have a problem.
02:27:05.000And I remember going there, it was really interesting to think about this.
02:27:10.000I remember arriving, it's a clearing in the woods, a big wooden place in the clearing of the woods.
02:27:15.000And I remember absolutely instinctively looking at my phone and feeling really, when the minute I got out of the car, I'm feeling really pissed off that I couldn't check my email.
02:27:22.000I was like, oh wait, you're in the right place, right?
02:27:24.000And 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.
02:27:31.000Like, then it would have been World of Warcraft, now it would be Fortnite.
02:27:36.000And speaking to these young men, I remember having this realisation talking to the woman who runs it, this amazing woman called Dr Hilary 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,
02:27:54.000because they're getting something out of it, right?
02:27:56.000And she argues that one of the things they're getting is the things they used to get from the culture, but no longer get.
02:28:04.000Well, 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.
02:28:11.000You know, kids spend very little time outdoors now, right?
02:30:00.000It means I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed not doing it.
02:30:03.000The difference between a lot of video game addictions, and particularly gambling addictions, is that they tend to wreck people's lives.
02:30:11.000You know when you had this period of jiu-jitsu addiction, did you, did you, because I think 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?
02:30:23.000It's really fun, you know, so you're chasing the thrill.
02:30:26.000I mean, I'm certain I was avoiding pain with almost everything I've done in my life, in some way, shape, or form.
02:30:32.000You know, there's some of it where you're trying to do something positive to mitigate the pain.
02:30:36.000Or the frustration or the anger or whatever it is that's bothering you.
02:30:41.000The video game thing was a real addiction, though.
02:31:08.000And so the only way to do it was to stop playing it all together.
02:31:11.000And we started playing it again recently after more than shit, more than 15 years of ever playing it at all.
02:31:17.000You know, and it's still addictive, but I'm so busy now, I can't really fall into the grip of it.
02:31:23.000I'm actually just enjoying it for an hour here or there.
02:31:25.000But that's so interesting in itself, isn't it?
02:31:27.000That's a bit like the rap part principle, it feels to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that like...
02:31:32.000The 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?
02:31:44.000And I think that is a principle that's true.
02:31:47.000This was the principle behind the Portuguese drug decriminalisation, right?
02:31:50.000If we give people good lives, they will not want to anaesthetise themselves so much.
02:32:02.000The happier I am, the less I want to turn to, you know, the behaviours that I developed as a child to avoid being present with, like, violence and aggression.
02:32:14.000Like, I don't think of, like, writing as an addiction.
02:33:03.000And again, I think it really helps us because partly what I'm arguing in Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream is we need to deeply reconceptualise how we think about these forms of pain like depression and addiction.
02:33:14.000And this isn't some wacky view, this is the view of the World Health Organisation, these leading medical bodies when it comes to depression.
02:33:56.000But you know, Adderall opens up a whole other thing, right?
02:33:59.000Which is, there's what you're talking about again, which is, look, I'm not against people, obviously not against people using drugs in order to enhance their lives.
02:34:07.000Look, I have, before I came here, I drank enough caffeine to kill a whole fucking field of cows, right?
02:34:13.000I, as viewers can probably tell, I personally limit my Stimulant use because I can tell that I could easily, a bit like what I did with the modafinil, when I started using that modafinil,
02:34:29.000I just used it every day for three months, which was a ludicrous thing to do.
02:34:34.000But I think in terms of stimulants, there's a whole debate that needs to be had.
02:34:41.000I'm going to write about this at some point.
02:34:44.000One in ten 13-year-old boys in this country is being given a stimulant drug, right?
02:35:12.000Well, it's also children have a lot of energy, and it's not easy to control them.
02:35:17.000And so they decide that these children have something wrong with them.
02:35:20.000Do you know, I went to this Amish village for Lost Connections, but one of the things 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?
02:35:29.000And there's this big debate, what's going on there?
02:35:32.000So there's one argument, which is then obviously not exposed to digital media, and there's some evidence of just speaking to Professor Stephen Lee here.
02:35:40.000Yeah, but people were getting loads of ADHD when I was in school.
02:35:44.000So that's just because I spoke to a guy at UCLA, Professor Stephen Lee, and there's some effect of digital media, but it's not massive, right?
02:35:51.000I think what's happening from the very small amount of research you did talking to the Amish is, you know, I'd say to them, do you have kids who don't want to sit still?
02:35:58.000And they go, yeah, we'll let them go off and go fishing.
02:36:01.000The Amish don't want to make you sit still for eight hours a day.
02:36:04.000There's nothing in their society that...
02:36:06.000There's nothing natural about getting a child to sit still for eight hours a day.
02:38:17.000It's spreading over more and more of our day.
02:38:19.000The average person, I think, answers their first email, I think it's 7.43am and leaves work at 7.15pm, right?
02:38:25.000And I learned there's an amazing Australian social scientist who I went to interview, called Professor Michael Marmot, who discovered the key factor that causes depression at work, right?
02:38:34.000It's not the only one, but a key factor.
02:38:35.000If 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.
02:38:44.000I think it relates to what we've been talking about all along.
02:38:46.000You need to feel you're good at something.
02:38:48.000You need to feel your life has meaning.
02:38:51.000If you're controlled all the time, you can't feel that, right?
02:38:54.000So when I first learned this, I remember the first time I went to see Professor Marmot, misunderstanding the implications of this, because I thought he was saying...
02:39:03.000I 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?
02:41:06.000They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks.
02:41:10.000And one of the things that was so interesting to me, their business is called Baltimore Bicycle Works.
02:41:13.000Spending time with them, totally in line with Professor Marmot's findings, You know, giving them back control over their work made them much less unhappy, depressed, and anxious, right?
02:41:26.000And it's not like, you know, they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right?
02:41:31.000They fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now.
02:41:34.000The difference is now they've got control over their work, right?
02:41:37.000Giving people back control over their work is a really powerful antidepressant.
02:41:41.000Now, Every corporation could be a democratic cooperative, right?
02:41:45.000That's a big change in our society, but we've all lived through big changes in our society.
02:41:51.000And by the way, it would be better for the economy.
02:41:53.000A 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.
02:42:12.000People 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...
02:42:31.000And we should be listening to that and respecting that.
02:42:33.000And like the doctor in Vietnam said to me, listen to your nausea.
02:42:37.000It will tell us what's wrong with you.
02:42:38.000We should be listening to their nausea and using it as a kind of fuel to change the way we live in ways that won't just make people who are depressed and anxious and addicted better off.
02:42:50.000Everyone'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 Lost Connections.
02:42:58.000Now, Lost Connections is your most recent book?
02:43:00.000Yeah, that's the one about depression and anxiety.
02:43:02.000Yeah, yeah, they're both available, yeah.
02:43:04.000Now, Lost Connections, how did the two of them tie together?
02:43:08.000So 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,
02:43:23.000which is the opposite of addiction is connection, I said it earlier in our conversation, Based on Rat Park, right?
02:43:29.000And lots of people started saying to me, well, are you just saying it's social isolation, right?
02:44:00.000So 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 was, what did Switzerland deal with, right?
02:44:10.000That I couldn't quite, I didn't quite answer because I didn't quite understand when I was in Switzerland.
02:44:14.000So 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...
02:44:23.000Lab 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.
02:44:42.000Everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?
02:44:46.000But there's this really interesting evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.
02:44:53.000So 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?
02:45:04.000That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said, right?
02:45:07.000But weirdly, nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois.
02:45:17.000And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this.
02:45:47.000Everyone will have something in their life that just gives them joy as they do it, right?
02:45:51.000Okay, now imagine you played the piano not...
02:45:54.000I don't know, not because you love it, but because your parents are massively pressuring you, it's their dream for you.
02:46:00.000Or in a dive bar that you can't stand to pay the rent, or to impress a woman, right?
02:46:05.000That would be what's called an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right?
02:46:08.000You're not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you're doing it to get something further down the line, right?
02:46:12.000Now obviously we're all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things.
02:46:17.000Firstly, 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 a significant amount.
02:46:27.000He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right?
02:46:37.000Think about how Instagram makes you feel, right?
02:46:39.000We've become much more driven by this hollow external sense of...
02:46:44.000Think about something as simple as, a while ago, I was at Elton John's last night in Caesar's Palace, right?
02:46:50.000Amazing thing to be at, and about half the fucking room is filming it, isn't even looking at Elton John, they're just watching it through their phone.
02:46:57.000Now that's a small example, but you can see what they're doing.
02:47:00.000In order to display their life to invite envy from other people, They are not living their life.
02:47:06.000No one wants to watch your shitty video about Elton John.
02:47:09.000There's thousands of videos about Elton John that are much better than yours, right?
02:47:24.000And it makes them feel like shit because you're trying to invite envy in your friends.
02:47:28.000That's a small example of a much wider thing of the kind of junk values that have taken over our minds.
02:47:33.000So the reason that relates to what you're asking about Brazil is Professor Kassa has shown there's two sets of solutions to these junk values taken over our minds.
02:47:42.000One is, it's like fucking air pollution.
02:47:44.000You know, get the messaging out of your head.
02:47:47.000More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own surname, their own last name, right?
02:47:55.000From the moment, Professor Kasser 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?
02:48:05.000None of your listeners will lie on their deathbeds and think about All the shit they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram.
02:48:11.000They'll think about moments of meaning and connection.
02:48:47.000I think it's a fascinating discussion, but it is, in a sense, it's limiting free speech as well.
02:48:51.000I mean, we have a real problem with that.
02:48:53.000The 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 advertise, even if it's advertising honestly about a great product.
02:49:04.000People will have real issues with that.
02:49:06.000So we already have advertising regulation.
02:49:08.000You can't pop an advert saying, I've found the cure for cancer.
02:49:12.000Right, that's what I'm saying, honestly.
02:52:44.000And people, of course, say, like, a home, a car, whatever.
02:52:47.000But quite quickly, people would say Nike sneakers.
02:52:49.000The parents would name expensive things.
02:52:51.000And they go, okay, tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers, right?
02:52:55.000And And very rarely, I don't think any of them were like basketball players where it was like, I need the jump or whatever, if that's the right phrase.
02:53:03.000It was very often, almost immediately, I'd say I'd be accepted by the group.
02:53:14.000And of course, everyone thinks they're smarter than the ad.
02:53:17.000But giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values were, that was the first part.
02:53:22.000Second part was much more interesting and took longer.
02:53:24.000Then 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?
02:53:33.000What are things that are meaningful to you?
02:53:35.000People, you know, a whole range of things.
02:53:37.000Playing sports, playing music, reading, whatever it was, right?
02:53:42.000And they say, okay, how could we build more of that into your life and less of these junk values?
02:53:47.000How could you do more of this every week?
02:53:49.000And 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.
02:53:58.000I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach and we went...
02:54:03.000What it led to, so this was monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to a significant shift in people's values.
02:54:09.000They had a significant decrease in junk values and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values.
02:54:17.000And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time.
02:54:22.000The weird thing is, I sometimes feel like with all my, with both my books, Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections, I sometimes feel like I'm giving people permission to know the thing they already know, right?
02:54:31.000Like, 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 was talking about how loneliness causes depression, right?
02:54:46.000And the interviewer goes saying like, well, this is a very controversial theory, right?
02:54:52.000I'm kind of sitting there and I thought, how did we get to the point where pointing out the most fucking obvious thing you can imagine, that if you're really lonely, you're much more likely to become depressed.
02:55:01.000I don't think that's controversial at all.
02:55:04.000But I think the reason it's controversial is because these biological stories, which have some truth in them, Have dominated how...
02:55:13.000When I was a teenager, I went to my doctor...
02:55:14.000It's only thought of as being a medical issue.
02:55:17.000When 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 treat, she said, there's just a problem with your brain here.
02:55:29.000All you need to do is drug yourself, right?
02:55:31.000And I drug myself, and I got some relief from the chemical antidepressants, but it did not solve my depression.
02:55:35.000And 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?
02:55:41.000There's something missing in this picture.
02:55:43.000Because 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.
02:55:51.000There's something missing in this picture.
02:55:52.000And I think the reason why that's controversial, it seemed controversial to that woman, even though to you and me, it's...
02:55:58.000Crazy 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?
02:56:07.000I had a completely bizarre experience where...
02:56:47.000I didn't hear every speech, but some really great scientists, people like Thomas Ansel, who's the head of the National Institute of Health, who's a hugely admirable man.
02:56:55.000And I'm sitting there, and I'm like...
02:56:59.000All they're doing is looking at pictures of brain scans, right?
02:57:02.000If 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.
02:57:22.000You could have a conference about obesity that just looked at scans of people's stomachs, right?
02:57:27.000It wouldn't be untrue, it wouldn't be bad science, but you'd miss the whole fucking reason why they're fat, right?
02:57:32.000You could tell the plot of Romeo and Juliet using, like, Newtonian physics.
02:57:37.000You could draw a diagram, Romeo moves this way, Juliet moves this way.
02:57:40.000You wouldn't understand a damn thing about why anyone does anything, right?
02:57:45.000It was such a deep misunderstanding, or not a misunderstanding, such a partial truth, right?
02:57:50.000And I said to them, so we were in San Francisco, we were really near the Tenderloin, which obviously people will know is a place with a lot of chaotic street addiction.
02:57:59.000Let's all just walk over to the tenderloin, 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.
02:58:38.000Can 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.
02:58:50.000You can listen to audio overloads of the people we talked about and take a quiz to see how much you know about addiction.
02:58:54.000And Lost Connections is www.thelostconnections.com and there are audio books of both those books as well that you can get on those sites.