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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:43
Ending The War on Drugs - With Compassion!
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Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah?
It's my first time, I think, giving a speech with pews and a pipe organ.
So, I feel faith healing is in order.
I think that's how we're going to start the day.
So, is anyone here afflicted with an overlove of the state?
Come on up! So, this morning we're going to talk a little bit about the drug war.
I mulled it over quite a bit.
I've got 10 minutes, so I'm going to waste it telling you why I'm going to talk about what I'm talking about.
But I sort of mulled it over a bit.
Because there is an argument which is the non-aggression principle, do not initiate force against other people.
The use of drugs does not.
Has anyone here ever liked a musician who they suspect, maybe, maybe, maybe may have composed or performed under the influence?
Anyone? All right.
So for those who can't see the audience, that's no one.
No one at all. So, you know, I'm a Pink Floyd guy, so for me it's kind of tough.
I like Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury composed after he was introduced to a weak plant called cocaine.
So it's tough for me to sort of come down hard against it.
So there's a moral argument which says that if you do not initiate force against others, you're not doing anything wrong fundamentally.
It may be unwise.
But it's not immoral.
And so, if I stab myself, nobody charges me with assault.
And if I ingest a drug that may not be great for me in the long term, but enhances my happiness in the moment, maybe something worthy of intervention, it may be unwise, but it's not immoral and worthy of jail.
There's an old saying from Confucius, it says, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
The war on drugs It's not the proper name.
It's not a war on drugs.
If I get caught with a pound of cocaine, it's not the cocaine that goes to jail.
It's not a war on drugs.
It's a war on people.
And it's a war on a very specific kind of person.
No drug the world over throughout history has ever been shown To be innately addictive.
And I think we can all agree that it's really the addicts, the shoplifters, the thieves, the people who wreck their lives and the lives of those around them.
It's really the addiction that is the problem.
A guy who watches The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon on Saturday night with a joint is probably not worth motivating hundreds of billions of dollars at the military-industrial complex to go through his window with a tank.
It's the addicts. So who are the addicts?
The addicts, to put it very briefly, are people whose brain has been harmed by a specific set of circumstances and the addicts of opiates and of stimulants like cocaine are attempting to self-medicate a very specific brain problem.
We're all born too early.
A horse can run its first day out of its mother's womb.
Human beings take like two years.
And we're born early because we have these giant heads.
It's not just me, it's others. We have these giant heads and we're born like eight minutes before our heads get too big to fit through our mother's hoo-hoo.
That's Latin. You guys speak Latin, right?
UCC? And so we're born too early and so the majority of our brain development occurs after we're born.
And there are very specific systems in the brain around emotional self-regulation, And so we need motivation, which comes from the dopamine system, and we need self-soothing or calming down, which comes from the endorphin system.
Now, if you take a rat and you genetically engineer it to have no dopamine, then if you feed it, you put food in its mouth, it will be like, hey, thanks.
But if you put food like two inches from its mouth, it will not move to get it.
It will actually starve to death two inches from food because it has no motivation.
So you can genetically engineer problems in these stimulation and self-soothing systems within the brain and see very specifically what happens.
And when baby monkeys are groomed by their moms, they produce more endorphins, the happy warm hugs and all that kind of stuff.
Now if when you are Both in your mother's womb and shortly after birth for the first couple of years, if you're exposed to extraordinary stressors in life.
It could be war, it could be child abuse, it could be famine, it could be disease, it could be, you know, the general social decay that's hitting so many western cities in certain places.
If after you're born you experience extraordinary stressors, these systems do not work well.
You are short on dopamine and you are short on endorphins.
So if you are exposed to these in an external way, if you are exposed to any drugs which boost endorphin levels, the opiates, or if you're exposed to drugs which improve your dopamine levels, you feel normal for the first time in your life.
Most people with sort of happiness is up around here, right?
People who are born in traumatic situations, their happiness is down here.
They take a drug An illegal drug and they realize, they feel, what it means to be normally happy for the first time in their life.
And then when they go back down, and they go back down lower than where they came from, they realize the agony of their existence probably for the first time.
So what do they do? They want to get back to that.
Do you know that the brain does not distinguish between physical and emotional pain.
It's exactly the same centers that light up.
A really painful rejection is processed by the brain in the same way as getting stabbed.
So these people who've grown up in these traumatic environments have a susceptibility.
This is where the addiction comes from.
Their brains don't work. You could really look at it as a physical brain injury.
Now people who are attempting to self-medicate a physical brain injury should not be sent to jail.
At all. There is a sadism in the war on drugs in that we are finding people who were traumatized as children, who are self-medicating themselves the only way they know how, the only way they can, and we are subjecting them to persecution, confinement, trauma, stress, which is exactly the conditions which brought about their susceptibility to addiction in the first place.
That is, I would argue, morally revolting.
People who are attempting to self-medicate for brain injuries sustained as children should be given our support, our sympathy, our help.
It is a medical problem. We do not throw people in jail for being in a wheelchair.
And if we made wheelchairs illegal and people had to barter and steal to get them, Would we then be justified in throwing those people in jail because you obtained your wheelchair illegally?
And therefore you are a criminal.
Come on, we gotta do better than that as a society.
We have to be more warm-hearted than that as a society.
It is a medical problem.
There is no evidence That it's purely genetic.
And genetic means nothing because genes are switched on and off by the environment.
We are, in many ways, genetically the vessels, like we are the water poured into a vessel.
We take the shape of the vessel of our early experiences.
So, people who've been victimized as children And who are attempting to self-medicate.
There's a physician out of Vancouver, Gabor Mate, who's worked for 12 years with some of the most egregiously addicted people.
So he says, for instance, that in his entire 12 years of dealing with female addicts, he's never met one, not one, in 12 years who was not raped as a child.
He has never met a man who is an addict who did not go through either child molestation, rape or other forms of egregious child abuse.
It's not a mystery as to why these people are in such agony that is identical in the brain to physical pain and that they're using opiates and stimulants to replace that which their environment has robbed from them.
It is a brain injury. No different from if somebody breaks your arm.
It's a medical problem. It's a problem of compassion.
And taking these people, hounding them, pursuing them, forcing them into a life of crime.
Do you know that the markup for a pound of coffee from farmer to my belly is 400%.
Anyone want to guess what it is for heroin?
Actually, don't. Because if you know this...
People will ask you questions.
Coffee's okay. But no, the mockup for heroin is 15,000% from farmer to tragically fill up Seymour Hoffman.
People like that who die. No, the guy died with 50 hits of heroin in his room.
The man was looking for a long weekend of non-oblivion.
And he had a difficult history.
So, I mean, these things can be fixed.
The beautiful thing about the brain is, you know, you lose your arm, it doesn't regrow, but a brain is like the tail of a lizard.
It actually regrows. You can change it.
There's neuroplasticity, which means you can reprogram, you can change your brain.
But these people are dealing with a medical injury, which needs our compassion, and this has been shown repeatedly.
Portugal, you know, decriminalized drug use over 10 years ago.
Have you read about it much? Because we're in the middle of a medieval witch hunt.
We're in the middle of persecuting the persecuted, of attacking victims.
Weren't you always told don't blame the victim when you were growing up?
Don't attack the victim, don't blame the victim.
People who are self-medicating through opiates and through stimulants are self-medicating.
How can we persecute them when they are the victims of horrendous childhood experiences?
And you can, you know, don't take my word for it.
You can go and look all this stuff up.
I'm no doctor, but this is as far as I understand.
I've actually interviewed Gabor Mateo on my show, and this stuff is all very clear.
So, of course, medicating yourself with drugs, maybe it's unwise.
I've never tried them myself, so, you know, I'm a caffeine guy myself.
Maybe it's unwise. I don't know.
Some people have done some really cool stuff.
Anybody here like Sergeant Peppers when you go through your parents' album collection?
I wish I knew. I don't know.
Who are the cool new bands who do drugs?
I don't know. But there's a lot of creativity in it.
A lot of great poetry has been written on it.
A lot of great music. I'm not a fan of it myself.
I think it's an unwise thing to do.
But I totally understand the medical reason why people are doing it.
It's easy to recreate these brain injuries in laboratory animals.
Easy to measure what happens.
You know, if you take away dopamine from a baby monkey, when the mother leaves, it doesn't even cry out.
When the mother is absent from its life, first thing that a healthy monkey, healthy baby monkey does is cry out.
Because it needs its mother for protection, survival, milk and cuddling and all that kind of good stuff.
They don't even bother to do that.
They grow up. Dopamine short, endorphin short, serotonin short, the brains are a gaping wound opened by traumatic histories.
Somebody has a brain tumor and does something wrong, we don't throw that person in jail.
We understand that the brain was negatively affected by the tumor and we treat that person, we do not throw that person in jail.
How is it different for very clear medical injuries that just aren't quite as obvious to the eye?
It's all these libertarian questions, you know, like a man's dying of thirst, he steals water.
Is that wrong? Well, these people are in genuine physical agony and they are taking some medication because we've made it so illegal that they have to steal ten times its value to pay for the habit.
Let's do better. Let's show compassion where there was trauma.
Thank you. All right.
So I'm talking about principles, moral principles, the initiation of the use of force against people voluntarily engaged in trade is immoral.
And I'm talking about all illicit substances, and we have people here talking about heavily regulating marijuana.
That is not an answer. I don't know if you guys know, I'm an anarchist.
Which totally makes me wish I was just gay.
No, like if I was gay, look, I got the accent, right?
So that's not hard.
I can do the gestures. I went to theater school.
I mean, we're not far off. I mean, if I was gay and say, oh, I'm gay, you know, people would say, oh, that's great.
Here's an Abba CD, some potpourri, and some askless chat, to which I'd say, good tunes, that smells nice, and sorry, I'm over 40, my ass can't cut it anymore.
But, um... An anarchist basically says that the initiation of force is immoral.
Government is a violation of the initiation of force.
And all you're going to do if you regulate is maintain the profits for black market activities.
Look, if you want to get people out of an industry, drive down the profits.
The government tomorrow passed a law saying that profiting from coffee was illegal.
They'd be smoking economic craters where Starbucks, Timothy's, and Tim Hortons would be.
So the way that you drive profits down in a business which puts capital elsewhere is you make it as open a market as possible, as free a market as possible.
That drives down profits.
You can still get illegal cigarettes in Canada, illegal booze, because once you start regulating things, you keep the profit margins high for criminal activities.
I mean, this is madness.
Oh, we'll limit the drugs to this concentration or that concentration.
Nonsense. I mean, one of the reasons why drugs are so prevalent right now is it's so profitable to get people hooked on them that you find vulnerable members of the population and you give them free samples until they're hooked and then you profit off it.
The more the profit is in the business, the more it will be given to people who shouldn't receive it or who should only receive it under the care of a doctor.
So the idea that, well, we're going to grudgingly regulate and hyperregulate one small substance, no.
If you are buying drugs from someone and you are ingesting them yourself, there's no complainant.
This is a fundamental aspect to the rise of the state.
No complainant. I mean, if I rip you off, sell you a car and it doesn't work, you can go to the government and we broke contract, then you have a complainant.
But there's no complainant. The government has to get in your face.
It has to get intrusive.
It has to start pursuing people who have no complaints against each other.
That's not going to change if we legalize.
So, yeah, I go on principle.
Let's not initiate force against anyone.
Now we're going to open the floor to 10 minutes of questions, but if you have a question, please direct it to the one speaker's involved in the studio webinar.
Do you think that the government legalization of marijuana will help reduce the amount of people who move on to harder drugs by limiting the pressure of drug dealers or increase it by normalizing drug use?
Who's that for? Who's that for?
Everyone. Okay.
You can only choose one. You can only choose one?
Okay. Mr.
Muir. I mean, there's no evidence to show that marijuana use is a gateway drug.
I mean, that's something that's often used out there in the comments, but there's no evidence that proves that.
So, again, I think, you know, if it's going to be We've got to put all those things into place.
And I do believe that a good system will go a long way in taking the criminal factor out of the current system that we have now.
And just to be clear, marijuana is a can't be a drug for Doritos.
Thank you.
All right, so this first lecture, I want to get one of the students to do with us today.
Uh, so this question is, um, directed towards, um, Mr.
Molyneux. Uh, you're the legalization and the regulation of, um, all solicit services.
Are you for age restriction, or, um, is that considered part of, um, regulation in your opinion?
Well, look, I mean, drug problems in the future are going to be as relevant as polio is today or smallpox.
We have inoculations against these illnesses, so they're not a big problem in society.
When we start treating infants and children better and not abusing them, not harming them, when we stop raping children as a society, which is not everyone, of course, right, but it's still a significant problem, we're not going to need to worry about drugs.
I mean, do you buy insurance against demonic possession these days?
No, because we don't generally believe in it, and it doesn't obviously happen, so...
So as far as age restriction goes, I think we're not going to need to worry about people's addictions to drugs.
I don't believe that there's a central coercive agency that can tell people what to put in their bodies.
Raise your children right, they won't even be tempted.
that's the solution in my book.
Thank you.
This was also Dr. Miss Maul's question.
Thank you.
Molyneux. Do you not agree that the policy set forward by the government, and the government as a body in itself, acts as a pool of knowledge to prevent people from going into drugs?
If people who use drugs start off in a catch-22 position, or by the time they experiment with it, they're in a state of irrationality, and kind of decide whether or not rationalists use that or not, they're free of to prevent them from using any drugs.
Governments do not prevent young people from using drugs.
Government pays for and enforces young children using drugs.
Anybody ever heard about SSRIs, antidepressants, ADHD medications and so on?
In the United States, you as a family will get paid for putting your children on these drugs.
The long-term health effects have never been studied.
One in ten children in America, boys in America, are diagnosed with ADHD. Legal prescription drugs kill far more people than illegal drugs.
Putting drugs in the hands of government is like, as P.G. O'Rogg said, giving whiskey and car keys to a 14-year-old boy.
It's not a place where you put responsibility in the monopoly of force.
This question is also, yeah, okay.
So, you talked about, as a solution, just ending, like, children being raped.
Of course, if we could do that, we absolutely would, and I don't think there's any disagreement with anyone in this room, that we would stop raving children if we could.
So, with the idea that everyone is working to stop these sort of traumatizations, and working to stop the things that lead to these sort of addictions, What would you say is a solution for people who have these irritations and they have these dopamine deficiencies, aside from just getting hooked on it?
Well, you give them the sympathy that they only get from drugs.
There's a woman who described her first hit of heroin as a soft, warm hug.
You give people the empathy socially that they can only get chemically, and that will start to change their brain.
You know, our brains develop socially.
We're not these objectivist, isolated people.
And if you give people sympathy and understanding for prior trauma, their bodies begin to produce this stuff.
You can biochemically change people By being nice to them.
It's an incredible but fairly well-established medical fact.
So once we start to accept that they're self-medicating for prior trauma, give them the sympathy and understanding and compassion that they need, we can begin to transition them to the beneficial drug of love as opposed to the biochemical drug of opiates.
Good morning.
I always have a question to Mrs.
Swan. I wanted to ask that one of the speakers just mentioned that different drugs lead to problems, medical problems.
And I want to mention that there are also some problems that society faces.
Under the effects of drugs, people do crimes.
Not big ones, but they do crimes.
so is this the only way that you can deal with your um stress and with your depression because i know other ways that it helps uh is that the only way that it that you can overcome that or no i mean as far as i understand it there are ways of getting people off drugs i mean obviously they steal because it's so expensive so if you have a three thousand dollar a month cocaine habit not you particularly the guy behind you
but if you have a because he's and anyone here with a soul patch we've got our eyes on you. But do you know how much you have to steal every month to support a $3,000 a month cocaine habit?
It's $30,000 because stolen goods are marked down 90%.
So we're driving people into a life of crime by making it illegal.
There was no organized crime other than the federal government in the United States prior to prohibition.
It all came over with that.
40% of the profits of organized crime come directly from drugs.
So, you make it legal and you can actually help people rather than continuing to persecute the persecuted, as I mentioned.
So, there are definite intervention therapies.
Governor Matei has tried working with a native drug from South America to get people off addiction.
He was immediately shut down by the government despite very promising results.
Look, the government doesn't care about you fundamentally.
Have you heard about a thing called the national debt?
Were you forced into crappy public schools just against your will?
Well, maybe not you people.
But a lot of people are, right?
so they don't fundamentally care about you otherwise you wouldn't be born $150,000 in debt.
I was wondering, you talked about how a lot of these people that are addicted to these hard drugs are going through traumatic past one-on-one.
Do you think it's, you know, smart, even sane, to give them more means to put them at an even lower level?
You give them these drugs that they get addicted to, that screw up their lives completely, and so you make them even more vulnerable, and they harm themselves even more.
Don't you think it's their responsibility to minimize self-harm, just like we don't allow suicide to happen?
Well, okay, that's a big question and it'll be short on time.
Obviously what we're doing now is causing far more harm.
Look, if throwing people in jail or hounding them or whatever made them stop using drugs, we're saying that negative consequences will stop people from doing drugs.
The negative consequences of being a drug addict Are so unbelievably horrible.
You know, HIV, hepatitis, you lose your teeth, you lose your beauty, your youth, you're just a mess.
So negative consequences don't stop this kind of stuff.
There's ways of transitioning people into a better environment, but that requires an open understanding and sympathy and compassion for people who have spent their whole lives being spat upon, beaten, and raped.
So no, of course we treat people who are traumatized with kindness.
You kind of have to do the opposite to help people.
You don't hit someone with a broken arm with a pipe.
So, the opposite of what they've experienced is the best chance they have for recovery.
I'm sorry, I know it's totally unfair I get the last word, because I know you've got more to say, but we are short on time.
I do want to take issue with one of the things Stefan said, though.
Only one? I don't think you should see the picture of the addict, which is a word we don't use.
Because I'm a person.
I'm not an addict. I might have an addiction.
I might have all sorts of other problems too, but I'm a person first.
But, and I know Gavard Mate, he's a great guy.
But I think you have to look at the enchantment.
I think a number of the people, many people in this room are as susceptible to addiction.
It might not be drugs.
It might be Computers.
It might be sex.
It might be shopping.
It might be iPhones.
It might be... So the idea of addiction just coming from the trauma of childhood is not something...
It's a contentious idea, a powerful idea, and it applies to a lot of people.
But if people in this room, whether they feel they've been traumatized or not, Can we just make one last point then?
It's true, there's lots of addictions and so on, and the majority of people who are traumatized don't become drug addicts, but the numbers are very clear.
According to wide statistical studies coming out of Kaiser Permanente in the States, If you experience significant trauma as a child, you are 46 times more likely to become a drug addict.
46 times more likely.
So if we have better childhoods, the chance of drug addiction goes down by a factor of about 46 times.
That basically eliminates the problem as far as it can be eliminated.
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