The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1250 - Johann Hari

00:00:00.000 Here we go.

00:00:01.000 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello, Johan.

00:00:12.000 Hey, Joe.

00:00:12.000 It's great to be back with you.

00:00:13.000 Good to see you, man.

00:00:13.000 What's happening?

00:00:14.000 Yeah, good.

00:00:15.000 We 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.

00:00:25.000 I 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.

00:00:34.000 And she kept looking at me going, what?

00:00:36.000 What?

00:00:38.000 Literally three minutes she goes, do you speak English? 0.97

00:00:42.000 I was like, my people fucking invented it, right? 0.99

00:00:45.000 But no one was there to laugh at my sad joke because they didn't understand what the fuck I was saying. 0.99

00:00:48.000 Arizona's a strange place. 0.99

00:00:50.000 I really love Arizona.

00:00:51.000 There's great parts.

00:00:52.000 Phoenix is amazing.

00:00:53.000 Tucson's a great place too, but it's a Wild West sort of a state.

00:00:58.000 It's one of those weird holdover states that have a lot of weird old school laws.

00:01:02.000 I think you could just walk around with a gun.

00:01:06.000 Yeah, you can.

00:01:06.000 My main experience in Phoenix was, in Arizona, in fact, was going out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang, wearing t-shirts saying, I was a drug addict, while members of the public mock them and jeer at them.

00:01:19.000 Right, because I've written this book about the war on drugs.

00:01:21.000 Is that Joe Arpaio?

00:01:23.000 Yeah, Sheriff Arpaio.

00:01:24.000 No longer Sheriff now, thankfully.

00:01:25.000 But yeah, Arizona is a deeply weird place.

00:01:28.000 It's weird.

00:01:29.000 A lot of really nice people.

00:01:32.000 But it's 150,000 degrees.

00:01:34.000 Yeah.

00:01:34.000 Well, literally, almost nobody lived there until air conditioning was invented, right?

00:01:37.000 Right.

00:01:38.000 And 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.

00:01:44.000 So I was like, oh, just walk.

00:01:45.000 It's fine.

00:01:45.000 And I get like halfway there, and people are literally stopping their cars going, are you okay?

00:01:49.000 Because the only reason anyone would ever walk in Phoenix was basically if your car had broken.

00:01:53.000 It didn't even occur to them, I might have actually just chosen to walk, right? 0.82

00:01:57.000 Plus, you're so white. 0.94

00:01:58.000 I am literally the whitest person. 0.99

00:02:00.000 You 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! 1.00

00:02:07.000 How can a human be so white? 0.99

00:02:09.000 I never have a nice colour.

00:02:11.000 I'm either this albino colour or red.

00:02:14.000 There's no rich brown hue there, ever.

00:02:17.000 None of my ancestors, they're Scottish and Swiss, so they never saw the sun, right? 1.00

00:02:22.000 None of my ancestors.

00:02:23.000 My friend Jamie was over at my house once, and he's, not this friend Jamie, a different friend Jamie, who's British as well.

00:02:30.000 And 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.

00:02:38.000 And she goes, Yeah.

00:02:39.000 She goes, No, no.

00:02:40.000 Like, he's white like paper.

00:02:44.000 So from then on, Jamie became Jamie white like paper.

00:02:49.000 A very accurate description of my lack of pigment is cruelly true.

00:02:52.000 It's funny how much we appreciate the English accent, though.

00:02:55.000 The English accent is like one of the best tools for selling things to very gullible Americans.

00:03:01.000 British people benefit from constant positive discrimination in the United States, right? 1.00

00:03:05.000 It's like having a 10-inch dick, just having a British accent. 1.00

00:03:07.000 People go, oh my god, you got an accent! 1.00

00:03:10.000 And it's like, all humans have accents, I've just got a slightly different one. 0.80

00:03:13.000 But it's a cherished one.

00:03:15.000 It makes you feel like you're more sophisticated, you're more well-read, you're more aware of the world.

00:03:24.000 I mean, I just am sophisticated and well-read.

00:03:26.000 Anyway, you get this constant, yeah, constantly people ascribing to you much better qualities than you actually have.

00:03:34.000 But what does it work in reverse, like in England?

00:03:37.000 What is the reaction to American accents?

00:03:39.000 It's mostly disgust, right?

00:03:42.000 I don't know.

00:03:42.000 There's a mixture.

00:03:44.000 Americans...

00:03:44.000 I always think the relationship of Britain and America is like one of those police mirrors.

00:03:50.000 Because we grow up constantly looking at the United States, right?

00:03:53.000 We're constantly staring through.

00:03:54.000 We are immersed in American culture.

00:03:57.000 But when Americans look back at us, they're just seeing a reflection of themselves. 0.90

00:04:00.000 I mean, Americans watch Downton Abbey and know about the Queen or whatever.

00:04:03.000 But there isn't that...

00:04:04.000 Two-way dialogue that there is.

00:04:08.000 Yeah, so it's a slightly weird...

00:04:10.000 I think we feel very American, right? 0.95

00:04:13.000 And 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? 0.95

00:04:22.000 And those moments of disorientation are really strange. 0.96

00:04:26.000 But give me one for an example.

00:04:28.000 Well, there's a question that Americans ask all the time that I have literally never heard a European ask, right?

00:04:35.000 It's the question, what's your story?

00:04:38.000 Every American, you can go to the most crusty right-wing person coming out of Mar-a-Lago or a kid in West Baltimore and you can say, what's your story?

00:04:46.000 And they'll have an answer.

00:04:47.000 The only context I can imagine a British person saying, what's your story?

00:04:51.000 Would be in a police interrogation.

00:04:53.000 It would be an extremely hostile question.

00:04:54.000 What's your story?

00:04:56.000 Right?

00:04:56.000 It would be...

00:04:57.000 You just wouldn't ever say it, right?

00:04:59.000 Americans 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?

00:05:09.000 That people will tell you...

00:05:11.000 I remember once being on a bus in Mississippi and sitting next to a woman And within five minutes of chatting to her, she told me about her two miscarriages, how her mother hated her.

00:05:20.000 And I thought, if we were Swiss, where my dad's from, you wouldn't tell me this until we got married.

00:05:25.000 And maybe not even then, right?

00:05:27.000 So there's a level of candor and storytelling among Americans. 0.96

00:05:31.000 It's one of the best things about this, you know, fucked up and amazing place, right? 0.97

00:05:35.000 That I just love. 0.91

00:05:36.000 And there's something about there's a kind of narrative openness that's very different about this place than Europe, anywhere in Europe.

00:05:43.000 Now, when you talk to people in England, you guys don't have the same level of reality television.

00:05:54.000 You have some, like Big Brother, but you don't have it to the extent that we have it here, right?

00:05:58.000 Yeah, it hasn't.

00:05:59.000 Well, I mean, your country has literally been taken over by reality television, right?

00:06:02.000 We have a reality television president.

00:06:04.000 No, it hasn't conquered the whole culture in that way.

00:06:07.000 Well, he's a reality television president, but he's sort of a game show host president.

00:06:11.000 Like, that's how I used to describe myself when I was hosting Fear Factor.

00:06:14.000 They're like, you host a reality show?

00:06:16.000 I'm like, sort of?

00:06:17.000 It's a game show. 1.00

00:06:18.000 It's just a fucked up game show. 0.99

00:06:20.000 And Trump was hosting a game show. 0.99

00:06:23.000 Essentially, right?

00:06:24.000 It was a contest.

00:06:25.000 It wasn't like keeping up with the Kardashians. 0.98

00:06:28.000 That's a true reality show because there's literally nothing going on other than these people's lives and whatever orchestrated bullshit they put in to make it more interesting. 0.93

00:06:39.000 Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way.

00:06:40.000 What do you guys have?

00:06:42.000 But I think that's part of the thing that I was getting to about Americans always wanted to give you their narrative.

00:06:48.000 They always wanted to give you the story of their life.

00:06:50.000 So when someone says, what's your story?

00:06:52.000 They already have it ready.

00:06:53.000 Because it's almost like we feel like...

00:06:56.000 We're in some sort of a small television show all the time or some sort of small production.

00:07:01.000 It's like almost a part of who we are.

00:07:04.000 Yeah, every American thinks they're the star of their own movie, right?

00:07:07.000 And I forget who said this, but someone realized, you know, sometimes in life you realize you're just the extra, right?

00:07:12.000 You're in the corner of the shot, right?

00:07:14.000 Right.

00:07:15.000 And yeah, I think that's true, and I think that's not as true of British people or...

00:07:20.000 I think there's certain...

00:07:21.000 How do I put it?

00:07:22.000 Like...

00:07:23.000 There's a certain kind of self-deprecation you're taught as a British person.

00:07:26.000 You're taught, and I had to kind of unlearn it living here.

00:07:30.000 So what would be examples?

00:07:31.000 I forget where I read this story, so maybe it's not true, but I remember reading it years ago.

00:07:35.000 So we had these terrible subway bombs in 2005. I'm sure you remember four young British men go on to the London Underground.

00:07:42.000 Murder, I think it was over 50 people.

00:07:44.000 And two weeks later, another group of jihadis tried to do the same thing.

00:07:48.000 But they hadn't built the bombs very well, so they go down into the subway, and there's a loud bang, but it doesn't connect with the detonator.

00:07:56.000 So there's a loud bang, but it doesn't actually blow everyone up.

00:07:58.000 Obviously, people freak the fuck out, as you can imagine, right?

00:08:01.000 And I forget, maybe this is a story that someone told that wasn't factually true, but I think it reveals something very...

00:08:09.000 Something about our British character.

00:08:11.000 So 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? 0.86

00:08:18.000 And someone, I think it was an off-duty fire officer in the story, chases after them for ages, chases after the guy for ages, while everyone else is running the fuck away.

00:08:26.000 And he catches the guy and he throws him to the ground. 0.99

00:08:28.000 And what he said to him was that the off-duty fire officer says to the attempted suicide bomber, you rude, rude man.

00:08:35.000 And what I love about that is the idea that suicide bombing is just bad manners. 0.71

00:08:40.000 It's just impolite.

00:08:42.000 Or even a better example, which is true, it was reported at the time definitely, was during the riots we had in 2011 in London.

00:08:50.000 There was one place, I forget where it is, where they broke into a luxury goods store.

00:08:53.000 And they could only make, it was a very strong window, so they could only make a hole in the corner of the window.

00:08:58.000 And it was caught on the security cameras that the rioters formed a line to go in and loot the store, right?

00:09:04.000 That's how deep the idea of, like, queuing and making a line is in British culture.

00:09:08.000 Even in a riot, we're like, oh, no, I think you were before me, right? 0.99

00:09:13.000 I'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! 1.00

00:09:19.000 You don't know how to riot! 0.99

00:09:20.000 This is a riot!

00:09:20.000 You're bombing a queue!

00:09:21.000 What's wrong with you people, right?

00:09:23.000 You guys don't have Black Friday sales, do you?

00:09:25.000 No, they've just started, and, yeah, it's an unfortunate business.

00:09:28.000 That might be the end of your humility.

00:09:30.000 We're not going to make it.

00:09:32.000 We survived the Nazis. 0.99

00:09:33.000 We're not fucking surviving Black Friday, right? 0.98

00:09:36.000 There's something about those deals. 0.96

00:09:38.000 When people get that bargain and then they open that door, ready, go!

00:09:41.000 And people pile through.

00:09:43.000 All humanity gets tossed aside. 1.00

00:09:44.000 It gives you insight into the fucking... 0.99

00:09:46.000 Financial desperation of ordinary Americans, right? 0.95

00:09:49.000 It's a little bit of that, but it's also the competitive nature of those things where you're trying to grab the few remaining items that are 25% off, and you've been saving for this TV for six months, and there it is right in front of you, and you charge, and people are fighting left and right.

00:10:03.000 It's awful.

00:10:04.000 It's just a terrible way for people to, you know, to interact with each other.

00:10:11.000 So, what do you got here for me?

00:10:13.000 So we were going to talk about, yeah, the...

00:10:15.000 I was really interested to talk to you because we talked last time about my book about depression, lost connections.

00:10:19.000 And one of the things that was suggested to me is we talk about the book I wrote about addiction and the war on drugs.

00:10:25.000 And I really...

00:10:25.000 Was that out last time you came?

00:10:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:28.000 So that was a book that came out a few years before.

00:10:29.000 It's just come out in a new edition where there's loads of extra material, particularly about the opioid crisis.

00:10:33.000 And essentially because...

00:10:34.000 So you added to it?

00:10:35.000 Yeah, loads of new stuff.

00:10:36.000 Because that book's about five years old now.

00:10:38.000 And although with loads of new stuff now, but...

00:10:41.000 You 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.

00:10:49.000 I 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.

00:10:55.000 And 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.

00:11:08.000 And I was trying to figure out what to do.

00:11:10.000 Nothing I was doing was working.

00:11:11.000 Nothing I was doing was helping.

00:11:13.000 And I decided, right, okay, well, there are lots of people all over the world who are trying to deal with this problem.

00:11:18.000 I want to go and meet with them, talk with them.

00:11:20.000 So I ended up going on this big journey.

00:11:22.000 It took three years.

00:11:22.000 I travelled over 30,000 miles.

00:11:24.000 I wanted to sit with, you know, people who'd been through addiction.

00:11:28.000 It 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.

00:11:33.000 And 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. 1.00

00:11:45.000 Vietnam, where they make people with addiction problems go into literally forced labour camps.

00:11:49.000 And the places that had the most compassionate possible policies, like Portugal, where they decriminalised all drugs with incredible results.

00:11:55.000 Switzerland, where they legalised heroin, incredible results.

00:11:58.000 And I guess...

00:12:00.000 I ended up just spending so much time with such a crazy mixture of people from a transgendered crack dealer in Brooklyn who ended up actually being one of the smartest people I know to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel who's definitely not one of the smartest people I know and I learned loads of things but I guess the heart of what I learned is Just so much of what we've been told about this for so long. 0.99

00:12:20.000 It's now 100 years since we started fighting the war on drugs in this country and it was then imposed on the rest of the world.

00:12:25.000 So much of what we're told is wrong.

00:12:27.000 Drugs aren't what we think they are.

00:12:28.000 Addiction isn't what we think it is.

00:12:30.000 The war on drugs isn't what we think it is and the alternatives to the war on drugs aren't what we think they are.

00:12:35.000 So 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.

00:12:45.000 The main reason why people assume that people do drugs is to escape reality.

00:12:51.000 What do you think is the primary thing that they're running from?

00:12:56.000 So you've got to separate out two things.

00:12:57.000 And this surprised me because my family's experience was...

00:13:09.000 Right.

00:13:13.000 Right.

00:13:25.000 A sip of wine at work.

00:13:26.000 Or ecstasy or a whole range of currently cannabis, a whole range of currently illegal drugs.

00:13:33.000 In most cases there are some people who have addictions to cannabis.

00:13:36.000 So you've then got to ask, what's happening with this 10% who have got a problem, right?

00:13:42.000 What's going on?

00:13:43.000 And one of the things that really blew my mind in the research for Chasing the Scream was realizing I had deeply misunderstood what addiction is.

00:13:50.000 I had misunderstood the thing I thought I had been seeing in front of me since I was a kid, right?

00:13:55.000 So most people, let's think about heroin addiction because that was close to me.

00:13:59.000 Most people, if we stop the next 20 people to walk past your studio and we said to them, what causes heroin addiction? 1.00

00:14:06.000 I think they'd look at us like we were stupid and they'd say, well, the clue's in the name, dipshit, right? 0.99

00:14:12.000 Heroin causes heroin addiction. 1.00

00:14:14.000 We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense, right?

00:14:19.000 We 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.

00:14:29.000 There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need. 0.87

00:14:35.000 And we think that, a lot of people think that's what addiction is, right?

00:14:38.000 It's this physical hunger for the chemical hook inside the drug, right?

00:14:43.000 There is some reality to chemical hooks.

00:14:45.000 They exist.

00:14:46.000 They're real.

00:14:46.000 But that's actually a very small part of what's going on.

00:14:50.000 The first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something wrong with that story we've been told is when it was explained to me by loads of doctors in Britain, where I'm from, if you step out into the street and you get hit by a truck and you break your hip...

00:15:03.000 You'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine.

00:15:07.000 Diamorphine is heroin, right?

00:15:09.000 It's the medical name for heroin. 0.97

00:15:10.000 The stuff you'll be given in hospital is much better than the shit you buy on the street because it's medically pure, it's not contaminated. 0.67

00:15:17.000 If what we think about addiction is right, that it's just caused by exposure to the drug, What should be happening to all these people in British hospitals who've been given loads of heroin, right? 0.97

00:15:27.000 Anyone watching this podcast who's got a British grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taken a shit ton of heroin, right?

00:15:34.000 If what we think is right, that addiction is caused primarily by exposure to the chemical hooks, loads of these people should be leaving hospital and trying to score on the streets, right?

00:15:43.000 This has been studied very carefully.

00:15:44.000 It virtually never happens, right?

00:15:46.000 And when I learned that It just seems so weird to me.

00:15:50.000 I thought it couldn't possibly be true, right?

00:15:52.000 How could it be you've got someone in a hospital bed who's taking loads of really potent heroin, they don't become addicted, and in the alleyway outside, you've got someone who's using actually a weaker form of the drug who becomes addicted.

00:16:05.000 How can that be?

00:16:06.000 What's happening here?

00:16:08.000 And I only began to understand it.

00:16:10.000 When 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.

00:16:18.000 It's a new way of thinking and loads of new evidence.

00:16:21.000 So, Professor Alexander explained to me, this story that we've been told, right, that addiction is caused by the chemical hooks, primarily, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.

00:16:31.000 They're really simple experiments.

00:16:33.000 Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit shitty today, right? 0.81

00:16:36.000 You take a rat... 0.65

00:16:38.000 You put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles.

00:16:41.000 One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.

00:16:45.000 You might remember in the 1980s, there's a famous Partnership for Drug-Free America ad that shows this experiment, right?

00:16:52.000 And the rat in this cage always prefers the heroin water, and almost always kills itself within a week or two, right?

00:17:01.000 So there you go.

00:17:02.000 That's our story.

00:17:03.000 You're exposed to the drug, it takes you over, and then you just die, right?

00:17:08.000 But in the 70s, Professor Alexander comes along and says he was working with people with addiction problems, and he's like, well, hang on a minute.

00:17:15.000 We put these rats alone In an empty cage, they've got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats, right?

00:17:23.000 What would happen if we did this differently?

00:17:25.000 So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right? 0.99

00:17:30.000 They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. 1.00

00:17:34.000 Anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park. 0.98

00:17:37.000 And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both.

00:17:42.000 They don't know what's in them.

00:17:43.000 This is the fascinating thing.

00:17:44.000 In Rat Park, they don't like the water very much.

00:17:47.000 Yeah, the heroin water.

00:18:10.000 It's not sobriety.

00:18:11.000 The opposite of addiction is connection.

00:18:12.000 We have to ask ourselves, what are the contexts in which people become addicted?

00:18:16.000 Because there are some contexts where people find these drugs extremely addictive, and there are some contexts where they don't become addicted at all.

00:18:24.000 There's something...

00:18:25.000 The drug plays a role.

00:18:26.000 Chemical hooks are real.

00:18:27.000 I can talk about how we know that.

00:18:28.000 They play some role, but they're actually a surprisingly small amount of what's going on.

00:18:34.000 We know this from...

00:18:35.000 I mean, there's so many examples, but I'll give you another one.

00:18:37.000 At the same time as Rat Park, there was an experiment going on that everyone listening to this will have heard of, the Vietnam War, right?

00:18:43.000 In Vietnam, shitloads of American troops were using heroin, right?

00:18:47.000 It was very easy to get it out there.

00:18:49.000 They'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.

00:18:57.000 So...

00:18:58.000 Cannabis was everywhere.

00:18:59.000 Sorry, heroin was everywhere.

00:19:00.000 Loads of American troops were using it.

00:19:02.000 And if you look at what people said at the time, the authorities, the Nixon White House, they were shitting themselves because they're like, they believe this chemical hooks theory of addiction. 0.99

00:19:11.000 So they're like, fuck, when this war ends, we're going to have, you know, half a million heroin addicts on the streets of the United States. 0.98

00:19:18.000 There's a really good study that followed these men home. 0.99

00:19:22.000 And it found that the vast majority of them just stopped.

00:19:26.000 They didn't go to rehab, most of them.

00:19:28.000 They didn't go into horrific withdrawal.

00:19:30.000 Some of them had uncomfortable flu-like symptoms, but most of them just stopped.

00:19:35.000 Now, if you believe this old theory that chemical hooks take you over, that makes no sense.

00:19:40.000 But 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?

00:19:50.000 You, me, everyone in this area, if I took any of us and put us in a horrific, pestilential jungle where we don't want to be and I made you kill a load of people and potentially die at any moment, you would find heroin much more appealing than you do now,

00:20:05.000 right?

00:20:05.000 If we want to understand why people turn to painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in pain, right?

00:20:11.000 And the core of addiction has made me...

00:20:15.000 I learned from these amazing experts all over the world that the core of addiction...

00:20:20.000 It's about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be.

00:20:24.000 And once you understand that, you can see why what we've been doing is such a disaster, right?

00:20:29.000 Because the theory we have with the war on drugs, think about Arizona.

00:20:32.000 We can talk about that more.

00:20:33.000 But I, you know, like I say, I went to this...

00:20:37.000 Nightmare prison, Estrella prison in Phoenix, Arizona, where people are humiliated.

00:20:42.000 And the theory behind that, part of the theory behind the war on drugs is, if you've got people who are addicted, you've got to inflict pain on them to give them an incentive to stop, right?

00:20:53.000 But 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.

00:21:02.000 Truth is much worse, right?

00:21:03.000 That makes addiction worse.

00:21:05.000 Those women I went out with and spent all that time with who were, you know, humiliate... 1.00

00:21:09.000 I remember in that prison, we come back from being on the chain gang where they have to...

00:21:15.000 Sometimes they have to dig graves.

00:21:17.000 They weren't doing that the day I was there.

00:21:18.000 They had to collect garbage one of the days I was there.

00:21:22.000 But...

00:21:23.000 We come back, and normally with prisons, as a journalist, they don't want to show you anything, right?

00:21:29.000 Like, you have to kind of really finagle to get them to show you anything.

00:21:32.000 In this prison, it's like a pantomime of cruelty.

00:21:36.000 They want to show it to you.

00:21:37.000 The whole point is to humiliate these people, right?

00:21:39.000 So the women I've been talking to and the men were really terrified of what they called the hole, right?

00:21:44.000 It's the solitary block.

00:21:46.000 And so I said to the guards, will you show me the hole?

00:21:48.000 I was sure they said no.

00:21:49.000 They're like, yeah, sure, come on, I'll show you.

00:21:50.000 So 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? 1.00

00:21:59.000 It's like a concrete block.

00:22:01.000 You're on your own.

00:22:01.000 There's nothing in it.

00:22:02.000 There's a tiny window where you can see sunlight.

00:22:04.000 No TV, nothing.

00:22:07.000 And I remember speaking to a woman who was in this and suddenly thinking, this is the closest you could get To an exact human recreation of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats, right?

00:22:19.000 And this is what we're doing, thinking it will stop these women being addicted. 0.99

00:22:24.000 It's...

00:22:25.000 The system we've built...

00:22:26.000 Dr. 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?

00:22:34.000 What have people with addiction problems not suffered?

00:22:36.000 What humiliation have they not endured?

00:22:39.000 So we've got this...

00:22:40.000 I think we've got to really shift our perspective on what addiction is and there are places that have done this that have led to incredible results.

00:22:46.000 I love that rat experiment one because that had always been parroted as this is the proof positive that these drugs are so terrible for you but once they figured out that if you take those rats and put them in a wonderful place and they don't have addiction it really does make you step back and go okay what is exactly going on here?

00:23:04.000 Obviously there's chemical hooks.

00:23:05.000 They are real.

00:23:06.000 Like people that are on sustained, prolonged use of opiates, especially people with back injuries, have an incredibly difficult time kicking them.

00:23:14.000 Even really positive people who don't necessarily have awful lives.

00:23:17.000 But it's one of those things that gets in your head and then you sort of parrot it.

00:23:24.000 You've heard it.

00:23:25.000 You repeat it.

00:23:27.000 But it's the reason why I asked you the question.

00:23:29.000 It's like, what is the cause?

00:23:33.000 For most people, you believe it's an unfulfilled life, or a painful self-image, or Remorse for your past or like, what is it?

00:23:45.000 Do we have like primary reasons or primary attributes that we attach to these people that are drug addicted?

00:23:54.000 Yeah, so this was what my more recent book, which is called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions is about.

00:24:01.000 Because I think the core of addiction is about trying to deal with pain.

00:24:05.000 But the causes of human pain are obviously huge.

00:24:09.000 But what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of deep despair, right?

00:24:16.000 Now, if you think about depression, very similar factors play out with addiction.

00:24:20.000 They're actually densely interconnected phenomena.

00:24:23.000 But there are real biological factors, right?

00:24:26.000 Your genes can make you more vulnerable to that, just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others.

00:24:30.000 And there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed or addicted that can make it harder to get out, right?

00:24:36.000 But...

00:24:38.000 Most of the factors that are causing this despair are not factors in our biology, they're factors in the way we live.

00:24:44.000 I think it's a kind of, this doesn't cover all of the causes that I learned about Velocity Connections, but it covers a lot of them.

00:24:50.000 Everyone watching your show knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right?

00:24:54.000 You need food.

00:24:55.000 You need water.

00:24:56.000 You need shelter.

00:24:57.000 You need clean air.

00:24:58.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:24:58.000 If I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked really quickly, right? 1.00

00:25:01.000 But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? 0.99

00:25:06.000 You need to feel you belong.

00:25:07.000 You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.

00:25:10.000 You need to feel that people see you and value you.

00:25:12.000 You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.

00:25:15.000 And this culture we've built is good at lots of things, and I'm really glad to be alive today for all sorts of reasons.

00:25:19.000 I had to go to the dentist the other day.

00:25:21.000 I'm glad to be alive now, not like 100 years ago.

00:25:23.000 But there's a lot of evidence that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs.

00:25:29.000 Let'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.

00:25:39.000 Where is the opioid crisis happening?

00:25:41.000 I've been to a lot of the epicenters of it, places like Monadnock in New Hampshire.

00:25:46.000 Why are things so disastrous there?

00:25:48.000 Why is there much higher opioid addiction in West Virginia than on the faculty of Harvard, right?

00:25:55.000 People on the Faculty of Harvard have much better access to opioids, right?

00:25:57.000 Everyone there has good health insurance.

00:26:00.000 They have much better access.

00:26:02.000 What's going on?

00:26:03.000 Some amazing economists, Angus Dayton and Anne Case, did a massive study of this, and they said that we need to understand the opioid deaths mainly as what they call deaths of despair, right?

00:26:14.000 It'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.

00:26:25.000 These things are clustering together for a reason, right?

00:26:28.000 And you don't have to spend much time in those places to see.

00:26:30.000 People, through no fault of their own, are like the rats in that first cage, right?

00:26:34.000 They have been deprived of the things that make life meaningful.

00:26:37.000 This doesn't mean chemical hooks don't play some role.

00:26:39.000 They do play a role.

00:26:40.000 But I've been to the places that have solved this, and it wasn't by thinking primarily about that.

00:26:43.000 So 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.

00:26:49.000 So there's a very strong agreement among scientists that the most powerful chemical hook we know is nicotine.

00:26:54.000 You smoke cigarettes.

00:26:55.000 My mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day.

00:26:57.000 You smoke cigarettes.

00:26:58.000 The thing you feel a physical craving for when you stop, which my mother would never do, is nicotine.

00:27:04.000 That's the chemical hook.

00:27:07.000 And so in the late 80s, when nicotine patches were invented...

00:27:12.000 There's this huge wave of optimism among scientists because they're like, oh right, cigarette smoking is an addiction to the chemical hook, nicotine.

00:27:19.000 Now we can give people all the chemical hook they're addicted to without any of this shitty cancer-causing smoke.

00:27:26.000 People are going to stop smoking, right?

00:27:28.000 So nicotine patches are introduced and the US Surgeon General's report a couple of years later finds highly motivated people using nicotine patches.

00:27:39.000 17% of them will stop smoking.

00:27:42.000 Right?

00:27:42.000 Now it's important to say that is not nothing, right?

00:27:45.000 That means if you meet the chemical hook for people who are addicted to cigarettes, 17% of them will stop entirely.

00:27:51.000 That's a big deal, right?

00:27:52.000 That saved a huge number of people's lives.

00:27:55.000 But obviously 17% It's not 100%.

00:27:58.000 That leaves 83%.

00:27:59.000 They've got to be explained by the other things.

00:28:02.000 And that's really the factors that I talk about in Lost Connections.

00:28:04.000 So, I mean, there's a whole range of them.

00:28:06.000 But, you know, if you are acutely lonely, we are the loneliest society there's ever been, right?

00:28:10.000 You are much more likely to be vulnerable to despair, depression, addiction.

00:28:13.000 If you are controlled and humiliated at work, which most people now are to some degree, you're much more vulnerable to these things.

00:28:20.000 There's a whole range.

00:28:21.000 I go through nine of these factors in the book.

00:28:23.000 To 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?

00:28:37.000 And they did something that's very different to what Americans are being urged to do.

00:28:42.000 So I'm a Swiss citizen, because my dad's from there, so I know Switzerland well.

00:28:45.000 And by the time you get to the year 2000, Switzerland is having like an opioid nightmare, right?

00:28:51.000 People can look up videos from the time, but, you know, people, like, Swiss people are obsessed with order. 0.98

00:28:58.000 It's not a coincidence they invented clocks and all that shit, right? 0.91

00:29:01.000 Like, in their public parks, people, like, injecting in the neck, like, nightmare scenes, right? 0.98

00:29:06.000 That'd be bad anywhere, but to Swiss people, this is, like, their worst nightmare, right?

00:29:10.000 And they try all sorts of things.

00:29:12.000 They try the American way, arresting people, punishing people, shaming people, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

00:29:18.000 And 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.

00:29:28.000 Um...

00:29:30.000 And she explains to people, I think the solution is to legalise heroin.

00:29:35.000 And she said, I know that sounds really shocking, because when you hear the word legalisation, what you picture is anarchy and chaos.

00:29:41.000 She said, what we have now is anarchy and chaos, right?

00:29:46.000 We have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to Unknown drug users, all in the dark, all filled with violence, disease and chaos.

00:29:56.000 Legalisation, she explained, is the way we restore order to this madness, right?

00:29:59.000 So the way it works is I spent a lot of time in these places.

00:30:03.000 Obviously, maybe there's some really hardcore libertarians, but almost no one believes we should legalise heroin the way alcohol or cannabis are legal, right?

00:30:10.000 No one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in CVS. That's not the plan, right?

00:30:14.000 What I did in Switzerland is if you had a heroin problem, you were assigned to a clinic.

00:30:17.000 I spent a lot of time in the one in Geneva.

00:30:20.000 The former president, Ruth Dreyfuss, lives opposite this clinic.

00:30:23.000 I think that tells you something.

00:30:25.000 Like across the street?

00:30:26.000 Across the street.

00:30:28.000 So the way it works is...

00:30:30.000 She should move.

00:30:31.000 Well, but if you see the clinic, I'll tell you why, right? 0.93

00:30:34.000 So 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. 1.00

00:30:41.000 It's a constant disagreement between me and my dad. 0.86

00:30:43.000 You turn up.

00:30:44.000 You go in.

00:30:45.000 They give you your heroin there.

00:30:46.000 They give you medically pure heroin.

00:30:48.000 You can't take it out with you.

00:30:49.000 You've got to use it there, partly because they don't want you to sell it on, but mainly because they want to monitor you to make sure you don't overdose.

00:30:57.000 You use it there, and then you leave to go to your job because you're given loads of support to get housing, work, and therapy to figure out why you can't bear to be present in your life, right?

00:31:09.000 So it's really important they give two things.

00:31:11.000 It's important to bear in mind these two things because it's the opposite of what we're doing at the moment here.

00:31:14.000 Give them the safest possible version of the drug And give them massive amounts of help to deal with the reasons why they need that drug.

00:31:22.000 Now when they're giving them the drug, are they injecting it in them?

00:31:24.000 Yeah, no, the individual injects it himself or herself.

00:31:26.000 So if you were the patient, I'm the nurse, I give you the heroin and I give you a clean syringe.

00:31:32.000 And one of the things that really surprised me At first I found really weird, is they will give you any dose of heroin that you want, apart from one that would kill you, and there is never any pressure to cut back.

00:31:43.000 And 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.

00:31:51.000 There were like three people who'd been there the whole time.

00:31:53.000 Almost everyone does cut back and stop over time.

00:31:56.000 And I remember saying to Rita Mangy, who's the chief psychiatrist there, well...

00:32:01.000 Well, how can that be?

00:32:02.000 Because we're told the chemical hooks take you over, you need more and more.

00:32:06.000 If you had an unlimited supply, you would just carry on forever.

00:32:09.000 How do you explain this?

00:32:12.000 And she looked at me like I was dumb and she said, well, we help them and their lives get better.

00:32:18.000 And as your life gets better, you don't want to be anaesthetised so much.

00:32:22.000 Which, once that's explained to you, is so obvious, right?

00:32:26.000 And it's worth just explaining the results of the Swiss programme.

00:32:30.000 It's 15 years now.

00:32:31.000 In the 15 years since this began, according to the best scientific evidence, people like Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen have shown, there have been...

00:32:39.000 Zero deaths, overdose deaths, on legal heroin.

00:32:43.000 Not one person.

00:32:44.000 There's been a massive fall in overdose deaths outside the legal program because people transfer in.

00:32:49.000 Because why would you carry on using expensive, shitty street drugs when you could be getting, you know, help and giving the drug for free?

00:32:56.000 And one thing that's fascinating about this is Swiss people are really conservative, right? 0.96

00:33:00.000 My Swiss relatives make Donald Trump look like Oprah. 0.99

00:33:03.000 And yet Swiss people, after this had been in practice for... 0.72

00:33:07.000 Five years, had a referendum on whether to get rid of it.

00:33:10.000 And 70% of Swiss people voted to keep heroin legal.

00:33:13.000 Not because they're so compassionate, to be honest.

00:33:15.000 That's not...

00:33:16.000 They're not.

00:33:16.000 They're really not.

00:33:17.000 It was because crime fell so much, right?

00:33:20.000 It's much cheaper to give some...

00:33:21.000 How much did crime fall?

00:33:23.000 I've got the statistics in the book.

00:33:24.000 It's for years since I wrote it.

00:33:25.000 But there was, I think, something like a 50% fall in street crime.

00:33:28.000 Street prostitution literally ended, right?

00:33:31.000 There was no street prostitution after that. 0.89

00:33:32.000 Turns out women, you know, don't want to be on the street being fucked by random strangers for money if they've got, like, an alternative. 1.00

00:33:38.000 Who knew? 0.97

00:33:39.000 But there was an enormous fall in crime across the board, and the police confirmed that.

00:33:43.000 Everyone agrees with that in Switzerland.

00:33:45.000 And all the kind of anarchy in the streets just stopped, right?

00:33:48.000 But the reason I think this is really relevant to the opioid crisis is...

00:33:52.000 What we're doing is the exact opposite, right?

00:33:55.000 So, they give them the safe version of the drug, give them help to figure out why, practical support to change their environment, to get out of that isolated cage and into a life that's more like Rat Park.

00:34:05.000 What do we do?

00:34:07.000 If your doctor in this country finds out that you are using, say, Percocet or Oxy, not because you've got back pain, but because you've got an addiction, your doctor, by law, has to cut you off, right?

00:34:17.000 If they don't, they can be busted as a dealer.

00:34:19.000 It's happened to lots of doctors.

00:34:21.000 So they have to cut you off.

00:34:22.000 So instead of giving you the drug, we stop you getting the drug.

00:34:24.000 Most people then, or not most, a very large number, then transfer to much more dangerous street drugs like heroin.

00:34:30.000 Secondly, far from giving you help to turn your life around, we give you a criminal record We shame you.

00:34:36.000 We stigmatize you.

00:34:37.000 We put barriers between you and reconnecting.

00:34:40.000 The opposite of addiction is connection, but what do we do?

00:34:42.000 We put barriers between people and reconnecting.

00:34:45.000 This is why...

00:34:46.000 That's one part of it, right?

00:34:47.000 So 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.

00:34:54.000 But there's something I think that's even deeper than that, which you really see in places like West Virginia, Monadnock...

00:35:01.000 The kind of hearts of the opioid crisis, which is we're also creating a society that is becoming harder and harder for people to be present in, especially in those places.

00:35:12.000 There's an analogy I keep thinking of.

00:35:14.000 In the 18th century in Britain, Loads of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in like London and Manchester.

00:35:25.000 And something happened that has been well documented.

00:35:31.000 There was something called the gin craze, right?

00:35:32.000 Where basically shitloads of people just became alcoholics, drank gin until they died, right?

00:35:37.000 There's a famous painting from the time called Gin Lane of a mother down in like a bottle of vodka while a baby like falls out the window.

00:35:44.000 Right?

00:35:44.000 And things like that really were happening.

00:35:46.000 If you look at what people said at the time, very similar to what they're saying now, they said, look at this evil drug gin. 0.98

00:35:52.000 Look what it's fucking done to us. 0.99

00:35:54.000 If only we could get rid of this evil drug gin, this problem would go away. 0.99

00:35:57.000 Right?

00:35:58.000 We know now, when we look back at the gin craze, it can have been gin that caused it, because anyone in Britain who's over the age of 18 can go and buy gin, right?

00:36:06.000 And while we still have some alcoholics, to be sure, we don't have mass epidemics of alcoholism, we don't have babies falling out of windows.

00:36:12.000 What changed?

00:36:15.000 It wasn't the availability of the drug.

00:36:16.000 The drug is more available now than it was then.

00:36:19.000 What changed was the amount of pain and distress in the society, right?

00:36:22.000 We don't have a society where people are as profoundly disorientated.

00:36:25.000 I mean, it's going up because we're creating more disorientation.

00:36:28.000 So if you create a society where people's basic psychological needs are not met, right?

00:36:34.000 Where they have a shrinking number of friends and social connections... 0.94

00:36:39.000 Where they're taught that life is about money and buying shit and displaying it on Instagram Excuse me Where they spend most of their time at jobs they find unfulfilling, controlling and humiliating. 0.71

00:36:51.000 You're going to create growing pools of people who can't... 0.92

00:36:55.000 By 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.

00:37:04.000 So you create this pervasive insecurity in the society.

00:37:07.000 You're going to create very large numbers of people...

00:37:10.000 Who are going to want to feel a need to anaesthetise themselves.

00:37:14.000 Now, that's not a good solution.

00:37:16.000 Obviously, I don't think heroin, opioids, these are not good solutions to these problems.

00:37:21.000 But it's not a crazy solution either.

00:37:24.000 There's a line I think of all the time.

00:37:26.000 I don't quote it very often because...

00:37:29.000 People can really react against this insight.

00:37:31.000 I think it's actually important.

00:37:32.000 You know, Marianne Faithfull, the great, like, 60s British singer?

00:37:35.000 She went out with Mick Jagger.

00:37:36.000 Annoyingly, that's why people remember.

00:37:37.000 She's much better than Mick Jagger.

00:37:39.000 In her memoir, she had a heroin addiction in the 60s.

00:37:42.000 She was homeless for a while.

00:37:43.000 She has this very challenging line that I think about a lot.

00:37:46.000 I'm going to phrase it slightly wrong.

00:37:47.000 But she said, heroin saved my life.

00:37:51.000 Because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself at that point.

00:37:55.000 Now, Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin was a good solution to her homelessness.

00:37:59.000 But we've got to understand this drug use is happening because it performs a function, right?

00:38:05.000 One 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?

00:38:16.000 They are telling us something.

00:38:17.000 The 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.

00:38:29.000 That is a signal that is telling us something.

00:38:31.000 And that's because of drug addiction?

00:38:33.000 Overwhelmingly because of drug addiction and suicide.

00:38:35.000 It's risen to that point.

00:38:36.000 There are other factors going on, like obesity, but the main drivers are overdose and suicide.

00:38:42.000 That is telling us something.

00:38:44.000 And what we've been doing up to now is we've been insulting that signal.

00:38:47.000 We've either been saying depressed people, addicted people are just weak.

00:38:51.000 Or we've been saying, oh, it's just a problem in their brain.

00:38:54.000 There are real things going on in their brains, of course.

00:38:57.000 Or we've been saying, you know, it's just craziness.

00:39:01.000 But, in fact, it is largely a response to the way we're living.

00:39:05.000 Of course, there are other things going on as well, and we can talk about them.

00:39:09.000 And once you understand that, you realise there's got to be a deeper response.

00:39:13.000 And I went to places that had done that, not just Switzerland.

00:39:16.000 Switzerland, what is the overall population?

00:39:19.000 Five and a half million.

00:39:21.000 So it's a fairly small country.

00:39:23.000 How much money do they have to spend to keep this program going? 0.96

00:39:27.000 What is the time constraints in terms of how long is a person who's got an addiction problem allowed to stay there and receive treatment?

00:39:35.000 We're good to go.

00:39:56.000 And 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.

00:40:06.000 It's actually cheaper than...

00:40:10.000 The police constantly harassing people, putting them in prison, putting them on trial.

00:40:14.000 Those are really expensive things to do.

00:40:16.000 Heroin is unbelievably cheap if you buy it legally, right?

00:40:18.000 Well, I would think the amount of money they would save just in street crime being radically reduced.

00:40:23.000 Exactly.

00:40:23.000 It makes the life of the person with addiction better.

00:40:26.000 It makes the lives of other citizens who were not addicted better.

00:40:31.000 And it saves money, right?

00:40:33.000 Which is why Swiss people are very pragmatic.

00:40:35.000 They're not, you know, the most compassionate people, but they are very pragmatic people.

00:40:39.000 That's why it was so popular.

00:40:41.000 Let's think about another place that adopted really different drug policies, right?

00:40:46.000 Because I think it's something we can learn from there as well.

00:40:48.000 So Portugal... 0.98

00:40:50.000 Around the time Switzerland's having its horrific heroin crisis, Portugal is having a fucking nightmare, right? 0.89

00:40:55.000 By the year 2000, 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is incredible, right? 0.79

00:41:01.000 And 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. 0.71

00:41:09.000 And then one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they're like, we can't go on like this, what are we going to do?

00:41:16.000 And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the drug war began in this country 70 years before.

00:41:22.000 They said, should we, like, ask some scientists what the best thing to do would be?

00:41:27.000 So 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.

00:41:40.000 And they said to them, you guys just go away.

00:41:44.000 Look at all the evidence and figure out what the hell we can do.

00:41:47.000 So 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,

00:42:04.000 arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.

00:42:10.000 And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment here in the United States, right?

00:42:14.000 So they do some residential rehab that has some value.

00:42:18.000 Main thing they did was a big program of job creation for people with addiction problems.

00:42:22.000 Say you used to be a mechanic.

00:42:23.000 They go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages.

00:42:29.000 Again, much cheaper than sending him to prison, right?

00:42:31.000 They set up a big program of small loans so people with addiction problems could set up and run businesses, the things that they thought were important.

00:42:38.000 At the time, people are like, this is crazy, they're just going to spend it all on drugs, lunacy, right?

00:42:42.000 By the time I went to Portugal, it was, again, 13 years since this had begun, and the results were in.

00:42:47.000 Addiction was down by 50%.

00:42:49.000 This is by figures from the British Journal of Criminology, the best scientific study of this.

00:42:55.000 Overdose deaths were massively down.

00:42:56.000 HIV was massively down.

00:42:59.000 Every single indicator on problems related to drug use had fallen like a cliff, right?

00:43:04.000 It wasn't perfect, they've still got problems, of course, but there was that massive improvement.

00:43:07.000 And one of the reasons you know it works so well is that virtually no one in Portugal wants to go back.

00:43:12.000 I 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.

00:43:21.000 And 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.

00:43:32.000 And when I went to see him, the audio's on the Chasing the Screen website, he said something like...

00:43:38.000 Everything I said would happen didn't happen.

00:43:40.000 And everything the other side said would happen did.

00:43:42.000 And 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.

00:43:51.000 And this is something that I saw all over the world, right?

00:43:54.000 The places that have drug policies based on shame and stigma and the fantasy that you can get rid of drug use, which you can never do...

00:44:03.000 They have really terrible and rising problems.

00:44:06.000 The 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?

00:44:19.000 Again, not perfect, but it was such a significant improvement.

00:44:23.000 The support in Portugal...

00:44:24.000 I mean, they've got five main political parties.

00:44:26.000 None of them want to go back, right?

00:44:27.000 That tells you something.

00:44:28.000 Right.

00:44:29.000 Yeah.

00:44:30.000 Now, when they did this in Switzerland, what was the primary cause for this drug addiction and how did they deal with that?

00:44:38.000 So 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.

00:44:47.000 What 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?

00:44:54.000 So it's a combination.

00:44:55.000 They gave people lots of therapy.

00:44:56.000 So I remember one of the people I spent some time with in that clinic had been terribly sexually abused.

00:45:02.000 There's a lot of evidence that giving survivors of sexual abuse safe places in which they can release their shame about that leads to a big fall in depression, addiction and other problems.

00:45:10.000 There's a lot of evidence that that kind of abuse is a big driver of a lot of addiction for a lot of people, though clearly not everyone.

00:45:18.000 Some of it was just there were people who had never been given a chance in life or had never had stable lives.

00:45:24.000 It was kind of a mixture of things.

00:45:26.000 And one of the things that's really good about the Swiss system is it wasn't saying in this kind of cookie-cutter way that often happens in drug treatment in the United States, although there's plenty of good examples as well, you know.

00:45:37.000 You don't arrive and they say, this is your problem.

00:45:39.000 We're here to tell you your problem and how to solve your problem.

00:45:42.000 It's very much guided by actually the person themselves, right?

00:45:46.000 People who are in deep pain, the core of it is you have to listen to them, right?

00:45:50.000 If we think about this addiction, depression in the way that I'm arguing that we should see them as signals that are telling us something, the most important thing is to listen to the signal, right?

00:45:59.000 I remember something I thought about a lot.

00:46:00.000 I had this weird experience.

00:46:02.000 That I kept thinking about all the time I was writing my book, Lost Connections, about depression.

00:46:06.000 And it was only quite late in the day that I realised why I kept thinking about it so much.

00:46:11.000 I was in Vietnam about five years ago now, maybe a little bit less. 0.99

00:46:16.000 And I did this really stupid thing. 0.87

00:46:18.000 I was in Hanoi and I was really tired. 0.98

00:46:20.000 I was doing research for a different book that I hadn't finished yet.

00:46:23.000 And by the side of the road, I saw this big red apple, women selling it.

00:46:29.000 And I'm shit at haggling, so I paid like $5 for this apple or something, and I took it back to my hotel. 0.94

00:46:33.000 I was so tired, I lay on the bed, and I start eating it, and it was just gross, right? 0.96

00:46:37.000 It was something really...

00:46:38.000 It's chemical taste.

00:46:40.000 It was like how I imagined food would taste after a nuclear war when I used to watch those films in the 80s, right?

00:46:46.000 But I was so tired, even though I knew it was wrong, I ate like half of it and threw it in the garbage.

00:46:51.000 And next, like, four days, I was just like violently sick, right?

00:46:56.000 Like, just in it, like, something from The Exorcist, right?

00:46:59.000 So I'm lying there in front of CNN and occasionally projectile vomiting.

00:47:03.000 But I'd had food poisoning before.

00:47:05.000 I basically lived on fried chicken in my 20s, so I was not new to this rodeo.

00:47:08.000 And 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.

00:47:18.000 I'm like, look, I'm only here for another three days or whatever it was.

00:47:21.000 I've got to go and meet these people, otherwise this whole trip would have been a waste of time.

00:47:24.000 So he drives me like six or seven hours into the countryside.

00:47:27.000 And we get there and he's lined up these people for me to interview.

00:47:29.000 And I'm like, oh my God, I feel so bad actually.

00:47:32.000 I 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.

00:47:38.000 So I'm talking to her.

00:47:40.000 And as she's speaking, the room starts to...

00:47:43.000 I've never had this feeling before.

00:47:44.000 I've had a feeling when you're drunk, when you feel the room's moving, but it literally felt like the room was moving around me.

00:47:48.000 Like, I didn't feel like I was disorientated.

00:47:51.000 And then, while she's talking, I just, like, explode all over her heart.

00:47:54.000 Oh, no! 1.00

00:47:56.000 From both ends, like, fucking horror show, right? 0.99

00:47:59.000 And so, I say to Huang, just take me back... 0.99

00:48:02.000 Put me in the car, take me back to Hanoi, right?

00:48:05.000 Right?

00:48:06.000 And this old woman's saying something to him, and I'm just lying there.

00:48:09.000 And she says, you've got to go to the hospital, you're really sick.

00:48:12.000 And I'm like, no, no, I just need to go back to the hotel.

00:48:14.000 And he said, Johan, this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War in this village.

00:48:18.000 I'm going to listen to her health advice over yours.

00:48:21.000 We're going to the hospital.

00:48:22.000 So we go to this hospital where I'm pretty sure I was the only European who'd ever been treated.

00:48:25.000 They take me in, and Hwang's completely lying, going like, this is an important Westerner.

00:48:29.000 It will disgrace Vietnam if he dies here, right? 1.00

00:48:31.000 And so I'm lying there.

00:48:34.000 And they're like jabbing me with everything and I'm like, what's going on?

00:48:38.000 And they're asking me lots of questions and I felt the most nauseous I've ever felt, right?

00:48:43.000 And I kept saying to them, give me something for the nausea through Juan because they didn't speak in English.

00:48:48.000 And the doctor said to me, You need your nausea.

00:48:52.000 It will tell us what's wrong with you.

00:48:54.000 Even lying there, I was thinking, that's kind of interesting.

00:48:56.000 I was thinking lying there and thinking, they figured out it was the apple.

00:48:59.000 I remember having such a ridiculous thought where I thought, okay, I'm about to die.

00:49:04.000 I've been killed by an apple. 0.52

00:49:06.000 I'm like Eve or like Snow White or like Alan Turing.

00:49:09.000 And then I was like... 1.00

00:49:10.000 You're about to die and your last thought is that you're basically a pretentious cunt, right? 1.00

00:49:14.000 I was horrified by myself. 1.00

00:49:16.000 Anyway, they gave me this treatment and a few days later when I leave, I'm talking to the doctor and I was discussing various things with him.

00:49:24.000 And I said to him, what would have happened if I had gone back to Hanoi, if he'd driven me back to Hanoi?

00:49:28.000 And he said, oh, well, what happened is my kidneys had stopped working because I hadn't kept any water in for four days.

00:49:33.000 So it was like I had been in the desert for four days.

00:49:35.000 And the doctor said, oh, you would have died on the journey.

00:49:37.000 You wouldn't have made it.

00:49:38.000 And...

00:49:39.000 So I kept thinking about this experience, which weirdly didn't actually affect my worldview or anything.

00:49:43.000 It's the closest I've ever had to a near-death experience.

00:49:45.000 But 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.

00:49:53.000 And 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?

00:50:07.000 As like a kind of malfunction, right?

00:50:09.000 Something that you should get rid of.

00:50:10.000 And actually...

00:50:12.000 What we need to do is hear it, right?

00:50:14.000 Because it will tell us what's wrong with us, right?

00:50:16.000 It doesn't mean it's a good feeling.

00:50:17.000 It's awful, right?

00:50:18.000 Depression is the worst thing I've ever felt.

00:50:20.000 Addiction is a terrible state to be in.

00:50:21.000 It's not saying just in some kind of, you know, way, oh, we need to put up with it.

00:50:25.000 It's that if we hear the signal, we can begin to find solutions.

00:50:29.000 And all the places I went, the places that have solved depression crises that I went to for Lost Connections, places that have solved addiction crises that I went to for Chasing the Screen...

00:50:37.000 There are places that have said, actually this means something, right?

00:50:41.000 Your pain makes sense.

00:50:42.000 You 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.

00:50:54.000 So did they figure out in Switzerland what was causing this rash of addiction?

00:50:58.000 And just by treating, it seems like if there is some underlying condition that's causing this depression that's leading people to drug addiction, they're just giving them free heroin is not going to fix the root cause.

00:51:09.000 So how did they find out what the root cause was and why was such an epidemic?

00:51:13.000 You're totally right.

00:51:15.000 The heroin does two things.

00:51:18.000 Partly, as you become addicted, you spiral.

00:51:21.000 For people who don't have huge private resources, some people do, right?

00:51:26.000 As you become addicted, what happens to a lot of people is you spiral into chaotic street use, right?

00:51:31.000 So for a lot of women, that means sex work. 1.00

00:51:34.000 For a lot of men, that means property crime.

00:51:36.000 Some men, sex work as well, but mostly not.

00:51:39.000 And so what happens is actually you become, you know, you develop an addiction because you're dealing with this pain, but then you actually move into a much more chaotic way of living, right?

00:51:48.000 Which causes deeper pain and deeper pain. 0.97

00:51:50.000 Obviously if you're being fucked by strangers every day and they're treating you badly. 0.99

00:51:55.000 You're going to want to be even more anaesthetised after that, right? 0.99

00:51:57.000 Or if you're frightened of the police all the time.

00:52:00.000 So what happens is, partly what happened in Switzerland was giving people the legal heroin ended the chaos of street use, which in itself was making addiction worse.

00:52:09.000 And that's clearly not the cause, because you don't start out as a street user.

00:52:13.000 So it was partly that.

00:52:14.000 And I think it was partly...

00:52:17.000 Attending to people's deeper distress.

00:52:19.000 And it's not like there's one cookie cutter thing that was the answer.

00:52:23.000 It was listening to different people at different stages and looking at...

00:52:27.000 They'd had some problems with unemployment, but you don't want to overstate that.

00:52:30.000 They'd have...

00:52:31.000 We're good to go.

00:52:53.000 Anything that reduces the shame, stigma and humiliation will, over time, reduce addiction for most people.

00:52:59.000 Not everyone.

00:53:00.000 Some people are in such internal agony.

00:53:02.000 They will always need anaesthetics.

00:53:04.000 And this, I think, is a really important point and one that can be quite challenging to some people, including people like me, who have people they love with addiction problems.

00:53:12.000 So where I open Chasing the Scream is with this story that I think a lot of people... 0.90

00:53:18.000 Think, why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this? 0.84

00:53:20.000 And I think it tells you so much. 0.98

00:53:22.000 So, in 1939, in a hotel in midtown Manhattan, Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, walked on stage.

00:53:29.000 And she sang for the first time a song that I'm sure all your listeners and viewers have heard.

00:53:34.000 It's a song called Strange Fruit, right?

00:53:36.000 It's a song against lynching.

00:53:38.000 It'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? 1.00

00:53:45.000 This was unbelievably challenging at that time.

00:53:47.000 There were very few popular songs like that.

00:53:51.000 And to have an African-American woman doing it was quite shocking. 1.00

00:53:54.000 She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel.

00:53:57.000 They made her go through the service elevator because she was African-American. 0.97

00:54:01.000 And 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?

00:54:11.000 And you think, well, wait, what's this got to do with the war on drugs?

00:54:13.000 So 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.

00:54:22.000 So Harry Anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending.

00:54:29.000 So you've had this big war on alcohol. 0.97

00:54:31.000 It's been a shitshow. 0.97

00:54:32.000 It's been a disaster. 0.98

00:54:33.000 And he takes it over.

00:54:35.000 And he wants to keep his government department going.

00:54:37.000 And he invents the modern war on drugs.

00:54:40.000 He's the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs.

00:54:43.000 And he really builds this war on drugs around two intense hatreds he has.

00:54:48.000 And Billie Holiday is the personification of both. 0.75

00:54:51.000 One was a really intense hatred of African-Americans. 0.69

00:54:55.000 I mean, he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s, which gives you a sense of how racist he was. 0.90

00:55:01.000 He used the N-word so often in official memos, his own senator said he should have to resign. 0.70

00:55:06.000 That's how hardcore he was, right?

00:55:07.000 And he also had an intense hatred of people with addiction problems.

00:55:12.000 And Billie Holiday, she'd grown up on the streets of Baltimore, a part of Baltimore called Pigtown. 0.91

00:55:17.000 When she was 10, she was horrific. 0.70

00:55:19.000 She was raped. 0.98

00:55:20.000 The man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half. 0.97

00:55:23.000 She was sent to reformatory for longer than he got, right? 0.80

00:55:27.000 She was tormented by the nuns there.

00:55:29.000 They said she was disobedient. 0.99

00:55:31.000 She brought it on herself.

00:55:32.000 They used to lock her in with dead bodies overnight to teach her a lesson. 0.85

00:55:35.000 She eventually ran away.

00:55:37.000 She tried to find her mother.

00:55:38.000 Her mother had gone to what's now called Roosevelt Island now.

00:55:41.000 It wasn't called that then.

00:55:42.000 Where 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,

00:56:01.000 Billie Holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that, right?

00:56:06.000 So she starts out using loads of alcohol and then she's using loads of other stuff as well, mostly heroin. 0.99

00:56:12.000 And 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? 0.99

00:56:25.000 And at that point, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. 0.99

00:56:28.000 The first man he sent to track her is a man called, follow her around, is a guy called Jimmy Fletcher.

00:56:35.000 Harry 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.

00:56:43.000 So he employed this African-American guy called Jimmy Fletcher, whose job title was a bag man.

00:56:47.000 So he was given the job, follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right?

00:56:53.000 He dances with her in nightclubs.

00:56:55.000 He gets to know her really well.

00:56:56.000 And Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her.

00:57:00.000 And his whole life he felt really ashamed of what he did.

00:57:03.000 He busts her. 1.00

00:57:05.000 When they come in to search her, she pisses in front of him and says, you can look in my pussy. 1.00

00:57:12.000 You can see I don't have anything here. 1.00

00:57:14.000 She's put on trial. 0.98

00:57:15.000 The trial was called the United States versus Billie Holiday, and she said that's how it fucking felt. 0.98

00:57:20.000 She's sent to prison for 18 months. 0.98

00:57:22.000 She doesn't sing a word in prison. 0.93

00:57:24.000 But what happened to her next, I think, is the cruelest thing.

00:57:27.000 She gets out of prison.

00:57:29.000 And at that time, to sing anywhere where they served alcohol, you needed what was called a cabaret performer's license.

00:57:35.000 Ann Slinger makes sure she doesn't get it.

00:57:37.000 So one of her friends, Yolanda Bavan, who's also a great jazz singer, said to me, what's the cruelest thing you can do to a person?

00:57:43.000 It's to take away the thing they love, right?

00:57:45.000 They take away singing from Billie Holiday.

00:57:47.000 It's what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States, right?

00:57:50.000 We give them criminal records that make it much harder to do the things that are meaningful to them by work, for example.

00:57:56.000 So in that situation, obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? 0.88

00:58:00.000 She starts using a shit ton of heroin again. 0.95

00:58:02.000 One day in the early 50s, she collapses, not far from where she'd first sung Strange Fruit. 0.97

00:58:09.000 The first hospital won't even take her because she's got an addiction problem. 0.98

00:58:13.000 They said, we're not having her.

00:58:14.000 Second hospital takes her, but she says to her friend, Maylee Dufty, on the way in, that Anslinger's men weren't done with her.

00:58:22.000 They were going to come for her.

00:58:23.000 She said, they're going to kill me in there. 0.91

00:58:24.000 Don't let them. 1.00

00:58:25.000 They're going to kill me.

00:58:26.000 She wasn't wrong. 1.00

00:58:27.000 So in the hospital, she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer.

00:58:32.000 Probably related to her severe alcoholism.

00:58:36.000 And in the hospital, she goes into heroin withdrawal.

00:58:41.000 So 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?

00:58:47.000 Like when you're old or you've...

00:58:50.000 Anslinger's men come.

00:58:51.000 They arrest her on her hospital bed.

00:58:54.000 They handcuff her to the hospital bed.

00:58:56.000 I 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.

00:59:03.000 They handcuff her to a hospital bed.

00:59:05.000 They don't let her friends in to see her.

00:59:06.000 They don't let her even have candies. 1.00

00:59:08.000 Outside, Reverend Callender led protests with signs saying, let Lady Day live. 0.92

00:59:13.000 There were big protests.

00:59:15.000 They knew they were killing her, right?

00:59:17.000 Then after 10 days they cut off the methadone and she died the next day.

00:59:21.000 One of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life.

00:59:27.000 There's loads of things about this story which is being made into a movie.

00:59:30.000 Lee Daniels is directing it.

00:59:34.000 There's so many things about this story that tell us what this war on drugs is about, right?

00:59:38.000 Firstly, it's about...

00:59:39.000 It's effect.

00:59:42.000 It's about shaming addicts and its effect is it makes addicts worse, right?

00:59:45.000 You see that with Billie Holiday, you see that everywhere.

00:59:47.000 Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right?

00:59:51.000 At the same time that Harry Anslinger found out Billie Holiday had a heroin addiction, he found out Judy Garland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, had a heroin addiction.

00:59:57.000 It changes how you watch The Wizard of Oz when you know that.

01:00:00.000 And he went to the studio and he advised...

01:00:03.000 He said to Judy Garland and to the studio, she should take longer vacations.

01:00:08.000 Spot the difference. 0.99

01:00:09.000 With a white woman, Judy Garland, longer vacations, with Billie Holiday, fucking destroy her, right? 0.99

01:00:14.000 In fact, one of the agents he sent to destroy her, a man called George White, who's got a tractor in the last days of her life. 1.00

01:00:20.000 We now know, I mean, he's literally a psychopath. 0.74

01:00:23.000 We're good to go.

01:00:42.000 It'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.

01:00:51.000 That is indeed a heroic story.

01:00:53.000 Everyone watching this who's managed to do that is a hero, and I massively love and congratulate them.

01:00:59.000 But that is not the only heroic story we should tell about people with addiction problems.

01:01:03.000 Billie Holiday never stopped using drugs. 0.99

01:01:05.000 She was still a fucking hero. 1.00

01:01:07.000 She never let these people stop her singing that song. 1.00

01:01:11.000 She would go to the places where you didn't have a license. 1.00

01:01:14.000 She'd go to the worst parts of the Deep South. 0.89

01:01:16.000 She sang Strange Fruit.

01:01:18.000 People threw bottles at her.

01:01:20.000 They stubbed out cigarettes on her.

01:01:21.000 She never stopped singing that song, right?

01:01:24.000 And 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.

01:01:35.000 And all over the world, every day, we are still following the policies of Harry Anslinger, and it makes us weaker.

01:01:41.000 And this conflict that begins right at the start of the drug...

01:01:45.000 And I think, if I'm honest, I think...

01:01:47.000 This isn't an easy thing to say, but I think one of the reasons why the debate about the drug war is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of all of us, right?

01:01:57.000 Anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem, as I do...

01:02:02.000 There's a Harry Anslinger in your head, right? 0.97

01:02:04.000 There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks, someone should just fucking stop you. 0.96

01:02:07.000 Why are you doing this? 0.98

01:02:08.000 Someone should stop you doing this.

01:02:10.000 And then, for most people, there's another part that's like, okay, that anger isn't useful in most cases.

01:02:19.000 Actually, you're doing this for a reason.

01:02:20.000 We need to understand those reasons.

01:02:22.000 We need to help you to change your life, right?

01:02:25.000 But that conflict is very deep in us.

01:02:28.000 And Harry Anslinger...

01:02:30.000 The war he invented, and we can talk about what he did with cannabis and loads of other things, but because he invented the ban on cannabis, that war is still playing out.

01:02:40.000 Does that make sense?

01:02:40.000 I know that was a long answer, but...

01:02:42.000 Sorry!

01:02:43.000 No, it does make sense, and it's a horrific story about Billie Holiday.

01:02:47.000 And I had no idea that Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was also addicted.

01:02:52.000 And the Munchkins, a lot of them as well. 0.98

01:02:55.000 Now, Harry, why was Harry Anslinger's hate towards her so extreme?

01:03:01.000 So 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.

01:03:10.000 His dad was actually a refugee from, well, refugee in a bit comms, immigrant from Switzerland.

01:03:15.000 And they grew up in this farmhouse, and in the next farmhouse down, there was a A farmer's wife who had a heroin addiction. 0.99

01:03:24.000 Sorry, a morphine addiction.

01:03:26.000 It would have been heroin then.

01:03:28.000 And Harry Anseling had this really haunting memory of going to that house and hearing this woman scream and scream.

01:03:34.000 And him being sent to take the horse and cart.

01:03:35.000 I think he was 11 or something.

01:03:37.000 Being sent to take the horse and cart into town to go to the pharmacy to get her the morphine and then bringing it back and her scream stopping.

01:03:43.000 The lesson he took from that is these drugs are evil and we need to destroy them.

01:03:47.000 Especially later on, he was in Europe during the First World War.

01:03:52.000 And he had this very keen...

01:03:53.000 He was a diplomat. 0.99

01:03:54.000 He had this very keen sense that civilization was incredibly fragile, it could collapse at any moment, that you only need a little bit of contamination and it would all go to shit. 0.99

01:04:06.000 And so he... 0.89

01:04:08.000 Yeah, 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.

01:04:13.000 And I felt like what I was doing, going to all these different places from the killing fields in Mexico to Portugal and Switzerland...

01:04:19.000 Was 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.

01:04:30.000 Yeah, but I still don't understand why he had this intense...

01:04:32.000 With Billie Holiday.

01:04:33.000 Yeah. 0.82

01:04:33.000 So, well, she's an African-American woman standing up to white supremacy who has an addiction problem. 0.82

01:04:38.000 But the truth is, what he did to Billie Holiday is not...

01:04:41.000 It's not...

01:04:42.000 This is what he did to African-Americans and to people with addiction problems.

01:04:46.000 Billie Holiday just happens to be famous, so I'm telling her story.

01:04:49.000 But this is what he did to huge numbers of people, right?

01:04:51.000 He wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene.

01:04:54.000 One of the amazing things, spending time in his...

01:04:57.000 Archives in Penn State was seeing all these memos from his agents.

01:05:02.000 He said to them, go to your local jazz club, document the evil things that are happening there.

01:05:06.000 And the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious, right?

01:05:08.000 There'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.

01:05:16.000 And had a lyric that said, when he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean.

01:05:21.000 And he's like, there is going to be an epidemic of drowning across the United States as people use cannabis because they're going to believe they can walk on water.

01:05:30.000 So he would...

01:05:30.000 I mean, literally, they're hilarious.

01:05:32.000 He said, you know, he believed that...

01:05:35.000 When you smoke cannabis, time slows down, so a minute seems to last a thousand years.

01:05:39.000 These extraordinarily heightened, crazy things that he would say.

01:05:43.000 At that time, when he first takes over what becomes the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, You know, cocaine and heroin just aren't very popular, right?

01:05:52.000 There's just not much of a war to fight.

01:05:54.000 I mean, they exist, but they're not that popular.

01:05:55.000 They're confined to small urban scenes.

01:05:58.000 Cannabis was more popular, not as popular as it is now, but...

01:06:01.000 And he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful.

01:06:08.000 We're good to go.

01:06:26.000 And he starts trying to get support for a ban on cannabis.

01:06:29.000 And he latches onto one case in particular.

01:06:32.000 And it's important because I think we're hearing these things again now.

01:06:35.000 So 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.

01:06:44.000 And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst Newspapers, Anslinger announces, this is what will happen if you use cannabis. 0.64

01:06:53.000 Literally, you will kill your family with an axe, right?

01:06:56.000 And this becomes a very famous story across the United States, and cannabis is banned in its wake.

01:07:01.000 Years later, someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Lycona.

01:07:04.000 There wasn't even evidence he'd ever used cannabis, right?

01:07:07.000 He'd had terrible problems with psychosis.

01:07:09.000 His family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized, and they refused.

01:07:13.000 They kept him at home.

01:07:16.000 We're hearing these scare stories again about cannabis.

01:07:20.000 There's something that Anslinger said that I think could be like the motto for the entire drug war.

01:07:25.000 So Anslinger introduces this ban in the US. He promises drugs will disappear, right?

01:07:31.000 You will have noticed drugs did not disappear.

01:07:33.000 He starts to say, well that's just because evil foreign countries like Mexico are flooding our country with drugs.

01:07:38.000 You'll notice that's come back as well.

01:07:40.000 So what we need to do is force all these other countries to ban them as well and then they'll disappear.

01:07:44.000 So the US in the wake of the Second World War really has the power to do that.

01:07:47.000 The world is in ruins.

01:07:49.000 And there's one place, when he goes to the new United Nations, and he's insisting this happens, and they're basically threatening people.

01:07:54.000 They're saying, we'll cut off your foreign aid, or you won't be allowed to sell goods to the US market if you don't do this.

01:08:00.000 The ambassador from Thailand is like, well, you know, it doesn't seem to have worked very well in your country.

01:08:05.000 We've actually got a long pattern of established drug use in Thailand.

01:08:08.000 We don't really have many problems.

01:08:10.000 We don't want to do this.

01:08:11.000 And Anslinger said to him, I've made up my mind.

01:08:14.000 Don't try to confuse me with the facts.

01:08:17.000 And I always feel like, That's the drug war, right?

01:08:20.000 I made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts. 0.93

01:08:23.000 Well, 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. 0.84

01:08:41.000 It was a wild Mexican tobacco, right? 0.95

01:08:46.000 Yeah.

01:08:47.000 But didn't Nixon do a similar thing with the sweeping Psychedelic Act of 1970?

01:08:53.000 He did it so that they could infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement because there were so many people in the Civil Rights Movement that were using various psychedelic drugs.

01:09:01.000 They could use it as an excuse to crack down on them and lock them up and put them in jail and pit them against each other and have them inform on each other.

01:09:09.000 Yeah, this is really important.

01:09:11.000 You cannot enforce the drug laws against everyone who's broken them.

01:09:14.000 It is impossible.

01:09:15.000 Half of all Americans, by a conservative estimate, have broken the drug laws, right?

01:09:18.000 So what do you do?

01:09:19.000 Everywhere in the world, the drug laws are used to persecute groups the state wants to persecute for other reasons, right?

01:09:26.000 So one of the people I write about in Chasing the Scream is...

01:09:30.000 A woman who really had a kind of epiphany about this, right? 0.98

01:09:33.000 So, Lee Maddox was a cop in Baltimore.

01:09:35.000 She used to do the I-95. 1.00

01:09:38.000 And she would very proudly bust people who even had a single joint, right? 0.97

01:09:42.000 She was a real... 0.60

01:09:43.000 Harriet Anslinger's dream girl.

01:09:44.000 And she had signed up to become a cop, which is really interesting personally.

01:09:48.000 She'd signed up to become a cop for quite a personal reason.

01:09:50.000 As a kid, she'd had a best friend, a kid and teenager, called Lisa.

01:09:55.000 They looked really similar.

01:09:56.000 They shared a fake ID. They were like sisters.

01:09:59.000 And one day when they were in their late teens, they went to Ocean City for a day out.

01:10:05.000 And Lisa decided to hitchhike back to New Jersey where she lived. 0.99

01:10:09.000 And so Lisa said bye to her.

01:10:11.000 And the next day she gets a call saying Lisa had not arrived.

01:10:14.000 So she waits and waits.

01:10:16.000 She has this terrible summer waiting to find out what happened.

01:10:18.000 And then they discover that Lisa had been gang raped and murdered.

01:10:23.000 Her body was found underneath a house where it had been eaten by animals.

01:10:27.000 And Lee became convinced at that time that Lisa had, for various reasons, that Lisa had been killed as part of a gang initiation ceremony.

01:10:35.000 She's like, I'm going to destroy these gangs.

01:10:38.000 I'm going to dedicate my life to destroying these gangs.

01:10:40.000 She goes and applies to become a police officer.

01:10:42.000 And for years she's this, you know, hardline cop, right?

01:10:47.000 Takes real pleasure in busting people.

01:10:50.000 But Lee started to notice a few things.

01:10:53.000 First thing was, when you're a cop and you arrest a rapist, there are fewer rapes in your town the next week, right? 0.58

01:11:01.000 When you are a cop and you bust a pedophile, fewer children get sexually abused.

01:11:05.000 But she knows when you bust a dealer, There's no fewer dealers.

01:11:09.000 There's someone on the corner the next day for sure, right?

01:11:11.000 It didn't seem to be having any effect.

01:11:13.000 In 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.

01:11:27.000 So the best way to explain this is, if you imagine...

01:11:30.000 Obviously, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right?

01:11:33.000 They're transferred from the people who used to control them, licensed legal businesses, to armed criminal gangs, right?

01:11:39.000 And these armed criminal gangs operate in a different way to legal businesses.

01:11:43.000 So if you imagine, if you and me decided we want to go and steal now a bottle of vodka, right?

01:11:47.000 We go into a local liquor store, and that store catches us.

01:11:51.000 They'll call the cops.

01:11:52.000 The cops will come and take us away.

01:11:53.000 That liquor store doesn't need to be violent.

01:11:55.000 It doesn't need to be intimidating.

01:11:56.000 They've got the power of the law to uphold their property rights.

01:11:59.000 Okay, now imagine we wanted to steal a bag of coke, right?

01:12:03.000 If we go to the guy near here, I'm sure there is someone who sells coke, and he catches us.

01:12:09.000 He can't call the cops, obviously.

01:12:11.000 Cops would arrest him.

01:12:12.000 He has to fight us.

01:12:13.000 Now, if you're a dealer, you don't want to be having a fight every day, right? 0.99

01:12:16.000 You want to establish a reputation for being so frightening that no one will dare to fuck with you, right? 0.97

01:12:21.000 So you establish your place in that neighbourhood through aggression, through violence, and you maintain it through aggression and violence, right? 0.99

01:12:27.000 Legal businesses compete on cost and quality of product. 0.99

01:12:31.000 In illegal markets, people compete on how much of a frightening fucker you're prepared to be, right? 0.98

01:12:37.000 As a writer called Charles Bowden put it, The war on drugs creates a war for drugs, right? 0.99

01:12:44.000 It transfers it to these criminal gangs who have to operate through violence to protect their property rights.

01:12:50.000 So Lee goes into the drug war thinking, I'm the one stopping these gangs. 0.99

01:12:55.000 She realises, shit, I'm the one enabling them, right? 0.99

01:12:58.000 They control one of the biggest industries in the world because of this police action and because of this decision to prohibit these drugs. 0.99

01:13:06.000 And if you want to know how much of this violence is caused by...

01:13:11.000 By the fact that we prohibited it, just ask yourself, where are the violent alcohol dealers, right?

01:13:16.000 Everyone knows who Al Capone was.

01:13:19.000 Does the head of Smirnoff go and shoot the head of Budweiser in the face, right? 0.91

01:13:23.000 Does your local bar go and send a bunch of kids to go and shoot everyone in the next bar down? 0.96

01:13:27.000 Of course not.

01:13:28.000 Exactly that happened under alcohol prohibition.

01:13:30.000 When did it end?

01:13:31.000 It ended on the day alcohol prohibition ended.

01:13:34.000 Because legal markets don't compete with that.

01:13:36.000 So Lee's partly having this insight, right? 0.99

01:13:38.000 She's realising, shit, I think I'm taking down these gangs. 0.99

01:13:40.000 I'm actually empowering them. 0.99

01:13:42.000 What will really disempower them is reclaiming the market and making it legal.

01:13:45.000 But she also has another really painful realisation.

01:13:48.000 So early in her career as a cop, Lee had done this really brave thing.

01:13:52.000 She'd gone undercover with the Klan to expose them. 0.95

01:13:55.000 She'd done a really important work in breaking up parts of the Maryland Klan.

01:13:58.000 She really was not a racist, right?

01:14:00.000 She'd had relationships with African-American men.

01:14:03.000 But 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? 0.91

01:14:13.000 One of her colleagues, Matthew Fogg, once went to his superior officer and said, you know...

01:14:20.000 This is a bit weird, right?

01:14:21.000 We only ever seem to go to African-American neighborhoods to do all our drug busts. 1.00

01:14:24.000 I'm fairly sure white people sometimes use drugs. 0.58

01:14:27.000 Should we go to like a white neighborhood as well? 0.98

01:14:29.000 And the supervisor said, of course, you're right. 1.00

01:14:31.000 White people use drugs. 1.00

01:14:32.000 But white people know journalists and lawyers and judges. 1.00

01:14:36.000 That's really... 1.00

01:14:37.000 That's just a whole load of shit for us. 1.00

01:14:38.000 Just go for the low-hanging fruit. 1.00

01:14:40.000 So Lee, who is not a racist...

01:14:43.000 Could see the effect of what she was doing was in fact racist, right?

01:14:47.000 And she was very uncomfortable with that.

01:14:48.000 And this really came to a head for Lee when Lee's police partner was a guy called Ed Totally, who she loved, platonically loved.

01:14:56.000 He was a great champion of women police officers.

01:14:58.000 He was a great guy.

01:14:59.000 And one day she gets a call at home.

01:15:01.000 Ed had been sent on a drug bust.

01:15:03.000 He was undercover.

01:15:04.000 And the guy had thought he was ripping him off and shot him in the head.

01:15:07.000 And Lee goes to see Ed's body and she's like...

01:15:10.000 What did he die for?

01:15:12.000 Right?

01:15:12.000 There are no fewer drug dealers.

01:15:14.000 Every time we arrest a drug dealer, the supply of drugs is not disrupted for one hour.

01:15:20.000 We are enforcing a racist war. 0.63

01:15:22.000 We are empowering these gangs.

01:15:24.000 Why are we doing this?

01:15:25.000 So Lee quit as a police officer.

01:15:28.000 She retrained as a lawyer.

01:15:29.000 She now gets the criminal records expunged whenever she can of the kind of people that she busted when she was a cop. 0.61

01:15:34.000 And she was part of a brilliant group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who are cops who argue for ending the drug war.

01:15:41.000 But it's interesting to me because...

01:15:43.000 It's hard to be Harry.

01:15:45.000 Lee was trying to be Harry Anslinger.

01:15:47.000 It's hard to be Harry Anslinger if you're an honest person with a conscience, right?

01:15:52.000 And there are police officers all over the country who are making these realisations now.

01:15:57.000 And that, you know, obviously, it's very close to my heart what we do to people with addiction problems.

01:16:06.000 But I don't...

01:16:07.000 Horrific and catastrophic, though, that is.

01:16:09.000 I don't actually think that's the biggest moral issue around the war on drugs.

01:16:13.000 The biggest moral issue is the violence created by prohibition, right?

01:16:17.000 If I think about places I've spent time like Colombia, Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico, that's the biggest issue, right?

01:16:24.000 More people have died in Latin America...

01:16:28.000 Central and South America in the drug war violence than have died in Syria.

01:16:32.000 I don't know what we can do about Syria. 0.98

01:16:34.000 We can end this violence.

01:16:35.000 There's a professor at Harvard called Jeffrey Myron who has a graph of the murder rate in the 20th century in the United States.

01:16:45.000 Massively shoots up the day alcohol is banned and falls like a stone the day alcohol is legalized, right?

01:16:49.000 And massively rises again when there's an intensification of the drug war later.

01:16:54.000 We can end a huge amount of this violence, right?

01:16:56.000 We can do what Switzerland did. 0.95

01:16:57.000 We can do what's happening here.

01:16:59.000 So what's stopping us?

01:17:01.000 So I think the main thing...

01:17:03.000 This is a logical conclusion based on facts and based on cases like Portugal and Switzerland.

01:17:09.000 There's obviously data.

01:17:10.000 So people are aware of this.

01:17:12.000 So people must be confronted with this data.

01:17:14.000 To this day, people know that the prohibition on alcohol was a massive disaster and no one would ever accept it again.

01:17:20.000 We're slowly starting to realize that marijuana, at least for some people, is safe and reasonable and should be used recreationally and has some massive benefits medically.

01:17:30.000 So we're starting to see legalization both for recreational use and clearly for medical use is spread.

01:17:37.000 I think it's like...

01:17:42.000 There's a certain amount of states where it's just fully legal recreationally and more where it's medical, but I think it's more than 18 states total now.

01:17:51.000 Soon we're going to be half of the American population.

01:17:54.000 It should be 100%, right?

01:17:55.000 It is in Canada.

01:17:57.000 Yes, it is in Canada, as it should be for alcohol.

01:18:00.000 But 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?

01:18:11.000 I think you've gone to the really important question.

01:18:13.000 So there's a range of things.

01:18:15.000 Is the public perception a big one?

01:18:17.000 I think you've gone to the most important, right?

01:18:19.000 So some people say it's the vested financial interest in the existing system.

01:18:22.000 That's true.

01:18:23.000 If you look at who funds the no campaigns whenever they want to legalize marijuana, you can see the interests, right?

01:18:29.000 Prison 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.

01:18:42.000 So it's partly that, but I think you're right.

01:18:44.000 I don't think that's the main thing that's going on.

01:18:45.000 It's significant and real, but I don't think it's the main thing that's going on.

01:18:48.000 The main thing, the main block is huge majorities of Americans, more than 80% say the war on drugs has failed and been a disaster.

01:18:57.000 And yet most people are afraid of the alternatives, right?

01:19:00.000 And that's part...

01:19:01.000 So I think there's two things going on.

01:19:02.000 There's ignorance about what the alternatives actually mean.

01:19:05.000 So 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...

01:19:13.000 It's because way too often in this debate, we talk like we're at a philosophy seminar.

01:19:18.000 People go, well, what would legalisation mean?

01:19:20.000 How would it work?

01:19:21.000 And they go into this weird, abstract conversation. 1.00

01:19:23.000 I'm like, fuck that. 0.99

01:19:24.000 Here's a plane ticket to Geneva. 0.99

01:19:26.000 Here's a plane ticket to Lisbon.

01:19:27.000 Here's a plane ticket to Colorado, right?

01:19:29.000 It's not rocket science, right?

01:19:31.000 I've been to the places that have tried these things.

01:19:33.000 We can see the results, right?

01:19:36.000 Legalisation is not an app, and decriminalisation, I can explain the difference if you want, are not...

01:19:42.000 What's the key differences between legalization and decriminalization?

01:19:45.000 So decriminalization is where you stop punishing users, but they still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get their drug.

01:19:51.000 Legalization is where you open up some legal route for people to get their drugs, and that varies according to the drug, right?

01:19:57.000 So I guess the kind of headline would be, decriminalization shuts down Orange is the New Black, and legalization shuts down Breaking Bad and Narcos, right?

01:20:04.000 And of course we need to do both, right?

01:20:05.000 We need to decriminalize use and legalize supply.

01:20:08.000 Did Mexico decriminalize a lot of drugs, like, fairly recently?

01:20:11.000 Yeah, so they had a big Supreme Court decision.

01:20:13.000 I spent a lot of time in Mexico, and I... You know, I think about...

01:20:19.000 I think about this time I spent in Mexico really often because it was...

01:20:26.000 I mean, I've been to a lot of bad places.

01:20:28.000 I've covered the war in the Congo.

01:20:29.000 I've been to Iraq.

01:20:30.000 I've been to Gaza.

01:20:31.000 I've never seen anything like what happened in Juarez when I was there.

01:20:35.000 The...

01:20:37.000 You know, I think it's worth explaining.

01:20:39.000 So, when you, like I was saying, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right?

01:20:46.000 They're transferred to armed criminal gangs.

01:20:47.000 If you live in a housing project in the United States where 5% of the economy of that housing project is in the hands of armed criminal gangs, that's going to be a shitty, frightening place to be, right?

01:20:57.000 A place like Ciudad Juarez, which is on the border with, Mexican side of the United States, border with them, it's the other side with El Paso.

01:21:07.000 By the time I went there, it was 70%, 70% of the economy was in the hands of these armed criminal gangs, right?

01:21:13.000 So, I remember going to see this guy, Rosalio Retta.

01:21:18.000 I interviewed people about him in Juarez, but then I went to...

01:21:20.000 He's in prison in the United States.

01:21:21.000 He's in Tyler County.

01:21:23.000 And Rosalio...

01:21:25.000 He's an interesting guy.

01:21:26.000 So he butchered or beheaded about 70 people between the ages of 13 and 17. I remember going into the prison actually to see him and the guard said to me on the way in, well obviously I can't leave you alone with him because he's like butchered all these people.

01:21:39.000 I was like, oh great, thanks. 0.98

01:21:41.000 And about five minutes in, the guard was fucking gone. 0.95

01:21:44.000 But I was sitting with Rosalio, talking about his life and his story. 0.98

01:21:49.000 So Rosalio grew up in Laredo, on the Texas side of the border.

01:21:54.000 Basically the same place as Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side.

01:21:57.000 It was very easy to cross the border at that time.

01:21:59.000 He was growing up in the late 90s, noughties.

01:22:03.000 Rosalio was 13. So the Zetas were a kind of famous drug gang at that time.

01:22:07.000 They still are.

01:22:08.000 A drug cartel.

01:22:10.000 How the Zetas were created is an insane story every taxpayer should know.

01:22:13.000 The US government decided to train an elite anti-drug force for the Mexican government, right?

01:22:19.000 Like kind of Navy SEALs for the anti-drug force.

01:22:21.000 They take them to Fort Bragg.

01:22:23.000 They spent something like $250 million training them up.

01:22:25.000 They go back to Mexico.

01:22:26.000 Six months later, they all defected en masse, almost all of them, and created a drug cartel, the Zetas.

01:22:32.000 Great, you see your tax money.

01:22:34.000 So the Zetas were this kind of glamorous, in inverted commas, drug gang, right, operating on that part of the border.

01:22:41.000 Drug routes move around according to where they put policing.

01:22:43.000 It always gets through, but it moves around.

01:22:45.000 They call it the balloon effect.

01:22:46.000 Imagine a balloon half full of air, you push down one pace, the air comes up somewhere else.

01:22:50.000 But at that time, it was going through Juarez and El Paso and Laredo and Nuevo Laredo.

01:22:57.000 And Rosalio, so there's two stories about how Rosalio gets involved with the Zetas.

01:23:01.000 What Rosalio says is he was basically kidnapped by them and forced to start killing people.

01:23:06.000 I don't think that's true.

01:23:07.000 If you look at the evidence, it's that he sort of volunteered.

01:23:09.000 But he's 13, so I don't hold him morally responsible for that.

01:23:14.000 Either way, there's one night, it all begins.

01:23:16.000 He's taken on the Mexican side of the border to a warehouse where they are torturing people, burning them alive.

01:23:23.000 He'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.

01:23:30.000 And when you're in with the Zetas, you never get out, right?

01:23:33.000 No one leaves.

01:23:35.000 No one leaves alive.

01:23:37.000 And so they begin to train him.

01:23:39.000 In 2005, he's sent to a summer camp that's literally a camp that teaches you how to behead people and do all sorts of things.

01:23:47.000 And he's then sent, him and his friends are then sent to murder people.

01:23:53.000 He's with his friends Jesse and Gabriel.

01:23:55.000 They murder a huge number of people.

01:23:57.000 The Zetas call these child soldiers the Expendables. 1.00

01:24:01.000 Because they don't give a shit if they live or die, right? 0.99

01:24:04.000 As one person said to me, they prefer children because they don't understand death so well, right? 0.99

01:24:08.000 Obviously, Rosado got a bit older.

01:24:10.000 He understood death better.

01:24:11.000 All his friends get murdered.

01:24:13.000 Eventually, he tries to get back to the US. He cooperates.

01:24:15.000 He now lives in solitary confinement where he will live for the rest of his life because when they let him out of solitary, shortly before I met him, he was immediately stabbed in the neck.

01:24:23.000 Um...

01:24:25.000 And again, you think about this insane violence that we created, right?

01:24:30.000 When I went to Juarez, it's this bizarre thing.

01:24:32.000 So at that time, you were told it wasn't, quite rightly, it wasn't safe to stay in Juarez overnight.

01:24:36.000 So I would stay overnight in El Paso and I'd walk across the bridge, right?

01:24:40.000 Obviously, you have to show your passport. 0.99

01:24:43.000 I remember the customs people going, why the fuck are you going into Juarez? 0.98

01:24:45.000 But go in there. 0.99

01:24:48.000 It's weird.

01:24:48.000 On the other side of the bridge, there's this sign and it says, welcome to historic downtown Juarez.

01:24:54.000 And it used to be a tourist site.

01:24:56.000 Billie Holiday got married there.

01:24:57.000 But now it's just, at that time, it was just covered with images of missing women.

01:25:04.000 Just everywhere, because this is another really important part of what this violence does, and I think it's really important we understand.

01:25:11.000 This is the violence caused by the system that we uphold and we imposed on Mexico. 0.98

01:25:15.000 Mexicans do not want this, right? 0.98

01:25:17.000 So there's another story.

01:25:18.000 Of all the stories I wrote about for Chasing the Scream, along with one other one I can tell you about if you want, this was the hardest.

01:25:25.000 There's a woman in Juarez, when the drug war violence starts to go through, called Maricela Escobedo.

01:25:31.000 She 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. 0.81

01:25:42.000 She had three kids.

01:25:43.000 Her youngest daughter was called Ruby.

01:25:45.000 She was 14 at the time.

01:25:46.000 And they would work on this stall in the marketplace every Saturday.

01:25:50.000 I think maybe even Sundays as well.

01:25:51.000 Some Sundays.

01:25:53.000 And 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.

01:26:03.000 Maricela was kind of soft-hearted, she gives him a job working on her market store.

01:26:08.000 And 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?

01:26:19.000 He's 21, she's 14. This is a crime.

01:26:21.000 Police don't do anything.

01:26:22.000 She doesn't understand it.

01:26:24.000 Why are they not investigating this?

01:26:26.000 Her daughter starts...

01:26:28.000 Running away to be with Sergio.

01:26:32.000 Maricela keeps going to get her back. 0.98

01:26:33.000 She keeps going to the police saying, this is a crime.

01:26:35.000 He can't live with a 14-year-old.

01:26:37.000 Go and arrest him.

01:26:37.000 They won't do anything.

01:26:38.000 She's completely puzzled by this.

01:26:40.000 Then Ruby gets pregnant.

01:26:42.000 Maricela's like, she was 15 by then. 1.00

01:26:43.000 She's like, fuck, I've got to keep her in my life. 1.00

01:26:45.000 So she keeps going to see Ruby. 0.99

01:26:48.000 By this time, she's kind of accepted the police with real rage that the police aren't going to do anything.

01:26:53.000 And 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.

01:27:02.000 She's gone.

01:27:02.000 She's not coming back.

01:27:04.000 And Maricela's like, what, and left her baby? 1.00

01:27:07.000 No, she hasn't done that.

01:27:08.000 I know she hasn't done that.

01:27:09.000 I know my daughter.

01:27:09.000 He's like, well, she's gone.

01:27:11.000 So Maricela waits.

01:27:13.000 Christmas comes, no message.

01:27:14.000 New Year comes, no message.

01:27:15.000 She starts to go to the neighbourhood.

01:27:18.000 And hand out leaflets with pictures of her daughter.

01:27:21.000 Loads of women are going missing in Juarez at this time. 1.00

01:27:23.000 I'll tell you why in a minute.

01:27:25.000 Just saying, have you seen this girl?

01:27:27.000 And after a few days, she gets a call from a kid called Angel who says, I'm really frightened to tell you something.

01:27:32.000 If you drive me out into the desert, I'll tell you.

01:27:34.000 So she drives Angel out into the desert.

01:27:36.000 I think he was 14. And he says, Sergio murdered your daughter and he made me help him dispose of the body.

01:27:44.000 And he told Maricela where the body was.

01:27:46.000 It was actually a place where they dumped pig carcasses from the abattoirs.

01:27:50.000 She goes and she finds the body with her son.

01:27:54.000 And she goes to the police and the police finally do something and they arrest Sergio.

01:27:58.000 Sergio's put on trial in the witness box.

01:28:01.000 He breaks down, admits he did it and apologises to Maricela.

01:28:05.000 And then a few weeks later, he's acquitted of all charges and disappears. 0.98

01:28:10.000 And Maricela's like, what the fuck is going on here?

01:28:13.000 So 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? 0.98

01:28:22.000 Now, if you're a member of the Zetas at that time in Juarez, it's different now because another drug gang has displaced them, You own the state, right?

01:28:31.000 If they control 70% of the economy, you have more money than the government, right?

01:28:36.000 So the police worked for them when I went to go interview Rosalio.

01:28:38.000 He said, when I would go murder people, the police would come with me.

01:28:41.000 They would dispose of the body, right?

01:28:43.000 And what year are we talking about?

01:28:45.000 This is like six years ago.

01:28:47.000 I remember the...

01:28:48.000 I remember...

01:28:49.000 Because one of the things when you're in a dangerous place...

01:28:51.000 When you're in a dangerous place, one of the things you do is you read danger from how frightened the people around you are, right?

01:28:57.000 Because you don't know the place.

01:28:59.000 I mean, I was there with Julian Cardona, who's my fixer, who's an amazing...

01:29:02.000 He's the Reuters correspondent.

01:29:03.000 He's one of the bravest people I've ever met.

01:29:06.000 But it was realizing how frightened other people were for me and Julian, right?

01:29:12.000 And I remember after I'd been there for a few days...

01:29:16.000 Julian kept introducing me.

01:29:18.000 By that time, the killings were basically all being done by the police.

01:29:21.000 And 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.

01:29:29.000 And he just laughed and said, no, that's not how it works, Johan.

01:29:31.000 Now, if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay the police to do it, right?

01:29:35.000 So it's this real realisation, alright, if someone comes to you, there is nowhere for you to go, right?

01:29:40.000 So, Maricela refuses to accept that she lives in a country where there is no justice. 0.99

01:29:45.000 She decides, okay, they're not going to solve this, I'm going to solve this.

01:29:49.000 She appealed, loads of women are missing because it turns out if... 1.00

01:29:53.000 A bunch of criminals control the state.

01:29:54.000 They will just murder loads of women and get away with it, right? 1.00

01:29:56.000 There are some men who just want to murder women and if they give them license to do it, they'll do it.

01:30:00.000 That's why so many women were missing. 1.00

01:30:02.000 Maricela gathers a load of those mothers. 1.00

01:30:03.000 She says some of them don't know where their daughters are.

01:30:05.000 Some of them know their daughters are dead.

01:30:07.000 She's like, I need your help.

01:30:08.000 We're going to find this guy who's done this.

01:30:12.000 So Maricela turns herself with these women into a detective. 0.98

01:30:17.000 She starts tracking Sergio all over Mexico, wherever there are sightings.

01:30:21.000 She walks everywhere.

01:30:23.000 She walks over a thousand miles, right? 0.99

01:30:25.000 She walks through the desert.

01:30:26.000 It becomes a media phenomenon.

01:30:27.000 People follow her.

01:30:28.000 She's like this symbol of the loss that's happened in Mexico.

01:30:32.000 And incredibly, with her friend Berta Alicia Garcia, who I got to know later, After two years, she finds Sergio.

01:30:39.000 She tracks him down.

01:30:40.000 She goes to the police.

01:30:42.000 She tells them where he is.

01:30:44.000 They tip him off and he disappears.

01:30:46.000 And she's devastated.

01:30:47.000 So she decides she's going to go to the governor's mansion in Chihuahua, which is the state capital.

01:30:53.000 She goes there and she sets up...

01:30:55.000 Tent outside the governor's mansion.

01:30:58.000 And she's like, I'm not leaving here until you people go and find this man.

01:31:02.000 And she calls on every mother who has a daughter who's missing or who they're afraid of for to come and join her in this fight, right? 0.95

01:31:11.000 And it gets to Christmas Eve and she's preparing to...

01:31:15.000 Just before Christmas, she says on Christmas Eve, I'm going to have this big Christmas dinner here.

01:31:18.000 People can join me.

01:31:19.000 She gives this great speech and...

01:31:22.000 And a man walks up to her and shoots her in the head, in front of all the police, everyone.

01:31:28.000 And I thought a lot about Maricela.

01:31:33.000 I got to know her children who live here in the United States now.

01:31:35.000 They've got refuge here.

01:31:39.000 When I think about the drug war and what it does, the first person I think of after Billie Holiday is Maricela Escobedo, right?

01:31:46.000 We have created an enormous amount of violence that has nothing to do with the drug, right? 0.98

01:31:52.000 Often 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?

01:32:00.000 There's a really good study by a guy called Professor Paul Goldstein that looked at everything that was classified as drug-related violence in New York City in 1986. What it found was 3% of what's called drug-related violence is someone using drugs and losing their shit. 0.99

01:32:13.000 That's real. 0.99

01:32:13.000 It happens sometimes, right? 0.99

01:32:14.000 3%.

01:32:15.000 Another 7% was people with an addiction problem, like committing property crimes and getting caught or whatever.

01:32:22.000 And the vast majority...

01:32:25.000 Was rival drug gangs and exactly the kind of violence we're talking about.

01:32:29.000 The war for drugs created by prohibition.

01:32:32.000 Now we can reduce the problems associated with drug use by having these, just they have in Switzerland and Portugal.

01:32:37.000 And we can end the violence caused by the war for drugs.

01:32:40.000 There are no violent alcohol gangs.

01:32:42.000 Al Capone killed loads of people.

01:32:44.000 No alcohol seller anywhere in the United States today will kill a single other alcohol seller, right?

01:32:49.000 That violence ended.

01:32:51.000 If we banned rice, there would be violent rice sellers, right?

01:32:55.000 We have to understand that what we are doing to... 0.99

01:32:58.000 And there's this bullshit fucking thing that's said where they'll take these deaths on the supply route, right? 1.00

01:33:04.000 Prohibitionists. 1.00

01:33:05.000 And they'll say, look at you evil drug users.

01:33:08.000 You're responsible for the deaths of these people, right? 0.55

01:33:11.000 And...

01:33:11.000 And to me, that is so pernicious, right?

01:33:14.000 You could have every single piece of drug use that happened in the United States today and none of those killings on the supply route.

01:33:20.000 It is the system those people have erected and imposed and lied their way to maintain that causes this violence, right?

01:33:28.000 And we can end this violence.

01:33:30.000 And I think about the Rosalio, right?

01:33:34.000 I got asked once in an interview, who do you feel most sorry for of all the people you met?

01:33:39.000 And obviously I met people with addiction problems all over the world.

01:33:41.000 And I surprised myself.

01:33:42.000 The person who came into my head was Rosalio.

01:33:45.000 Because...

01:33:47.000 What have we done to these people?

01:33:49.000 Well, it's not we, for sure.

01:33:52.000 Well, as taxpayers, we're responsible for it, right?

01:33:54.000 I 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.

01:34:05.000 And it goes back to your question, why does it persist, right?

01:34:08.000 The key reason...

01:34:10.000 I think it's two things.

01:34:12.000 Partly people are afraid of the alternatives for understandable reasons.

01:34:15.000 There are real risks in pursuing the alternatives.

01:34:17.000 I think we can understand what those risks are and deal with them.

01:34:20.000 But hold on, because it seems like those risks have been mitigated in Portugal and Switzerland.

01:34:24.000 I mean, we have real evidence that those risks, they're unfounded.

01:34:29.000 Exactly.

01:34:30.000 You can understand, it's not crazy to have that fear.

01:34:32.000 But then we can address that fear by talking about what actually happened.

01:34:34.000 Well, why don't we implement some sort of a small-scale version of this?

01:34:38.000 I mean, how come no one has ever tried to do this?

01:34:40.000 I mean, do it in Vermont, do it in New Hampshire, do it in a small state.

01:34:44.000 Well, there are loads of people who want to do that, but the federal drug laws are federal, right?

01:34:47.000 So federal law supersedes… But that doesn't happen with cannabis.

01:34:51.000 So that's a big debate.

01:34:54.000 Technically and legally, the federal government could go after Colorado, Washington.

01:34:59.000 Now, there's a political decision to not do that, because cannabis legalisation is popular in those places, right?

01:35:05.000 Yes.

01:35:05.000 There were people, Jeff Sessions, when he was the AG, wanted to do that.

01:35:09.000 It's just our good luck that actually he pissed off Trump over something else, because of the Mueller inquiry and everything, that Trump, kind of to spite Jeff Sessions.

01:35:19.000 So, and the The federal banking laws actually mean that, you know, cannabis stores are operating in this weird gray area.

01:35:26.000 They can't have bank accounts.

01:35:27.000 My point is, why is no one pushing this?

01:35:29.000 All over the world, people are pushing this.

01:35:31.000 I mean, in America.

01:35:32.000 Yeah.

01:35:32.000 So I think there are lots of people who are pushing this.

01:35:35.000 There are amazing groups that urge everyone to join and support the Drug Policy Alliance.

01:35:38.000 What I'm saying is, why are no politicians ever discussing this?

01:35:42.000 This is never an option, because those are the only ones that are going to really change policy.

01:35:45.000 So we're seeing a big change in public opinion that is changing on many issues.

01:35:49.000 So 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.

01:35:58.000 Today, 70% of Americans support legalizing cannabis.

01:36:03.000 Extraordinary transformation in a very short period of time, right?

01:36:06.000 Likely brought on by the fact that the medical use of it was prohibited up until then.

01:36:11.000 I mean, it was like 1994, right, when it was passed?

01:36:14.000 And then California started doing it and you started having Positive tax revenues from it.

01:36:20.000 You started seeing people that were suffering from a lot of ailments, showing that they were helped substantially by cannabis.

01:36:27.000 And then the attitude of it changed in popular culture.

01:36:29.000 It 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.

01:36:43.000 There's still people alive today to believe some of that.

01:36:46.000 I think you put that really well.

01:36:47.000 I think there's a series of things going on.

01:36:49.000 Partly 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?

01:37:03.000 Dehumanisation of drug users, and we should talk about use as opposed to addiction, but...

01:37:09.000 Dehumanisation of drug users, dehumanisation of people with addiction problems, dehumanisation of drug dealers.

01:37:14.000 There'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. 0.74

01:37:21.000 Dehumanisation of people on the supply route countries.

01:37:23.000 You're hearing the way people are talking about Mexicans now, powerful people in this society.

01:37:27.000 And one of the reasons why Chasing the Scream is written as stories of people...

01:37:34.000 It's because the solution to dehumanisation is to rehumanisation.

01:37:36.000 When I was meeting these people all over the world, I kept thinking...

01:37:43.000 If 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, 0.66

01:37:59.000 right?

01:38:00.000 They would not say, yeah, let's pursue a policy that kills them because we get some imaginary benefit further down the line, right?

01:38:05.000 Think about Lee Maddox, the cop in Baltimore.

01:38:07.000 It was when Ed died.

01:38:08.000 It was when her partner died.

01:38:09.000 She thought, what are we losing these people for?

01:38:11.000 It's that moment of getting people to see everyone involved as human, right?

01:38:16.000 We're not there yet.

01:38:17.000 Still the ways people are talking about addiction are...

01:38:23.000 Repellent, right?

01:38:24.000 Well, they think of people as being weak.

01:38:26.000 They think of people as having poor willpower, poor character, and that's why they're addicted.

01:38:32.000 Most 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.

01:38:46.000 I mean, it's really about re-engineering our entire culture.

01:38:49.000 I mean, re-engineering not just the way we treat addiction, but the way we treat human beings, the way we treat poor neighbourhoods.

01:38:55.000 I mean, there's so much that needs to be done that's never addressed.

01:39:01.000 Totally right.

01:39:02.000 And there's one part of this that's a funny...

01:39:07.000 One 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?

01:39:20.000 So 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?

01:39:30.000 Our 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.

01:39:38.000 Even with what we think of as the devil drugs, like heroin, crack, the vast majority of people who use heroin and crack do not become addicted, right?

01:39:46.000 Right.

01:39:46.000 Which I found really...

01:39:47.000 When Carl first explained that to me, I was like, what's this guy talking about?

01:39:51.000 And then he looked at the scientific evidence.

01:39:52.000 There is very clear evidence, right?

01:39:55.000 Actually, the ratio of people who use any drug who become addicted is pretty consistently 10 to 20%, right?

01:40:02.000 Slightly higher for things like heroin, but it's pretty consistently in that zone, right?

01:40:07.000 Which is not to say that there aren't other...

01:40:09.000 Heroin depresses your breathing, it can cause death.

01:40:11.000 That way there are other harms, but we're talking about addiction, right?

01:40:15.000 So...

01:40:18.000 It's interesting, there's so much I think we need to explain to people.

01:40:22.000 One person here in LA who really helped me to understand this in the research for the book is a guy called Professor Ronald K. Siegel.

01:40:28.000 You should totally have on your show.

01:40:29.000 He's a very interesting guy.

01:40:30.000 So he was an advisor to four American presidents.

01:40:32.000 He was a WH advisor to the World Health Organization.

01:40:35.000 Really serious scientist, but he had a sideline for 30 years where he investigated animals using drugs, right?

01:40:41.000 And he's basically shown loads of species love getting intoxicated for the pleasure of it, right?

01:40:47.000 Sure.

01:40:47.000 Elephants.

01:40:48.000 Elephants.

01:40:48.000 Yeah, 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?

01:40:55.000 There'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. 0.98

01:41:09.000 So anyway, loads of examples. 0.93

01:41:11.000 Professor 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?

01:41:27.000 And I said, oh right, and at the end of your three years, what did you discover?

01:41:30.000 And he said, turns out they just jumped the same height as everyone, all the other grasshoppers.

01:41:33.000 I was like, that wasn't a great use of your three years of life.

01:41:36.000 But he also got, he had an interesting time when he was in Hawaii, he was investigating mongoose, whether mongooses like hallucinogens, psychedelics.

01:41:44.000 And so he's like spying on these mongooses with binoculars.

01:41:49.000 And he gets caught by a load of drug traffickers. 1.00

01:41:54.000 And they're like, who the fuck are you? 1.00

01:41:55.000 And he's like, oh, don't worry. 1.00

01:41:56.000 I'm just investigating whether mongoose is like psychedelic. 0.99

01:41:58.000 He's like, that is the worst fucking cover story we've ever heard. 0.98

01:42:01.000 They've held him hostage for like two days. 0.98

01:42:03.000 But what he showed is something I think is really important and there's loads of other evidence for, which is...

01:42:09.000 It is absolutely innate to other species, especially to humans, the desire to get intoxicated, right?

01:42:16.000 There has never been a human society anywhere in the world where people didn't seek out intoxicants and enjoy using them.

01:42:21.000 The 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. 0.97

01:42:31.000 To get a fucked up head state, because that's how deep it is in human beings. 0.67

01:42:34.000 If there is nothing in the environment... 1.00

01:42:35.000 They would starve themselves. 0.99

01:42:36.000 Yeah, if you starve yourself long enough, you get a kind of fucked up head state, basically. 0.99

01:42:39.000 How far? 0.99

01:42:40.000 How long you gotta go for?

01:42:41.000 I don't know.

01:42:42.000 I don't think I looked into the details of it, but he writes about that.

01:42:45.000 So it's fasting.

01:42:47.000 Yeah, fasting causes an altered head state.

01:42:50.000 I've never done it, but this intoxication impulse is as deep in human beings as the sexual impulse.

01:42:56.000 You even see it in small children.

01:42:57.000 You 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?

01:43:02.000 Even though you know it will make you sick, you do it because you get an altered head space.

01:43:06.000 That is one of the first expressions of the kind of intoxication impulse.

01:43:11.000 A really nice example is for 2,000 years, 40 miles outside of Athens, In ancient Greece, there used to be, once a year, people would meet at a place called the Temple of Eleusis.

01:43:24.000 And it was basically Burning Man.

01:43:26.000 They would all use a psychedelic together.

01:43:28.000 Do they know what that psychedelic is?

01:43:30.000 Yeah, it was a kind of...

01:43:31.000 There's lots of different theories, but they think it was a kind of fungus, basically.

01:43:35.000 I can't remember the name of it, but there's been research on this.

01:43:39.000 I don't want to say it wrong.

01:43:41.000 It was some kind of fungus.

01:43:42.000 Some kind of psychedelic mushroom.

01:43:44.000 And people like Plato and Aristotle.

01:43:46.000 Sometimes people say, you know, drugs are...

01:43:47.000 I remember William Bennett, the former drug star, saying, drugs are an attack on the foundations of Western civilization.

01:43:53.000 And you're like, no...

01:43:54.000 At the actual foundations of Western civilization, the people you're holding up as the icons, like Plato and Aristotle, were literally getting fucked up in exactly the way you say it's an attack on them, right?

01:44:03.000 It's this deep misunderstanding.

01:44:04.000 So, this is a natural human impulse.

01:44:07.000 We are never going to get rid of it.

01:44:08.000 We want to get rid of it.

01:44:09.000 It gives people a lot of joy and pleasure.

01:44:11.000 And yet...

01:44:13.000 Oscar Wilde said once, I'm going to get the quote slightly wrong, he said it better than this, but he said, Puritanism is the deep and gnawing fear that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves.

01:44:23.000 And there's this puritanical hatred of drug use, right?

01:44:28.000 Now, some of that is understandable fears about genuine harms, and that's a different thing.

01:44:34.000 But a lot of it is just very deep Puritanism.

01:44:36.000 And you really see it in... 0.94

01:44:39.000 One phrase we need to get out of the English language is the ridiculous phrase, drugs and alcohol. 0.73

01:44:44.000 It's like saying fruit and apples. 0.87

01:44:46.000 Alcohol is a drug, right?

01:44:48.000 Alcohol is easily the deadliest drug in our culture, well, after tobacco.

01:44:55.000 It's like saying, you know, as my friend Steve Rolls, who's a big campaigner on this, it's like saying metal and iron, right?

01:45:00.000 It's a meaningless phrase.

01:45:02.000 But this distinction between alcohol and other drugs is a way of maintaining this drug war, right?

01:45:08.000 Because the reality is, the same proportion of people who become addicted to alcohol has become addicted to cocaine, right?

01:45:14.000 Same proportion, not absolute numbers because more people use alcohol, obviously.

01:45:19.000 Risks from alcohol are very similar to risks from other drugs, right?

01:45:22.000 Actually, some of them are...

01:45:23.000 Alcohol is significantly more dangerous than some drugs that are currently banned.

01:45:29.000 But we...

01:45:30.000 With alcohol...

01:45:31.000 And it comes back to what you were saying about why we don't change these policies.

01:45:34.000 With alcohol, enough people...

01:45:37.000 Well, everyone knows people who drink alcohol, right?

01:45:39.000 And one of the reasons things changed on cannabis is because more people came out and talked about it. 0.92

01:45:43.000 And so you have this situation where you've got Harry Anslinger saying if you use cannabis you'll kill your family with an axe.

01:45:51.000 By the time we get to the 90s enough people know enough people who've used cannabis to go right well Jimmy over there ain't chopping his family to death with an axe right? 1.00

01:46:00.000 This is bullshit. 0.98

01:46:01.000 And I think one of the things we have to do is encourage people to talk. 0.99

01:46:04.000 One of the weird things is that prohibition Creates a distorted picture of overall drug use, right?

01:46:11.000 Because loads of your listeners might say on Facebook, you know, I went out on Saturday night and I had, you know, five vodka shots and I got hammered and had a great time. 0.87

01:46:21.000 You'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? 0.96

01:46:26.000 You'd be... 0.99

01:46:27.000 Never followed a lot of people I follow.

01:46:29.000 Let me ask you this.

01:46:30.000 Is there a culture where there's no demonized use of drugs or alcohol?

01:46:34.000 Is there any culture that doesn't frown upon some drugs or have some forbidden categories for drugs?

01:46:43.000 Well, there have been those societies throughout history, right?

01:46:45.000 I mean, now.

01:46:46.000 Well, we've got to understand it in the context of the war that Harry Anslinger imposed upon the whole world, right?

01:46:52.000 There was no country.

01:46:53.000 I mean, think about what happened to Mexico, right?

01:46:56.000 So Mexico had...

01:46:58.000 So 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. 0.77

01:47:05.000 You've got to ban drugs and have a vicious war on drugs, right?

01:47:08.000 And the Mexican government are like, no.

01:47:11.000 We can see the policies don't work for you.

01:47:13.000 We're not going to do it. 0.99

01:47:14.000 They had a drug czar, a drug minister called Leopoldo Salazar-Viniegro, who they should build fucking statues to. 0.98

01:47:19.000 No man has ever been more prescient. 0.98

01:47:21.000 He explained to the Americans, we don't want to ban cannabis.

01:47:24.000 It's not particularly harmful.

01:47:25.000 With other drugs, we should be providing people with compassionate care.

01:47:28.000 And if we ban drugs, our country is going to be taken over by drug lords, right?

01:47:32.000 No one has ever been more right about anything.

01:47:36.000 The Americans, the US, start pressuring Mexico more and more.

01:47:41.000 In the end, they cut off...

01:47:44.000 So all opiates for pain relief used in hospitals were manufactured in the Americas and the United States at that time.

01:47:50.000 They cut off the supply of all of them.

01:47:52.000 People start dying in hospitals all over Mexico in agony.

01:47:56.000 And the Mexicans give in, they fire this guy, and they begin the drug war. 0.90

01:48:00.000 And 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.

01:48:06.000 And this is something we haven't explained that I think is so important, right?

01:48:09.000 Actually, it really surprised me learning about the history of all this stuff.

01:48:13.000 At the birth of the drug war, it was intensely resisted, right?

01:48:17.000 Think about here in LA, right?

01:48:19.000 In Los Angeles, there was a doctor called Henry Smith Williams.

01:48:22.000 When heroin was banned, there was a deliberate loophole in the law that said, okay, you can't sell heroin, but doctors can prescribe it to people with addiction problems, just like what happened in Switzerland, right?

01:48:32.000 So here in LA, big heroin clinic prescribed.

01:48:36.000 Anslinger, it drives him crazy.

01:48:37.000 He wants to shut it down.

01:48:38.000 So the mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of this heroin prescription clinic and says, you will not shut this down.

01:48:44.000 This does a good job for us, but Anslinger shuts it down.

01:48:46.000 When the doctors say to the...

01:48:48.000 There's the biggest crackdown on doctors in American history.

01:48:50.000 Over 12,000 doctors are arrested and rounded up.

01:48:54.000 When they come to the one in Portland, Oregon, the doctors say, but what are we meant to do with all these vulnerable, addicted people?

01:49:00.000 And one of the agents said, go and throw them in the lake, they'll make good fish food, right?

01:49:04.000 That was the attitude.

01:49:06.000 So this is resisted intensely at the birth of the drug war.

01:49:09.000 So you had a society really recently that had a much more mature, exactly what you're asking about, a much more mature attitude to drug use than we have now, right?

01:49:18.000 It's not that people thought all drug use is good.

01:49:20.000 We should celebrate every instance of drug use.

01:49:22.000 No one thinks that, right?

01:49:23.000 There were problems and there is some joy associated with drug use.

01:49:27.000 That's actually the norm.

01:49:29.000 There is some pain and terrible things associated with drug use, which are mostly driven by underlying harm, but there are real harms that come from some drugs as well.

01:49:38.000 And most societies, until very recently, had a mature appreciation of this, right?

01:49:43.000 Really?

01:49:43.000 We are the outlier that most societies have had licensed intoxicants.

01:49:50.000 Now, of course, in different societies at different times, there was a czar of Russia who wanted to ban tobacco, right?

01:49:55.000 And did terrible things to anyone who was banned with tobacco.

01:49:58.000 Different societies have had different panics at different times.

01:50:01.000 But...

01:50:04.000 We are the historical outliers, right?

01:50:07.000 I mean, to give you a sense, just the United States imprisons two million people.

01:50:12.000 There has never been a society that imprisons this many of its citizens, this higher proportion of its citizens anywhere ever.

01:50:19.000 It's overwhelmingly driven by the drug war, right?

01:50:21.000 I 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.

01:50:31.000 That's how extreme this war is, right?

01:50:35.000 And what we do to people, the conditions this war creates, it's...

01:50:45.000 And it's a total historical outlier.

01:50:47.000 We are in a freak experiment, right?

01:50:49.000 And 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?

01:50:56.000 The United States has done it for 100 years.

01:50:59.000 This country has spent a trillion dollars on it.

01:51:02.000 We've imprisoned Millions of our own citizens.

01:51:05.000 We've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate.

01:51:09.000 We've destroyed whole countries like Colombia. 0.83

01:51:11.000 Isn't the problem now that there's a gigantic business behind it all?

01:51:14.000 From private prisons to prison guard unions to the pharmaceutical industry that would benefit from keeping most of these drugs illegal so their profits continue to rise to law enforcement.

01:51:26.000 I mean, down the line, you'd be disrupting like an evil industry, but an industry.

01:51:33.000 I think that's a real factor, but I don't want to overstate it.

01:51:36.000 Lots of policies have vested interests.

01:51:37.000 What's the main factor?

01:51:39.000 The main factor is...

01:51:42.000 Most people asked, do you think the drug war has failed?

01:51:45.000 Say yes.

01:51:46.000 And most people asked, do you want to legalize any drug other than cannabis?

01:51:49.000 Say no very strongly.

01:51:50.000 So education?

01:51:51.000 I think it's about...

01:51:53.000 I won't use the word education.

01:51:54.000 Can I give you an example of a specific person who I think showed a way to do this?

01:51:59.000 So in the year 2000, in Vancouver, there was a homeless street addict called Bud Osborne.

01:52:04.000 And he lived in a notorious part of Vancouver called the Downtown Eastside.

01:52:08.000 People in Vancouver will know it.

01:52:11.000 It's a place, particularly at that time, that had a really high, like, nightmarish open drug scene, right?

01:52:16.000 Just, again, people in Switzerland, people injecting in the streets, that kind of thing.

01:52:20.000 And Bud was living homeless, and he was watching his friends die all around him.

01:52:25.000 At that time, there was a really big police crackdown, and so people would go and hide in dumpsters or in alleyways to shoot up, but obviously if you're hiding and you overdose and no one sees you, you just die, right?

01:52:39.000 And one day Bud learns that one of his friends, Judith, had died, and he's like, I can't just sit here and wait for all my friends to die and then for me to die. 0.92

01:52:49.000 But as Bud would have put it then, he also thought, I'm a homeless junkie, what the fuck am I going to do? 0.90

01:52:54.000 Bud had a really simple idea. 0.92

01:52:56.000 He 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?

01:53:12.000 And if we see someone overdosing, we'll ring an ambulance.

01:53:13.000 No officials, nothing like that, just us.

01:53:16.000 And loads of people had descended on the downtown east side to come up with problems to solve everything.

01:53:20.000 And people were very sceptical, but they liked Bud.

01:53:23.000 Okay, we'll do it.

01:53:24.000 So they start going and searching.

01:53:27.000 And over the next three months, the death toll on the downtown east side had a significant fall. 0.99

01:53:34.000 And obviously that meant people who would have died were living, which is a great thing, but it also meant the addicts thought, ah, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone says we are, right? 0.99

01:53:41.000 Maybe we can do something. 0.99

01:53:43.000 They were like, what else can we do?

01:53:44.000 Bud went to the library.

01:53:45.000 He learned that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had opened safe injection rooms, a bit like what happened in California until they shut it down, Anslinger shut it down, where people could go and use their drugs and be watched by doctors and nurses, and that this had massively reduced deaths in Frankfurt.

01:53:58.000 Nothing like this had happened in the United States since Anslinger shut it all down, but Bud's like...

01:54:03.000 Okay, we'll persuade our mayor.

01:54:05.000 They set up a group called VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.

01:54:09.000 Okay, the mayor was a conservative right-wing guy called Philip Owen, who will be an American comparison.

01:54:16.000 It's not Trump, like Mitt Romney.

01:54:18.000 Rich guy from a privileged family, didn't know anything about addicts.

01:54:21.000 He'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.

01:54:29.000 Gives you a sense of where he's coming from, right?

01:54:31.000 People are not optimistic about persuading him.

01:54:34.000 Vandu, Bud, his friends, they decide everywhere Philip Owen goes, they're going to follow him with a coffin.

01:54:42.000 And the coffin had written on it, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injection site?

01:54:49.000 Every time Philip Owen spoke in public, one of the homeless people with addiction problems would stand up and say, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injection site?

01:55:00.000 One day, Dean Wilson, one of the main people in Van Du, stood up and said, do you remember Julia, who asked you recently who would die next?

01:55:06.000 It turned out to be her because you haven't done it.

01:55:08.000 Right?

01:55:09.000 This goes on for a long time.

01:55:10.000 They do loads of public actions.

01:55:12.000 They filled Oppenheimer Park, which is a big park in Vancouver, with a cross, more than a thousand crosses, each one representing someone who had died of an overdose.

01:55:20.000 And they wrote the names of the people on the crosses. 0.99

01:55:24.000 And one day, after this had been going on for years, eternally to his credit, Philip Owen just said, who the fuck are these people? 0.99

01:55:30.000 What is this? 0.99

01:55:31.000 And he went to meet loads of the addicts.

01:55:33.000 He sat with them.

01:55:34.000 It blew his mind.

01:55:35.000 He thought people with addiction problems were just people who partied too hard, indulged themselves.

01:55:39.000 He was completely shocked.

01:55:40.000 He came here to the United States to meet Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who'd grown up under alcohol prohibition.

01:55:48.000 And Milton Friedman explains drug prohibition to Philip Owen.

01:55:52.000 Philip 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...

01:56:01.000 I'm not going to speak again without having the addicts here with me about addiction because they understand it better than me.

01:56:06.000 We're going to open the first safe injection site in North America.

01:56:09.000 We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America.

01:56:13.000 Things are going to change around here.

01:56:15.000 They opened the safe injection site.

01:56:17.000 Philip Owen's right-wing party is so horrified They deselect him as their candidate and his whole political career ends, but a more liberal guy wins the election and the room stays open, right?

01:56:27.000 In the 10 years that followed, overdose deaths on the downtown east side fell by 80%, 80%, right?

01:56:34.000 Average life expectancy in that neighbourhood rose by 10 years.

01:56:38.000 You just don't get figures like that very often.

01:56:40.000 And 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...

01:56:48.000 You don't write people off, right?

01:56:50.000 But I realised I would have written off Filippo in Right-wing guy runs for saying we should lock them all up in the military base, right?

01:56:59.000 You don't write off anyone.

01:57:01.000 You don't know who can be persuaded by a message of love and compassion.

01:57:04.000 And the most unlikely, one of the biggest champions of my book is a conservative evangelical Christian in Mississippi called Christina Dent who's doing incredible work with this, right?

01:57:13.000 And I thought a lot about Philip Owen when I went to go and see Philip Owen on the downtown east side.

01:57:18.000 And he said to me he would sacrifice his entire political career All over again, given the chance for this cause.

01:57:24.000 He said, how often do you get to save thousands of lives of the most vulnerable people?

01:57:28.000 And after I got to know Bud Osborne, the guy who started this movement, He died.

01:57:35.000 And I remember, you know, he was only in his early 60s, but he'd been a homeless addict during a drug war.

01:57:41.000 It takes a toll on you.

01:57:42.000 And they sealed off the streets of the downtown east side where Bud had lived as a homeless person.

01:57:47.000 And they had this incredible memorial ceremony.

01:57:49.000 And there were loads of people at that ceremony who knew that they were alive because of what Bud had started and because so many other people had joined them and so many people who didn't have addiction problems had opened their hearts, right?

01:58:00.000 And I remember thinking that day...

01:58:03.000 You know, when you get disheartened about this, it's easy to get disheartened, right?

01:58:05.000 This is a hundred year long drug war.

01:58:09.000 We're up against very powerful forces.

01:58:14.000 Everyone watching your show, listening to your show, is more powerful than Bud was that day, right?

01:58:18.000 The day he started that, right?

01:58:20.000 Just by virtue of the fact they have a device on which to listen to this, right?

01:58:24.000 Bud didn't sit there thinking, someone else is going to handle this.

01:58:28.000 He didn't sit there thinking, ah, we're up against these forces that can't be defeated.

01:58:33.000 He started where he stood.

01:58:35.000 He appealed to the people around him and it started this circle of change that, you know, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled, because the right-wing government of Stephen Harper tried to shut down this injection site, 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.

01:58:51.000 That will never be taken away now, right?

01:58:53.000 That started because, you know, when you have nothing else, you have a voice.

01:58:59.000 You have a human voice that you can use to persuade other people with love and compassion.

01:59:05.000 You can tell them stories.

01:59:07.000 You can build people's love and compassion in the middle of this catastrophe that we're seeing in this country with the addiction crisis, right?

01:59:13.000 I mean, more people died last year in the opioid crisis than all the soldiers who died in the Vietnam War combined.

01:59:20.000 In the middle of this catastrophe, We can carry on doing what we've been doing.

01:59:25.000 Okay, we can carry on doing that.

01:59:26.000 Then we will continue to get the horrific results we are now getting.

01:59:30.000 We can continue to copy the places that have failed, right?

01:59:33.000 At the end of a hundred year long drug war that has cost a trillion dollars, we can't even keep drugs out of our prisons.

01:59:40.000 Where we have a walled perimeter and we pay people to walk around it the whole time.

01:59:43.000 So good luck keeping them out of a 3,000 mile border, right?

01:59:47.000 That will never happen.

01:59:49.000 That is a ludicrous fantasy.

01:59:50.000 You may as well take all the money that will be spent on trying to keep drugs out that way and burn it in a pile, right? 0.98

01:59:55.000 It is absurd.

01:59:56.000 There's never been such a society.

02:00:00.000 Or we can start to copy the places that have succeeded, right?

02:00:03.000 Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, Canada...

02:00:06.000 There 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.

02:00:22.000 This is the consistent pattern. 0.98

02:00:25.000 Before it happens, people think it's the work of a bunch of fucking wackos. 0.99

02:00:29.000 They think people want to, you know, get everyone to use drugs and get children to use drugs and think it's madness. 0.98

02:00:34.000 And then they see that that's not at all what motivates people who want reform.

02:00:37.000 And that's not what happens in practice when you adopt these policies.

02:00:42.000 And it's not a magic bullet and they still have problems.

02:00:44.000 But there's been such a significant improvement in all those places.

02:00:48.000 That the resistance tends to...

02:00:50.000 I mean, how many people are arguing for reversing the cannabis legalization here?

02:00:53.000 You don't ever hear it now, right?

02:00:54.000 I mean, there's been a little bit of a backlash in a kind of absurd book that's come out, repeating the kind of Victor Laikata style.

02:01:00.000 Well, I actually had that guy on...

02:01:02.000 Oh, really?

02:01:02.000 Tell me about that.

02:01:03.000 I didn't know that.

02:01:03.000 We had a debate between him and Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike Hart from Canada.

02:01:11.000 And...

02:01:12.000 There's some reality to the dangers of cannabis use of some people that are susceptible to schizophrenia.

02:01:20.000 And I think that there's also some at least anecdotal evidence that points to the fact that some people experience these psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic episodes probably directly as a result of large dose use of THC, whether it's through edibles or whether it's through smoking.

02:01:36.000 And some people freak out.

02:01:37.000 I've known people I've known of people that have had real issues with it.

02:01:54.000 Yeah, so it's really important.

02:01:56.000 The case for legalizing cannabis is not that there is no harm associated with cannabis, right?

02:02:00.000 In the same way, the case for legalizing alcohol is not, there's no harm associated with alcohol.

02:02:03.000 Of course, but this is what Alex Berenstein is trying to go over in his book.

02:02:06.000 I don't think he did a good job for two reasons.

02:02:08.000 One, because...

02:02:10.000 He's basically only making the case for it to be negative.

02:02:14.000 And I think there's far more evidence that cannabis has a positive influence on people.

02:02:19.000 It reinforces community.

02:02:21.000 It makes people more sensitive and kind.

02:02:23.000 This thought of paranoia, it makes people more humble.

02:02:29.000 Sex feels better.

02:02:30.000 It makes food taste better.

02:02:32.000 There's creativity aspects to it that are undeniable.

02:02:35.000 There's a lot of very positive aspects to it.

02:02:37.000 For some people it's not good.

02:02:39.000 But it's like saying, hey, some people die when they eat peanuts.

02:02:42.000 Let's outlaw peanuts. 0.65

02:02:45.000 Warn your children about peanuts.

02:02:47.000 Yeah, I think everything you just said is absolutely right.

02:02:50.000 I 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.

02:02:56.000 So 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.

02:03:07.000 We can't legalise cannabis because it's much stronger now than it used to be.

02:03:11.000 THC content has gone up, people are smoking skunk.

02:03:13.000 It's really important to understand why that happened.

02:03:15.000 It's because of drug prohibition.

02:03:17.000 So the day before alcohol was banned in the US, the most popular drinks by far were beer and wine, right?

02:03:23.000 In the weeks after alcohol prohibition ended, most popular drinks again were beer and wine as they are today.

02:03:29.000 In between, you could not get a hold of beer and wine.

02:03:31.000 The most popular drinks were whiskey and moonshine.

02:03:33.000 You look at that and you think, well...

02:03:35.000 Why would that be?

02:03:36.000 What's going on?

02:03:38.000 It's because of a kind of slightly wonky and boring thing, but I think it's worth talking about.

02:03:42.000 It's called the Iron Law of Prohibition.

02:03:44.000 If you imagine, if we had to smuggle the nearest bar to here, if we had to smuggle all the alcohol for that bar in a wagon from the Mexican border, right, from Tijuana, In a wagon, we fill our wagon with beer, we're going to get a drink for 100 people.

02:03:59.000 If we fill it with vodka, we're going to get a drink for thousands of people, right?

02:04:02.000 So, when you ban a drug and it has to be smuggled around, you get a premium on getting the biggest possible kick into the smallest possible space, right?

02:04:10.000 This is why mild forms of the drug disappear.

02:04:13.000 Before 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?

02:04:21.000 Very low level of opiates.

02:04:22.000 The most popular way of consuming coca-based products Prior to the banning was Coca-Cola, right?

02:04:27.000 It's called that for a reason.

02:04:29.000 When the ban happens, heroin becomes the only form of opiates, powder cocaine becomes the only form of cocaine.

02:04:34.000 In fact, when there's a huge crackdown on powder cocaine in the 80s, the iron law kicks in even more and that's when crack is invented because you can get even more of a hit into an even smaller possible space, right?

02:04:45.000 I think it's important to understand, it is not good.

02:04:49.000 Most people who drink alcohol don't want to drink vodka, and they certainly don't want to drink absinthe most of the time, right?

02:04:55.000 Most people want a mild form of their drug.

02:04:57.000 That's true of cannabis. 0.86

02:04:58.000 Of course, there's some people who want to get totally fucked up, either for fun or because they have addiction problems.

02:05:02.000 But most people want a mild form of the drug.

02:05:04.000 It's not good that mild forms of the drug are when they're not available.

02:05:06.000 Let me stop you. 0.95

02:05:07.000 I don't think that's true.

02:05:08.000 It's definitely not true in California.

02:05:10.000 In California what happened was medical cannabis got passed, and once medical cannabis got passed, there was an emphasis on the strongest possible stuff because people wanted it.

02:05:22.000 It was a direct result of people having higher tolerances because marijuana was so readily available.

02:05:27.000 If you have a high tolerance and you smoke a lot of pot, you want strong pot because weak pot doesn't do anything.

02:05:34.000 It's the number one complaint amongst cannabis enthusiasts is someone having weak pot.

02:05:39.000 So you've got a subculture of people who are cannabis enthusiasts.

02:05:42.000 Yes.

02:05:43.000 You're right.

02:05:44.000 Just like there's a subculture of people who want vodka or absinthe, right?

02:05:47.000 But I don't think it's a matter...

02:05:49.000 It's not the same thing.

02:05:50.000 Like gin, obviously, is more potent than whiskey or than beer, rather.

02:05:53.000 It's easier to carry gin around.

02:05:55.000 You have to carry less of it.

02:05:57.000 With cannabis, people are still buying the same quantity. 0.99

02:05:59.000 They're just getting more fucked up. 0.84

02:06:02.000 Because their tolerances are so much higher, they need the stronger and stronger THC. So as you have a legal market, you can have a variety of options, right? 0.98

02:06:11.000 What 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.

02:06:19.000 You're totally right. 0.52

02:06:19.000 There's some people who want maximum THC, maximally fucked up. 0.52

02:06:22.000 Well, there's still a market for lower-grade weed.

02:06:26.000 I mean, they have it listed at all these dispensaries.

02:06:29.000 They have it listed, you know, 20%, 35%.

02:06:32.000 They have it listed so you can choose a more mild marijuana if you'd like to.

02:06:36.000 But the OG people, the people that do it every day, they want that really potent weed.

02:06:40.000 It's not like...

02:06:41.000 But 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. 0.88

02:06:49.000 There's definitely a concentrated market of very dedicated users who want to get maximally fucked up. 0.84

02:06:54.000 You're totally right. 0.52

02:06:55.000 Yeah, I think that's what pushed the...

02:06:57.000 I mean, it's also in botnists.

02:06:59.000 And I'm friends with a bunch of people who breed and grow these various strains.

02:07:04.000 So, Professor David Nutt has done really interesting work on this.

02:07:08.000 So, if I remember rightly, there's 38 active components in cannabis, right?

02:07:11.000 So, cannabinoids.

02:07:13.000 Well, there's hundreds of cannabinoids.

02:07:14.000 Yeah.

02:07:14.000 So, I think the...

02:07:16.000 If I remember from Professor Nutt's work, he argues there's 38, kind of, significant active components.

02:07:21.000 Maybe other people...

02:07:22.000 Yeah, I think there's over a hundred cannabinoids.

02:07:24.000 I think we just discussed this, right?

02:07:26.000 Didn't we...

02:07:26.000 So, one of the things he argues, and I'm happy to be corrected on the specific number, but one of the things he argues...

02:07:33.000 So 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?

02:07:46.000 And even a small number of people where you have a very widely used drug, that's really problematic, right?

02:07:50.000 But actually, this is really interesting evidence.

02:07:54.000 Why do people who are prone to psychosis and schizophrenia want cannabis, right?

02:07:59.000 Because there is a lot of them who want it.

02:08:01.000 It's not that people...

02:08:02.000 Hardly anyone wants to have a psychotic episode.

02:08:05.000 It's actually...

02:08:05.000 So THC correlates with psychosis in some people.

02:08:11.000 But there's another component of cannabis called CBD... Cannabidiol, which actually we know there's good evidence, soothes psychosis in schizophrenia, right?

02:08:20.000 It's actually given as a treatment in some places in distilled pill form.

02:08:24.000 So actually it's a slightly more complex picture than cannabis causes psychosis, right?

02:08:29.000 Very rich THC in some people will cause psychosis.

02:08:32.000 That's a real problem.

02:08:33.000 There are things we can do to prevent that and one of the good things about a legal market is you can regulate it so we can limit the amount of THC that is available just like we can limit You know, you can't go and buy 70% proof alcohol.

02:08:45.000 But also, what Professor Nutt has been arguing is we need to be...

02:08:49.000 And they exist, but they need to be commercialised and promoted more...

02:08:53.000 Or promoted in a public health way, not necessarily commercially.

02:08:58.000 CBD-rich cannabis will actually be helpful to people with psychosis and schizophrenia.

02:09:02.000 So it's a slightly more complicated pitch.

02:09:03.000 I know that you're not saying...

02:09:05.000 You're not endorsing what...

02:09:08.000 The Tell Your Kids guy...

02:09:09.000 What's he called again?

02:09:10.000 The guy who did your debate...

02:09:12.000 Alex Bernstein.

02:09:13.000 Yeah.

02:09:14.000 I know you're not endorsing the kind of simplistic view on either side, but I think it's slightly more complicated than that.

02:09:22.000 The 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?

02:09:29.000 It's bad for developing brains.

02:09:31.000 There's one person I interviewed who really helped me to, again, to think about this, a guy called Fred Martins, who's in...

02:09:36.000 I went to go see him in Camden, New Jersey.

02:09:38.000 And Fred was a cop.

02:09:39.000 He's retired now, but he was a cop.

02:09:41.000 It was really kind of right-wing.

02:09:42.000 It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood character in Dirty Harry.

02:09:44.000 He's not a liberal, right?

02:09:46.000 And he had this, he wouldn't use a fancy word like this, but he had an epiphany about drug legalisation one day.

02:09:51.000 He was in a car park in Wayne, New Jersey.

02:09:55.000 In 1971, he was staking out a dealer.

02:09:58.000 He's in plain clothes, obviously.

02:09:59.000 And a kid comes up to him, like an 11-year-old or something, and goes, Hey, mister, I'm not allowed to buy alcohol.

02:10:06.000 Will you go into that liquor store and buy some for me?

02:10:09.000 And Fred goes, no, get out of here.

02:10:10.000 So the kid walks over to the drug dealer and buys some drugs from him instead.

02:10:14.000 And 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?

02:10:23.000 This 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?

02:10:31.000 Drug dealers don't check ID. Licensed legal businesses do.

02:10:35.000 They really care if they're, because they've got something to lose, right?

02:10:39.000 So I think sometimes it's used as the kind of protect our kids argument is used as a case for prohibition.

02:10:44.000 In fact, if you want to protect your kids, you should be putting a big premium on getting these substances out of the hands of armed criminal gangs and into the hands of licensed legal businesses.

02:10:55.000 Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to argue that.

02:10:57.000 Anybody rational, rather.

02:10:59.000 I think that makes a lot of sense.

02:11:01.000 I think that the number of people that have schizophrenia is fairly stable in terms of the percentage of it across the board, cannabis users or non-cannabis users.

02:11:15.000 And so the argument against this idea that cannabis causes schizophrenic breaks is that these people already have schizophrenia.

02:11:21.000 And it just hasn't really manifested itself in a tangible sense.

02:11:25.000 So this is one of the things Professor Nutt says.

02:11:27.000 There is some evidence that cannabis in a small number of people causes psychosis.

02:11:32.000 There's a study in Sweden that showed this.

02:11:34.000 With schizophrenia, it's much more contested.

02:11:36.000 So psychosis versus schizophrenia, what is the major distinction?

02:11:41.000 I've not researched this in depth, but psychosis involves...

02:11:47.000 Delusions and paranoia.

02:11:50.000 Schizophrenia is a subset of mental illness that's very specific, has a significant genetic component, although there can be environmental triggers for it.

02:11:57.000 So it could possibly trigger both.

02:11:58.000 It could possibly trigger psychosis and schizophrenia.

02:12:00.000 The argument against that...

02:12:02.000 So there is evidence with psychosis.

02:12:04.000 The argument...

02:12:05.000 I want to stress it's a very small number of people, but it is real.

02:12:09.000 And there are things we can do in a legal market to counteract that that are much harder to do in a prohibited market.

02:12:14.000 But with schizophrenia, the argument against that, and I've not looked into this in a huge amount of detail, so I don't want to...

02:12:19.000 I 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.

02:12:35.000 If cannabis was causing schizophrenia, you would expect it to vary with cannabis use, at least to some degree, there'd be some relationship, and that doesn't seem to be the case.

02:12:44.000 So again, that's what Professor Nart, who's the former Chief Scientific Advisor on Drugs in Britain, says.

02:12:49.000 I haven't looked into that in great detail, but he's basically right on all the things that I have looked into that he says.

02:12:57.000 Do they know what the mechanism would be that would cause someone to consume THC and have a psychotic break?

02:13:04.000 Has that been examined?

02:13:05.000 I don't know enough about it.

02:13:06.000 That would seem to be a big issue, right?

02:13:08.000 Like, find out what it is that's causing this trigger, and whether or not this exists in these people anyway, and maybe a stressful situation, a bad breakup, losing their job, maybe one of those things could also cause this trigger.

02:13:19.000 Well, we know with all mental health, all aspects of mental health, All mental health problems.

02:13:26.000 There are three kinds of cause, right?

02:13:29.000 There's my book Lost Connections, which is about depression and anxiety, there's a lot about this.

02:13:33.000 There are biological causes, things like your genes, real brain changes, things like the introduction of a drug.

02:13:39.000 There 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.

02:13:49.000 And in all mental health phenomena, to some degree, these three sets of causes play out.

02:13:55.000 So let's think about even something very...

02:13:56.000 Dementia.

02:13:58.000 Dementia has a very, obviously, has a heavy biological driver, right?

02:14:02.000 Dementia is a physical degeneration of the brain or a disease like Alzheimer's.

02:14:07.000 But even with dementia, which has this very heavy biological driver, We know there are big social and psychological effects that can mitigate it.

02:14:14.000 So if you're part of a strong community and have lots of social connections, if you have a positive self-image, if you speak other languages, your dementia will develop significantly more slowly than if you don't have any of these factors, right?

02:14:25.000 So with things like psychosis, there's a brilliant person called Tanya Lerman, Professor Tanya Lerman at Stanford University, who's done really interesting research on this.

02:14:34.000 I haven't looked into it in great detail, but I interviewed her.

02:14:38.000 So we know recovery from psychosis and schizophrenia is much stronger in African countries than it is in the United States, right?

02:14:46.000 And it's not a genetic thing because Africans who come to the United States end up having the American level of recovery, not the African level of recovery. 0.86

02:14:53.000 And 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,

02:15:11.000 right?

02:15:11.000 They have much stronger social connections.

02:15:13.000 It's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis?

02:15:18.000 And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five.

02:15:21.000 Today, the most common answer is none, right?

02:15:24.000 It's not the average, but it's the most common answer.

02:15:27.000 Half of all Americans asked, how many people know you well?

02:15:30.000 Say, nobody, right?

02:15:33.000 It's a huge amount of evidence.

02:15:35.000 Loneliness is toxic for human beings.

02:15:38.000 Lonely people, as Guy did a lot of experiments on this here in LA, lonely people exposed to the flu virus and the cold virus and the colds are way more likely to actually get them than non-lonely people.

02:15:50.000 Right?

02:15:52.000 It's just devastating for your physical and mental health to be lonely.

02:15:55.000 There's other things going on.

02:15:56.000 So I think there's a whole range of things that are going on with all mental health problems.

02:15:59.000 I don't know how this relates to cannabis and psychosis.

02:16:01.000 I don't want to...

02:16:01.000 I don't know.

02:16:02.000 But we know with psychosis, yeah, there's a big debate about this.

02:16:06.000 Immigrants are more likely to have psychosis than non-immigrants. 1.00

02:16:08.000 There's a whole...

02:16:09.000 Lots of environmental factors playing out, even in extreme mental health problems like...

02:16:13.000 Now, I want to stress this.

02:16:14.000 They're not the only thing.

02:16:15.000 There are real biological aspects as well.

02:16:17.000 Which are clearly very significant in things like schizophrenia and play some role in things like depression for a lot of people.

02:16:24.000 But yeah, does that make sense?

02:16:29.000 I mean, sort of, yeah.

02:16:31.000 I mean, obviously there's varying biological factors, but the cultural factors make sense.

02:16:35.000 The fact that these people in Africa are not, they're not expelled from the community.

02:16:40.000 So they have a sense of bond and maybe it's more easy to recover.

02:16:44.000 And one of the things that you hear about part of the problem with mental illness is that people with mental illness are pushed away.

02:16:51.000 People don't want to deal with their problem and it exacerbates whatever is causing it in the first place.

02:16:57.000 What drugs have you used?

02:16:59.000 I have to be slightly careful in my answer because I'm in an immigration process with the United States.

02:17:04.000 What about prescription legal drugs?

02:17:06.000 So, I used a drug illegally that is a prescription drug called Modafinil or Provigil.

02:17:12.000 Yeah, Provigil.

02:17:13.000 Why did you use it illegally?

02:17:14.000 It's pretty easy to get a prescription for that.

02:17:16.000 So just to explain to people who don't know, ProVigil is a drug that was developed for people with narcolepsy.

02:17:20.000 Well, it was actually developed as a performance enhancer, and they just had to find a reason to use it.

02:17:26.000 I thought it was the other way around.

02:17:27.000 How interesting.

02:17:28.000 They had to find a reason to use it, and the reason to use it was to say, oh, let's give it to people with narcolepsy.

02:17:34.000 Let's check to see if that's true, because that's how it's been explained to me, actually by my doctor.

02:17:39.000 Oh, that's really interesting.

02:17:40.000 I'm perfectly prepared to...

02:17:41.000 I don't know about that, but that sounds plausible to me.

02:17:45.000 So I think, for me...

02:17:46.000 Do you use that a lot?

02:17:48.000 No, so...

02:17:49.000 I don't have to use it now.

02:17:50.000 So for me, I think...

02:17:53.000 I didn't have an addiction to that.

02:17:54.000 What I had an addiction to was working all the time, right?

02:17:56.000 So I grew up in a crazy and violent environment in many ways.

02:18:01.000 And my way of...

02:18:03.000 Whether it's addiction and other things...

02:18:05.000 And my way of coping in that environment was to read and write all the time, to just not be present by just working, right, even when I was a small child.

02:18:13.000 And as I got older, that was really my way of being in the world, right, to work all the time.

02:18:20.000 And 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.

02:18:32.000 I was at that point where the obsessive and compulsive work wasn't working for me, right?

02:18:37.000 It wasn't...

02:18:38.000 And like a lot of people with addictive behaviour, I was doubling down on the thing that wasn't working that well.

02:18:46.000 So, for me, Modafinil was, or Provigil, I bought it on the internet...

02:18:54.000 It was a way, I thought, initially, to make it so I could work even more hours, do even more, right?

02:19:00.000 And initially, when you start taking it, a lot of people take it before exams, for example.

02:19:05.000 It does make you feel...

02:19:06.000 It's not a caffeine buzz.

02:19:07.000 It wasn't for me anyway.

02:19:09.000 It's just you feel like you can just... 0.93

02:19:12.000 You know that feeling when someone put it to me, this wasn't a scientist so it could be bullshit, but... 0.96

02:19:16.000 So we evolved to... 0.96

02:19:19.000 We had this thing called executive focus, right?

02:19:23.000 I've got executive focus on now, I'm really concentrating on what I'm saying to you and the signal's coming from you, right?

02:19:27.000 But obviously, we can't be in a state of executive focus all the time, right?

02:19:33.000 But what modafinil does is it makes you much more in a state of executive focus for longer.

02:19:38.000 And you can see why people evolved to do that. 0.99

02:19:40.000 If you were being chased by a lion, your brain just switches off all the other shit and is like, get the fuck away from the lion, right? 0.99

02:19:47.000 And my understanding is that modafinil triggers that state. 0.99

02:19:52.000 Not a panicked state, but an executive focus state.

02:19:56.000 Which is good for a while, except there are two really big downsides to that.

02:19:59.000 Firstly, you don't sleep. 0.99

02:20:01.000 And if you don't sleep, you go fucking crazy. 0.98

02:20:03.000 I've never heard that there's an issue with sleeping in modafinil, new vigil or provigil. 0.99

02:20:07.000 In fact, that's one of the positive aspects of it, that you can sleep on it.

02:20:10.000 Oh, well, I mean, it was designed for people who find it hard to stay awake.

02:20:13.000 I think that's not true.

02:20:16.000 That's what I'm reading.

02:20:17.000 What are you reading?

02:20:18.000 The guy who discovered it, Michael Jouvet, was a sleep study neurophysiologist and was working on the compound Adra or Adrafanil.

02:20:30.000 And then they discovered and made Modafanil, which is a stronger version of that.

02:20:35.000 Is there anything that says that it was originally developed as a performance enhancing drug?

02:20:40.000 I didn't see anything like that. 1.00

02:20:41.000 Fucking doctor. 1.00

02:20:44.000 My experience was two problems. 0.99

02:20:46.000 So firstly, I don't know how general this is, I haven't done a huge amount of research on this drug.

02:20:50.000 My experience was...

02:20:52.000 Firstly, not sleeping, which is really bad for you over time.

02:20:55.000 And secondly, actually, if you're in that focus mode, so your mind needs time wandering.

02:21:01.000 Sorry, your mind needs time to wander, right?

02:21:04.000 It needs time...

02:21:06.000 You know, if I just leave here and walk out down the street, my brain will just start wandering around loads of things.

02:21:11.000 And then it will go back into executive focus when I do the next interview or whatever.

02:21:15.000 You need those periods when you're not in exact focus.

02:21:18.000 Right.

02:21:18.000 Recovery time.

02:21:18.000 Exactly.

02:21:19.000 Or not even recovery.

02:21:20.000 That's when...

02:21:21.000 Variation.

02:21:21.000 Recovery is part of it.

02:21:22.000 That's when your brain often has creative thoughts, right?

02:21:25.000 When your mind is wandering, when things will come to you.

02:21:27.000 Because a certain amount of your mind is processing things even though you're not conscious of it, right?

02:21:32.000 That's what I felt with New Vigil.

02:21:34.000 New Vigil or Pro Vigil, they're very similar.

02:21:36.000 It didn't seem like there was much creativity going on.

02:21:39.000 That it was more of like a grunt tool.

02:21:42.000 How long did you use it for, Jay?

02:21:44.000 I mean, I would not use it regularly.

02:21:46.000 I would take it like...

02:21:49.000 Once a couple weeks, once a week or so like that.

02:21:52.000 For how long?

02:21:54.000 I think I did it for like a year, a year or so.

02:21:57.000 And then I just stopped.

02:21:58.000 I haven't taken it in years.

02:21:59.000 Right, right.

02:22:00.000 But I liked it.

02:22:01.000 What did you like about it?

02:22:02.000 I got it from some guy who was a biohacker.

02:22:04.000 He was the one who told me about it.

02:22:06.000 And he said it was pretty easy to get a prescription for it.

02:22:08.000 Got a prescription for it.

02:22:09.000 And it just gave you like this pepped up sense of focus and awareness.

02:22:14.000 I felt like you could get a lot done when you're on it.

02:22:17.000 But it didn't seem like it helped with those wandering creative thoughts, as you were saying.

02:22:21.000 Yeah, if I was ever going to do exams again, which fortunately I will never do in my life, I would use that.

02:22:26.000 But I think you're right.

02:22:29.000 But 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.

02:22:46.000 It relates back to what we were saying right at the start about chemical hooks, right?

02:22:49.000 So if you look at the debate about non-drug-based addictions, right?

02:22:54.000 You 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...

02:23:01.000 Gambling.

02:23:01.000 Exactly, gambling addiction.

02:23:03.000 At the time, initially what people say is, well, this is bullshit, because they believe the chemical hooks theory of addiction, right? 0.98

02:23:08.000 Right. 0.96

02:23:09.000 So it just seems like, well, that's not...

02:23:10.000 I mean, there's an episode of Cheers, actually, which...

02:23:13.000 Now would be...

02:23:14.000 Yeah, you wouldn't do this, but there's an episode where the whole hilarious premise of the show is...

02:23:18.000 What's the Ted Dunstan character?

02:23:19.000 Sam Malone.

02:23:20.000 Ted Dunstan's character thinks he's a sex addict, and this is like a punchline all the way through the show, right?

02:23:25.000 This 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?

02:23:37.000 That wouldn't happen in a sitcom now.

02:23:39.000 Why not?

02:23:39.000 People thought...

02:23:41.000 Well, it might, but people don't think the very idea of sex addiction is ridiculous in the way they did, right?

02:23:47.000 I don't think.

02:23:48.000 Maybe they do.

02:23:49.000 But then I think that's because there hasn't been a shift in gambling.

02:23:54.000 If 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.

02:24:03.000 I've known a lot.

02:24:03.000 I've known a lot of gambling addicts.

02:24:06.000 And did you feel that they were as addicted as...

02:24:07.000 Oh yeah, they're straight up junkies.

02:24:09.000 They might as well be chasing crack.

02:24:10.000 And that tells us something really important because you don't snort a roulette wheel, right?

02:24:14.000 You don't inject online poker, right?

02:24:17.000 If you can have...

02:24:18.000 Professor Nutt said this to me.

02:24:19.000 If you can have...

02:24:21.000 All of the addiction, but none of the chemical hooks.

02:24:25.000 That tells us about how we've overestimated the role of chemical hooks and addiction.

02:24:28.000 Well, there is a chemical hook.

02:24:29.000 There's a dopamine addiction.

02:24:31.000 Well, absolutely everything you do that you like gives you a dopamine hit.

02:24:35.000 So I think there's been this attempt to integrate it by going, oh, well, there's this pleasure in the brain.

02:24:39.000 It's also a self-destructive issue.

02:24:41.000 There's something about gambling.

02:24:43.000 There's a lot of self-hate involved and this overwhelming feeling of failure that a lot of gambling addicts have because they fail so often.

02:24:54.000 And they're always trying to chase the dragon.

02:24:56.000 They're always trying to make up for all the past things they've gone wrong.

02:24:59.000 This big score.

02:25:00.000 With this big score, we're going to settle it out.

02:25:03.000 There's someone who talked to me about...

02:25:04.000 I just think about what you're saying in relation to him.

02:25:07.000 A guy called Peter Cohen, who's a professor in the Netherlands, who actually didn't say this to me directly.

02:25:12.000 I read it.

02:25:13.000 He says, we shouldn't call it addiction.

02:25:17.000 We should call it bonding.

02:25:18.000 That human beings have an innate need to bond and connect, right?

02:25:22.000 And when you're happy and healthy, you'll bond and connect with, like, the people around you with meaningful work.

02:25:28.000 But if you can't do that because you're isolated or traumatized or beaten down by life or you haven't been taught how to do that, You will bond with something that gives you some sense of relief, right?

02:25:39.000 Now for some people that might be porn, for some people that might be gambling, for some people it might be cocaine, alcohol, whatever.

02:25:45.000 But he says if you only have one bond that's giving you any relief, you will obsessively return to that bond, right?

02:25:52.000 And I don't think that's a total, as he would say, that's not a total explanation for what's going on.

02:25:57.000 But I do think that is a useful way to think about some of these behavioural addictions, right?

02:26:01.000 So I, someone I know very well, a relative of mine has a gambling addiction, and this is someone who has...

02:26:09.000 There's no alternative form of joy or pleasure in their life, right?

02:26:14.000 And gambling gives a moment, well, lots of moments.

02:26:21.000 Especially if you look at someone who's playing online poker, as I've done with my relative, they're not happy.

02:26:26.000 It's not looking at someone watching a nice movie, right?

02:26:29.000 It's, you can see, I don't mean, sorry, someone with an addiction problem playing online poker.

02:26:34.000 Some people have, most people don't have a problem.

02:26:35.000 Right.

02:26:38.000 It's the relief of just being absent from your life for a moment, or for however long you play, rather than...

02:26:46.000 I went to this...

02:26:49.000 For Lost Connections, my book about depression, I went to the first ever internet rehab centre in the United States.

02:26:55.000 It's a weird place.

02:26:56.000 It's an impressive place, actually.

02:26:58.000 I like the people there.

02:26:58.000 It's in Spokane, just outside Spokane in Washington.

02:27:02.000 It's called Restart Washington.

02:27:05.000 And I remember going there, it was really interesting to think about this.

02:27:10.000 I remember arriving, it's a clearing in the woods, a big wooden place in the clearing of the woods.

02:27:15.000 And 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.

02:27:22.000 I was like, oh wait, you're in the right place, right?

02:27:24.000 And it's really interesting because they get all kinds of people in Restart Washington, but they disproportionately get young men who are obsessed with multiplayer role-player games.

02:27:31.000 Like, then it would have been World of Warcraft, now it would be Fortnite.

02:27:36.000 And 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,

02:27:54.000 because they're getting something out of it, right?

02:27:56.000 And she argues that one of the things they're getting is the things they used to get from the culture, but no longer get.

02:28:03.000 Like what?

02:28:04.000 Well, a feeling they're good at something, a feeling that other people see them, that they're part of a tribe, a feeling that they're moving around.

02:28:11.000 You know, kids spend very little time outdoors now, right?

02:28:14.000 Yeah.

02:28:14.000 I think there's also anticipation.

02:28:15.000 There's puzzles.

02:28:16.000 There's things where you're trying to figure out whether or not something's right or wrong and how to get it.

02:28:20.000 And then if you do get it, you get this positive surge.

02:28:23.000 If you don't get it...

02:28:24.000 I mean, I think there's human reward systems that are being mirrored there in gambling as well.

02:28:28.000 Absolutely.

02:28:28.000 And what psychologists call that feeling of mastery.

02:28:31.000 Feeling of mastery is when you feel you are good at something.

02:28:33.000 Right.

02:28:33.000 It's an absolutely underlying psychological need.

02:28:36.000 Everyone needs to feel they're good at something.

02:28:37.000 If you don't have a sense of mastery in your life, you will be depressed and anxious, right?

02:28:41.000 Or you're much more likely to become depressed and anxious.

02:28:43.000 And I think, again, because it's very striking to me, I've got teenage nephews, I've got godsons.

02:28:49.000 We actually don't ask anything of young men, right?

02:28:53.000 Very rarely are they actually asked to do very much.

02:28:56.000 They're not given responsibilities, right?

02:28:59.000 I think...

02:29:00.000 And look, again, I want to stress that most people playing video games are not addicted.

02:29:03.000 It's a perfectly good form of pleasure.

02:29:05.000 They're very addictive.

02:29:06.000 I mean, they're not...

02:29:07.000 Most people playing them have a healthy relationship with them in the same way that I... I don't know if that's true.

02:29:12.000 Okay, maybe I... I think a lot of people playing them have a real problem with them.

02:29:15.000 They take up massive hours of their time.

02:29:17.000 It's a giant problem with young boys.

02:29:20.000 I mean, the thing is, it's become an actual avenue for a career now.

02:29:25.000 There's eSports careers where...

02:29:28.000 These young guys are making millions of dollars playing video games.

02:29:31.000 It's not like the old days where you would say, hey, you're wasting your life.

02:29:34.000 Now it's basically almost like practicing golf.

02:29:37.000 But we have a setup back here where we play video games against each other.

02:29:41.000 It's very addictive.

02:29:42.000 Don't you think it's addictive?

02:29:43.000 Sure.

02:29:44.000 Yeah.

02:29:45.000 So it's like basketball when I was younger, too.

02:29:47.000 I loved playing basketball.

02:29:48.000 Couldn't get me to play in the rain.

02:29:50.000 Right.

02:29:50.000 The basketball has movement and exercise attached to it, so you get some positive benefit from that addiction.

02:29:55.000 I was definitely addicted to jiu-jitsu.

02:29:57.000 I would even train when I was injured.

02:29:59.000 But what does that mean?

02:30:00.000 It means I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed not doing it.

02:30:03.000 The difference between a lot of video game addictions, and particularly gambling addictions, is that they tend to wreck people's lives.

02:30:11.000 You 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?

02:30:23.000 It's really fun, you know, so you're chasing the thrill.

02:30:26.000 I mean, I'm certain I was avoiding pain with almost everything I've done in my life, in some way, shape, or form.

02:30:32.000 You know, there's some of it where you're trying to do something positive to mitigate the pain.

02:30:36.000 Or the frustration or the anger or whatever it is that's bothering you.

02:30:41.000 The video game thing was a real addiction, though.

02:30:44.000 It was like a compulsion.

02:30:45.000 How long did it last?

02:30:46.000 Years.

02:30:48.000 Several years.

02:30:49.000 How did you get out of it, Jay?

02:30:50.000 I quit.

02:30:50.000 I just quit.

02:30:51.000 Cold turkey.

02:30:53.000 Stopped playing.

02:30:54.000 I realized it was kind of messing up my life and my career.

02:30:56.000 It was just taking up way too much time.

02:30:58.000 I came to a realization.

02:31:00.000 I was like, I've got to stop doing this.

02:31:01.000 I'm just playing way too much.

02:31:03.000 So I just said, the only way, I'm just too competitive.

02:31:06.000 I enjoyed it too much.

02:31:08.000 And so the only way to do it was to stop playing it all together. 0.97

02:31:11.000 And we started playing it again recently after more than shit, more than 15 years of ever playing it at all. 0.95

02:31:17.000 You know, and it's still addictive, but I'm so busy now, I can't really fall into the grip of it. 0.97

02:31:23.000 I'm actually just enjoying it for an hour here or there.

02:31:25.000 But that's so interesting in itself, isn't it?

02:31:27.000 That's a bit like the rap part principle, it feels to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that like...

02:31:32.000 The more you have in your life that is meaningful, that is good, and gives you pleasure or a sense of mastery, the less space there will be for these objects of obsession to come in, right?

02:31:44.000 And I think that is a principle that's true.

02:31:47.000 This was the principle behind the Portuguese drug decriminalisation, right?

02:31:50.000 If we give people good lives, they will not want to anaesthetise themselves so much.

02:31:54.000 It was the Swiss principle.

02:31:55.000 And I think we all see that in our lives to different degrees.

02:31:58.000 I, you know...

02:32:02.000 The 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.

02:32:14.000 Like, I don't think of, like, writing as an addiction.

02:32:18.000 It might be a compulsion.

02:32:19.000 If I have a day when I don't do it, I feel terrible.

02:32:21.000 But something that is positive and rewarding, I don't think is an addiction, right?

02:32:26.000 Something that enriches your life and is not...

02:32:29.000 It's a way of living life...

02:32:31.000 In the most fulfilling way for you.

02:32:32.000 You call it an obsession, maybe a positive obsession.

02:32:34.000 Yeah, a compulsion obsession, a way of being in the world, right?

02:32:39.000 Like, I don't...

02:32:41.000 It's like sometimes I get people saying to me, you know, like, oh, am I addicted to sex or whatever?

02:32:46.000 And you want to set it up and say, well, does it give you pleasure?

02:32:51.000 Does it...

02:32:52.000 Is it...

02:32:54.000 Is it a way of avoiding pain?

02:32:56.000 If it gives you pleasure and it's not a way of avoiding pain, it's not an addiction, it's just a happy way of being in the world, right?

02:33:01.000 And that's the reality for...

02:33:03.000 And 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.

02:33:14.000 And this isn't some wacky view, this is the view of the World Health Organisation, these leading medical bodies when it comes to depression.

02:33:20.000 Yeah, sorry.

02:33:23.000 Now, people that are journalists and writers often like stimulants.

02:33:27.000 They often like Adderall.

02:33:28.000 Adderall is a big issue for journalists.

02:33:32.000 How much experience do you have with Adderall?

02:33:35.000 I've never used it.

02:33:36.000 It's supposed to be amazing.

02:33:37.000 Me neither.

02:33:38.000 I've never tried it.

02:33:38.000 I've never used it precisely because I know I would love it, right?

02:33:42.000 I've got a young relative who's prescribed it, and there are times when I've been...

02:33:49.000 He's so often trying to not spike me, but like get me to join him.

02:33:54.000 Johan, this is for you.

02:33:56.000 But you know, Adderall opens up a whole other thing, right?

02:33:59.000 Which 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. 0.96

02:34:07.000 Look, I have, before I came here, I drank enough caffeine to kill a whole fucking field of cows, right?

02:34:13.000 I, 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, 0.94

02:34:29.000 I just used it every day for three months, which was a ludicrous thing to do.

02:34:34.000 But I think in terms of stimulants, there's a whole debate that needs to be had.

02:34:41.000 I'm going to write about this at some point.

02:34:44.000 One in ten 13-year-old boys in this country is being given a stimulant drug, right?

02:34:50.000 In any given year.

02:34:51.000 Right.

02:34:52.000 For ADD or ADHD or...

02:34:54.000 I mean, that is horrifying.

02:34:57.000 It's crazy.

02:34:58.000 Right.

02:34:58.000 30% of children in foster care in the United States are being given at least one psychiatric drug.

02:35:03.000 Yeah.

02:35:03.000 These are not children in the main who are, you know, have some biological insanity.

02:35:07.000 These are kids who've been fucking abused and treated abysmally. 0.99

02:35:10.000 And what do we do? 1.00

02:35:11.000 We drug them to shut them up. 0.75

02:35:12.000 Well, it's also children have a lot of energy, and it's not easy to control them.

02:35:17.000 And so they decide that these children have something wrong with them.

02:35:20.000 Do 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?

02:35:29.000 And there's this big debate, what's going on there?

02:35:32.000 And...

02:35:32.000 So 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.

02:35:40.000 Yeah, but people were getting loads of ADHD when I was in school.

02:35:43.000 Exactly.

02:35:44.000 So 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?

02:35:51.000 I 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? 1.00

02:35:58.000 And they go, yeah, we'll let them go off and go fishing.

02:36:01.000 The Amish don't want to make you sit still for eight hours a day. 0.99

02:36:04.000 There's nothing in their society that...

02:36:06.000 There's nothing natural about getting a child to sit still for eight hours a day.

02:36:10.000 It's insane.

02:36:11.000 Just like trying to get a puppy to sit still for eight hours a day.

02:36:13.000 Exactly.

02:36:13.000 That's exactly the right analogy.

02:36:15.000 What we do to our children, we try to deaden them and discipline them to cope...

02:36:22.000 And thrive in a deadened and disciplined and inverted commas economy, right? 0.83

02:36:26.000 If you...

02:36:27.000 The school system was designed in the 1870s to prepare people to work in factories, right?

02:36:32.000 If you're going to work in a factory in the 1870s, what do you need? 0.98

02:36:34.000 You need to learn to shut the fuck up, not complain, be passive, do what you're told, right? 0.98

02:36:40.000 There's... 0.99

02:36:42.000 I think it's a guy called Alfred Cohn.

02:36:44.000 I think it's him who says, every school has two curriculums, or curricula, whatever the plural is.

02:36:48.000 You've got the official curriculum, which is like geography, history, whatever.

02:36:53.000 And then you have the hidden curriculum, which is the kind of person the school is trying to make you into, right?

02:36:59.000 And what is the school system designed to be?

02:37:02.000 It's designed to make people who are passive... 0.99

02:37:04.000 Who are obedient, who sit still and shut the fuck up, right? 0.95

02:37:10.000 Now, that was never a good way to make humans, right? 0.99

02:37:12.000 That was always wrong.

02:37:14.000 But it's particularly awful in the, you know, the culture we've created.

02:37:18.000 And this relates to one of the causes of depression that I write about in Lost Connections, which is, you know, there's really good...

02:37:24.000 I noticed that loads of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work.

02:37:29.000 We talked about this last time I was on a thing.

02:37:31.000 But I was like, okay, people I know, maybe they're unusual, right?

02:37:35.000 So I started to look at the evidence base.

02:37:36.000 Gallup did a really big study of people in the US and Europe.

02:37:39.000 See, what do people feel about their work, right?

02:37:43.000 13% of people, 1-3%, like their work most of the time.

02:37:48.000 63% are what they called sleep working.

02:37:51.000 You don't like it, you don't hate it, you kind of tolerate it. 0.97

02:37:54.000 And 24% of people fucking hate and fear their jobs, all right? 0.97

02:37:57.000 So you think about that. 0.97

02:37:58.000 That means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time.

02:38:03.000 Now, that can't be far off what the figure was in the Soviet Union, right?

02:38:05.000 That's a really extreme figure.

02:38:08.000 And I'm like, so I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, okay, could this bear some relationship to our mental health crisis, right?

02:38:15.000 This thing that we don't like...

02:38:17.000 It's spreading over more and more of our day.

02:38:19.000 The average person, I think, answers their first email, I think it's 7.43am and leaves work at 7.15pm, right?

02:38:25.000 And 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?

02:38:33.000 If you go to...

02:38:34.000 It's not the only one, but a key factor.

02:38:35.000 If you go to work tomorrow and you are controlled, so you have low or no control over your work, you're much more likely to become depressed and anxious.

02:38:44.000 I think it relates to what we've been talking about all along.

02:38:45.000 People have psychological needs.

02:38:46.000 You need to feel you're good at something.

02:38:48.000 You need to feel your life has meaning.

02:38:51.000 If you're controlled all the time, you can't feel that, right?

02:38:54.000 So 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...

02:39:03.000 Wrongly. 0.97

02:39:03.000 I thought he was saying, okay, you've got this 13% of elite people at the top, like you and me, who get to have jobs we love, and then you've got everyone else who's condemned to the shit, right? 0.97

02:39:12.000 And I thought about my family. 0.98

02:39:12.000 My brother is an Uber driver, my dad was a bus driver, my grandmother cleaned toilets. 0.98

02:39:17.000 I'm like, wait, are we saying they're just condemned to these miserable lives?

02:39:20.000 And he explained to me, it's not the work that makes you depressed, right?

02:39:23.000 It's being controlled at work.

02:39:25.000 And there are solutions to that.

02:39:26.000 There are changes we can make, right?

02:39:29.000 I went to interview this woman We're good to go.

02:39:39.000 We're good to go.

02:39:53.000 It was boring, it was controlled, she couldn't just stand the thought this was going to be the next 40 years of her life.

02:39:59.000 So one day with her husband Josh, Meredith did this quite bold thing.

02:40:03.000 Josh, her husband, had been working in bike stores since he was a kid, in Baltimore, teenager.

02:40:08.000 And you know, that's controlled work, it's insecure, you don't even have rights really.

02:40:13.000 And one day Josh and his colleagues are in the bike store and they ask themselves, What does our boss actually do?

02:40:19.000 They liked their boss.

02:40:20.000 He wasn't a bad person, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money.

02:40:23.000 This doesn't seem like such a good deal to me, right?

02:40:25.000 So they decided they were going to set up a bike store that works on different principle, right?

02:40:29.000 The place they worked before was a corporation.

02:40:31.000 Most people listening to your show work in corporations.

02:40:34.000 It's a very recent human invention.

02:40:36.000 You know how it works.

02:40:37.000 There's an army.

02:40:38.000 The boss at the top is like the little dictator.

02:40:39.000 You've got to obey him or leave, right?

02:40:41.000 And sometimes he's a nice dictator and sometimes he's Kim Jong-un, but you don't have much say over that, right?

02:40:48.000 Josh and his colleagues decided to set up a bike store that works on a different principle.

02:40:51.000 It's not a corporation.

02:40:52.000 It's a democratic cooperative.

02:40:54.000 So they don't have a boss.

02:40:57.000 They run the business together.

02:40:58.000 They take decisions about it together.

02:40:59.000 They have a meeting once every couple of weeks.

02:41:01.000 In practice, they agree, but sometimes they don't, and then they vote.

02:41:04.000 They share the profits.

02:41:06.000 They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks.

02:41:10.000 And one of the things that was so interesting to me, their business is called Baltimore Bicycle Works.

02:41:13.000 Spending 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?

02:41:26.000 And it's not like, you know, they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right?

02:41:31.000 They fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now.

02:41:34.000 The difference is now they've got control over their work, right?

02:41:37.000 Giving people back control over their work is a really powerful antidepressant.

02:41:41.000 Now, Every corporation could be a democratic cooperative, right?

02:41:45.000 That's a big change in our society, but we've all lived through big changes in our society.

02:41:50.000 There's no reason...

02:41:51.000 And by the way, it would be better for the economy.

02:41:53.000 A study at Cornell University found democratic workplaces grow, on average, four times faster than non-democratic workplaces because people are more committed, they're bringing more of their energy and their life to it.

02:42:07.000 We've got to understand...

02:42:08.000 It goes back to why addiction is so bad.

02:42:10.000 It's what we've got to understand.

02:42:12.000 People who are showing these signs of distress, depression, anxiety, addiction, they're doing that not because they're crazy, there are some biological factors that are not rational, but mostly it's just actually we've built a society that's...

02:42:29.000 Not good for them.

02:42:31.000 And we should be listening to that and respecting that.

02:42:33.000 And like the doctor in Vietnam said to me, listen to your nausea.

02:42:37.000 It will tell us what's wrong with you.

02:42:38.000 We 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.

02:42:50.000 Everyone's life will be better off if they control their work more if you go through some of the other big solutions to depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections.

02:42:58.000 Now, Lost Connections is your most recent book?

02:43:00.000 Yeah, that's the one about depression and anxiety.

02:43:01.000 Is that out?

02:43:02.000 Yeah, yeah, they're both available, yeah.

02:43:04.000 Now, Lost Connections, how did the two of them tie together?

02:43:08.000 So I wrote Chasing the Scream because of this addiction in my family, and I go on this big journey all over the world to understand the drug war, and I said a line in my, I did a TED talk about it called Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, and I said a line in that,

02:43:23.000 which is the opposite of addiction is connection, I said it earlier in our conversation, Based on Rat Park, right?

02:43:29.000 And lots of people started saying to me, well, are you just saying it's social isolation, right?

02:43:36.000 Like loneliness.

02:43:37.000 And I very clearly in my mind know that I don't think that's the lesson of Rat Park, right?

02:43:41.000 I don't think that's just what's going on in Rat Park.

02:43:43.000 It's they don't have anything that makes life meaningful.

02:43:45.000 Now, rats are obviously much more, much less complex than us, right?

02:43:50.000 So I started thinking, well, what What is actually missing for people who are addicted, depressed, anxious?

02:43:58.000 What is driving this crisis?

02:44:00.000 So I think that question that people kept asking me, I could see that Portugal and Switzerland had dealt with Some problems of disconnection, but you went quite rightly to the important question, which was, what did Switzerland deal with, right?

02:44:10.000 That I couldn't quite, I didn't quite answer because I didn't quite understand when I was in Switzerland.

02:44:14.000 So I ended up, again, going on this big journey all over the world from a crazy mixture of places like an Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have low levels of depression, to a... 1.00

02:44:23.000 Lab in Baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to a city in Brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make them feel better.

02:44:32.000 Did it?

02:44:33.000 Which bit?

02:44:34.000 Banning advertising.

02:44:35.000 Yeah.

02:44:36.000 So that's not been properly scientifically studied, but there is a science that tells us it should.

02:44:39.000 I can explain what that is.

02:44:40.000 So this is...

02:44:42.000 Everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right?

02:44:46.000 But there's this really interesting evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. 0.98

02:44:53.000 So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and how you look to other people in a kind of showing off way, you're going to feel like shit, right? 0.97

02:45:04.000 That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said, right?

02:45:07.000 But 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.

02:45:17.000 And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this.

02:45:25.000 There's two ways.

02:45:27.000 Everyone listening to your show has two kinds of motivation in their life, right?

02:45:31.000 We're all a mixture of both.

02:45:32.000 So imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano, it gives you joy, right?

02:45:38.000 That would be what's called an intrinsic reason to play the piano, right?

02:45:41.000 You're not doing it to get anything out of it.

02:45:43.000 That's the thing you love, right?

02:45:44.000 Sounds like jiu-jitsu was like that for you.

02:45:46.000 Writing is like that for me.

02:45:47.000 Everyone will have something in their life that just gives them joy as they do it, right?

02:45:51.000 Okay, now imagine you played the piano not...

02:45:54.000 I don't know, not because you love it, but because your parents are massively pressuring you, it's their dream for you.

02:46:00.000 Or in a dive bar that you can't stand to pay the rent, or to impress a woman, right?

02:46:05.000 That would be what's called an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right?

02:46:08.000 You're not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you're doing it to get something further down the line, right?

02:46:12.000 Now obviously we're all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things.

02:46:17.000 Firstly, The more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your intrinsic values are starved, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite a significant amount.

02:46:27.000 He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right?

02:46:35.000 We've become much more driven by...

02:46:37.000 Think about how Instagram makes you feel, right?

02:46:39.000 We've become much more driven by this hollow external sense of...

02:46:44.000 Think about something as simple as, a while ago, I was at Elton John's last night in Caesar's Palace, right? 0.80

02:46:50.000 Amazing 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.

02:46:57.000 Now that's a small example, but you can see what they're doing. 0.97

02:47:00.000 In order to display their life to invite envy from other people, They are not living their life. 0.98

02:47:06.000 No one wants to watch your shitty video about Elton John. 0.96

02:47:09.000 There's thousands of videos about Elton John that are much better than yours, right? 0.99

02:47:13.000 Why are you doing that?

02:47:14.000 You're never going to watch it either.

02:47:16.000 You're doing it to say to other people, envy me, right?

02:47:19.000 It doesn't make you feel good in that room.

02:47:20.000 It actually makes you feel worse.

02:47:22.000 You're not enjoying the experience. 0.99

02:47:24.000 And it makes them feel like shit because you're trying to invite envy in your friends. 0.99

02:47:28.000 That's a small example of a much wider thing of the kind of junk values that have taken over our minds. 0.99

02:47:33.000 So 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. 0.99

02:47:42.000 One is, it's like fucking air pollution. 0.99

02:47:44.000 You know, get the messaging out of your head. 0.99

02:47:47.000 More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own surname, their own last name, right?

02:47:55.000 From 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? 0.98

02:48:05.000 None of your listeners will lie on their deathbeds and think about All the shit they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. 0.96

02:48:11.000 They'll think about moments of meaning and connection. 0.99

02:48:13.000 That's like a banal, obvious thing.

02:48:14.000 But we're constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend, right?

02:48:21.000 These junk values have taken over our minds. 0.98

02:48:24.000 So part of the solution is just fucking get rid of most of this advertising. 0.99

02:48:27.000 Get rid of most of this. 0.97

02:48:28.000 You know, very tightly regulate it.

02:48:31.000 But...

02:48:31.000 In doing so, you limit commerce.

02:48:34.000 You're limiting people's ability to sell things.

02:48:37.000 You're changing the current market that a lot of people don't have any problem with.

02:48:41.000 I know this is a heresy in the United States, but limiting commercial speech is fine by me, yeah.

02:48:46.000 I think it's fascinating.

02:48:47.000 I think it's a fascinating discussion, but it is, in a sense, it's limiting free speech as well.

02:48:51.000 I mean, we have a real problem with that.

02:48:53.000 The problem with it is that as soon as you start to put any regulations at all, And, you know, you say, oh, you shouldn't be allowed to advertise, even if it's advertising honestly about a great product.

02:49:04.000 People will have real issues with that.

02:49:06.000 So we already have advertising regulation.

02:49:08.000 You can't pop an advert saying, I've found the cure for cancer.

02:49:12.000 Right, that's what I'm saying, honestly.

02:49:14.000 So this is...

02:49:15.000 I would argue this is a tightening.

02:49:16.000 So, for example, in London, there was a big controversy a couple of years back.

02:49:20.000 Skinny billboards.

02:49:21.000 Exactly.

02:49:22.000 So it was this...

02:49:22.000 It was a billboard of an impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man.

02:49:27.000 And the billboard said something like, are you beach body ready?

02:49:31.000 Right. 0.98

02:49:31.000 The clear implication being, if you don't look like these people who you'll never fucking look like, you're not ready to go to the beach. 0.98

02:49:36.000 And the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, just said, you can't do this, right? 0.94

02:49:40.000 You can still advertise your bodybuilding... 0.98

02:49:42.000 But that's so silly.

02:49:43.000 I mean, it's not an unobtainable ideal. 0.90

02:49:46.000 You're looking at two examples of it.

02:49:48.000 They're real human beings.

02:49:50.000 Yeah, but that's like...

02:49:51.000 I mean, in a way, I understand what you're saying.

02:49:52.000 I was saying that you have to be that way.

02:49:55.000 But if you do want to look like that man and have that body, it is a possible goal.

02:50:01.000 I mean, it's not possible for the vast majority of people, right?

02:50:04.000 If they don't have the time or the effort, it's not.

02:50:07.000 But very many people have radically changed their body.

02:50:11.000 I'm not saying that you have to do it.

02:50:12.000 I'm not saying you should do it.

02:50:14.000 But it is a possible thing to do.

02:50:16.000 And if you're trying to sell fitness, wouldn't you sell an example of someone who's really good at it?

02:50:20.000 Like if you're trying to sell a business course, Wouldn't you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari?

02:50:26.000 Like, this is a guy who's done really well at business.

02:50:28.000 Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan.

02:50:31.000 You wouldn't say, well, that's an impossible goal.

02:50:34.000 I'm going to show you a person in a middle-class suburb because this is as good as you're ever going to get.

02:50:38.000 I think that's a fair point.

02:50:39.000 I think there's two things going on, isn't there?

02:50:41.000 There's...

02:50:43.000 The freedom of people to market what they want to do.

02:50:46.000 It's a nanny state issue that people have a problem with. 1.00

02:50:51.000 By saying that these are impossible to achieve body goals.

02:50:54.000 We already have regulation of these things.

02:50:58.000 And people don't call that a nanny state thing.

02:51:01.000 You may have regulation of these things, but that is not, I mean, I don't think this is a good example.

02:51:07.000 What's a better example?

02:51:08.000 So Professor Kassa said there's two sets of solutions to these junk values problems.

02:51:11.000 There's get the contaminants out of the atmosphere sort of thing, which he says is actually a weaker one than the second set of solutions. 0.98

02:51:19.000 So how do we stop people being pumped full of bullshit junk values, right? 0.97

02:51:23.000 Educate them on what is happening to them and make it less appealing. 0.99

02:51:26.000 Well, this is the second part.

02:51:27.000 And you've gone to what I think was the most important part of the research Professor Kasser did.

02:51:31.000 So he was working with a guy called Nathan Dungan.

02:51:34.000 Nathan is a financial advisor in Minneapolis.

02:51:40.000 And his job was to work with adults who were having trouble budgeting and explain budgeting to them and help them do it, right?

02:51:48.000 And he gets a call from a school.

02:51:50.000 It was a kind of middle class school.

02:51:51.000 It wasn't super rich.

02:51:52.000 It wasn't poor.

02:51:53.000 It was a middle class.

02:51:54.000 Where they're having a problem.

02:51:56.000 The kids at this school were becoming obsessed with getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone or whatever it was.

02:52:01.000 And if their parents couldn't afford it, the kids were really freaking out, right?

02:52:05.000 So they say to Nathan, would you come in and just explain budgeting to these kids, right? 0.98

02:52:09.000 So Nathan goes in, he tries to explain budgeting and quickly realises these kids don't give a shit about budgeting, right? 0.98

02:52:14.000 There's something else going on here. 0.98

02:52:15.000 They are so obsessed with getting these things.

02:52:17.000 So with Professor Kasser, he designs this programme that led to a really interesting breakthrough.

02:52:23.000 It's something people can try at home, right?

02:52:24.000 You don't have to do it in this context.

02:52:27.000 They got, and you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and their teenagers, right?

02:52:32.000 They come in.

02:52:33.000 It was once every couple of weeks for, I think, four months.

02:52:36.000 And at first, they just say, the first meeting they had, they just said, write a list of everything you have got to have.

02:52:43.000 They didn't define that, right?

02:52:44.000 And people, of course, say, like, a home, a car, whatever.

02:52:47.000 But quite quickly, people would say Nike sneakers.

02:52:49.000 The parents would name expensive things.

02:52:51.000 And they go, okay, tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers, right?

02:52:55.000 And 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.

02:53:03.000 It was very often, almost immediately, I'd say I'd be accepted by the group.

02:53:07.000 People would envy me, right?

02:53:08.000 These insights are just beneath the surface.

02:53:11.000 They go, who put that idea in your head?

02:53:13.000 Where did you get that idea?

02:53:14.000 And of course, everyone thinks they're smarter than the ad.

02:53:17.000 But giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values were, that was the first part.

02:53:22.000 Second part was much more interesting and took longer.

02:53:24.000 Then they would have in future sessions, they'd say, well, okay, given that's not actually made you feel better, What are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied, happy, in a flow state?

02:53:33.000 What are things that are meaningful to you?

02:53:35.000 People, you know, a whole range of things.

02:53:37.000 Playing sports, playing music, reading, whatever it was, right?

02:53:42.000 And they say, okay, how could we build more of that into your life and less of these junk values?

02:53:47.000 How could you do more of this every week?

02:53:49.000 And just meeting, we don't have these conversations in our culture very often, just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other and going, actually, I managed to play guitar for an hour every day.

02:53:58.000 I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach and we went...

02:54:01.000 That's going to stifle materialism?

02:54:03.000 What it led to, so this was monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to a significant shift in people's values.

02:54:09.000 They had a significant decrease in junk values and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values.

02:54:17.000 And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time.

02:54:22.000 The 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?

02:54:31.000 Like, I had this completely bizarre experience when the book first came out, where I was being, Lost Connections, the depression one, where I was being interviewed by some American interviewer, I can't remember who it was, and I was talking about how loneliness causes depression, right?

02:54:46.000 And the interviewer goes saying like, well, this is a very controversial theory, right?

02:54:52.000 I'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.

02:55:01.000 I don't think that's controversial at all. 0.99

02:55:03.000 I think that person's silly.

02:55:04.000 But I think the reason it's controversial is because these biological stories, which have some truth in them, Have dominated how...

02:55:13.000 When I was a teenager, I went to my doctor...

02:55:14.000 It's only thought of as being a medical issue.

02:55:17.000 When I went to my doctor when I was a teenager and I was really depressed and I said I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me and I couldn't control it, my doctor told me, an entirely biological treat, she said, there's just a problem with your brain here.

02:55:29.000 All you need to do is drug yourself, right?

02:55:31.000 And I drug myself, and I got some relief from the chemical antidepressants, but it did not solve my depression.

02:55:35.000 And one of the reasons I wrote Lost Connections is because after 13 years of taking the maximum possible dose, I was like, well, what's going wrong here?

02:55:41.000 There's something missing in this picture.

02:55:43.000 Because I still feel depressed, and every year that I've been alive, I'm 40, depression and anxiety have increased in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world.

02:55:51.000 There's something missing in this picture.

02:55:52.000 And I think the reason why that's controversial, it seemed controversial to that woman, even though to you and me, it's...

02:55:58.000 Crazy to think it's controversial, is because these biological stories, which have some basis in reality, have become the whole of the picture for a lot of people, right?

02:56:07.000 I had a completely bizarre experience where...

02:56:10.000 You know Peter Thiel?

02:56:12.000 Have you had him on your show?

02:56:13.000 No, but I know him.

02:56:14.000 Yeah, so Peter Thiel, people who don't know, is the founder of PayPal gazillionaire, right?

02:56:18.000 Back to the Trump campaign.

02:56:20.000 I got an invitation from Peter Thiel just before...

02:56:23.000 It was after Trump had been elected, but before he'd been inaugurated, his people, to go to a...

02:56:29.000 They were organising a conference for app developers who were trying to develop apps to deal with depression, anxiety, and addiction.

02:56:38.000 And I'm a bit like, I don't think apps are really the solution, but I wanted an excuse to go to San Francisco anyway.

02:56:43.000 So I go.

02:56:44.000 It's a day-long conference...

02:56:47.000 I 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.

02:56:55.000 And I'm sitting there, and I'm like...

02:56:59.000 All they're doing is looking at pictures of brain scans, right?

02:57:02.000 If all you knew about depression and anxiety was this conference and addiction, you would literally think they were just things that happened inside the brain.

02:57:11.000 And I'm like the last person up.

02:57:12.000 I don't think this was designed this way.

02:57:14.000 Maybe they did.

02:57:15.000 I'm sitting there thinking, what do I say to these people?

02:57:17.000 And I thought, you know...

02:57:21.000 I was trying to think of metaphors.

02:57:22.000 You could have a conference about obesity that just looked at scans of people's stomachs, right? 0.98

02:57:27.000 It wouldn't be untrue, it wouldn't be bad science, but you'd miss the whole fucking reason why they're fat, right?

02:57:32.000 You could tell the plot of Romeo and Juliet using, like, Newtonian physics. 0.94

02:57:37.000 You could draw a diagram, Romeo moves this way, Juliet moves this way.

02:57:40.000 You wouldn't understand a damn thing about why anyone does anything, right?

02:57:45.000 It was such a deep misunderstanding, or not a misunderstanding, such a partial truth, right?

02:57:50.000 And 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.

02:57:56.000 It's like...

02:57:58.000 Let's not discuss this.

02:57:59.000 Let'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.

02:58:10.000 It's a bizarre misunderstanding.

02:58:13.000 Is there something going on with people's amygdalas?

02:58:15.000 Yes.

02:58:15.000 Is it important to understand that science?

02:58:17.000 Of course, right?

02:58:18.000 I'm strongly in favour of brain science.

02:58:20.000 I'm in favour of the science of understanding the stomach.

02:58:22.000 But it's a bizarre reduction of what human beings are.

02:58:27.000 To think that these are the main drivers of these crises, right?

02:58:31.000 Yes. 0.92

02:58:31.000 It's ridiculous. 0.92

02:58:34.000 Yeah.

02:58:35.000 Sorry.

02:58:35.000 I agree.

02:58:36.000 We have to wrap this up.

02:58:37.000 We're already after three hours.

02:58:38.000 I really enjoyed the show.

02:58:38.000 Can I just say very quickly that anyone who wants any more information, publishers fucking whip me if I don't say this, anyone who wants any more information about either of my books, Chasing the Scream is www.chasingthescream.com.

02:58:50.000 You can listen to audio overloads of the people we talked about and take a quiz to see how much you know about addiction.

02:58:54.000 And Lost Connections is www.thelostconnections.com and there are audio books of both those books as well that you can get on those sites.

02:59:00.000 Beautiful.

02:59:00.000 Thank you very much.

02:59:01.000 I really enjoyed that, Joe.

02:59:02.000 Cheers.

02:59:02.000 Thank you very much.

02:59:03.000 Thanks.

02:59:06.000 I think?

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 20, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1250 - Johann Hari

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