Feb. 20, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:59:03
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
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5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello, Johan. | |
| Hey, Joe. | ||
| It's great to be back with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good to see you, man. | |
| What's happening? | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And she kept looking at me going, what? | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Literally three minutes she goes, do you speak English? | ||
| I was like, my people fucking invented it, right? | ||
| But no one was there to laugh at my sad joke because they didn't understand what the fuck I was saying. | ||
| Arizona's a strange place. | ||
| I really love Arizona. | ||
| There's great parts. | ||
| Phoenix is amazing. | ||
| Tucson's a great place too, but it's a Wild West sort of a state. | ||
| It's one of those weird holdover states that have a lot of weird old school laws. | ||
| I think you could just walk around with a gun. | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| My main experience in Phoenix was, in Arizona, in fact, was going out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang, wearing t-shirts saying, I was a drug addict, while members of the public mock them and jeer at them. | ||
| Right, because I've written this book about the war on drugs. | ||
| Is that Joe Arpaio? | ||
| Yeah, Sheriff Arpaio. | ||
| No longer Sheriff now, thankfully. | ||
| But yeah, Arizona is a deeply weird place. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| A lot of really nice people. | ||
| But it's 150,000 degrees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, literally, almost nobody lived there until air conditioning was invented, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| So I was like, oh, just walk. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| And I get like halfway there, and people are literally stopping their cars going, are you okay? | ||
| Because the only reason anyone would ever walk in Phoenix was basically if your car had broken. | ||
| It didn't even occur to them, I might have actually just chosen to walk, right? | ||
| Plus, you're so white. | ||
| I am literally the whitest person. | ||
| 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! | ||
| How can a human be so white? | ||
| I never have a nice colour. | ||
| I'm either this albino colour or red. | ||
| There's no rich brown hue there, ever. | ||
| None of my ancestors, they're Scottish and Swiss, so they never saw the sun, right? | ||
| None of my ancestors. | ||
| My friend Jamie was over at my house once, and he's, not this friend Jamie, a different friend Jamie, who's British as well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And she goes, Yeah. | ||
| She goes, No, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, he's white like paper. | |
| So from then on, Jamie became Jamie white like paper. | ||
| A very accurate description of my lack of pigment is cruelly true. | ||
| It's funny how much we appreciate the English accent, though. | ||
| The English accent is like one of the best tools for selling things to very gullible Americans. | ||
| British people benefit from constant positive discrimination in the United States, right? | ||
| It's like having a 10-inch dick, just having a British accent. | ||
| People go, oh my god, you got an accent! | ||
| And it's like, all humans have accents, I've just got a slightly different one. | ||
| But it's a cherished one. | ||
| It makes you feel like you're more sophisticated, you're more well-read, you're more aware of the world. | ||
| I mean, I just am sophisticated and well-read. | ||
| Anyway, you get this constant, yeah, constantly people ascribing to you much better qualities than you actually have. | ||
| But what does it work in reverse, like in England? | ||
| What is the reaction to American accents? | ||
| It's mostly disgust, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a mixture. | ||
| Americans... | ||
| I always think the relationship of Britain and America is like one of those police mirrors. | ||
| Because we grow up constantly looking at the United States, right? | ||
| We're constantly staring through. | ||
| We are immersed in American culture. | ||
| But when Americans look back at us, they're just seeing a reflection of themselves. | ||
| I mean, Americans watch Downton Abbey and know about the Queen or whatever. | ||
| But there isn't that... | ||
| Two-way dialogue that there is. | ||
| Yeah, so it's a slightly weird... | ||
| I think we feel very American, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And those moments of disorientation are really strange. | ||
| But give me one for an example. | ||
| Well, there's a question that Americans ask all the time that I have literally never heard a European ask, right? | ||
| It's the question, what's your story? | ||
| Every American, you can go to the most crusty right-wing person coming out of Mar-a-Lago or a kid in West Baltimore and you can say, what's your story? | ||
| And they'll have an answer. | ||
| The only context I can imagine a British person saying, what's your story? | ||
| Would be in a police interrogation. | ||
| It would be an extremely hostile question. | ||
| What's your story? | ||
| Right? | ||
| It would be... | ||
| You just wouldn't ever say it, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| That people will tell you... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I thought, if we were Swiss, where my dad's from, you wouldn't tell me this until we got married. | ||
| And maybe not even then, right? | ||
| So there's a level of candor and storytelling among Americans. | ||
| It's one of the best things about this, you know, fucked up and amazing place, right? | ||
| That I just love. | ||
| And there's something about there's a kind of narrative openness that's very different about this place than Europe, anywhere in Europe. | ||
| Now, when you talk to people in England, you guys don't have the same level of reality television. | ||
| You have some, like Big Brother, but you don't have it to the extent that we have it here, right? | ||
| Yeah, it hasn't. | ||
| Well, I mean, your country has literally been taken over by reality television, right? | ||
| We have a reality television president. | ||
| No, it hasn't conquered the whole culture in that way. | ||
| Well, he's a reality television president, but he's sort of a game show host president. | ||
| Like, that's how I used to describe myself when I was hosting Fear Factor. | ||
| They're like, you host a reality show? | ||
| I'm like, sort of? | ||
| It's a game show. | ||
| It's just a fucked up game show. | ||
| And Trump was hosting a game show. | ||
| Essentially, right? | ||
| It was a contest. | ||
| It wasn't like keeping up with the Kardashians. | ||
| That's a true reality show because there's literally nothing going on other than these people's lives and whatever orchestrated bullshit they put in to make it more interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. | ||
| What do you guys have? | ||
| But I think that's part of the thing that I was getting to about Americans always wanted to give you their narrative. | ||
| They always wanted to give you the story of their life. | ||
| So when someone says, what's your story? | ||
| They already have it ready. | ||
| Because it's almost like we feel like... | ||
| We're in some sort of a small television show all the time or some sort of small production. | ||
| It's like almost a part of who we are. | ||
| Yeah, every American thinks they're the star of their own movie, right? | ||
| And I forget who said this, but someone realized, you know, sometimes in life you realize you're just the extra, right? | ||
| You're in the corner of the shot, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And yeah, I think that's true, and I think that's not as true of British people or... | ||
| I think there's certain... | ||
| How do I put it? | ||
| Like... | ||
| There's a certain kind of self-deprecation you're taught as a British person. | ||
| You're taught, and I had to kind of unlearn it living here. | ||
| So what would be examples? | ||
| I forget where I read this story, so maybe it's not true, but I remember reading it years ago. | ||
| So we had these terrible subway bombs in 2005. I'm sure you remember four young British men go on to the London Underground. | ||
| Murder, I think it was over 50 people. | ||
| And two weeks later, another group of jihadis tried to do the same thing. | ||
| But they hadn't built the bombs very well, so they go down into the subway, and there's a loud bang, but it doesn't connect with the detonator. | ||
| So there's a loud bang, but it doesn't actually blow everyone up. | ||
| Obviously, people freak the fuck out, as you can imagine, right? | ||
| And I forget, maybe this is a story that someone told that wasn't factually true, but I think it reveals something very... | ||
| Something about our British character. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And someone, I think it was an off-duty fire officer in the story, chases after them for ages, chases after the guy for ages, while everyone else is running the fuck away. | ||
| And he catches the guy and he throws him to the ground. | ||
| And what he said to him was that the off-duty fire officer says to the attempted suicide bomber, you rude, rude man. | ||
| And what I love about that is the idea that suicide bombing is just bad manners. | ||
| It's just impolite. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There was one place, I forget where it is, where they broke into a luxury goods store. | ||
| And they could only make, it was a very strong window, so they could only make a hole in the corner of the window. | ||
| And it was caught on the security cameras that the rioters formed a line to go in and loot the store, right? | ||
| That's how deep the idea of, like, queuing and making a line is in British culture. | ||
| Even in a riot, we're like, oh, no, I think you were before me, right? | ||
| I've got a Chilean friend, Isabel Banquet, who lives in London, and she, like, I remember her phony, after she read that, I'd be like, you're fucking English! | ||
| You don't know how to riot! | ||
| This is a riot! | ||
| You're bombing a queue! | ||
| What's wrong with you people, right? | ||
| You guys don't have Black Friday sales, do you? | ||
| No, they've just started, and, yeah, it's an unfortunate business. | ||
| That might be the end of your humility. | ||
| We're not going to make it. | ||
| We survived the Nazis. | ||
| We're not fucking surviving Black Friday, right? | ||
| There's something about those deals. | ||
| When people get that bargain and then they open that door, ready, go! | ||
| And people pile through. | ||
| All humanity gets tossed aside. | ||
| It gives you insight into the fucking... | ||
| Financial desperation of ordinary Americans, right? | ||
| It's a little bit of that, but it's also the competitive nature of those things where you're trying to grab the few remaining items that are 25% off, and you've been saving for this TV for six months, and there it is right in front of you, and you charge, and people are fighting left and right. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It's just a terrible way for people to, you know, to interact with each other. | ||
| So, what do you got here for me? | ||
| So we were going to talk about, yeah, the... | ||
| I was really interested to talk to you because we talked last time about my book about depression, lost connections. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I really... | ||
| Was that out last time you came? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| So that was a book that came out a few years before. | ||
| It's just come out in a new edition where there's loads of extra material, particularly about the opioid crisis. | ||
| And essentially because... | ||
| So you added to it? | ||
| Yeah, loads of new stuff. | ||
| Because that book's about five years old now. | ||
| And although with loads of new stuff now, but... | ||
| You know, it was something I cared about for this really, like, personal reason in that one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I was trying to figure out what to do. | ||
| Nothing I was doing was working. | ||
| Nothing I was doing was helping. | ||
| And I decided, right, okay, well, there are lots of people all over the world who are trying to deal with this problem. | ||
| I want to go and meet with them, talk with them. | ||
| So I ended up going on this big journey. | ||
| It took three years. | ||
| I travelled over 30,000 miles. | ||
| I wanted to sit with, you know, people who'd been through addiction. | ||
| It actually led to a lot of other aspects of the war on drugs, which I think are as important as what we do about addiction. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Vietnam, where they make people with addiction problems go into literally forced labour camps. | ||
| And the places that had the most compassionate possible policies, like Portugal, where they decriminalised all drugs with incredible results. | ||
| Switzerland, where they legalised heroin, incredible results. | ||
| And I guess... | ||
| I ended up just spending so much time with such a crazy mixture of people from a transgendered crack dealer in Brooklyn who ended up actually being one of the smartest people I know to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel who's definitely not one of the smartest people I know and I learned loads of things but I guess the heart of what I learned is Just so much of what we've been told about this for so long. | ||
| It's now 100 years since we started fighting the war on drugs in this country and it was then imposed on the rest of the world. | ||
| So much of what we're told is wrong. | ||
| Drugs aren't what we think they are. | ||
| Addiction isn't what we think it is. | ||
| The war on drugs isn't what we think it is and the alternatives to the war on drugs aren't what we think they are. | ||
| So in some ways it's kind of dawning to go all over the world and realise so much of what we take for granted isn't right but that opens up this whole exciting other set of possibilities. | ||
| The main reason why people assume that people do drugs is to escape reality. | ||
| What do you think is the primary thing that they're running from? | ||
| So you've got to separate out two things. | ||
| and this surprised me because my family's experience was pretty bad and catastrophic addiction. | ||
| But most drug use, even the main drug war body in the world, the UN Office of Drug Control, admits that 90% of all currently banned drug use is what they call non-problematics. | ||
| so the person isn't addicted and it doesn't damage their health. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So 90%. | ||
| So let's set that aside. | ||
| We'll come back to that. | ||
| There's 90% that's recreational use, where people use because it makes their lives better. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Then you've got the temp. | ||
| Like coffee, sip of wine at work, or... | ||
| Or ecstasy or a whole range of currently cannabis, a whole range of currently illegal drugs. | ||
| In most cases there are some people who have addictions to cannabis. | ||
| So you've then got to ask, what's happening with this 10% who have got a problem, right? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| And one of the things that really blew my mind in the research for Chasing the Scream was realizing I had deeply misunderstood what addiction is. | ||
| I had misunderstood the thing I thought I had been seeing in front of me since I was a kid, right? | ||
| So most people, let's think about heroin addiction because that was close to me. | ||
| Most people, if we stop the next 20 people to walk past your studio and we said to them, what causes heroin addiction? | ||
| I think they'd look at us like we were stupid and they'd say, well, the clue's in the name, dipshit, right? | ||
| Heroin causes heroin addiction. | ||
| We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need. | ||
| And we think that, a lot of people think that's what addiction is, right? | ||
| It's this physical hunger for the chemical hook inside the drug, right? | ||
| There is some reality to chemical hooks. | ||
| They exist. | ||
| They're real. | ||
| But that's actually a very small part of what's going on. | ||
| The first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something wrong with that story we've been told is when it was explained to me by loads of doctors in Britain, where I'm from, if you step out into the street and you get hit by a truck and you break your hip... | ||
| You'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine. | ||
| Diamorphine is heroin, right? | ||
| It's the medical name for heroin. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Anyone watching this podcast who's got a British grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taken a shit ton of heroin, right? | ||
| If what we think is right, that addiction is caused primarily by exposure to the chemical hooks, loads of these people should be leaving hospital and trying to score on the streets, right? | ||
| This has been studied very carefully. | ||
| It virtually never happens, right? | ||
| And when I learned that It just seems so weird to me. | ||
| I thought it couldn't possibly be true, right? | ||
| How could it be you've got someone in a hospital bed who's taking loads of really potent heroin, they don't become addicted, and in the alleyway outside, you've got someone who's using actually a weaker form of the drug who becomes addicted. | ||
| How can that be? | ||
| What's happening here? | ||
| And I only began to understand it. | ||
| When I went to Vancouver, 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. | ||
| It's a new way of thinking and loads of new evidence. | ||
| So, Professor Alexander explained to me, this story that we've been told, right, that addiction is caused by the chemical hooks, primarily, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. | ||
| They're really simple experiments. | ||
| Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit shitty today, right? | ||
| You take a rat... | ||
| You put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles. | ||
| One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. | ||
| You might remember in the 1980s, there's a famous Partnership for Drug-Free America ad that shows this experiment, right? | ||
| And the rat in this cage always prefers the heroin water, and almost always kills itself within a week or two, right? | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| That's our story. | ||
| You're exposed to the drug, it takes you over, and then you just die, right? | ||
| But in the 70s, Professor Alexander comes along and says he was working with people with addiction problems, and he's like, well, hang on a minute. | ||
| We put these rats alone In an empty cage, they've got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats, right? | ||
| What would happen if we did this differently? | ||
| So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right? | ||
| They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. | ||
| Anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park. | ||
| And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both. | ||
| They don't know what's in them. | ||
| This is the fascinating thing. | ||
| In Rat Park, they don't like the water very much. | ||
| None of them ever use it compulsively. | ||
|
unidentified
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The heroin water. | |
| Yeah, the heroin water. | ||
| None of them ever use it compulsively. | ||
| None of them ever overdose. | ||
| So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and death by overdose when their lives are shitty to none when they have the things that make life meaningful. | ||
| There's loads of human examples I'm sure we'll talk about. | ||
| But the main thing I took from this is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. | ||
| The opposite of addiction is connection. | ||
| We have to ask ourselves, what are the contexts in which people become addicted? | ||
| Because there are some contexts where people find these drugs extremely addictive, and there are some contexts where they don't become addicted at all. | ||
| There's something... | ||
| The drug plays a role. | ||
| Chemical hooks are real. | ||
| I can talk about how we know that. | ||
| They play some role, but they're actually a surprisingly small amount of what's going on. | ||
| We know this from... | ||
| I mean, there's so many examples, but I'll give you another one. | ||
| At the same time as Rat Park, there was an experiment going on that everyone listening to this will have heard of, the Vietnam War, right? | ||
| In Vietnam, shitloads of American troops were using heroin, right? | ||
| It was very easy to get it out there. | ||
| They'd actually, insanely, they had cracked down on cannabis, and so people had moved to heroin because sniffer dogs can't detect heroin as easily as cannabis. | ||
| So... | ||
| Cannabis was everywhere. | ||
| Sorry, heroin was everywhere. | ||
| Loads of American troops were using it. | ||
| And if you look at what people said at the time, the authorities, the Nixon White House, they were shitting themselves because they're like, they believe this chemical hooks theory of addiction. | ||
| So they're like, fuck, when this war ends, we're going to have, you know, half a million heroin addicts on the streets of the United States. | ||
| There's a really good study that followed these men home. | ||
| And it found that the vast majority of them just stopped. | ||
| They didn't go to rehab, most of them. | ||
| They didn't go into horrific withdrawal. | ||
| Some of them had uncomfortable flu-like symptoms, but most of them just stopped. | ||
| Now, if you believe this old theory that chemical hooks take you over, that makes no sense. | ||
| But if you understand 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? | ||
| You, me, everyone in this area, if I took any of us and put us in a horrific, pestilential jungle where we don't want to be and I made you kill a load of people and potentially die at any moment, you would find heroin much more appealing than you do now, right? | ||
| If we want to understand why people turn to painkillers, we've got to understand why they're in pain, right? | ||
| And the core of addiction has made me... | ||
| I learned from these amazing experts all over the world that the core of addiction... | ||
| It's about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. | ||
| And once you understand that, you can see why what we've been doing is such a disaster, right? | ||
| Because the theory we have with the war on drugs, think about Arizona. | ||
| We can talk about that more. | ||
| But I, you know, like I say, I went to this... | ||
| Nightmare prison, Estrella prison in Phoenix, Arizona, where people are humiliated. | ||
| And the theory behind that, part of the theory behind the war on drugs is, if you've got people who are addicted, you've got to inflict pain on them to give them an incentive to stop, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Truth is much worse, right? | ||
| That makes addiction worse. | ||
| Those women I went out with and spent all that time with who were, you know, humiliate... | ||
| I remember in that prison, we come back from being on the chain gang where they have to... | ||
| Sometimes they have to dig graves. | ||
| They weren't doing that the day I was there. | ||
| They had to collect garbage one of the days I was there. | ||
| But... | ||
| We come back, and normally with prisons, as a journalist, they don't want to show you anything, right? | ||
| Like, you have to kind of really finagle to get them to show you anything. | ||
| In this prison, it's like a pantomime of cruelty. | ||
| They want to show it to you. | ||
| The whole point is to humiliate these people, right? | ||
| So the women I've been talking to and the men were really terrified of what they called the hole, right? | ||
| It's the solitary block. | ||
| And so I said to the guards, will you show me the hole? | ||
| I was sure they said no. | ||
| They're like, yeah, sure, come on, I'll show you. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's like a concrete block. | ||
| You're on your own. | ||
| There's nothing in it. | ||
| There's a tiny window where you can see sunlight. | ||
| No TV, nothing. | ||
| And I remember speaking to a woman who was in this and suddenly thinking, this is the closest you could get To an exact human recreation of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats, right? | ||
| And this is what we're doing, thinking it will stop these women being addicted. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's... | |
| The system we've built... | ||
| 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? | ||
| What have people with addiction problems not suffered? | ||
| What humiliation have they not endured? | ||
| So we've got this... | ||
| I think we've got to really shift our perspective on what addiction is and there are places that have done this that have led to incredible results. | ||
| I love that rat experiment one because that had always been parroted as this is the proof positive that these drugs are so terrible for you but once they figured out that if you take those rats and put them in a wonderful place and they don't have addiction it really does make you step back and go okay what is exactly going on here? | ||
| Obviously there's chemical hooks. | ||
| They are real. | ||
| Like people that are on sustained, prolonged use of opiates, especially people with back injuries, have an incredibly difficult time kicking them. | ||
| Even really positive people who don't necessarily have awful lives. | ||
| But it's one of those things that gets in your head and then you sort of parrot it. | ||
| You've heard it. | ||
| You repeat it. | ||
| But it's the reason why I asked you the question. | ||
| It's like, what is the cause? | ||
| For most people, you believe it's an unfulfilled life, or a painful self-image, or Remorse for your past or like, what is it? | ||
| Do we have like primary reasons or primary attributes that we attach to these people that are drug addicted? | ||
| Yeah, so this was what my more recent book, which is called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions is about. | ||
| Because I think the core of addiction is about trying to deal with pain. | ||
| But the causes of human pain are obviously huge. | ||
| But what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of deep despair, right? | ||
| Now, if you think about depression, very similar factors play out with addiction. | ||
| They're actually densely interconnected phenomena. | ||
| But there are real biological factors, right? | ||
| Your genes can make you more vulnerable to that, just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others. | ||
| And there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed or addicted that can make it harder to get out, right? | ||
| But... | ||
| Most of the factors that are causing this despair are not factors in our biology, they're factors in the way we live. | ||
| I think it's a kind of, this doesn't cover all of the causes that I learned about Velocity Connections, but it covers a lot of them. | ||
| Everyone watching your show knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right? | ||
| You need food. | ||
| You need water. | ||
| You need shelter. | ||
| You need clean air. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked really quickly, right? | ||
| But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? | ||
| You need to feel you belong. | ||
| You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. | ||
| You need to feel that people see you and value you. | ||
| You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. | ||
| And this culture we've built is good at lots of things, and I'm really glad to be alive today for all sorts of reasons. | ||
| I had to go to the dentist the other day. | ||
| I'm glad to be alive now, not like 100 years ago. | ||
| But there's a lot of evidence that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. | ||
| Let's think about, you 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. | ||
| Where is the opioid crisis happening? | ||
| I've been to a lot of the epicenters of it, places like Monadnock in New Hampshire. | ||
| Why are things so disastrous there? | ||
| Why is there much higher opioid addiction in West Virginia than on the faculty of Harvard, right? | ||
| People on the Faculty of Harvard have much better access to opioids, right? | ||
| Everyone there has good health insurance. | ||
| They have much better access. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Some amazing economists, Angus Dayton and Anne Case, did a massive study of this, and they said that we need to understand the opioid deaths mainly as what they call deaths of despair, right? | ||
| It's not a coincidence that the places where opioid addiction is highest are also the places where suicide not with opioids is highest, where antidepressant prescriptions are highest. | ||
| These things are clustering together for a reason, right? | ||
| And you don't have to spend much time in those places to see. | ||
| People, through no fault of their own, are like the rats in that first cage, right? | ||
| They have been deprived of the things that make life meaningful. | ||
| This doesn't mean chemical hooks don't play some role. | ||
| They do play a role. | ||
| But I've been to the places that have solved this, and it wasn't by thinking primarily about that. | ||
| So I'll just talk about the reality of chemical hooks, if that's right, because I think it's very important to understand in relation to opioids. | ||
| So there's a very strong agreement among scientists that the most powerful chemical hook we know is nicotine. | ||
| You smoke cigarettes. | ||
| My mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. | ||
| You smoke cigarettes. | ||
| The thing you feel a physical craving for when you stop, which my mother would never do, is nicotine. | ||
| That's the chemical hook. | ||
| And so in the late 80s, when nicotine patches were invented... | ||
| There's this huge wave of optimism among scientists because they're like, oh right, cigarette smoking is an addiction to the chemical hook, nicotine. | ||
| Now we can give people all the chemical hook they're addicted to without any of this shitty cancer-causing smoke. | ||
| People are going to stop smoking, right? | ||
| So nicotine patches are introduced and the US Surgeon General's report a couple of years later finds highly motivated people using nicotine patches. | ||
| 17% of them will stop smoking. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now it's important to say that is not nothing, right? | ||
| That means if you meet the chemical hook for people who are addicted to cigarettes, 17% of them will stop entirely. | ||
| That's a big deal, right? | ||
| That saved a huge number of people's lives. | ||
| But obviously 17% It's not 100%. | ||
| That leaves 83%. | ||
| They've got to be explained by the other things. | ||
| And that's really the factors that I talk about in Lost Connections. | ||
| So, I mean, there's a whole range of them. | ||
| But, you know, if you are acutely lonely, we are the loneliest society there's ever been, right? | ||
| You are much more likely to be vulnerable to despair, depression, addiction. | ||
| If you are controlled and humiliated at work, which most people now are to some degree, you're much more vulnerable to these things. | ||
| There's a whole range. | ||
| I go through nine of these factors in the book. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And they did something that's very different to what Americans are being urged to do. | ||
| So I'm a Swiss citizen, because my dad's from there, so I know Switzerland well. | ||
| And by the time you get to the year 2000, Switzerland is having like an opioid nightmare, right? | ||
| People can look up videos from the time, but, you know, people, like, Swiss people are obsessed with order. | ||
| It's not a coincidence they invented clocks and all that shit, right? | ||
| Like, in their public parks, people, like, injecting in the neck, like, nightmare scenes, right? | ||
| That'd be bad anywhere, but to Swiss people, this is, like, their worst nightmare, right? | ||
| And they try all sorts of things. | ||
| They try the American way, arresting people, punishing people, shaming people, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. | ||
| And then one day, they get this incredible woman called Ruth Dreyfus, who I got to know later, who becomes the Minister of Health and then the President, the first ever female President of Switzerland. | ||
| Um... | ||
| And she explains to people, I think the solution is to legalise heroin. | ||
| And she said, I know that sounds really shocking, because when you hear the word legalisation, what you picture is anarchy and chaos. | ||
| She said, what we have now is anarchy and chaos, right? | ||
| We have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to Unknown drug users, all in the dark, all filled with violence, disease and chaos. | ||
| Legalisation, she explained, is the way we restore order to this madness, right? | ||
| So the way it works is I spent a lot of time in these places. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in CVS. That's not the plan, right? | ||
| What I did in Switzerland is if you had a heroin problem, you were assigned to a clinic. | ||
| I spent a lot of time in the one in Geneva. | ||
| The former president, Ruth Dreyfuss, lives opposite this clinic. | ||
| I think that tells you something. | ||
| Like across the street? | ||
| Across the street. | ||
| So the way it works is... | ||
| She should move. | ||
| Well, but if you see the clinic, I'll tell you why, right? | ||
| So the way it works is you have to go to the clinic at 7 o'clock in the morning because Swiss people believe in doing things really fucking early. | ||
| It's a constant disagreement between me and my dad. | ||
| You turn up. | ||
| You go in. | ||
| They give you your heroin there. | ||
| They give you medically pure heroin. | ||
| You can't take it out with you. | ||
| You've got to use it there, partly because they don't want you to sell it on, but mainly because they want to monitor you to make sure you don't overdose. | ||
| You use it there, and then you leave to go to your job because you're given loads of support to get housing, work, and therapy to figure out why you can't bear to be present in your life, right? | ||
| So it's really important they give two things. | ||
| It's important to bear in mind these two things because it's the opposite of what we're doing at the moment here. | ||
| Give them the safest possible version of the drug And give them massive amounts of help to deal with the reasons why they need that drug. | ||
| Now when they're giving them the drug, are they injecting it in them? | ||
| Yeah, no, the individual injects it himself or herself. | ||
| So if you were the patient, I'm the nurse, I give you the heroin and I give you a clean syringe. | ||
| And one of the things that really surprised me At first I found really weird, is they will give you any dose of heroin that you want, apart from one that would kill you, and there is never any pressure to cut back. | ||
| And yet, I went there when it was 13 years after this had first started, and there was almost nobody on the programme from the start. | ||
| There were like three people who'd been there the whole time. | ||
| Almost everyone does cut back and stop over time. | ||
| And I remember saying to Rita Mangy, who's the chief psychiatrist there, well... | ||
| Well, how can that be? | ||
| Because we're told the chemical hooks take you over, you need more and more. | ||
| If you had an unlimited supply, you would just carry on forever. | ||
| How do you explain this? | ||
| And she looked at me like I was dumb and she said, well, we help them and their lives get better. | ||
| And as your life gets better, you don't want to be anaesthetised so much. | ||
| Which, once that's explained to you, is so obvious, right? | ||
| And it's worth just explaining the results of the Swiss programme. | ||
| It's 15 years now. | ||
| In the 15 years since this began, according to the best scientific evidence, people like Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen have shown, there have been... | ||
| Zero deaths, overdose deaths, on legal heroin. | ||
| Not one person. | ||
| There's been a massive fall in overdose deaths outside the legal program because people transfer in. | ||
| Because why would you carry on using expensive, shitty street drugs when you could be getting, you know, help and giving the drug for free? | ||
| And one thing that's fascinating about this is Swiss people are really conservative, right? | ||
| My Swiss relatives make Donald Trump look like Oprah. | ||
| And yet Swiss people, after this had been in practice for... | ||
| Five years, had a referendum on whether to get rid of it. | ||
| And 70% of Swiss people voted to keep heroin legal. | ||
| Not because they're so compassionate, to be honest. | ||
| That's not... | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're really not. | ||
| It was because crime fell so much, right? | ||
| It's much cheaper to give some... | ||
| How much did crime fall? | ||
| I've got the statistics in the book. | ||
| It's for years since I wrote it. | ||
| But there was, I think, something like a 50% fall in street crime. | ||
| Street prostitution literally ended, right? | ||
| There was no street prostitution after that. | ||
| Turns out women, you know, don't want to be on the street being fucked by random strangers for money if they've got, like, an alternative. | ||
| Who knew? | ||
| But there was an enormous fall in crime across the board, and the police confirmed that. | ||
| Everyone agrees with that in Switzerland. | ||
| And all the kind of anarchy in the streets just stopped, right? | ||
| But the reason I think this is really relevant to the opioid crisis is... | ||
| What we're doing is the exact opposite, right? | ||
| So, they give them the safe version of the drug, give them help to figure out why, practical support to change their environment, to get out of that isolated cage and into a life that's more like Rat Park. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| If your doctor in this country finds out that you are using, say, Percocet or Oxy, not because you've got back pain, but because you've got an addiction, your doctor, by law, has to cut you off, right? | ||
| If they don't, they can be busted as a dealer. | ||
| It's happened to lots of doctors. | ||
| So they have to cut you off. | ||
| So instead of giving you the drug, we stop you getting the drug. | ||
| Most people then, or not most, a very large number, then transfer to much more dangerous street drugs like heroin. | ||
| Secondly, far from giving you help to turn your life around, we give you a criminal record We shame you. | ||
| We stigmatize you. | ||
| We put barriers between you and reconnecting. | ||
| The opposite of addiction is connection, but what do we do? | ||
| We put barriers between people and reconnecting. | ||
| This is why... | ||
| That's one part of it, right? | ||
| So there's the drug policy part of it, where we're doing exactly the opposite of the country that succeeded in ending its opioid epidemic. | ||
| But there's something I think that's even deeper than that, which you really see in places like West Virginia, Monadnock... | ||
| The kind of hearts of the opioid crisis, which is we're also creating a society that is becoming harder and harder for people to be present in, especially in those places. | ||
| There's an analogy I keep thinking of. | ||
| In the 18th century in Britain, Loads of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in like London and Manchester. | ||
| And something happened that has been well documented. | ||
| There was something called the gin craze, right? | ||
| Where basically shitloads of people just became alcoholics, drank gin until they died, right? | ||
| There's a famous painting from the time called Gin Lane of a mother down in like a bottle of vodka while a baby like falls out the window. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And things like that really were happening. | ||
| If you look at what people said at the time, very similar to what they're saying now, they said, look at this evil drug gin. | ||
| Look what it's fucking done to us. | ||
| If only we could get rid of this evil drug gin, this problem would go away. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We know now, when we look back at the gin craze, it can have been gin that caused it, because anyone in Britain who's over the age of 18 can go and buy gin, right? | ||
| And while we still have some alcoholics, to be sure, we don't have mass epidemics of alcoholism, we don't have babies falling out of windows. | ||
| What changed? | ||
| It wasn't the availability of the drug. | ||
| The drug is more available now than it was then. | ||
| What changed was the amount of pain and distress in the society, right? | ||
| We don't have a society where people are as profoundly disorientated. | ||
| I mean, it's going up because we're creating more disorientation. | ||
| So if you create a society where people's basic psychological needs are not met, right? | ||
| Where they have a shrinking number of friends and social connections... | ||
| Where they're taught that life is about money and buying shit and displaying it on Instagram Excuse me Where they spend most of their time at jobs they find unfulfilling, controlling and humiliating. | ||
| You're going to create growing pools of people who can't... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you create this pervasive insecurity in the society. | ||
| You're going to create very large numbers of people... | ||
| Who are going to want to feel a need to anaesthetise themselves. | ||
| Now, that's not a good solution. | ||
| Obviously, I don't think heroin, opioids, these are not good solutions to these problems. | ||
| But it's not a crazy solution either. | ||
| There's a line I think of all the time. | ||
| I don't quote it very often because... | ||
| People can really react against this insight. | ||
| I think it's actually important. | ||
| You know, Marianne Faithfull, the great, like, 60s British singer? | ||
| She went out with Mick Jagger. | ||
| Annoyingly, that's why people remember. | ||
| She's much better than Mick Jagger. | ||
| In her memoir, she had a heroin addiction in the 60s. | ||
| She was homeless for a while. | ||
| She has this very challenging line that I think about a lot. | ||
| I'm going to phrase it slightly wrong. | ||
| But she said, heroin saved my life. | ||
| Because if it wasn't for heroin, I would have killed myself at that point. | ||
| Now, Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin was a good solution to her homelessness. | ||
| But we've got to understand this drug use is happening because it performs a function, right? | ||
| One of the most important things I learned for both my books, for Chasing the Scream and Lost Connection, is that these forms of despair, depression, anxiety, addiction, they are meaningful signals, right? | ||
| They are telling us something. | ||
| The fact that they have been rising year after year after year, 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. | ||
| That is a signal that is telling us something. | ||
| And that's because of drug addiction? | ||
| Overwhelmingly because of drug addiction and suicide. | ||
| It's risen to that point. | ||
| There are other factors going on, like obesity, but the main drivers are overdose and suicide. | ||
| That is telling us something. | ||
| And what we've been doing up to now is we've been insulting that signal. | ||
| We've either been saying depressed people, addicted people are just weak. | ||
| Or we've been saying, oh, it's just a problem in their brain. | ||
| There are real things going on in their brains, of course. | ||
| Or we've been saying, you know, it's just craziness. | ||
| But, in fact, it is largely a response to the way we're living. | ||
| Of course, there are other things going on as well, and we can talk about them. | ||
| And once you understand that, you realise there's got to be a deeper response. | ||
| And I went to places that had done that, not just Switzerland. | ||
| Switzerland, what is the overall population? | ||
| Five and a half million. | ||
| So it's a fairly small country. | ||
| How much money do they have to spend to keep this program going? | ||
| What is the time constraint in terms of how long is a person who's got an addiction problem allowed to stay there and receive treatment? | ||
| There's no time constraint. | ||
| You can stay on for your entire life if you want to. | ||
| In practice, that doesn't happen very often. | ||
| Do they stay in the facility? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They live in apartments. | ||
| They just go every day or whenever they want to. | ||
| I mean, I think you can go twice a day. | ||
| And it's free? | ||
| It's free. | ||
| It doesn't cost anything. | ||
| I mean, some people, once they have jobs, then pay health insurance and the health insurance pays for it. | ||
| But if you don't have money, then they pay for it. | ||
| And one of the things that was fascinating is they found it was in Joanne Sett did good research on or sites good research on this. | ||
| She did research for the Open Society Foundation. | ||
| It's actually cheaper than... | ||
| The police constantly harassing people, putting them in prison, putting them on trial. | ||
| Those are really expensive things to do. | ||
| Heroin is unbelievably cheap if you buy it legally, right? | ||
| Well, I would think the amount of money they would save just in street crime being radically reduced. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It makes the life of the person with addiction better. | ||
| It makes the lives of other citizens who were not addicted better. | ||
| And it saves money, right? | ||
| Which is why Swiss people are very pragmatic. | ||
| They're not, you know, the most compassionate people, but they are very pragmatic people. | ||
| That's why it was so popular. | ||
| Let's think about another place that adopted really different drug policies, right? | ||
| Because I think it's something we can learn from there as well. | ||
| So Portugal... | ||
| Around the time Switzerland's having its horrific heroin crisis, Portugal is having a fucking nightmare, right? | ||
| By the year 2000, 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is incredible, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they're like, we can't go on like this, what are we going to do? | ||
| And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the drug war began in this country 70 years before. | ||
| They said, should we, like, ask some scientists what the best thing to do would be? | ||
| So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know in Portugal called Dr. Juan Gulao, a totally extraordinary person, and he'd run the first ever drug treatment centre in Portugal, founded after the dictatorship. | ||
| And they said to them, you guys just go away. | ||
| Look at all the evidence and figure out what the hell we can do. | ||
| So they go away for two years, they 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, arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around. | ||
| And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment here in the United States, right? | ||
| So they do some residential rehab that has some value. | ||
| Main thing they did was a big program of job creation for people with addiction problems. | ||
| Say you used to be a mechanic. | ||
| They go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. | ||
| Again, much cheaper than sending him to prison, right? | ||
| They set up a big program of small loans so people with addiction problems could set up and run businesses, the things that they thought were important. | ||
| At the time, people are like, this is crazy, they're just going to spend it all on drugs, lunacy, right? | ||
| By the time I went to Portugal, it was, again, 13 years since this had begun, and the results were in. | ||
| Addiction was down by 50%. | ||
| This is by figures from the British Journal of Criminology, the best scientific study of this. | ||
| Overdose deaths were massively down. | ||
| HIV was massively down. | ||
| Every single indicator on problems related to drug use had fallen like a cliff, right? | ||
| It wasn't perfect, they've still got problems, of course, but there was that massive improvement. | ||
| And one of the reasons you know it works so well is that virtually no one in Portugal wants to go back. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And when I went to see him, the audio's on the Chasing the Screen website, he said something like... | ||
| Everything I said would happen didn't happen. | ||
| And everything the other side said would happen did. | ||
| And he talks about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalisation screwing people's lives up when he could have been helping them turn their lives around. | ||
| And this is something that I saw all over the world, right? | ||
| The places that have drug policies based on shame and stigma and the fantasy that you can get rid of drug use, which you can never do... | ||
| They have really terrible and rising problems. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Again, not perfect, but it was such a significant improvement. | ||
| The support in Portugal... | ||
| I mean, they've got five main political parties. | ||
| None of them want to go back, right? | ||
| That tells you something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, when they did this in Switzerland, what was the primary cause for this drug addiction and how did they deal with that? | ||
| So if they dealt with it in Portugal with these loans and helping out businesses by paying for half the salary and all those things, that seemed like wonderful ideas. | ||
| 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? | ||
| So it's a combination. | ||
| They gave people lots of therapy. | ||
| So I remember one of the people I spent some time with in that clinic had been terribly sexually abused. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that giving survivors of sexual abuse safe places in which they can release their shame about that leads to a big fall in depression, addiction and other problems. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that that kind of abuse is a big driver of a lot of addiction for a lot of people, though clearly not everyone. | ||
| Some of it was just there were people who had never been given a chance in life or had never had stable lives. | ||
| It was kind of a mixture of things. | ||
| And one of the things that's really good about the Swiss system is it wasn't saying in this kind of cookie-cutter way that often happens in drug treatment in the United States, although there's plenty of good examples as well, you know. | ||
| You don't arrive and they say, this is your problem. | ||
| We're here to tell you your problem and how to solve your problem. | ||
| It's very much guided by actually the person themselves, right? | ||
| People who are in deep pain, the core of it is you have to listen to them, right? | ||
| If we think about this addiction, depression in the way that I'm arguing that we should see them as signals that are telling us something, the most important thing is to listen to the signal, right? | ||
| I remember something I thought about a lot. | ||
| I had this weird experience. | ||
| That I kept thinking about all the time I was writing my book, Lost Connections, about depression. | ||
| And it was only quite late in the day that I realised why I kept thinking about it so much. | ||
| I was in Vietnam about five years ago now, maybe a little bit less. | ||
| And I did this really stupid thing. | ||
| I was in Hanoi and I was really tired. | ||
| I was doing research for a different book that I hadn't finished yet. | ||
| And by the side of the road, I saw this big red apple, women selling it. | ||
| And I'm shit at haggling, so I paid like $5 for this apple or something, and I took it back to my hotel. | ||
| I was so tired, I lay on the bed, and I start eating it, and it was just gross, right? | ||
| It was something really... | ||
| It's chemical taste. | ||
| It was like how I imagined food would taste after a nuclear war when I used to watch those films in the 80s, right? | ||
| But I was so tired, even though I knew it was wrong, I ate like half of it and threw it in the garbage. | ||
| And next, like, four days, I was just like violently sick, right? | ||
| Like, just in it, like, something from The Exorcist, right? | ||
| So I'm lying there in front of CNN and occasionally projectile vomiting. | ||
| But I'd had food poisoning before. | ||
| I basically lived on fried chicken in my 20s, so I was not new to this rodeo. | ||
| And after about four days, I said to Huang, my fixer and translator, who was arranging, I was there to interview survivors of the Vietnam War for something. | ||
| I'm like, look, I'm only here for another three days or whatever it was. | ||
| I've got to go and meet these people, otherwise this whole trip would have been a waste of time. | ||
| So he drives me like six or seven hours into the countryside. | ||
| And we get there and he's lined up these people for me to interview. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my God, I feel so bad actually. | ||
| I was sitting in this hut with this woman, who's an 86 year old woman who was the only person from her village that survived the Vietnam War. | ||
| So I'm talking to her. | ||
| And as she's speaking, the room starts to... | ||
| I've never had this feeling before. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, I didn't feel like I was disorientated. | ||
| And then, while she's talking, I just, like, explode all over her heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no! | |
| From both ends, like, fucking horror show, right? | ||
| And so, I say to Huang, just take me back... | ||
| Put me in the car, take me back to Hanoi, right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And this old woman's saying something to him, and I'm just lying there. | ||
| And she says, you've got to go to the hospital, you're really sick. | ||
| And I'm like, no, no, I just need to go back to the hotel. | ||
| And he said, Johan, this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War in this village. | ||
| I'm going to listen to her health advice over yours. | ||
| We're going to the hospital. | ||
| So we go to this hospital where I'm pretty sure I was the only European who'd ever been treated. | ||
| They take me in, and Hwang's completely lying, going like, this is an important Westerner. | ||
| It will disgrace Vietnam if he dies here, right? | ||
| And so I'm lying there. | ||
| And they're like jabbing me with everything and I'm like, what's going on? | ||
| And they're asking me lots of questions and I felt the most nauseous I've ever felt, right? | ||
| And I kept saying to them, give me something for the nausea through Juan because they didn't speak in English. | ||
| And the doctor said to me, You need your nausea. | ||
| It will tell us what's wrong with you. | ||
| Even lying there, I was thinking, that's kind of interesting. | ||
| I was thinking lying there and thinking, they figured out it was the apple. | ||
| I remember having such a ridiculous thought where I thought, okay, I'm about to die. | ||
| I've been killed by an apple. | ||
| I'm like Eve or like Snow White or like Alan Turing. | ||
| And then I was like... | ||
| You're about to die and your last thought is that you're basically a pretentious cunt, right? | ||
| I was horrified by myself. | ||
| Anyway, they gave me this treatment and a few days later when I leave, I'm talking to the doctor and I was discussing various things with him. | ||
| And I said to him, what would have happened if I had gone back to Hanoi, if he'd driven me back to Hanoi? | ||
| And he said, oh, well, what happened is my kidneys had stopped working because I hadn't kept any water in for four days. | ||
| So it was like I had been in the desert for four days. | ||
| And the doctor said, oh, you would have died on the journey. | ||
| You wouldn't have made it. | ||
| And... | ||
| So I kept thinking about this experience, which weirdly didn't actually affect my worldview or anything. | ||
| It's the closest I've ever had to a near-death experience. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| As like a kind of malfunction, right? | ||
| Something that you should get rid of. | ||
| And actually... | ||
| What we need to do is hear it, right? | ||
| Because it will tell us what's wrong with us, right? | ||
| It doesn't mean it's a good feeling. | ||
| It's awful, right? | ||
| Depression is the worst thing I've ever felt. | ||
| Addiction is a terrible state to be in. | ||
| It's not saying just in some kind of, you know, way, oh, we need to put up with it. | ||
| It's that if we hear the signal, we can begin to find solutions. | ||
| And all the places I went, the places that have solved depression crises that I went to for Lost Connections, places that have solved addiction crises that I went to for Chasing the Screen... | ||
| There are places that have said, actually this means something, right? | ||
| Your pain makes sense. | ||
| You feel these ways for reasons, and we need to get down into these deeper reasons, which is really not what we've done in the United States since the drug war began, you know, a century ago. | ||
| So did they figure out in Switzerland what was causing this rash of addiction? | ||
| And just by treating, it seems like if there is some underlying condition that's causing this depression that's leading people to drug addiction, they're just giving them free heroin is not going to fix the root cause. | ||
| So how did they find out what the root cause was and why was such an epidemic? | ||
| You're totally right. | ||
| The heroin does two things. | ||
| Partly, as you become addicted, you spiral. | ||
| For people who don't have huge private resources, some people do, right? | ||
| As you become addicted, what happens to a lot of people is you spiral into chaotic street use, right? | ||
| So for a lot of women, that means sex work. | ||
| For a lot of men, that means property crime. | ||
| Some men, sex work as well, but mostly not. | ||
| And so what happens is actually you become, you know, you develop an addiction because you're dealing with this pain, but then you actually move into a much more chaotic way of living, right? | ||
| Which causes deeper pain and deeper pain. | ||
| Obviously if you're being fucked by strangers every day and they're treating you badly. | ||
| You're going to want to be even more anaesthetised after that, right? | ||
| Or if you're frightened of the police all the time. | ||
| So what happens is, partly what happened in Switzerland was giving people the legal heroin ended the chaos of street use, which in itself was making addiction worse. | ||
| And that's clearly not the cause, because you don't start out as a street user. | ||
| So it was partly that. | ||
| And I think it was partly... | ||
| Attending to people's deeper distress. | ||
| And it's not like there's one cookie cutter thing that was the answer. | ||
| It was listening to different people at different stages and looking at... | ||
| They'd had some problems with unemployment, but you don't want to overstate that. | ||
| They'd have some problems with child abuse. | ||
| You don't want to overstate that. | ||
| It was more like a kind of menu of things, a more sophisticated menu of things. | ||
| But the thing that they definitely showed in the Swiss model and in Portugal and in lots of other places I went to is compassionate treatment reduces addiction, right? | ||
| And treatment understood in the broadest sense because it reduces the pain the individual is in. | ||
| Anything that reduces the shame, stigma, and humiliation will over time reduce addiction for most people. | ||
| Not everyone. | ||
| Some people are in such internal agony. | ||
| They will always need anaesthetics. | ||
| And this, I think, is a really important point and one that can be quite challenging to some people, including people like me, who have people they love with addiction problems. | ||
| So where I open Chasing the Scream is with this story that I think a lot of people... | ||
| Think, why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this? | ||
| And I think it tells you so much. | ||
| So, in 1939, in a hotel in midtown Manhattan, Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, walked on stage. | ||
| And she sang for the first time a song that I'm sure all your listeners and viewers have heard. | ||
| It's a song called Strange Fruit, right? | ||
| It's a song against lynching. | ||
| It's the idea that in the South, the bodies of African-American men hang from the trees and they're like a kind of strange fruit in the South, right? | ||
| This was unbelievably challenging at that time. | ||
| There were very few popular songs like that. | ||
| And to have an African-American woman doing it was quite shocking. | ||
| She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel. | ||
| They made her go through the service elevator because she was African-American. | ||
| And that night, Billie Holiday gets a warning from a man called Harry Anslinger, from the agents of a man called Harry Anslinger, that basically says, stop singing this song, right? | ||
| And you think, well, wait, what's this got to do with the war on drugs? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So Harry Anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. | ||
| So you've had this big war on alcohol. | ||
| It's been a shitshow. | ||
| It's been a disaster. | ||
| And he takes it over. | ||
| And he wants to keep his government department going. | ||
| And he invents the modern war on drugs. | ||
| He's the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs. | ||
| And he really builds this war on drugs around two intense hatreds he has. | ||
| And Billie Holiday is the personification of both. | ||
| One was a really intense hatred of African-Americans. | ||
| I mean, he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s, which gives you a sense of how racist he was. | ||
| He used the N-word so often in official memos, his own senator said he should have to resign. | ||
| That's how hardcore he was, right? | ||
| And he also had an intense hatred of people with addiction problems. | ||
| And Billie Holiday, she'd grown up on the streets of Baltimore, a part of Baltimore called Pigtown. | ||
| When she was 10, she was horrific. | ||
| She was raped. | ||
| The man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half. | ||
| She was sent to reformatory for longer than he got, right? | ||
| She was tormented by the nuns there. | ||
| They said she was disobedient. | ||
| She brought it on herself. | ||
| They used to lock her in with dead bodies overnight to teach her a lesson. | ||
| She eventually ran away. | ||
| She tried to find her mother. | ||
| Her mother had gone to what's now called Roosevelt Island now. | ||
| It wasn't called that then. | ||
| 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, Billie Holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that, right? | ||
| So she starts out using loads of alcohol and then she's using loads of other stuff as well, mostly heroin. | ||
| And when she gets this warning from Harry Anslinger saying, stop singing this song, Billie Holiday's attitude is, fuck you, I'm an American citizen, I'll sing what I fucking please, right? | ||
| And at that point, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. | ||
| The first man he sent to track her is a man called, follow her around, is a guy called Jimmy Fletcher. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So he employed this African-American guy called Jimmy Fletcher, whose job title was a bag man. | ||
| So he was given the job, follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right? | ||
| He dances with her in nightclubs. | ||
| He gets to know her really well. | ||
| And Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her. | ||
| And his whole life he felt really ashamed of what he did. | ||
| He busts her. | ||
| When they come in to search her, she pisses in front of him and says, you can look in my pussy. | ||
| You can see I don't have anything here. | ||
| She's put on trial. | ||
| The trial was called the United States versus Billie Holiday, and she said that's how it fucking felt. | ||
| She's sent to prison for 18 months. | ||
| She doesn't sing a word in prison. | ||
| But what happened to her next, I think, is the cruelest thing. | ||
| She gets out of prison. | ||
| And at that time, to sing anywhere where they served alcohol, you needed what was called a cabaret performer's license. | ||
| Ann Slinger makes sure she doesn't get it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's to take away the thing they love, right? | ||
| They take away singing from Billie Holiday. | ||
| It's what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States, right? | ||
| We give them criminal records that make it much harder to do the things that are meaningful to them by work, for example. | ||
| So in that situation, obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? | ||
| She starts using a shit ton of heroin again. | ||
| One day in the early 50s, she collapses, not far from where she'd first sung Strange Fruit. | ||
| The first hospital won't even take her because she's got an addiction problem. | ||
| They said, we're not having her. | ||
| Second hospital takes her, but she says to her friend, Maylee Dufty, on the way in, that Anslinger's men weren't done with her. | ||
| They were going to come for her. | ||
| She said, they're going to kill me in there. | ||
| Don't let them. | ||
| They're going to kill me. | ||
| She wasn't wrong. | ||
| So in the hospital, she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. | ||
| Probably related to her severe alcoholism. | ||
| And in the hospital, she goes into heroin withdrawal. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Like when you're old or you've... | ||
| Anslinger's men come. | ||
| They arrest her on her hospital bed. | ||
| They handcuff her to the hospital bed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They handcuff her to a hospital bed. | ||
| They don't let her friends in to see her. | ||
| They don't let her even have candies. | ||
| Outside, Reverend Callender led protests with signs saying, let Lady Day live. | ||
| There were big protests. | ||
| They knew they were killing her, right? | ||
| Then after 10 days they cut off the methadone and she died the next day. | ||
| One of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life. | ||
| There's loads of things about this story which is being made into a movie. | ||
| Lee Daniels is directing it. | ||
| There's so many things about this story that tell us what this war on drugs is about, right? | ||
| Firstly, it's about... | ||
| It's effect. | ||
| It's about shaming addicts and its effect is it makes addicts worse, right? | ||
| You see that with Billie Holiday, you see that everywhere. | ||
| Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right? | ||
| At the same time that Harry Anslinger found out Billie Holiday had a heroin addiction, he found out Judy Garland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, had a heroin addiction. | ||
| It changes how you watch The Wizard of Oz when you know that. | ||
| And he went to the studio and he advised... | ||
| He said to Judy Garland and to the studio, she should take longer vacations. | ||
| Spot the difference. | ||
| With a white woman, Judy Garland, longer vacations, with Billie Holiday, fucking destroy her, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We now know, I mean, he's literally a psychopath. | ||
| He was a hugely obese guy. | ||
| He was a strange guy. | ||
| He infiltrated a Chinese drug gang when he wasn't Chinese, the only person to ever do that. | ||
| But he boasted in his diary about murdering people, about spiking women and raping them. | ||
| I mean, these were really deranged people that founded the drug war. | ||
| But the reason I say it in relation to what we were just talking about is because in this culture, we tell only one heroic story about people with addiction problems. | ||
| and that's that they sometimes recover from their addiction. | ||
| That is indeed a heroic story. | ||
| Everyone watching this who's managed to do that is a hero, and I massively love and congratulate them. | ||
| But that is not the only heroic story we should tell about people with addiction problems. | ||
| Billie Holiday never stopped using drugs. | ||
| She was still a fucking hero. | ||
| She never let these people stop her singing that song. | ||
| She would go to the places where you didn't have a license. | ||
| She'd go to the worst parts of the Deep South. | ||
| She sang Strange Fruit. | ||
| People threw bottles at her. | ||
| They stubbed out cigarettes on her. | ||
| She never stopped singing that song, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And all over the world, every day, we are still following the policies of Harry Anslinger, and it makes us weaker. | ||
| And this conflict that begins right at the start of the drug... | ||
| And I think, if I'm honest, I think... | ||
| This isn't an easy thing to say, but I think one of the reasons why the debate about the drug war is so charged is because it runs through the hearts of all of us, right? | ||
| Anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem, as I do... | ||
| There's a Harry Anslinger in your head, right? | ||
| There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks, someone should just fucking stop you. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| Someone should stop you doing this. | ||
| And then, for most people, there's another part that's like, okay, that anger isn't useful in most cases. | ||
| Actually, you're doing this for a reason. | ||
| We need to understand those reasons. | ||
| We need to help you to change your life, right? | ||
| But that conflict is very deep in us. | ||
| And Harry Anslinger... | ||
| The war he invented, and we can talk about what he did with cannabis and loads of other things, but because he invented the ban on cannabis, that war is still playing out. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I know that was a long answer, but... | ||
| Sorry! | ||
| No, it does make sense, and it's a horrific story about Billie Holiday. | ||
| And I had no idea that Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was also addicted. | ||
| And the Munchkins, a lot of them as well. | ||
| Now, Harry, why was Harry Anslinger's hate towards her so extreme? | ||
| 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. | ||
| His dad was actually a refugee from, well, refugee in a bit comms, immigrant from Switzerland. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sorry, a morphine addiction. | ||
| It would have been heroin then. | ||
| And Harry Anseling had this really haunting memory of going to that house and hearing this woman scream and scream. | ||
| And him being sent to take the horse and cart. | ||
| I think he was 11 or something. | ||
| Being sent to take the horse and cart into town to go to the pharmacy to get her the morphine and then bringing it back and her scream stopping. | ||
| The lesson he took from that is these drugs are evil and we need to destroy them. | ||
| Especially later on, he was in Europe during the First World War. | ||
| And he had this very keen... | ||
| He was a diplomat. | ||
| He had this very keen sense that civilization was incredibly fragile, it could collapse at any moment, that you only need a little bit of contamination and it would all go to shit. | ||
| And so he... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I felt like what I was doing, going to all these different places from the killing fields in Mexico to Portugal and Switzerland... | ||
| Was like following this scream as it kind of ricocheted around and actually how he thinks he's stopping these screams is actually creating far more screams in their place. | ||
| Yeah, but I still don't understand why he had this intense... | ||
| With Billie Holiday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, well, she's an African-American woman standing up to white supremacy who has an addiction problem. | ||
| But the truth is, what he did to Billie Holiday is not... | ||
| It's not... | ||
| This is what he did to African-Americans and to people with addiction problems. | ||
| Billie Holiday just happens to be famous, so I'm telling her story. | ||
| But this is what he did to huge numbers of people, right? | ||
| He wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene. | ||
| One of the amazing things, spending time in his... | ||
| Archives in Penn State was seeing all these memos from his agents. | ||
| He said to them, go to your local jazz club, document the evil things that are happening there. | ||
| And the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious, right? | ||
| There's one agent who, I forget where it was, but he wrote back and it's like, there was a popular jazz song at the time called That Ocean Man. | ||
| And had a lyric that said, when he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean. | ||
| And he's like, there is going to be an epidemic of drowning across the United States as people use cannabis because they're going to believe they can walk on water. | ||
| So he would... | ||
| I mean, literally, they're hilarious. | ||
| He said, you know, he believed that... | ||
| When you smoke cannabis, time slows down, so a minute seems to last a thousand years. | ||
| These extraordinarily heightened, crazy things that he would say. | ||
| At that time, when he first takes over what becomes the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, You know, cocaine and heroin just aren't very popular, right? | ||
| There's just not much of a war to fight. | ||
| I mean, they exist, but they're not that popular. | ||
| They're confined to small urban scenes. | ||
| Cannabis was more popular, not as popular as it is now, but... | ||
| And he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful, not bothered about it. | ||
| Suddenly, when he cottons on that this is the way to build up his department, he announces that cannabis is, for his use, was the most evil drug in the world. | ||
| He said when Frankenstein's monster bumps into a spliff on the staircase, Frankenstein's monster dies of fright. | ||
| Like, these extraordinarily heightened claims. | ||
| And he starts trying to get support for a ban on cannabis, And he latches onto one case in particular. | ||
| And it's important because I think we're hearing these things again now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst Newspapers, Anslinger announces, this is what will happen if you use cannabis. | ||
| Literally, you will kill your family with an axe, right? | ||
| And this becomes a very famous story across the United States, and cannabis is banned in its wake. | ||
| Years later, someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Lycona. | ||
| There wasn't even evidence he'd ever used cannabis, right? | ||
| He'd had terrible problems with psychosis. | ||
| His family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized, and they refused. | ||
| They kept him at home. | ||
| We're hearing these scare stories again about cannabis. | ||
| There's something that Anslinger said that I think could be like the motto for the entire drug war. | ||
| So Anslinger introduces this ban in the US. He promises drugs will disappear, right? | ||
| You will have noticed drugs did not disappear. | ||
| He starts to say, well that's just because evil foreign countries like Mexico are flooding our country with drugs. | ||
| You'll notice that's come back as well. | ||
| So what we need to do is force all these other countries to ban them as well and then they'll disappear. | ||
| So the US in the wake of the Second World War really has the power to do that. | ||
| The world is in ruins. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The ambassador from Thailand is like, well, you know, it doesn't seem to have worked very well in your country. | ||
| We've actually got a long pattern of established drug use in Thailand. | ||
| We don't really have many problems. | ||
| We don't want to do this. | ||
| And Anslinger said to him, I've made up my mind. | ||
| Don't try to confuse me with the facts. | ||
| And I always feel like, That's the drug war, right? | ||
| I made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts. | ||
| Well, he, in conjunction with William Randolph Hearst, he worked with him to try to propagate these ridiculous propaganda stories about Mexicans and blacks smoking this evil drug called marijuana, which is really not even a real term for cannabis at the time. | ||
| It was a wild Mexican tobacco, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But didn't Nixon do a similar thing with the sweeping Psychedelic Act of 1970? | ||
| He did it so that they could infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement because there were so many people in the Civil Rights Movement that were using various psychedelic drugs. | ||
| They could use it as an excuse to crack down on them and lock them up and put them in jail and pit them against each other and have them inform on each other. | ||
| Yeah, this is really important. | ||
| You cannot enforce the drug laws against everyone who's broken them. | ||
| It is impossible. | ||
| Half of all Americans, by a conservative estimate, have broken the drug laws, right? | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| Everywhere in the world, the drug laws are used to persecute groups the state wants to persecute for other reasons, right? | ||
| So one of the people I write about in Chasing the Scream is... | ||
| A woman who really had a kind of epiphany about this, right? | ||
| So, Lee Maddox was a cop in Baltimore. | ||
| She used to do the I-95. | ||
| And she would very proudly bust people who even had a single joint, right? | ||
| She was a real... | ||
| Harriet Anslinger's dream girl. | ||
| And she had signed up to become a cop, which is really interesting personally. | ||
| She'd signed up to become a cop for quite a personal reason. | ||
| As a kid, she'd had a best friend, a kid and teenager, called Lisa. | ||
| They looked really similar. | ||
| They shared a fake ID. They were like sisters. | ||
| And one day when they were in their late teens, they went to Ocean City for a day out. | ||
| And Lisa decided to hitchhike back to New Jersey where she lived. | ||
| And so Lisa said bye to her. | ||
| And the next day she gets a call saying Lisa had not arrived. | ||
| So she waits and waits. | ||
| She has this terrible summer waiting to find out what happened. | ||
| And then they discover that Lisa had been gang raped and murdered. | ||
| Her body was found underneath a house where it had been eaten by animals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| She's like, I'm going to destroy these gangs. | ||
| I'm going to dedicate my life to destroying these gangs. | ||
| She goes and applies to become a police officer. | ||
| And for years she's this, you know, hardline cop, right? | ||
| Takes real pleasure in busting people. | ||
| But Lee started to notice a few things. | ||
| First thing was, when you're a cop and you arrest a rapist, there are fewer rapes in your town the next week, right? | ||
| When you are a cop and you bust a pedophile, fewer children get sexually abused. | ||
| But she knows when you bust a dealer, There's no fewer dealers. | ||
| There's someone on the corner the next day for sure, right? | ||
| It didn't seem to be having any effect. | ||
| In fact, what she discovered, what she began to learn about this was that there was something even worse, which was for a funny sort of reason, that she realised that she was actually creating these, empowering these gangs. | ||
| So the best way to explain this is, if you imagine... | ||
| Obviously, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right? | ||
| They're transferred from the people who used to control them, licensed legal businesses, to armed criminal gangs, right? | ||
| And these armed criminal gangs operate in a different way to legal businesses. | ||
| So if you imagine, if you and me decided we want to go and steal now a bottle of vodka, right? | ||
| We go into a local liquor store, and that store catches us. | ||
| They'll call the cops. | ||
| The cops will come and take us away. | ||
| That liquor store doesn't need to be violent. | ||
| It doesn't need to be intimidating. | ||
| They've got the power of the law to uphold their property rights. | ||
| Okay, now imagine we wanted to steal a bag of coke, right? | ||
| If we go to the guy near here, I'm sure there is someone who sells coke, and he catches us. | ||
| He can't call the cops, obviously. | ||
| Cops would arrest him. | ||
| He has to fight us. | ||
| Now, if you're a dealer, you don't want to be having a fight every day, right? | ||
| You want to establish a reputation for being so frightening that no one will dare to fuck with you, right? | ||
| So you establish your place in that neighbourhood through aggression, through violence, and you maintain it through aggression and violence, right? | ||
| Legal businesses compete on cost and quality of product. | ||
| In illegal markets, people compete on how much of a frightening fucker you're prepared to be, right? | ||
| As a writer called Charles Bowden put it, The war on drugs creates a war for drugs, right? | ||
| It transfers it to these criminal gangs who have to operate through violence to protect their property rights. | ||
| So Lee goes into the drug war thinking, I'm the one stopping these gangs. | ||
| She realises, shit, I'm the one enabling them, right? | ||
| They control one of the biggest industries in the world because of this police action and because of this decision to prohibit these drugs. | ||
| And if you want to know how much of this violence is caused by... | ||
| By the fact that we prohibited it, just ask yourself, where are the violent alcohol dealers, right? | ||
| Everyone knows who Al Capone was. | ||
| Does the head of Smirnoff go and shoot the head of Budweiser in the face, right? | ||
| Does your local bar go and send a bunch of kids to go and shoot everyone in the next bar down? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Exactly that happened under alcohol prohibition. | ||
| When did it end? | ||
| It ended on the day alcohol prohibition ended. | ||
| Because legal markets don't compete with that. | ||
| So Lee's partly having this insight, right? | ||
| She's realising, shit, I think I'm taking down these gangs. | ||
| I'm actually empowering them. | ||
| What will really disempower them is reclaiming the market and making it legal. | ||
| But she also has another really painful realisation. | ||
| So early in her career as a cop, Lee had done this really brave thing. | ||
| She'd gone undercover with the Klan to expose them. | ||
| She'd done a really important work in breaking up parts of the Maryland Klan. | ||
| She really was not a racist, right? | ||
| She'd had relationships with African-American men. | ||
| 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? | ||
| One of her colleagues, Matthew Fogg, once went to his superior officer and said, you know... | ||
| This is a bit weird, right? | ||
| We only ever seem to go to African-American neighborhoods to do all our drug busts. | ||
| I'm fairly sure white people sometimes use drugs. | ||
| Should we go to like a white neighborhood as well? | ||
| And the supervisor said, of course, you're right. | ||
| White people use drugs. | ||
| But white people know journalists and lawyers and judges. | ||
| That's really... | ||
| That's just a whole load of shit for us. | ||
| Just go for the low-hanging fruit. | ||
| So Lee, who is not a racist... | ||
| Could see the effect of what she was doing was in fact racist, right? | ||
| And she was very uncomfortable with that. | ||
| And this really came to a head for Lee when Lee's police partner was a guy called Ed Totally, who she loved, platonically loved. | ||
| He was a great champion of women police officers. | ||
| He was a great guy. | ||
| And one day she gets a call at home. | ||
| Ed had been sent on a drug bust. | ||
| He was undercover. | ||
| And the guy had thought he was ripping him off and shot him in the head. | ||
| And Lee goes to see Ed's body and she's like... | ||
| What did he die for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| There are no fewer drug dealers. | ||
| Every time we arrest a drug dealer, the supply of drugs is not disrupted for one hour. | ||
| We are enforcing a racist war. | ||
| We are empowering these gangs. | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| So Lee quit as a police officer. | ||
| She retrained as a lawyer. | ||
| She now gets the criminal records expunged whenever she can of the kind of people that she busted when she was a cop. | ||
| And she was part of a brilliant group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who are cops who argue for ending the drug war. | ||
| But it's interesting to me because... | ||
| It's hard to be Harry. | ||
| Lee was trying to be Harry Anslinger. | ||
| It's hard to be Harry Anslinger if you're an honest person with a conscience, right? | ||
| And there are police officers all over the country who are making these realisations now. | ||
| And that, you know, obviously, it's very close to my heart what we do to people with addiction problems. | ||
| But I don't... | ||
| Horrific and catastrophic, though, that is. | ||
| I don't actually think that's the biggest moral issue around the war on drugs. | ||
| The biggest moral issue is the violence created by prohibition, right? | ||
| If I think about places I've spent time like Colombia, Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico, that's the biggest issue, right? | ||
| More people have died in Latin America... | ||
| Central and South America in the drug war violence than have died in Syria. | ||
| I don't know what we can do about Syria. | ||
| We can end this violence. | ||
| There's a professor at Harvard called Jeffrey Myron who has a graph of the murder rate in the 20th century in the United States. | ||
| Massively shoots up the day alcohol is banned and falls like a stone the day alcohol is legalized, right? | ||
| And massively rises again when there's an intensification of the drug war later. | ||
| We can end a huge amount of this violence, right? | ||
| We can do what Switzerland did. | ||
| We can do what's happening here. | ||
| So what's stopping us? | ||
| So I think the main thing... | ||
| This is a logical conclusion based on facts and based on cases like Portugal and Switzerland. | ||
| There's obviously data. | ||
| So people are aware of this. | ||
| So people must be confronted with this data. | ||
| To this day, people know that the prohibition on alcohol was a massive disaster and no one would ever accept it again. | ||
| We're slowly starting to realize that marijuana, at least for some people, is safe and reasonable and should be used recreationally and has some massive benefits medically. | ||
| So we're starting to see legalization both for recreational use and clearly for medical use is spread. | ||
| I think it's like... | ||
| There's a certain amount of states where it's just fully legal recreationally and more where it's medical, but I think it's more than 18 states total now. | ||
| Soon we're going to be half of the American population. | ||
| It should be 100%, right? | ||
| It is in Canada. | ||
| Yes, it is in Canada, as it should be for alcohol. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think you've gone to the really important question. | ||
| So there's a range of things. | ||
| Is the public perception a big one? | ||
| I think you've gone to the most important, right? | ||
| So some people say it's the vested financial interest in the existing system. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| If you look at who funds the no campaigns whenever they want to legalize marijuana, you can see the interests, right? | ||
| Prison guard unions, alcohol companies, because they don't want a commercial competitor, religious fundamentalist groups like Mormons, not all Mormons fundamentalists, but the groups that funding this are. | ||
| So it's partly that, but I think you're right. | ||
| I don't think that's the main thing that's going on. | ||
| It's significant and real, but I don't think it's the main thing that's going on. | ||
| The main thing, the main block is huge majorities of Americans, more than 80% say the war on drugs has failed and been a disaster. | ||
| And yet most people are afraid of the alternatives, right? | ||
| And that's part... | ||
| So I think there's two things going on. | ||
| There's ignorance about what the alternatives actually mean. | ||
| So one of the reasons why Chasing Scream is written as, I went to all these places from the killing fields in northern Mexico to Switzerland... | ||
| It's because way too often in this debate, we talk like we're at a philosophy seminar. | ||
| People go, well, what would legalisation mean? | ||
| How would it work? | ||
| And they go into this weird, abstract conversation. | ||
| I'm like, fuck that. | ||
| Here's a plane ticket to Geneva. | ||
| Here's a plane ticket to Lisbon. | ||
| Here's a plane ticket to Colorado, right? | ||
| It's not rocket science, right? | ||
| I've been to the places that have tried these things. | ||
| We can see the results, right? | ||
| Legalisation is not an app, and decriminalisation, I can explain the difference if you want, are not... | ||
| What's the key differences between legalization and decriminalization? | ||
| So decriminalization is where you stop punishing users, but they still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get their drug. | ||
| Legalization is where you open up some legal route for people to get their drugs, and that varies according to the drug, right? | ||
| So I guess the kind of headline would be, decriminalization shuts down Orange is the New Black, and legalization shuts down Breaking Bad and Narcos, right? | ||
| And of course we need to do both, right? | ||
| We need to decriminalize use and legalize supply. | ||
| Did Mexico decriminalize a lot of drugs, like, fairly recently? | ||
| Yeah, so they had a big Supreme Court decision. | ||
| I spent a lot of time in Mexico, and I... You know, I think about... | ||
| I think about this time I spent in Mexico really often because it was... | ||
| I mean, I've been to a lot of bad places. | ||
| I've covered the war in the Congo. | ||
| I've been to Iraq. | ||
| I've been to Gaza. | ||
| I've never seen anything like what happened in Juarez when I was there. | ||
| The... | ||
| You know, I think it's worth explaining. | ||
| So, when you, like I was saying, when you ban drugs, they don't disappear, right? | ||
| They're transferred to armed criminal gangs. | ||
| If you live in a housing project in the United States where 5% of the economy of that housing project is in the hands of armed criminal gangs, that's going to be a shitty, frightening place to be, right? | ||
| A place like Ciudad Juarez, which is on the border with, Mexican side of the United States, border with them, it's the other side with El Paso. | ||
| By the time I went there, it was 70%, 70% of the economy was in the hands of these armed criminal gangs, right? | ||
| So, I remember going to see this guy, Rosalio Retta. | ||
| I interviewed people about him in Juarez, but then I went to... | ||
| He's in prison in the United States. | ||
| He's in Tyler County. | ||
| And Rosalio... | ||
| He's an interesting guy. | ||
| So he butchered or beheaded about 70 people between the ages of 13 and 17. I remember going into the prison actually to see him and the guard said to me on the way in, well obviously I can't leave you alone with him because he's like butchered all these people. | ||
| I was like, oh great, thanks. | ||
| And about five minutes in, the guard was fucking gone. | ||
| But I was sitting with Rosalio, talking about his life and his story. | ||
| So Rosalio grew up in Laredo, on the Texas side of the border. | ||
| Basically the same place as Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side. | ||
| It was very easy to cross the border at that time. | ||
| He was growing up in the late 90s, noughties. | ||
| Rosalio was 13. So the Zetas were a kind of famous drug gang at that time. | ||
| They still are. | ||
| A drug cartel. | ||
| How the Zetas were created is an insane story every taxpayer should know. | ||
| The US government decided to train an elite anti-drug force for the Mexican government, right? | ||
| Like kind of Navy SEALs for the anti-drug force. | ||
| They take them to Fort Bragg. | ||
| They spent something like $250 million training them up. | ||
| They go back to Mexico. | ||
| Six months later, they all defected en masse, almost all of them, and created a drug cartel, the Zetas. | ||
| Great, you see your tax money. | ||
| So the Zetas were this kind of glamorous, in inverted commas, drug gang, right, operating on that part of the border. | ||
| Drug routes move around according to where they put policing. | ||
| It always gets through, but it moves around. | ||
| They call it the balloon effect. | ||
| Imagine a balloon half full of air, you push down one pace, the air comes up somewhere else. | ||
| But at that time, it was going through Juarez and El Paso and Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. | ||
| And Rosalio, so there's two stories about how Rosalio gets involved with the Zetas. | ||
| What Rosalio says is he was basically kidnapped by them and forced to start killing people. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| If you look at the evidence, it's that he sort of volunteered. | ||
| But he's 13, so I don't hold him morally responsible for that. | ||
| Either way, there's one night, it all begins. | ||
| He's taken on the Mexican side of the border to a warehouse where they are torturing people, burning them alive. | ||
| He's given a gun by a guy called Miguel Trevino, who later became the head of the Zetas, and he's told to shoot someone in the head, and that's the moment you're in. | ||
| And when you're in with the Zetas, you never get out, right? | ||
| No one leaves. | ||
| No one leaves alive. | ||
| And so they begin to train him. | ||
| In 2005, he's sent to a summer camp that's literally a camp that teaches you how to behead people and do all sorts of things. | ||
| And he's then sent, him and his friends are then sent to murder people. | ||
| He's with his friends Jesse and Gabriel. | ||
| They murder a huge number of people. | ||
| The Zetas call these child soldiers the Expendables. | ||
| Because they don't give a shit if they live or die, right? | ||
| As one person said to me, they prefer children because they don't understand death so well, right? | ||
| Obviously, Rosado got a bit older. | ||
| He understood death better. | ||
| All his friends get murdered. | ||
| Eventually, he tries to get back to the US. He cooperates. | ||
| He now lives in solitary confinement where he will live for the rest of his life because when they let him out of solitary, shortly before I met him, he was immediately stabbed in the neck. | ||
| Um... | ||
| And again, you think about this insane violence that we created, right? | ||
| When I went to Juarez, it's this bizarre thing. | ||
| So at that time, you were told it wasn't, quite rightly, it wasn't safe to stay in Juarez overnight. | ||
| So I would stay overnight in El Paso and I'd walk across the bridge, right? | ||
| Obviously, you have to show your passport. | ||
| I remember the customs people going, why the fuck are you going into Juarez? | ||
| But go in there. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| On the other side of the bridge, there's this sign and it says, welcome to historic downtown Juarez. | ||
| And it used to be a tourist site. | ||
| Billie Holiday got married there. | ||
| But now it's just, at that time, it was just covered with images of missing women. | ||
| Just everywhere, because this is another really important part of what this violence does, and I think it's really important we understand. | ||
| This is the violence caused by the system that we uphold and we imposed on Mexico. | ||
| Mexicans do not want this, right? | ||
| So there's another story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a woman in Juarez, when the drug war violence starts to go through, called Maricela Escobedo. | ||
| 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. | ||
| She had three kids. | ||
| Her youngest daughter was called Ruby. | ||
| She was 14 at the time. | ||
| And they would work on this stall in the marketplace every Saturday. | ||
| I think maybe even Sundays as well. | ||
| Some Sundays. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maricela was kind of soft-hearted, she gives him a job working on her market store. | ||
| 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? | ||
| He's 21, she's 14. This is a crime. | ||
| Police don't do anything. | ||
| She doesn't understand it. | ||
| Why are they not investigating this? | ||
| Her daughter starts... | ||
| Running away to be with Sergio. | ||
| Maricela keeps going to get her back. | ||
| She keeps going to the police saying, this is a crime. | ||
| He can't live with a 14-year-old. | ||
| Go and arrest him. | ||
| They won't do anything. | ||
| She's completely puzzled by this. | ||
| Then Ruby gets pregnant. | ||
| Maricela's like, she was 15 by then. | ||
| She's like, fuck, I've got to keep her in my life. | ||
| So she keeps going to see Ruby. | ||
| By this time, she's kind of accepted the police with real rage that the police aren't going to do anything. | ||
| And one day, just after the baby was born, she goes to see Ruby, and Sergio's there with the baby, and he says, oh, Ruby's run away with another man. | ||
| She's gone. | ||
| She's not coming back. | ||
| And Maricela's like, what, and left her baby? | ||
| No, she hasn't done that. | ||
| I know she hasn't done that. | ||
| I know my daughter. | ||
| He's like, well, she's gone. | ||
| So Maricela waits. | ||
| Christmas comes, no message. | ||
| New Year comes, no message. | ||
| She starts to go to the neighbourhood. | ||
| And hand out leaflets with pictures of her daughter. | ||
| Loads of women are going missing in Juarez at this time. | ||
| I'll tell you why in a minute. | ||
| Just saying, have you seen this girl? | ||
| And after a few days, she gets a call from a kid called Angel who says, I'm really frightened to tell you something. | ||
| If you drive me out into the desert, I'll tell you. | ||
| So she drives Angel out into the desert. | ||
| I think he was 14. And he says, Sergio murdered your daughter and he made me help him dispose of the body. | ||
| And he told Maricela where the body was. | ||
| It was actually a place where they dumped pig carcasses from the abattoirs. | ||
| She goes and she finds the body with her son. | ||
| And she goes to the police and the police finally do something and they arrest Sergio. | ||
| Sergio's put on trial in the witness box. | ||
| He breaks down, admits he did it and apologises to Maricela. | ||
| And then a few weeks later, he's acquitted of all charges and disappears. | ||
| And Maricela's like, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| So she starts to look into this and she discovers, and this is where it intersects with the drug war in a really important way, that Sergio was a member of the Zetas, right? | ||
| Now, if you're a member of the Zetas at that time in Juarez, it's different now because another drug gang has displaced them, You own the state, right? | ||
| If they control 70% of the economy, you have more money than the government, right? | ||
| So the police worked for them when I went to go interview Rosalio. | ||
| He said, when I would go murder people, the police would come with me. | ||
| They would dispose of the body, right? | ||
| And what year are we talking about? | ||
| This is like six years ago. | ||
| I remember the... | ||
| I remember... | ||
| Because one of the things when you're in a dangerous place... | ||
| When you're in a dangerous place, one of the things you do is you read danger from how frightened the people around you are, right? | ||
| Because you don't know the place. | ||
| I mean, I was there with Julian Cardona, who's my fixer, who's an amazing... | ||
| He's the Reuters correspondent. | ||
| He's one of the bravest people I've ever met. | ||
| But it was realizing how frightened other people were for me and Julian, right? | ||
| And I remember after I'd been there for a few days... | ||
| Julian kept introducing me. | ||
| By that time, the killings were basically all being done by the police. | ||
| And I was saying, you know, Julian, this is important that I meet people who've been killed by the police, but I should also meet people who've been killed by the cartels more recently. | ||
| And he just laughed and said, no, that's not how it works, Johan. | ||
| Now, if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay the police to do it, right? | ||
| So it's this real realisation, alright, if someone comes to you, there is nowhere for you to go, right? | ||
| So, Maricela refuses to accept that she lives in a country where there is no justice. | ||
| She decides, okay, they're not going to solve this, I'm going to solve this. | ||
| She appealed, loads of women are missing because it turns out if... | ||
| A bunch of criminals control the state. | ||
| They will just murder loads of women and get away with it, right? | ||
| There are some men who just want to murder women and if they give them license to do it, they'll do it. | ||
| That's why so many women were missing. | ||
| Maricela gathers a load of those mothers. | ||
| She says some of them don't know where their daughters are. | ||
| Some of them know their daughters are dead. | ||
| She's like, I need your help. | ||
| We're going to find this guy who's done this. | ||
| So Maricela turns herself with these women into a detective. | ||
| She starts tracking Sergio all over Mexico, wherever there are sightings. | ||
| She walks everywhere. | ||
| She walks over a thousand miles, right? | ||
| She walks through the desert. | ||
| It becomes a media phenomenon. | ||
| People follow her. | ||
| She's like this symbol of the loss that's happened in Mexico. | ||
| And incredibly, with her friend Berta Alicia Garcia, who I got to know later, After two years, she finds Sergio. | ||
| She tracks him down. | ||
| She goes to the police. | ||
| She tells them where he is. | ||
| They tip him off and he disappears. | ||
| And she's devastated. | ||
| So she decides she's going to go to the governor's mansion in Chihuahua, which is the state capital. | ||
| She goes there and she sets up... | ||
| Tent outside the governor's mansion. | ||
| And she's like, I'm not leaving here until you people go and find this man. | ||
| And she calls on every mother who has a daughter who's missing or who they're afraid of for to come and join her in this fight, right? | ||
| And it gets to Christmas Eve and she's preparing to... | ||
| Just before Christmas, she says on Christmas Eve, I'm going to have this big Christmas dinner here. | ||
| People can join me. | ||
| She gives this great speech and... | ||
| And a man walks up to her and shoots her in the head, in front of all the police, everyone. | ||
| And I thought a lot about Maricela. | ||
| I got to know her children who live here in the United States now. | ||
| They've got refuge here. | ||
| When I think about the drug war and what it does, the first person I think of after Billie Holiday is Maricela Escobedo, right? | ||
| We have created an enormous amount of violence that has nothing to do with the drug, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| It happens sometimes, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
3%. | |
| 3%. | ||
| Another 7% was people with an addiction problem, like committing property crimes and getting caught or whatever. | ||
| And the vast majority... | ||
| Was rival drug gangs and exactly the kind of violence we're talking about. | ||
| The war for drugs created by prohibition. | ||
| Now we can reduce the problems associated with drug use by having these, just they have in Switzerland and Portugal. | ||
| And we can end the violence caused by the war for drugs. | ||
| There are no violent alcohol gangs. | ||
| Al Capone killed loads of people. | ||
| No alcohol seller anywhere in the United States today will kill a single other alcohol seller, right? | ||
| That violence ended. | ||
| If we banned rice, there would be violent rice sellers, right? | ||
| We have to understand that what we are doing to... | ||
| And there's this bullshit fucking thing that's said where they'll take these deaths on the supply route, right? | ||
| Prohibitionists. | ||
| And they'll say, look at you evil drug users. | ||
| You're responsible for the deaths of these people, right? | ||
| And... | ||
| And to me, that is so pernicious, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It is the system those people have erected and imposed and lied their way to maintain that causes this violence, right? | ||
| And we can end this violence. | ||
| And I think about the Rosalio, right? | ||
| I got asked once in an interview, who do you feel most sorry for of all the people you met? | ||
| And obviously I met people with addiction problems all over the world. | ||
| And I surprised myself. | ||
| The person who came into my head was Rosalio. | ||
| Because... | ||
| What have we done to these people? | ||
| Well, it's not we, for sure. | ||
| Well, as taxpayers, we're responsible for it, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it goes back to your question, why does it persist, right? | ||
| The key reason... | ||
| I think it's two things. | ||
| Partly people are afraid of the alternatives for understandable reasons. | ||
| There are real risks in pursuing the alternatives. | ||
| I think we can understand what those risks are and deal with them. | ||
| But hold on, because it seems like those risks have been mitigated in Portugal and Switzerland. | ||
| I mean, we have real evidence that those risks, they're unfounded. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You can understand, it's not crazy to have that fear. | ||
| But then we can address that fear by talking about what actually happened. | ||
| Well, why don't we implement some sort of a small-scale version of this? | ||
| I mean, how come no one has ever tried to do this? | ||
| I mean, do it in Vermont, do it in New Hampshire, do it in a small state. | ||
| Well, there are loads of people who want to do that, but the federal drug laws are federal, right? | ||
| So federal law supersedes… But that doesn't happen with cannabis. | ||
| So that's a big debate. | ||
| Technically and legally, the federal government could go after Colorado, Washington. | ||
| Now, there's a political decision to not do that, because cannabis legalisation is popular in those places, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There were people, Jeff Sessions, when he was the AG, wanted to do that. | ||
| It's just our good luck that actually he pissed off Trump over something else, because of the Mueller inquiry and everything, that Trump, kind of to spite Jeff Sessions. | ||
| So, and the The federal banking laws actually mean that, you know, cannabis stores are operating in this weird gray area. | ||
| They can't have bank accounts. | ||
| My point is, why is no one pushing this? | ||
| All over the world, people are pushing this. | ||
| I mean, in America. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think there are lots of people who are pushing this. | ||
| There are amazing groups that urge everyone to join and support the Drug Policy Alliance. | ||
| What I'm saying is, why are no politicians ever discussing this? | ||
| This is never an option, because those are the only ones that are going to really change policy. | ||
| So we're seeing a big change in public opinion that is changing on many issues. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Today, 70% of Americans support legalizing cannabis. | ||
| Extraordinary transformation in a very short period of time, right? | ||
| Likely brought on by the fact that the medical use of it was prohibited up until then. | ||
| I mean, it was like 1994, right, when it was passed? | ||
| And then California started doing it and you started having Positive tax revenues from it. | ||
| You started seeing people that were suffering from a lot of ailments, showing that they were helped substantially by cannabis. | ||
| And then the attitude of it changed in popular culture. | ||
| It changed, I mean, 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. | ||
| There's still people alive today to believe some of that. | ||
| I think you put that really well. | ||
| I think there's a series of things going on. | ||
| Partly what happened, one of the major factors that make it possible for the drug war to continue is the dehumanisation of people at every turn, right? | ||
| Dehumanisation of drug users, and we should talk about use as opposed to addiction, but... | ||
| Dehumanisation of drug users, dehumanisation of people with addiction problems, dehumanisation of drug dealers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dehumanisation of people on the supply route countries. | ||
| You're hearing the way people are talking about Mexicans now, powerful people in this society. | ||
| And one of the reasons why Chasing the Scream is written as stories of people... | ||
| It's because the solution to dehumanisation is to rehumanisation. | ||
| When I was meeting these people all over the world, I kept thinking... | ||
| 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, right? | ||
| They would not say, yeah, let's pursue a policy that kills them because we get some imaginary benefit further down the line, right? | ||
| Think about Lee Maddox, the cop in Baltimore. | ||
| It was when Ed died. | ||
| It was when her partner died. | ||
| She thought, what are we losing these people for? | ||
| It's that moment of getting people to see everyone involved as human, right? | ||
| We're not there yet. | ||
| Still the ways people are talking about addiction are... | ||
| Repellent, right? | ||
| Well, they think of people as being weak. | ||
| They think of people as having poor willpower, poor character, and that's why they're addicted. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, it's really about re-engineering our entire culture. | ||
| I mean, re-engineering not just the way we treat addiction, but the way we treat human beings, the way we treat poor neighbourhoods. | ||
| I mean, there's so much that needs to be done that's never addressed. | ||
| Totally right. | ||
| And there's one part of this that's a funny... | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Which I found really... | ||
| When Carl first explained that to me, I was like, what's this guy talking about? | ||
| And then he looked at the scientific evidence. | ||
| There is very clear evidence, right? | ||
| Actually, the ratio of people who use any drug who become addicted is pretty consistently 10 to 20%, right? | ||
| Slightly higher for things like heroin, but it's pretty consistently in that zone, right? | ||
| Which is not to say that there aren't other... | ||
| Heroin depresses your breathing, it can cause death. | ||
| That way there are other harms, but we're talking about addiction, right? | ||
| So... | ||
| It's interesting, there's so much I think we need to explain to people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You should totally have on your show. | ||
| He's a very interesting guy. | ||
| So he was an advisor to four American presidents. | ||
| He was a WH advisor to the World Health Organization. | ||
| Really serious scientist, but he had a sideline for 30 years where he investigated animals using drugs, right? | ||
| And he's basically shown loads of species love getting intoxicated for the pleasure of it, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Elephants. | ||
|
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Elephants. | |
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So anyway, loads of examples. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I said, oh right, and at the end of your three years, what did you discover? | ||
| And he said, turns out they just jumped the same height as everyone, all the other grasshoppers. | ||
| I was like, that wasn't a great use of your three years of life. | ||
| But he also got, he had an interesting time when he was in Hawaii, he was investigating mongoose, whether mongooses like hallucinogens, psychedelics. | ||
| And so he's like spying on these mongooses with binoculars. | ||
| And he gets caught by a load of drug traffickers. | ||
| And they're like, who the fuck are you? | ||
| And he's like, oh, don't worry. | ||
| I'm just investigating whether mongoose is like psychedelic. | ||
| He's like, that is the worst fucking cover story we've ever heard. | ||
| They've held him hostage for like two days. | ||
| But what he showed is something I think is really important and there's loads of other evidence for, which is... | ||
| It is absolutely innate to other species, especially to humans, the desire to get intoxicated, right? | ||
| There has never been a human society anywhere in the world where people didn't seek out intoxicants and enjoy using them. | ||
| The only society where there were no naturally occurring intoxicants was the Inuit, what used to be called the Eskimos in the Arctic, and they used to just starve themselves. | ||
| To get a fucked up head state, because that's how deep it is in human beings. | ||
| If there is nothing in the environment... | ||
| They would starve themselves. | ||
| Yeah, if you starve yourself long enough, you get a kind of fucked up head state, basically. | ||
| How far? | ||
| How long you gotta go for? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think I looked into the details of it, but he writes about that. | ||
| So it's fasting. | ||
| Yeah, fasting causes an altered head state. | ||
| I've never done it, but this intoxication impulse is as deep in human beings as the sexual impulse. | ||
| You even see it in small children. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Even though you know it will make you sick, you do it because you get an altered head space. | ||
| That is one of the first expressions of the kind of intoxication impulse. | ||
| A really nice example is for 2,000 years, 40 miles outside of Athens, In ancient Greece, there used to be, once a year, people would meet at a place called the Temple of Eleusis. | ||
| And it was basically Burning Man. | ||
| They would all use a psychedelic together. | ||
| Do they know what that psychedelic is? | ||
| Yeah, it was a kind of... | ||
| There's lots of different theories, but they think it was a kind of fungus, basically. | ||
| I can't remember the name of it, but there's been research on this. | ||
| I don't want to say it wrong. | ||
| It was some kind of fungus. | ||
| Some kind of psychedelic mushroom. | ||
| And people like Plato and Aristotle. | ||
| Sometimes people say, you know, drugs are... | ||
| I remember William Bennett, the former drug star, saying, drugs are an attack on the foundations of Western civilization. | ||
| And you're like, no... | ||
| At the actual foundations of Western civilization, the people you're holding up as the icons, like Plato and Aristotle, were literally getting fucked up in exactly the way you say it's an attack on them, right? | ||
| It's this deep misunderstanding. | ||
| So, this is a natural human impulse. | ||
| We are never going to get rid of it. | ||
| We want to get rid of it. | ||
| It gives people a lot of joy and pleasure. | ||
| And yet... | ||
| Oscar Wilde said once, I'm going to get the quote slightly wrong, he said it better than this, but he said, Puritanism is the deep and gnawing fear that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves. | ||
| And there's this puritanical hatred of drug use, right? | ||
| Now, some of that is understandable fears about genuine harms, and that's a different thing. | ||
| But a lot of it is just very deep Puritanism. | ||
| And you really see it in... | ||
| One phrase we need to get out of the English language is the ridiculous phrase, drugs and alcohol. | ||
| It's like saying fruit and apples. | ||
| Alcohol is a drug, right? | ||
| Alcohol is easily the deadliest drug in our culture, well, after tobacco. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's a meaningless phrase. | ||
| But this distinction between alcohol and other drugs is a way of maintaining this drug war, right? | ||
| Because the reality is, the same proportion of people who become addicted to alcohol has become addicted to cocaine, right? | ||
| Same proportion, not absolute numbers because more people use alcohol, obviously. | ||
| Risks from alcohol are very similar to risks from other drugs, right? | ||
| Actually, some of them are... | ||
| Alcohol is significantly more dangerous than some drugs that are currently banned. | ||
| But we... | ||
| With alcohol... | ||
| And it comes back to what you were saying about why we don't change these policies. | ||
| With alcohol, enough people... | ||
| Well, everyone knows people who drink alcohol, right? | ||
| And one of the reasons things changed on cannabis is because more people came out and talked about it. | ||
| And so you have this situation where you've got Harry Anslinger saying if you use cannabis you'll kill your family with an axe. | ||
| By the time we get to the 90s enough people know enough people who've used cannabis to go right well Jimmy over there ain't chopping his family to death with an axe right? | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| And I think one of the things we have to do is encourage people to talk. | ||
| One of the weird things is that prohibition Creates a distorted picture of overall drug use, right? | ||
| Because loads of your listeners might say on Facebook, you know, I went out on Saturday night and I had, you know, five vodka shots and I got hammered and had a great time. | ||
| You'd be pretty foolish if you put on Facebook, oh, Saturday night I went out and had five lines of coke and had a great night, right? | ||
| You'd be... | ||
| Never followed a lot of people I follow. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Is there a culture where there's no demonized use of drugs or alcohol? | ||
| Is there any culture that doesn't frown upon some drugs or have some forbidden categories for drugs? | ||
| Well, there have been those societies throughout history, right? | ||
| I mean, now. | ||
| Well, we've got to understand it in the context of the war that Harry Anslinger imposed upon the whole world, right? | ||
| There was no country. | ||
| I mean, think about what happened to Mexico, right? | ||
| So Mexico had... | ||
| 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. | ||
| You've got to ban drugs and have a vicious war on drugs, right? | ||
| And the Mexican government are like, no. | ||
| We can see the policies don't work for you. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| They had a drug czar, a drug minister called Leopoldo Salazar-Viniegro, who they should build fucking statues to. | ||
| No man has ever been more prescient. | ||
| He explained to the Americans, we don't want to ban cannabis. | ||
| It's not particularly harmful. | ||
| With other drugs, we should be providing people with compassionate care. | ||
| And if we ban drugs, our country is going to be taken over by drug lords, right? | ||
| No one has ever been more right about anything. | ||
| The Americans, the US, start pressuring Mexico more and more. | ||
| In the end, they cut off... | ||
| So all opiates for pain relief used in hospitals were manufactured in the Americas and the United States at that time. | ||
| They cut off the supply of all of them. | ||
| People start dying in hospitals all over Mexico in agony. | ||
| And the Mexicans give in, they fire this guy, and they begin the drug war. | ||
| And the whole journey that leads to Rosario Reto, the guy I know from the Zetas, and Maricela's death, that trajectory begins at that point. | ||
| And this is something we haven't explained that I think is so important, right? | ||
| Actually, it really surprised me learning about the history of all this stuff. | ||
| At the birth of the drug war, it was intensely resisted, right? | ||
| Think about here in LA, right? | ||
| In Los Angeles, there was a doctor called Henry Smith Williams. | ||
| When heroin was banned, there was a deliberate loophole in the law that said, okay, you can't sell heroin, but doctors can prescribe it to people with addiction problems, just like what happened in Switzerland, right? | ||
| So here in LA, big heroin clinic prescribed. | ||
| Anslinger, it drives him crazy. | ||
| He wants to shut it down. | ||
| So the mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of this heroin prescription clinic and says, you will not shut this down. | ||
| This does a good job for us, but Anslinger shuts it down. | ||
| When the doctors say to the... | ||
| There's the biggest crackdown on doctors in American history. | ||
| Over 12,000 doctors are arrested and rounded up. | ||
| When they come to the one in Portland, Oregon, the doctors say, but what are we meant to do with all these vulnerable, addicted people? | ||
| And one of the agents said, go and throw them in the lake, they'll make good fish food, right? | ||
| That was the attitude. | ||
| So this is resisted intensely at the birth of the drug war. | ||
| So you had a society really recently that had a much more mature, exactly what you're asking about, a much more mature attitude to drug use than we have now, right? | ||
| It's not that people thought all drug use is good. | ||
| We should celebrate every instance of drug use. | ||
| No one thinks that, right? | ||
| There were problems and there is some joy associated with drug use. | ||
| That's actually the norm. | ||
| There is some pain and terrible things associated with drug use, which are mostly driven by underlying harm, but there are real harms that come from some drugs as well. | ||
| And most societies, until very recently, had a mature appreciation of this, right? | ||
|
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Really? | |
| We are the outlier that most societies have had licensed intoxicants. | ||
| Now, of course, in different societies at different times, there was a czar of Russia who wanted to ban tobacco, right? | ||
| And did terrible things to anyone who was banned with tobacco. | ||
| Different societies have had different panics at different times. | ||
| But... | ||
| We are the historical outliers, right? | ||
| I mean, to give you a sense, just the United States imprisons two million people. | ||
| There has never been a society that imprisons this many of its citizens, this higher proportion of its citizens anywhere ever. | ||
| It's overwhelmingly driven by the drug war, right? | ||
| I mean, the 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. | ||
| That's how extreme this war is, right? | ||
| And what we do to people, the conditions this war creates, it's... | ||
| And it's a total historical outlier. | ||
| We are in a freak experiment, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| The United States has done it for 100 years. | ||
| This country has spent a trillion dollars on it. | ||
| We've imprisoned Millions of our own citizens. | ||
| We've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate. | ||
| We've destroyed whole countries like Colombia. | ||
| Isn't the problem now that there's a gigantic business behind it all? | ||
| From private prisons to prison guard unions to the pharmaceutical industry that would benefit from keeping most of these drugs illegal so their profits continue to rise to law enforcement. | ||
| I mean, down the line, you'd be disrupting like an evil industry, but an industry. | ||
| I think that's a real factor, but I don't want to overstate it. | ||
| Lots of policies have vested interests. | ||
| What's the main factor? | ||
| The main factor is... | ||
| Most people asked, do you think the drug war has failed? | ||
| Say yes. | ||
| And most people asked, do you want to legalize any drug other than cannabis? | ||
| Say no very strongly. | ||
| So education? | ||
| I think it's about... | ||
| I won't use the word education. | ||
| Can I give you an example of a specific person who I think showed a way to do this? | ||
| So in the year 2000, in Vancouver, there was a homeless street addict called Bud Osborne. | ||
| And he lived in a notorious part of Vancouver called the Downtown Eastside. | ||
| People in Vancouver will know it. | ||
| It's a place, particularly at that time, that had a really high, like, nightmarish open drug scene, right? | ||
| Just, again, people in Switzerland, people injecting in the streets, that kind of thing. | ||
| And Bud was living homeless, and he was watching his friends die all around him. | ||
| At that time, there was a really big police crackdown, and so people would go and hide in dumpsters or in alleyways to shoot up, but obviously if you're hiding and you overdose and no one sees you, you just die, right? | ||
| And one day Bud learns that one of his friends, Judith, had died, and he's like, I can't just sit here and wait for all my friends to die and then for me to die. | ||
| But as Bud would have put it then, he also thought, I'm a homeless junkie, what the fuck am I going to do? | ||
| Bud had a really simple idea. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And if we see someone overdosing, we'll ring an ambulance. | ||
| No officials, nothing like that, just us. | ||
| And loads of people had descended on the downtown east side to come up with problems to solve everything. | ||
| And people were very sceptical, but they liked Bud. | ||
| Okay, we'll do it. | ||
| So they start going and searching. | ||
| And over the next three months, the death toll on the downtown east side had a significant fall. | ||
| And obviously that meant people who would have died were living, which is a great thing, but it also meant the addicts thought, ah, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone says we are, right? | ||
| Maybe we can do something. | ||
| They were like, what else can we do? | ||
| Bud went to the library. | ||
| He learned that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had opened safe injection rooms, a bit like what happened in California until they shut it down, Anslinger shut it down, where people could go and use their drugs and be watched by doctors and nurses, and that this had massively reduced deaths in Frankfurt. | ||
| Nothing like this had happened in the United States since Anslinger shut it all down, but Bud's like... | ||
| Okay, we'll persuade our mayor. | ||
| They set up a group called VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. | ||
| Okay, the mayor was a conservative right-wing guy called Philip Owen, who will be an American comparison. | ||
| It's not Trump, like Mitt Romney. | ||
| Rich guy from a privileged family, didn't know anything about addicts. | ||
| He'd run for office saying all the local drug addicts should be taken and detained in the local military base in Chilliwack and never let out. | ||
| Gives you a sense of where he's coming from, right? | ||
| People are not optimistic about persuading him. | ||
| Vandu, Bud, his friends, they decide everywhere Philip Owen goes, they're going to follow him with a coffin. | ||
| And the coffin had written on it, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injection site? | ||
| Every time Philip Owen spoke in public, one of the homeless people with addiction problems would stand up and say, who will die next, Philip Owen, before you open a safe injection site? | ||
| One day, Dean Wilson, one of the main people in Van Du, stood up and said, do you remember Julia, who asked you recently who would die next? | ||
| It turned out to be her because you haven't done it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| This goes on for a long time. | ||
| They do loads of public actions. | ||
| They filled Oppenheimer Park, which is a big park in Vancouver, with a cross, more than a thousand crosses, each one representing someone who had died of an overdose. | ||
| And they wrote the names of the people on the crosses. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| And he went to meet loads of the addicts. | ||
| He sat with them. | ||
| It blew his mind. | ||
| He thought people with addiction problems were just people who partied too hard, indulged themselves. | ||
| He was completely shocked. | ||
| He came here to the United States to meet Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who'd grown up under alcohol prohibition. | ||
| And Milton Friedman explains drug prohibition to Philip Owen. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm not going to speak again without having the addicts here with me about addiction because they understand it better than me. | ||
| We're going to open the first safe injection site in North America. | ||
| We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. | ||
| Things are going to change around here. | ||
| They opened the safe injection site. | ||
| Philip Owen's right-wing party is so horrified They deselect him as their candidate and his whole political career ends, but a more liberal guy wins the election and the room stays open, right? | ||
| In the 10 years that followed, overdose deaths on the downtown east side fell by 80%, 80%, right? | ||
| Average life expectancy in that neighbourhood rose by 10 years. | ||
| You just don't get figures like that very often. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You don't write people off, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| You don't write off anyone. | ||
| You don't know who can be persuaded by a message of love and compassion. | ||
| And the most unlikely, one of the biggest champions of my book is a conservative evangelical Christian in Mississippi called Christina Dent who's doing incredible work with this, right? | ||
| And I thought a lot about Philip Owen when I went to go and see Philip Owen on the downtown east side. | ||
| And he said to me he would sacrifice his entire political career All over again, given the chance for this cause. | ||
| He said, how often do you get to save thousands of lives of the most vulnerable people? | ||
| And after I got to know Bud Osborne, the guy who started this movement, He died. | ||
| And I remember, you know, he was only in his early 60s, but he'd been a homeless addict during a drug war. | ||
| It takes a toll on you. | ||
| And they sealed off the streets of the downtown east side where Bud had lived as a homeless person. | ||
| And they had this incredible memorial ceremony. | ||
| And there were loads of people at that ceremony who knew that they were alive because of what Bud had started and because so many other people had joined them and so many people who didn't have addiction problems had opened their hearts, right? | ||
| And I remember thinking that day... | ||
| You know, when you get disheartened about this, it's easy to get disheartened, right? | ||
| This is a hundred year long drug war. | ||
| We're up against very powerful forces. | ||
| Everyone watching your show, listening to your show, is more powerful than Bud was that day, right? | ||
| The day he started that, right? | ||
| Just by virtue of the fact they have a device on which to listen to this, right? | ||
| Bud didn't sit there thinking, someone else is going to handle this. | ||
| He didn't sit there thinking, ah, we're up against these forces that can't be defeated. | ||
| He started where he stood. | ||
| He appealed to the people around him and it started this circle of change that, you know, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled, because the right-wing government of Stephen Harper tried to shut down this injection site, 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. | ||
| That will never be taken away now, right? | ||
| That started because, you know, when you have nothing else, you have a voice. | ||
| You have a human voice that you can use to persuade other people with love and compassion. | ||
| You can tell them stories. | ||
| You can build people's love and compassion in the middle of this catastrophe that we're seeing in this country with the addiction crisis, right? | ||
| I mean, more people died last year in the opioid crisis than all the soldiers who died in the Vietnam War combined. | ||
| In the middle of this catastrophe, We can carry on doing what we've been doing. | ||
| Okay, we can carry on doing that. | ||
| Then we will continue to get the horrific results we are now getting. | ||
| We can continue to copy the places that have failed, right? | ||
| At the end of a hundred year long drug war that has cost a trillion dollars, we can't even keep drugs out of our prisons. | ||
| Where we have a walled perimeter and we pay people to walk around it the whole time. | ||
| So good luck keeping them out of a 3,000 mile border, right? | ||
| That will never happen. | ||
| That is a ludicrous fantasy. | ||
| You may as well take all the money that will be spent on trying to keep drugs out that way and burn it in a pile, right? | ||
| It is absurd. | ||
| There's never been such a society. | ||
| Or we can start to copy the places that have succeeded, right? | ||
| Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, Canada... | ||
| There are plenty of places that have tried the alternatives, and people who 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. | ||
| This is the consistent pattern. | ||
| Before it happens, people think it's the work of a bunch of fucking wackos. | ||
| They think people want to, you know, get everyone to use drugs and get children to use drugs and think it's madness. | ||
| And then they see that that's not at all what motivates people who want reform. | ||
| And that's not what happens in practice when you adopt these policies. | ||
| And it's not a magic bullet and they still have problems. | ||
| But there's been such a significant improvement in all those places. | ||
| That the resistance tends to... | ||
| I mean, how many people are arguing for reversing the cannabis legalization here? | ||
| You don't ever hear it now, right? | ||
| I mean, there's been a little bit of a backlash in a kind of absurd book that's come out, repeating the kind of Victor Laikata style. | ||
| Well, I actually had that guy on... | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Tell me about that. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| We had a debate between him and Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike Hart from Canada. | ||
| And... | ||
| There's some reality to the dangers of cannabis use of some people that are susceptible to schizophrenia. | ||
| And I think that there's also some at least anecdotal evidence that points to the fact that some people experience these psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic episodes probably directly as a result of large dose use of THC, whether it's through edibles or whether it's through smoking. | ||
| And some people freak out. | ||
| I've known people I've known of people that have had real issues with it I mean had a comedian here a couple weeks ago talked about he doesn't smoke pot He's from Brazil he smoked pot Us of use of vape pen took a bunch of hits and was fucked up for two weeks There are there are dangers and problems. | ||
| Yeah, so it's really important The case for legalizing cannabis is not that there is no harm associated with cannabis, right? | ||
| In the same way, the case for legalizing alcohol is not, there's no harm associated with alcohol. | ||
| Of course, but this is what Alex Berenstein is trying to go over in his book. | ||
| I don't think he did a good job for two reasons. | ||
| One, because... | ||
| He's basically only making the case for it to be negative. | ||
| And I think there's far more evidence that cannabis has a positive influence on people. | ||
| It reinforces community. | ||
| It makes people more sensitive and kind. | ||
| This thought of paranoia, it makes people more humble. | ||
| Sex feels better. | ||
| It makes food taste better. | ||
| There's creativity aspects to it that are undeniable. | ||
| There's a lot of very positive aspects to it. | ||
| For some people it's not good. | ||
| But it's like saying, hey, some people die when they eat peanuts. | ||
| Let's outlaw peanuts. | ||
| Warn your children about peanuts. | ||
| Yeah, I think everything you just said is absolutely right. | ||
| I think there's another layer that's going on at the same time, kind of below that, which is really important for people to understand. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We can't legalise cannabis because it's much stronger now than it used to be. | ||
| THC content has gone up, people are smoking skunk. | ||
| It's really important to understand why that happened. | ||
| It's because of drug prohibition. | ||
| So the day before alcohol was banned in the US, the most popular drinks by far were beer and wine, right? | ||
| In the weeks after alcohol prohibition ended, most popular drinks again were beer and wine as they are today. | ||
| In between, you could not get a hold of beer and wine. | ||
| The most popular drinks were whiskey and moonshine. | ||
| You look at that and you think, well... | ||
| Why would that be? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| It's because of a kind of slightly wonky and boring thing, but I think it's worth talking about. | ||
| It's called the Iron Law of Prohibition. | ||
| If you imagine, if we had to smuggle the nearest bar to here, if we had to smuggle all the alcohol for that bar in a wagon from the Mexican border, right, from Tijuana, In a wagon, we fill our wagon with beer, we're going to get a drink for 100 people. | ||
| If we fill it with vodka, we're going to get a drink for thousands of people, right? | ||
| So, when you ban a drug and it has to be smuggled around, you get a premium on getting the biggest possible kick into the smallest possible space, right? | ||
| This is why mild forms of the drug disappear. | ||
| Before 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? | ||
| Very low level of opiates. | ||
| The most popular way of consuming coca-based products Prior to the banning was Coca-Cola, right? | ||
| It's called that for a reason. | ||
| When the ban happens, heroin becomes the only form of opiates, powder cocaine becomes the only form of cocaine. | ||
| In fact, when there's a huge crackdown on powder cocaine in the 80s, the iron law kicks in even more and that's when crack is invented because you can get even more of a hit into an even smaller possible space, right? | ||
| I think it's important to understand, it is not good. | ||
| Most people who drink alcohol don't want to drink vodka, and they certainly don't want to drink absinthe most of the time, right? | ||
| Most people want a mild form of their drug. | ||
| That's true of cannabis. | ||
| Of course, there's some people who want to get totally fucked up, either for fun or because they have addiction problems. | ||
| But most people want a mild form of the drug. | ||
| It's not good that mild forms of the drug are when they're not available. | ||
| Let me stop you. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| It's definitely not true in California. | ||
| In California what happened was medical cannabis got passed, and once medical cannabis got passed, there was an emphasis on the strongest possible stuff because people wanted it. | ||
| It was a direct result of people having higher tolerances because marijuana was so readily available. | ||
| If you have a high tolerance and you smoke a lot of pot, you want strong pot because weak pot doesn't do anything. | ||
| It's the number one complaint amongst cannabis enthusiasts is someone having weak pot. | ||
| So you've got a subculture of people who are cannabis enthusiasts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Just like there's a subculture of people who want vodka or absinthe, right? | ||
| But I don't think it's a matter... | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| Like gin, obviously, is more potent than whiskey or than beer, rather. | ||
| It's easier to carry gin around. | ||
| You have to carry less of it. | ||
| With cannabis, people are still buying the same quantity. | ||
| They're just getting more fucked up. | ||
| Because their tolerances are so much higher, they need the stronger and stronger THC. So as you have a legal market, you can have a variety of options, right? | ||
| What you have is what we'll discover, I think, as time goes by, because we know it's with alcohol, is different people want cannabis to do different things. | ||
| You're totally right. | ||
| There's some people who want maximum THC, maximally fucked up. | ||
| Well, there's still a market for lower-grade weed. | ||
| I mean, they have it listed at all these dispensaries. | ||
| They have it listed, you know, 20%, 35%. | ||
| They have it listed so you can choose a more mild marijuana if you'd like to. | ||
| But the OG people, the people that do it every day, they want that really potent weed. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's definitely a concentrated market of very dedicated users who want to get maximally fucked up. | ||
| You're totally right. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's what pushed the... | ||
| I mean, it's also in botnists. | ||
| And I'm friends with a bunch of people who breed and grow these various strains. | ||
| So, Professor David Nutt has done really interesting work on this. | ||
| So, if I remember rightly, there's 38 active components in cannabis, right? | ||
| So, cannabinoids. | ||
| Well, there's hundreds of cannabinoids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I think the... | ||
| If I remember from Professor Nutt's work, he argues there's 38, kind of, significant active components. | ||
| Maybe other people... | ||
| Yeah, I think there's over a hundred cannabinoids. | ||
| I think we just discussed this, right? | ||
| Didn't we... | ||
| 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... | ||
| 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? | ||
| And even a small number of people where you have a very widely used drug, that's really problematic, right? | ||
| But actually, this is really interesting evidence. | ||
| Why do people who are prone to psychosis and schizophrenia want cannabis, right? | ||
| Because there is a lot of them who want it. | ||
| It's not that people... | ||
| Hardly anyone wants to have a psychotic episode. | ||
| It's actually... | ||
| So THC correlates with psychosis in some people. | ||
| But there's another component of cannabis called CBD... Cannabidiol, which actually we know there's good evidence, soothes psychosis in schizophrenia, right? | ||
| It's actually given as a treatment in some places in distilled pill form. | ||
| So actually it's a slightly more complex picture than cannabis causes psychosis, right? | ||
| Very rich THC in some people will cause psychosis. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| There are things we can do to prevent that and one of the good things about a legal market is you can regulate it so we can limit the amount of THC that is available just like we can limit You know, you can't go and buy 70% proof alcohol. | ||
| But also, what Professor Nutt has been arguing is we need to be... | ||
| And they exist, but they need to be commercialised and promoted more... | ||
| Or promoted in a public health way, not necessarily commercially. | ||
| CBD-rich cannabis will actually be helpful to people with psychosis and schizophrenia. | ||
| So it's a slightly more complicated pitch. | ||
| I know that you're not saying... | ||
| You're not endorsing what... | ||
| The Tell Your Kids guy... | ||
| What's he called again? | ||
| The guy who did your debate... | ||
| Alex Bernstein. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know you're not endorsing the kind of simplistic view on either side, but I think it's slightly more complicated than that. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's bad for developing brains. | ||
| There's one person I interviewed who really helped me to, again, to think about this, a guy called Fred Martins, who's in... | ||
| I went to go see him in Camden, New Jersey. | ||
| And Fred was a cop. | ||
| He's retired now, but he was a cop. | ||
| It was really kind of right-wing. | ||
| It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood character in Dirty Harry. | ||
| He's not a liberal, right? | ||
| And he had this, he wouldn't use a fancy word like this, but he had an epiphany about drug legalisation one day. | ||
| He was in a car park in Wayne, New Jersey. | ||
| In 1971, he was staking out a dealer. | ||
| He's in plain clothes, obviously. | ||
| And a kid comes up to him, like an 11-year-old or something, and goes, Hey, mister, I'm not allowed to buy alcohol. | ||
| Will you go into that liquor store and buy some for me? | ||
| And Fred goes, no, get out of here. | ||
| So the kid walks over to the drug dealer and buys some drugs from him instead. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Drug dealers don't check ID. Licensed legal businesses do. | ||
| They really care if they're, because they've got something to lose, right? | ||
| So I think sometimes it's used as the kind of protect our kids argument is used as a case for prohibition. | ||
| In fact, if you want to protect your kids, you should be putting a big premium on getting these substances out of the hands of armed criminal gangs and into the hands of licensed legal businesses. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to argue that. | ||
| Anybody rational, rather. | ||
| I think that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| I think that the number of people that have schizophrenia is fairly stable in terms of the percentage of it across the board, cannabis users or non-cannabis users. | ||
| And so the argument against this idea that cannabis causes schizophrenic breaks is that these people already have schizophrenia. | ||
| And it just hasn't really manifested itself in a tangible sense. | ||
| So this is one of the things Professor Nutt says. | ||
| There is some evidence that cannabis in a small number of people causes psychosis. | ||
| There's a study in Sweden that showed this. | ||
| With schizophrenia, it's much more contested. | ||
| So psychosis versus schizophrenia, what is the major distinction? | ||
| I've not researched this in depth, but psychosis involves... | ||
| Delusions and paranoia. | ||
| Schizophrenia is a subset of mental illness that's very specific, has a significant genetic component, although there can be environmental triggers for it. | ||
| So it could possibly trigger both. | ||
| It could possibly trigger psychosis and schizophrenia. | ||
| The argument against that... | ||
| So there is evidence with psychosis. | ||
| The argument... | ||
| I want to stress it's a very small number of people, but it is real. | ||
| And there are things we can do in a legal market to counteract that that are much harder to do in a prohibited market. | ||
| But with schizophrenia, the argument against that, and I've not looked into this in a huge amount of detail, so I don't want to... | ||
| 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. | ||
| If cannabis was causing schizophrenia, you would expect it to vary with cannabis use, at least to some degree, there'd be some relationship, and that doesn't seem to be the case. | ||
| So again, that's what Professor Nart, who's the former Chief Scientific Advisor on Drugs in Britain, says. | ||
| I haven't looked into that in great detail, but he's basically right on all the things that I have looked into that he says. | ||
| Do they know what the mechanism would be that would cause someone to consume THC and have a psychotic break? | ||
| Has that been examined? | ||
| I don't know enough about it. | ||
| That would seem to be a big issue, right? | ||
| Like, find out what it is that's causing this trigger, and whether or not this exists in these people anyway, and maybe a stressful situation, a bad breakup, losing their job, maybe one of those things could also cause this trigger. | ||
| Well, we know with all mental health, all aspects of mental health, All mental health problems. | ||
| There are three kinds of cause, right? | ||
| There's my book Lost Connections, which is about depression and anxiety, there's a lot about this. | ||
| There are biological causes, things like your genes, real brain changes, things like the introduction of a drug. | ||
| There are psychological causes, 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. | ||
| And in all mental health phenomena, to some degree, these three sets of causes play out. | ||
| So let's think about even something very... | ||
| Dementia. | ||
| Dementia has a very, obviously, has a heavy biological driver, right? | ||
| Dementia is a physical degeneration of the brain or a disease like Alzheimer's. | ||
| But even with dementia, which has this very heavy biological driver, We know there are big social and psychological effects that can mitigate it. | ||
| So if you're part of a strong community and have lots of social connections, if you have a positive self-image, if you speak other languages, your dementia will develop significantly more slowly than if you don't have any of these factors, right? | ||
| So with things like psychosis, there's a brilliant person called Tanya Lerman, Professor Tanya Lerman at Stanford University, who's done really interesting research on this. | ||
| I haven't looked into it in great detail, but I interviewed her. | ||
| So we know recovery from psychosis and schizophrenia is much stronger in African countries than it is in the United States, right? | ||
| And it's not a genetic thing because Africans who come to the United States end up having the American level of recovery, not the African level of recovery. | ||
| And 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, right? | ||
| They have much stronger social connections. | ||
| It's a study that asks Americans, how many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis? | ||
| And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. | ||
| Today, the most common answer is none, right? | ||
| It's not the average, but it's the most common answer. | ||
| Half of all Americans asked, how many people know you well? | ||
| Say, nobody, right? | ||
| It's a huge amount of evidence. | ||
| Loneliness is toxic for human beings. | ||
| Lonely people, as Guy did a lot of experiments on this here in LA, lonely people exposed to the flu virus and the cold virus and the colds are way more likely to actually get them than non-lonely people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's just devastating for your physical and mental health to be lonely. | ||
| There's other things going on. | ||
| So I think there's a whole range of things that are going on with all mental health problems. | ||
| I don't know how this relates to cannabis and psychosis. | ||
| I don't want to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But we know with psychosis, yeah, there's a big debate about this. | ||
| Immigrants are more likely to have psychosis than non-immigrants. | ||
| There's a whole... | ||
| Lots of environmental factors playing out, even in extreme mental health problems like... | ||
| Now, I want to stress this. | ||
| They're not the only thing. | ||
| There are real biological aspects as well. | ||
| Which are clearly very significant in things like schizophrenia and play some role in things like depression for a lot of people. | ||
| But yeah, does that make sense? | ||
| I mean, sort of, yeah. | ||
| I mean, obviously there's varying biological factors, but the cultural factors make sense. | ||
| The fact that these people in Africa are not, they're not expelled from the community. | ||
| So they have a sense of bond and maybe it's more easy to recover. | ||
| And one of the things that you hear about part of the problem with mental illness is that people with mental illness are pushed away. | ||
| People don't want to deal with their problem and it exacerbates whatever is causing it in the first place. | ||
| What drugs have you used? | ||
| I have to be slightly careful in my answer because I'm in an immigration process with the United States. | ||
| What about prescription legal drugs? | ||
| So, I used a drug illegally that is a prescription drug called Modafinil or Provigil. | ||
| Yeah, Provigil. | ||
| Why did you use it illegally? | ||
| It's pretty easy to get a prescription for that. | ||
| So just to explain to people who don't know, ProVigil is a drug that was developed for people with narcolepsy. | ||
| Well, it was actually developed as a performance enhancer, and they just had to find a reason to use it. | ||
| I thought it was the other way around. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| They had to find a reason to use it, and the reason to use it was to say, oh, let's give it to people with narcolepsy. | ||
| Let's check to see if that's true, because that's how it's been explained to me, actually by my doctor. | ||
| Oh, that's really interesting. | ||
| I'm perfectly prepared to... | ||
| I don't know about that, but that sounds plausible to me. | ||
| So I think, for me... | ||
| Do you use that a lot? | ||
| No, so... | ||
| I don't have to use it now. | ||
| So for me, I think... | ||
| I didn't have an addiction to that. | ||
| What I had an addiction to was working all the time, right? | ||
| So I grew up in a crazy and violent environment in many ways. | ||
| And my way of... | ||
| Whether it's addiction and other things... | ||
| And my way of coping in that environment was to read and write all the time, to just not be present by just working, right, even when I was a small child. | ||
| And as I got older, that was really my way of being in the world, right, to work all the time. | ||
| And I think when I got into my, like, late 20s, I can't remember, I wrote an article about Modafinil, so I could figure out when I started taking it, but the Because I initially wrote a very positive article about it. | ||
| I was at that point where the obsessive and compulsive work wasn't working for me, right? | ||
| It wasn't... | ||
| And like a lot of people with addictive behaviour, I was doubling down on the thing that wasn't working that well. | ||
| So, for me, Modafinil was, or Provigil, I bought it on the internet... | ||
| It was a way, I thought, initially, to make it so I could work even more hours, do even more, right? | ||
| And initially, when you start taking it, a lot of people take it before exams, for example. | ||
| It does make you feel... | ||
| It's not a caffeine buzz. | ||
| It wasn't for me anyway. | ||
| It's just you feel like you can just... | ||
| You know that feeling when someone put it to me, this wasn't a scientist so it could be bullshit, but... | ||
| So we evolved to... | ||
| We had this thing called executive focus, right? | ||
| I've got executive focus on now, I'm really concentrating on what I'm saying to you and the signal's coming from you, right? | ||
| But obviously, we can't be in a state of executive focus all the time, right? | ||
| But what modafinil does is it makes you much more in a state of executive focus for longer. | ||
| And you can see why people evolved to do that. | ||
| If you were 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? | ||
| And my understanding is that modafinil triggers that state. | ||
| Not a panicked state, but an executive focus state. | ||
| Which is good for a while, except there are two really big downsides to that. | ||
| Firstly, you don't sleep. | ||
| And if you don't sleep, you go fucking crazy. | ||
| I've never heard that there's an issue with sleeping in modafinil, new vigil or provigil. | ||
| In fact, that's one of the positive aspects of it, that you can sleep on it. | ||
| Oh, well, I mean, it was designed for people who find it hard to stay awake. | ||
| I think that's not true. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's what I'm reading. | |
| What are you reading? | ||
| The guy who discovered it, Michael Jouvet, was a sleep study neurophysiologist and was working on the compound Adra or Adrafanil. | ||
| And then they discovered and made Modafanil, which is a stronger version of that. | ||
| Is there anything that says that it was originally developed as a performance enhancing drug? | ||
| I didn't see anything like that. | ||
| Fucking doctor. | ||
| My experience was two problems. | ||
| So firstly, I don't know how general this is, I haven't done a huge amount of research on this drug. | ||
| My experience was... | ||
| Firstly, not sleeping, which is really bad for you over time. | ||
| And secondly, actually, if you're in that focus mode, so your mind needs time wandering. | ||
| Sorry, your mind needs time to wander, right? | ||
| It needs time... | ||
| You know, if I just leave here and walk out down the street, my brain will just start wandering around loads of things. | ||
| And then it will go back into executive focus when I do the next interview or whatever. | ||
| You need those periods when you're not in exact focus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Recovery time. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Or not even recovery. | ||
| That's when... | ||
|
unidentified
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Variation. | |
| Recovery is part of it. | ||
| That's when your brain often has creative thoughts, right? | ||
| When your mind is wandering, when things will come to you. | ||
| Because a certain amount of your mind is processing things even though you're not conscious of it, right? | ||
| That's what I felt with New Vigil. | ||
| New Vigil or Pro Vigil, they're very similar. | ||
| It didn't seem like there was much creativity going on. | ||
| That it was more of like a grunt tool. | ||
| How long did you use it for, Jay? | ||
| I mean, I would not use it regularly. | ||
| I would take it like... | ||
| Once a couple weeks, once a week or so like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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For how long? | |
| I think I did it for like a year, a year or so. | ||
| And then I just stopped. | ||
| I haven't taken it in years. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But I liked it. | ||
|
unidentified
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What did you like about it? | |
| I got it from some guy who was a biohacker. | ||
| He was the one who told me about it. | ||
| And he said it was pretty easy to get a prescription for it. | ||
| Got a prescription for it. | ||
| And it just gave you like this pepped up sense of focus and awareness. | ||
| I felt like you could get a lot done when you're on it. | ||
| But it didn't seem like it helped with those wandering creative thoughts, as you were saying. | ||
| Yeah, if I was ever going to do exams again, which fortunately I will never do in my life, I would use that. | ||
| But I think you're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It relates back to what we were saying right at the start about chemical hooks, right? | ||
| So if you look at the debate about non-drug-based addictions, right? | ||
| 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... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gambling. | |
| Exactly, gambling addiction. | ||
| At the time, initially what people say is, well, this is bullshit, because they believe the chemical hooks theory of addiction, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it just seems like, well, that's not... | ||
| I mean, there's an episode of Cheers, actually, which... | ||
| Now would be... | ||
| Yeah, you wouldn't do this, but there's an episode where the whole hilarious premise of the show is... | ||
| What's the Ted Dunstan character? | ||
| Sam Malone. | ||
| Ted Dunstan's character thinks he's a sex addict, and this is like a punchline all the way through the show, right? | ||
| This is the attitude that ends with he goes through a meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and 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? | ||
| That wouldn't happen in a sitcom now. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| People thought... | ||
| Well, it might, but people don't think the very idea of sex addiction is ridiculous in the way they did, right? | ||
| I don't think. | ||
| Maybe they do. | ||
| But then I think that's because there hasn't been a shift in gambling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I've known a lot. | ||
| I've known a lot of gambling addicts. | ||
| And did you feel that they were as addicted as... | ||
| Oh yeah, they're straight up junkies. | ||
| They might as well be chasing crack. | ||
| And that tells us something really important because you don't snort a roulette wheel, right? | ||
| You don't inject online poker, right? | ||
| If you can have... | ||
| Professor Nutt said this to me. | ||
| If you can have... | ||
| All of the addiction, but none of the chemical hooks. | ||
| That tells us about how we've overestimated the role of chemical hooks and addiction. | ||
| Well, there is a chemical hook. | ||
| There's a dopamine addiction. | ||
| Well, absolutely everything you do that you like gives you a dopamine hit. | ||
| So I think there's been this attempt to integrate it by going, oh, well, there's this pleasure in the brain. | ||
| It's also a self-destructive issue. | ||
| There's something about gambling. | ||
| There's a lot of self-hate involved and this overwhelming feeling of failure that a lot of gambling addicts have because they fail so often. | ||
| And they're always trying to chase the dragon. | ||
| They're always trying to make up for all the past things they've gone wrong. | ||
| This big score. | ||
| With this big score, we're going to settle it out. | ||
| There's someone who talked to me about... | ||
| I just think about what you're saying in relation to him. | ||
| A guy called Peter Cohen, who's a professor in the Netherlands, who actually didn't say this to me directly. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| He says, we shouldn't call it addiction. | ||
| We should call it bonding. | ||
| That human beings have an innate need to bond and connect, right? | ||
| And when you're happy and healthy, you'll bond and connect with, like, the people around you with meaningful work. | ||
| But if you can't do that because you're isolated or traumatized or beaten down by life or you haven't been taught how to do that, You will bond with something that gives you some sense of relief, right? | ||
| Now for some people that might be porn, for some people that might be gambling, for some people it might be cocaine, alcohol, whatever. | ||
| But he says if you only have one bond that's giving you any relief, you will obsessively return to that bond, right? | ||
| And I don't think that's a total, as he would say, that's not a total explanation for what's going on. | ||
| But I do think that is a useful way to think about some of these behavioural addictions, right? | ||
| So I, someone I know very well, a relative of mine has a gambling addiction, and this is someone who has... | ||
| There's no alternative form of joy or pleasure in their life, right? | ||
| And gambling gives a moment, well, lots of moments. | ||
| Especially if you look at someone who's playing online poker, as I've done with my relative, they're not happy. | ||
| It's not looking at someone watching a nice movie, right? | ||
| It's, you can see, I don't mean, sorry, someone with an addiction problem playing online poker. | ||
| Some people have, most people don't have a problem. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| It's the relief of just being absent from your life for a moment, or for however long you play, rather than... | ||
| I went to this... | ||
| For Lost Connections, my book about depression, I went to the first ever internet rehab centre in the United States. | ||
| It's a weird place. | ||
| It's an impressive place, actually. | ||
| I like the people there. | ||
| It's in Spokane, just outside Spokane in Washington. | ||
| It's called Restart Washington. | ||
| And I remember going there, it was really interesting to think about this. | ||
| I remember arriving, it's a clearing in the woods, a big wooden place in the clearing of the woods. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was like, oh wait, you're in the right place, right? | ||
| And it's really interesting because they get all kinds of people in Restart Washington, but they disproportionately get young men who are obsessed with multiplayer role-player games. | ||
| Like, then it would have been World of Warcraft, now it would be Fortnite. | ||
| 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, because they're getting something out of it, right? | ||
| And she argues that one of the things they're getting is the things they used to get from the culture, but no longer get. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Well, a feeling they're good at something, a feeling that other people see them, that they're part of a tribe, a feeling that they're moving around. | ||
| You know, kids spend very little time outdoors now, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think there's also anticipation. | ||
| There's puzzles. | ||
| There's things where you're trying to figure out whether or not something's right or wrong and how to get it. | ||
| And then if you do get it, you get this positive surge. | ||
| If you don't get it... | ||
| I mean, I think there's human reward systems that are being mirrored there in gambling as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| And what psychologists call that feeling of mastery. | ||
| Feeling of mastery is when you feel you are good at something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's an absolutely underlying psychological need. | ||
| Everyone needs to feel they're good at something. | ||
| If you don't have a sense of mastery in your life, you will be depressed and anxious, right? | ||
| Or you're much more likely to become depressed and anxious. | ||
| And I think, again, because it's very striking to me, I've got teenage nephews, I've got godsons. | ||
| We actually don't ask anything of young men, right? | ||
| Very rarely are they actually asked to do very much. | ||
| They're not given responsibilities, right? | ||
| I think... | ||
| And look, again, I want to stress that most people playing video games are not addicted. | ||
| It's a perfectly good form of pleasure. | ||
| They're very addictive. | ||
| I mean, they're not... | ||
| Most people playing them have a healthy relationship with them in the same way that I... I don't know if that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, maybe I... I think a lot of people playing them have a real problem with them. | |
| They take up massive hours of their time. | ||
| It's a giant problem with young boys. | ||
| I mean, the thing is, it's become an actual avenue for a career now. | ||
| There's eSports careers where... | ||
| These young guys are making millions of dollars playing video games. | ||
| It's not like the old days where you would say, hey, you're wasting your life. | ||
| Now it's basically almost like practicing golf. | ||
| But we have a setup back here where we play video games against each other. | ||
| It's very addictive. | ||
| Don't you think it's addictive? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it's like basketball when I was younger, too. | ||
| I loved playing basketball. | ||
| Couldn't get me to play in the rain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The basketball has movement and exercise attached to it, so you get some positive benefit from that addiction. | ||
| I was definitely addicted to jiu-jitsu. | ||
| I would even train when I was injured. | ||
| But what does that mean? | ||
| It means I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed not doing it. | ||
| The difference between a lot of video game addictions, and particularly gambling addictions, is that they tend to wreck people's lives. | ||
| You know when you had this period of 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? | ||
| It's really fun, you know, so you're chasing the thrill. | ||
| I mean, I'm certain I was avoiding pain with almost everything I've done in my life, in some way, shape, or form. | ||
| You know, there's some of it where you're trying to do something positive to mitigate the pain. | ||
| Or the frustration or the anger or whatever it is that's bothering you. | ||
| The video game thing was a real addiction, though. | ||
| It was like a compulsion. | ||
| How long did it last? | ||
| Years. | ||
| Several years. | ||
| How did you get out of it, Jay? | ||
| I quit. | ||
| I just quit. | ||
| Cold turkey. | ||
| Stopped playing. | ||
| I realized it was kind of messing up my life and my career. | ||
| It was just taking up way too much time. | ||
| I came to a realization. | ||
| I was like, I've got to stop doing this. | ||
| I'm just playing way too much. | ||
| So I just said, the only way, I'm just too competitive. | ||
| I enjoyed it too much. | ||
| And so the only way to do it was to stop playing it all together. | ||
| And we started playing it again recently after more than shit, more than 15 years of ever playing it at all. | ||
| You know, and it's still addictive, but I'm so busy now, I can't really fall into the grip of it. | ||
| I'm actually just enjoying it for an hour here or there. | ||
| But that's so interesting in itself, isn't it? | ||
| That's a bit like the rap part principle, it feels to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that like... | ||
| The more you have in your life that is meaningful, that is good, and gives you pleasure or a sense of mastery, the less space there will be for these objects of obsession to come in, right? | ||
| And I think that is a principle that's true. | ||
| This was the principle behind the Portuguese drug decriminalisation, right? | ||
| If we give people good lives, they will not want to anaesthetise themselves so much. | ||
| It was the Swiss principle. | ||
| And I think we all see that in our lives to different degrees. | ||
| I, you know... | ||
| The happier I am, the less I want to turn to, you know, the behaviours that I developed as a child to avoid being present with, like, violence and aggression. | ||
| Like, I don't think of, like, writing as an addiction. | ||
| It might be a compulsion. | ||
| If I have a day when I don't do it, I feel terrible. | ||
| But something that is positive and rewarding, I don't think is an addiction, right? | ||
| Something that enriches your life and is not... | ||
| It's a way of living life... | ||
| In the most fulfilling way for you. | ||
| You call it an obsession, maybe a positive obsession. | ||
| Yeah, a compulsion obsession, a way of being in the world, right? | ||
| Like, I don't... | ||
| It's like sometimes I get people saying to me, you know, like, oh, am I addicted to sex or whatever? | ||
| And you want to set it up and say, well, does it give you pleasure? | ||
| Does it... | ||
| Is it... | ||
| Is it a way of avoiding pain? | ||
| If it gives you pleasure and it's not a way of avoiding pain, it's not an addiction, it's just a happy way of being in the world, right? | ||
| And that's the reality for... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| Now, people that are journalists and writers often like stimulants. | ||
| They often like Adderall. | ||
| Adderall is a big issue for journalists. | ||
| How much experience do you have with Adderall? | ||
| I've never used it. | ||
| It's supposed to be amazing. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| I've never tried it. | ||
| I've never used it precisely because I know I would love it, right? | ||
| I've got a young relative who's prescribed it, and there are times when I've been... | ||
| He's so often trying to not spike me, but like get me to join him. | ||
| Johan, this is for you. | ||
| But you know, Adderall opens up a whole other thing, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look, I have, before I came here, I drank enough caffeine to kill a whole fucking field of cows, right? | ||
| 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, I just used it every day for three months, which was a ludicrous thing to do. | ||
| But I think in terms of stimulants, there's a whole debate that needs to be had. | ||
| I'm going to write about this at some point. | ||
| One in ten 13-year-old boys in this country is being given a stimulant drug, right? | ||
| In any given year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| For ADD or ADHD or... | ||
| I mean, that is horrifying. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 30% of children in foster care in the United States are being given at least one psychiatric drug. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are not children in the main who are, you know, have some biological insanity. | ||
| These are kids who've been fucking abused and treated abysmally. | ||
| And what do we do? | ||
| We drug them to shut them up. | ||
| Well, it's also children have a lot of energy, and it's not easy to control them. | ||
| And so they decide that these children have something wrong with them. | ||
| Do you know, I went to this Amish village for Lost 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? | ||
| And there's this big debate, what's going on there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but people were getting loads of ADHD when I was in school. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And they go, yeah, we'll let them go off and go fishing. | ||
| The Amish don't want to make you sit still for eight hours a day. | ||
| There's nothing in their society that... | ||
| There's nothing natural about getting a child to sit still for eight hours a day. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Just like trying to get a puppy to sit still for eight hours a day. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly the right analogy. | ||
| What we do to our children, we try to deaden them and discipline them to cope... | ||
| And thrive in a deadened and disciplined and inverted commas economy, right? | ||
| If you... | ||
| The school system was designed in the 1870s to prepare people to work in factories, right? | ||
| If you're going to work in a factory in the 1870s, what do you need? | ||
| You need to learn to shut the fuck up, not complain, be passive, do what you're told, right? | ||
| There's... | ||
| I think it's a guy called Alfred Cohn. | ||
| I think it's him who says, every school has two curriculums, or curricula, whatever the plural is. | ||
| You've got the official curriculum, which is like geography, history, whatever. | ||
| And then you have the hidden curriculum, which is the kind of person the school is trying to make you into, right? | ||
| And what is the school system designed to be? | ||
| It's designed to make people who are passive... | ||
| Who are obedient, who sit still and shut the fuck up, right? | ||
| Now, that was never a good way to make humans, right? | ||
| That was always wrong. | ||
| But it's particularly awful in the, you know, the culture we've created. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I noticed that loads of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. | ||
| We talked about this last time I was on a thing. | ||
| But I was like, okay, people I know, maybe they're unusual, right? | ||
| So I started to look at the evidence base. | ||
| Gallup did a really big study of people in the US and Europe. | ||
| See, what do people feel about their work, right? | ||
| 13% of people, 1-3%, like their work most of the time. | ||
| 63% are what they called sleep working. | ||
| You don't like it, you don't hate it, you kind of tolerate it. | ||
| And 24% of people fucking hate and fear their jobs, all right? | ||
| So you think about that. | ||
| That means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of the time. | ||
| Now, that can't be far off what the figure was in the Soviet Union, right? | ||
| That's a really extreme figure. | ||
| And I'm like, so I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, okay, could this bear some relationship to our mental health crisis, right? | ||
| This thing that we don't like... | ||
| It's spreading over more and more of our day. | ||
| The average person, I think, answers their first email, I think it's 7.43am and leaves work at 7.15pm, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| If you go to... | ||
| It's not the only one, but a key factor. | ||
| If you go to work tomorrow and you are controlled, so you have low or no control over your work, you're much more likely to become depressed and anxious. | ||
| I think it relates to what we've been talking about all along. | ||
| People have psychological needs. | ||
| You need to feel you're good at something. | ||
| You need to feel your life has meaning. | ||
| If you're controlled all the time, you can't feel that, right? | ||
| So when I first learned this, I remember the first time I went to see Professor Marmot, misunderstanding the implications of this, because I thought he was saying... | ||
| Wrongly. | ||
| I thought he was saying, okay, you've got this 13% of elite people at the top, like you and me, who get to have jobs we love, and then you've got everyone else who's condemned to the shit, right? | ||
| And I thought about my family. | ||
| My brother is an Uber driver, my dad was a bus driver, my grandmother cleaned toilets. | ||
| I'm like, wait, are we saying they're just condemned to these miserable lives? | ||
| And he explained to me, it's not the work that makes you depressed, right? | ||
| It's being controlled at work. | ||
| And there are solutions to that. | ||
| There are changes we can make, right? | ||
| I went to interview this woman called Meredith Keough in Baltimore. | ||
| It's been part of this really interesting change. | ||
| And sometimes some people listening are going to think I'm going to say they should do this. | ||
| And they're going to think I can't do that. | ||
| And it's right. | ||
| This is an argument for something else. | ||
| So Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night, just sick with anxiety. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She had an office job. | ||
| It wasn't the worst office job in the world, as she would tell you. | ||
| She wasn't being bullied or harassed or anything, but it was boring. | ||
| It was controlled. | ||
| she couldn't just stand the thought this was going to be the next 40 years of her life. | ||
| So one day with her husband Josh, Meredith did this quite bold thing. | ||
| Josh, her husband, had been working in bike stores since he was a kid, in Baltimore, teenager. | ||
| And you know, that's controlled work, it's insecure, you don't even have rights really. | ||
| And one day Josh and his colleagues are in the bike store and they ask themselves, What does our boss actually do? | ||
| They liked their boss. | ||
| He wasn't a bad person, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes and he seems to make all the money. | ||
| This doesn't seem like such a good deal to me, right? | ||
| So they decided they were going to set up a bike store that works on different principle, right? | ||
| The place they worked before was a corporation. | ||
| Most people listening to your show work in corporations. | ||
| It's a very recent human invention. | ||
| You know how it works. | ||
| There's an army. | ||
| The boss at the top is like the little dictator. | ||
| You've got to obey him or leave, right? | ||
| And sometimes he's a nice dictator and sometimes he's Kim Jong-un, but you don't have much say over that, right? | ||
| Josh and his colleagues decided to set up a bike store that works on a different principle. | ||
| It's not a corporation. | ||
| It's a democratic cooperative. | ||
| So they don't have a boss. | ||
| They run the business together. | ||
| They take decisions about it together. | ||
| They have a meeting once every couple of weeks. | ||
| In practice, they agree, but sometimes they don't, and then they vote. | ||
| They share the profits. | ||
| They share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks. | ||
| And one of the things that was so interesting to me, their business is called Baltimore Bicycle Works. | ||
| Spending time with them, totally in line with Professor Marmot's findings, You know, giving them back control over their work made them much less unhappy, depressed, and anxious, right? | ||
| And it's not like, you know, they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right? | ||
| They fixed bikes before, they fixed bikes now. | ||
| The difference is now they've got control over their work, right? | ||
| Giving people back control over their work is a really powerful antidepressant. | ||
| Now, Every corporation could be a democratic cooperative, right? | ||
| That's a big change in our society, but we've all lived through big changes in our society. | ||
| There's no reason... | ||
| And by the way, it would be better for the economy. | ||
| A study at Cornell University found democratic workplaces grow, on average, four times faster than non-democratic workplaces because people are more committed, they're bringing more of their energy and their life to it. | ||
| We've got to understand... | ||
| It goes back to why addiction is so bad. | ||
| It's what we've got to understand. | ||
| People who are showing these signs of distress, depression, anxiety, addiction, they're doing that not because they're crazy, there are some biological factors that are not rational, but mostly it's just actually we've built a society that's... | ||
| Not good for them. | ||
| And we should be listening to that and respecting that. | ||
| And like the doctor in Vietnam said to me, listen to your nausea. | ||
| It will tell us what's wrong with you. | ||
| We should be listening to their nausea and using it as a kind of fuel to change the way we live in ways that won't just make people who are depressed and anxious and addicted better off. | ||
| Everyone's life will be better off if they control their work more if you go through some of the other big solutions to depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections. | ||
| Now, Lost Connections is your most recent book? | ||
| Yeah, that's the one about depression and anxiety. | ||
| Is that out? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, they're both available, yeah. | ||
| Now, Lost Connections, how did the two of them tie together? | ||
| So I wrote Chasing the Scream because of this addiction in my family, and I go on this big journey all over the world to understand the drug war, and I said a line in my, I did a TED talk about it called Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, and I said a line in that, which is the opposite of addiction is connection, I said it earlier in our conversation, Based on Rat Park, right? | ||
| And lots of people started saying to me, well, are you just saying it's social isolation, right? | ||
| Like loneliness. | ||
| And I very clearly in my mind know that I don't think that's the lesson of Rat Park, right? | ||
| I don't think that's just what's going on in Rat Park. | ||
| It's they don't have anything that makes life meaningful. | ||
| Now, rats are obviously much more, much less complex than us, right? | ||
| So I started thinking, well, what What is actually missing for people who are addicted, depressed, anxious? | ||
| What is driving this crisis? | ||
| So I think that question that people kept asking me, I could see that Portugal and Switzerland had dealt with Some problems of disconnection, but you went quite rightly to the important question, which was, what did Switzerland deal with, right? | ||
| That I couldn't quite, I didn't quite answer because I didn't quite understand when I was in Switzerland. | ||
| So I ended up, again, going on this big journey all over the world from a crazy mixture of places like an Amish village in Indiana, because the Amish have low levels of depression, to a... | ||
| Lab in Baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to a city in Brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make them feel better. | ||
| Did it? | ||
| Which bit? | ||
| Banning advertising. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's not been properly scientifically studied, but there is a science that tells us it should. | ||
| I can explain what that is. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| Everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? | ||
| But there's this really interesting evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. | ||
| So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money and status and how you look to other people in a kind of showing off way, you're going to feel like shit, right? | ||
| That's not an exact quote from Confucius, but that is the gist of what he said, right? | ||
| But weirdly, nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois. | ||
| And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this. | ||
| There's two ways. | ||
| Everyone listening to your show has two kinds of motivation in their life, right? | ||
| We're all a mixture of both. | ||
| So imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano, it gives you joy, right? | ||
| That would be what's called an intrinsic reason to play the piano, right? | ||
| You're not doing it to get anything out of it. | ||
| That's the thing you love, right? | ||
| Sounds like jiu-jitsu was like that for you. | ||
| Writing is like that for me. | ||
| Everyone will have something in their life that just gives them joy as they do it, right? | ||
| Okay, now imagine you played the piano not... | ||
| I don't know, not because you love it, but because your parents are massively pressuring you, it's their dream for you. | ||
| Or in a dive bar that you can't stand to pay the rent, or to impress a woman, right? | ||
| That would be what's called an extrinsic reason to play the piano, right? | ||
| You're not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you're doing it to get something further down the line, right? | ||
| Now obviously we're all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things. | ||
| Firstly, The more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your intrinsic values are starved, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite a significant amount. | ||
| He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values, right? | ||
| We've become much more driven by... | ||
| Think about how Instagram makes you feel, right? | ||
| We've become much more driven by this hollow external sense of... | ||
| Think about something as simple as, a while ago, I was at Elton John's last night in Caesar's Palace, right? | ||
| Amazing thing to be at, and about half the fucking room is filming it, isn't even looking at Elton John, they're just watching it through their phone. | ||
| Now that's a small example, but you can see what they're doing. | ||
| In order to display their life to invite envy from other people, They are not living their life. | ||
| No one wants to watch your shitty video about Elton John. | ||
| There's thousands of videos about Elton John that are much better than yours, right? | ||
| Why are you doing that? | ||
| You're never going to watch it either. | ||
| You're doing it to say to other people, envy me, right? | ||
| It doesn't make you feel good in that room. | ||
| It actually makes you feel worse. | ||
| You're not enjoying the experience. | ||
| And it makes them feel like shit because you're trying to invite envy in your friends. | ||
| That's a small example of a much wider thing of the kind of junk values that have taken over our minds. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One is, it's like fucking air pollution. | ||
| You know, get the messaging out of your head. | ||
| More 18-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own surname, their own last name, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| None of your listeners will lie on their deathbeds and think about All the shit they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. | ||
| They'll think about moments of meaning and connection. | ||
| That's like a banal, obvious thing. | ||
| But we're constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend, right? | ||
| These junk values have taken over our minds. | ||
| So part of the solution is just fucking get rid of most of this advertising. | ||
| Get rid of most of this. | ||
| You know, very tightly regulate it. | ||
| But... | ||
| In doing so, you limit commerce. | ||
| You're limiting people's ability to sell things. | ||
| You're changing the current market that a lot of people don't have any problem with. | ||
| I know this is a heresy in the United States, but limiting commercial speech is fine by me, yeah. | ||
| I think it's fascinating. | ||
| I think it's a fascinating discussion, but it is, in a sense, it's limiting free speech as well. | ||
| I mean, we have a real problem with that. | ||
| The problem with it is that as soon as you start to put any regulations at all, And, you know, you say, oh, you shouldn't be allowed to advertise, even if it's advertising honestly about a great product. | ||
| People will have real issues with that. | ||
| So we already have advertising regulation. | ||
| You can't pop an advert saying, I've found the cure for cancer. | ||
| Right, that's what I'm saying, honestly. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| I would argue this is a tightening. | ||
| So, for example, in London, there was a big controversy a couple of years back. | ||
| Skinny billboards. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it was this... | ||
| It was a billboard of an impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man. | ||
| And the billboard said something like, are you beach body ready? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The clear implication being, if you don't look like these people who you'll never fucking look like, you're not ready to go to the beach. | ||
| And the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, just said, you can't do this, right? | ||
| You can still advertise your bodybuilding... | ||
| But that's so silly. | ||
| I mean, it's not an unobtainable ideal. | ||
| You're looking at two examples of it. | ||
| They're real human beings. | ||
| Yeah, but that's like... | ||
| I mean, in a way, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| I was saying that you have to be that way. | ||
| But if you do want to look like that man and have that body, it is a possible goal. | ||
| I mean, it's not possible for the vast majority of people, right? | ||
| If they don't have the time or the effort, it's not. | ||
| But very many people have radically changed their body. | ||
| I'm not saying that you have to do it. | ||
| I'm not saying you should do it. | ||
| But it is a possible thing to do. | ||
| And if you're trying to sell fitness, wouldn't you sell an example of someone who's really good at it? | ||
| Like if you're trying to sell a business course, Wouldn't you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari? | ||
| Like, this is a guy who's done really well at business. | ||
| Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. | ||
| You wouldn't say, well, that's an impossible goal. | ||
| I'm going to show you a person in a middle-class suburb because this is as good as you're ever going to get. | ||
| I think that's a fair point. | ||
| I think there's two things going on, isn't there? | ||
| There's... | ||
| The freedom of people to market what they want to do. | ||
| It's a nanny state issue that people have a problem with. | ||
| By saying that these are impossible to achieve body goals. | ||
| We already have regulation of these things. | ||
| And people don't call that a nanny state thing. | ||
| You may have regulation of these things, but that is not, I mean, I don't think this is a good example. | ||
| What's a better example? | ||
| So Professor Kassa said there's two sets of solutions to these junk values problems. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how do we stop people being pumped full of bullshit junk values, right? | ||
| Educate them on what is happening to them and make it less appealing. | ||
| Well, this is the second part. | ||
| And you've gone to what I think was the most important part of the research Professor Kasser did. | ||
| So he was working with a guy called Nathan Dungan. | ||
| Nathan is a financial advisor in Minneapolis. | ||
| And his job was to work with adults who were having trouble budgeting and explain budgeting to them and help them do it, right? | ||
| And he gets a call from a school. | ||
| It was a kind of middle class school. | ||
| It wasn't super rich. | ||
| It wasn't poor. | ||
| It was a middle class. | ||
| Where they're having a problem. | ||
| The kids at this school were becoming obsessed with getting the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone or whatever it was. | ||
| And if their parents couldn't afford it, the kids were really freaking out, right? | ||
| So they say to Nathan, would you come in and just explain budgeting to these kids, right? | ||
| So Nathan goes in, he tries to explain budgeting and quickly realises these kids don't give a shit about budgeting, right? | ||
| There's something else going on here. | ||
| They are so obsessed with getting these things. | ||
| So with Professor Kasser, he designs this programme that led to a really interesting breakthrough. | ||
| It's something people can try at home, right? | ||
| You don't have to do it in this context. | ||
| They got, and you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and their teenagers, right? | ||
| They come in. | ||
| It was once every couple of weeks for, I think, four months. | ||
| And at first, they just say, the first meeting they had, they just said, write a list of everything you have got to have. | ||
| They didn't define that, right? | ||
| And people, of course, say, like, a home, a car, whatever. | ||
| But quite quickly, people would say Nike sneakers. | ||
| The parents would name expensive things. | ||
| And they go, okay, tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was very often, almost immediately, I'd say I'd be accepted by the group. | ||
| People would envy me, right? | ||
| These insights are just beneath the surface. | ||
| They go, who put that idea in your head? | ||
| Where did you get that idea? | ||
| And of course, everyone thinks they're smarter than the ad. | ||
| But giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values were, that was the first part. | ||
| Second part was much more interesting and took longer. | ||
| Then they would have in future sessions, they'd say, well, okay, given that's not actually made you feel better, What are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied, happy, in a flow state? | ||
| What are things that are meaningful to you? | ||
| People, you know, a whole range of things. | ||
| Playing sports, playing music, reading, whatever it was, right? | ||
| And they say, okay, how could we build more of that into your life and less of these junk values? | ||
| How could you do more of this every week? | ||
| And just meeting, we don't have these conversations in our culture very often, just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other and going, actually, I managed to play guitar for an hour every day. | ||
| I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach and we went... | ||
| That's going to stifle materialism? | ||
| What it led to, so this was monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to a significant shift in people's values. | ||
| They had a significant decrease in junk values and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values. | ||
| And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time. | ||
| The weird thing is, I sometimes feel like with 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? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And the interviewer goes saying like, well, this is a very controversial theory, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think that's controversial at all. | ||
| I think that person's silly. | ||
| But I think the reason it's controversial is because these biological stories, which have some truth in them, Have dominated how... | ||
| When I was a teenager, I went to my doctor... | ||
| It's only thought of as being a medical issue. | ||
| When I 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. | ||
| All you need to do is drug yourself, right? | ||
| And I drug myself, and I got some relief from the chemical antidepressants, but it did not solve my depression. | ||
| And one of the reasons I wrote Lost Connections is because after 13 years of taking the maximum possible dose, I was like, well, what's going wrong here? | ||
| There's something missing in this picture. | ||
| Because I still feel depressed, and every year that I've been alive, I'm 40, depression and anxiety have increased in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world. | ||
| There's something missing in this picture. | ||
| And I think the reason why that's controversial, it seemed controversial to that woman, even though to you and me, it's... | ||
| Crazy to think it's controversial, is because these biological stories, which have some basis in reality, have become the whole of the picture for a lot of people, right? | ||
| I had a completely bizarre experience where... | ||
| You know Peter Thiel? | ||
| Have you had him on your show? | ||
| No, but I know him. | ||
| Yeah, so Peter Thiel, people who don't know, is the founder of PayPal gazillionaire, right? | ||
| Back to the Trump campaign. | ||
| I got an invitation from Peter Thiel just before... | ||
| It was after Trump had been elected, but before he'd been inaugurated, his people, to go to a... | ||
| They were organising a conference for app developers who were trying to develop apps to deal with depression, anxiety, and addiction. | ||
| And I'm a bit like, I don't think apps are really the solution, but I wanted an excuse to go to San Francisco anyway. | ||
| So I go. | ||
| It's a day-long conference... | ||
| I didn't hear every speech, but some really great scientists, people like Thomas Ansel, who's the head of the National Institute of Health, who's a hugely admirable man. | ||
| And I'm sitting there, and I'm like... | ||
| All they're doing is looking at pictures of brain scans, right? | ||
| If all you knew about depression and anxiety was this conference and addiction, you would literally think they were just things that happened inside the brain. | ||
| And I'm like the last person up. | ||
| I don't think this was designed this way. | ||
| Maybe they did. | ||
| I'm sitting there thinking, what do I say to these people? | ||
| And I thought, you know... | ||
| I was trying to think of metaphors. | ||
| You could have a conference about obesity that just looked at scans of people's stomachs, right? | ||
| It wouldn't be untrue, it wouldn't be bad science, but you'd miss the whole fucking reason why they're fat, right? | ||
| You could tell the plot of Romeo and Juliet using, like, Newtonian physics. | ||
| You could draw a diagram, Romeo moves this way, Juliet moves this way. | ||
| You wouldn't understand a damn thing about why anyone does anything, right? | ||
| It was such a deep misunderstanding, or not a misunderstanding, such a partial truth, right? | ||
| And I said to them, so we were in San Francisco, we were really near the Tenderloin, which obviously people will know is a place with a lot of chaotic street addiction. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Let's not discuss this. | ||
| Let's all just walk over to the 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. | ||
| It's a bizarre misunderstanding. | ||
| Is there something going on with people's amygdalas? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is it important to understand that science? | ||
| Of course, right? | ||
| I'm strongly in favour of brain science. | ||
| I'm in favour of the science of understanding the stomach. | ||
| But it's a bizarre reduction of what human beings are. | ||
| To think that these are the main drivers of these crises, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We have to wrap this up. | ||
| We're already after three hours. | ||
| I really enjoyed the show. | ||
| Can I just say very quickly that anyone who wants any more information, publishers fucking whip me if I don't say this, anyone who wants any more information about either of my books, Chasing the Scream is www.chasingthescream.com. | ||
| You can listen to audio overloads of the people we talked about and take a quiz to see how much you know about addiction. | ||
| And Lost Connections is www.thelostconnections.com and there are audio books of both those books as well that you can get on those sites. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I really enjoyed that, Joe. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks. |
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