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Speaker 1: I'm Clayton English and I'm Greg Glad and this is

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Speaker 1: a War on drugs quick fix. All right, Clayton, what's

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Speaker 1: going on? Man? What's up? Man? We got another quick

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Speaker 1: fix for the people. We do have another quick fix

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Speaker 1: for the people, and this one is kind of a

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Speaker 1: follow up after our Johan Harry episode. Amazing Guests really

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Speaker 1: got into kind of the nitty gritty how this all started,

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Speaker 1: where the incentives lie, Like really the groundwork of the

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Speaker 1: war on drugs that we're still fighting over one hundred

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Speaker 1: years later in this country, right, the basis from which

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Speaker 1: it was founded, and it's h is a real shaky foundation.

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Speaker 1: You know. We did kind of harp on a lot

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Speaker 1: of the problems. But one of the great things about

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Speaker 1: I love Johan's book because it does get into what

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Speaker 1: actually works, what can work, and like where has it worked,

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Speaker 1: and so he really gets into a lot of actual

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Speaker 1: solutions to these problems when everyone's like, yeah, what do

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Speaker 1: you do about you know, people struggling with the addiction

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Speaker 1: or the opioid epidemic or all this crime that comes

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Speaker 1: from there. And that's one thing about the Johan episode.

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Speaker 1: It was great because he gave so much information in solutions,

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Speaker 1: and it was just so much that he gave us

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Speaker 1: we couldn't even put it all in one episode. So

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Speaker 1: that's why we have these quick fixes. And here's more

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Speaker 1: with Johan hard Am. I saying his name right, and

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Speaker 1: I want to mess up people's name. Okay, yeah, all right.

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Speaker 1: So people are going to hear this, and they hear

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Speaker 1: the problems, but let us know what solutions look like.

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Speaker 1: One of the things that's so exciting about this, Clayton,

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Speaker 1: is that are incredibly good solutions and we could move

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Speaker 1: to them really quickly, and I went to places that

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Speaker 1: have done it. So in the year two thousand, Portugal

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Speaker 1: had one of the worst drug problems in the world.

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Speaker 1: One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which

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Speaker 1: is staggering. It's a significantly worse situation than in the

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Speaker 1: US at the moment. And every year they tried the

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Speaker 1: American way more, they arrested more people, they imprisoned more people,

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Speaker 1: they shamed more people, and every year the problem got worse,

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Speaker 1: until finally the leader of the opposition and the Prime

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Speaker 1: minister got together and they were like, look, we can't

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Speaker 1: carry on like this with ever more people being addicted

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Speaker 1: to heroin. What are we going to do? So they

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Speaker 1: decided to do something really radical, something no one had

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Speaker 1: done since Harry Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

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Speaker 1: They said, shall we ask some scientists what we should do?

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Speaker 1: So they looked at all the evidence, they looked at

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Speaker 1: rat Park. They took two years, they really did a

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Speaker 1: deep dive into this, and they came back and they said, Okay,

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Speaker 1: here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize

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Speaker 1: all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot. But

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Speaker 1: and this is the crucial next step, we're going to

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Speaker 1: take all the money we currently spend unscrewing people's lives up,

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Speaker 1: arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to

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Speaker 1: spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.

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Speaker 1: The main thing they did was a huge program of reconnection.

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Speaker 1: But people with addiction problems say, you used to be

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Speaker 1: a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say,

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Speaker 1: if you employ this guy for a year, will pay

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Speaker 1: half his wages. They spent most of that stuff on

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Speaker 1: helping get people into work and on getting people housing,

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Speaker 1: and the results were very clear. The best research on

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Speaker 1: This was done by the British Journal of Criminology. They

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Speaker 1: found addiction felled by more than fifty percent, overdose rates

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Speaker 1: felled by more than eighty percent, HIV transmission among drug

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Speaker 1: users felled by ninety percent, massive fall in street crime, prostitution,

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Speaker 1: and one of the ways you know it worked really well.

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Speaker 1: It's hardly anyone in Portugal wants to go back. And

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Speaker 1: this is something I saw all over the world. When

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Speaker 1: you propose going beyond the war on drugs, it's hugely controversial, right,

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Speaker 1: people think it's crazy, and then people see it in

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Speaker 1: practice and it's not perfect. They still got some problems

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Speaker 1: in Portugal, to be sure, but there's such a drastic

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Speaker 1: improvement the support becomes extremely high. And this is what's

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Speaker 1: so encouraging and maddening, is that the alternatives work. Right.

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Speaker 1: If you treat people with addiction problems with love and compassion,

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Speaker 1: and you give them very practical help, targeted help to

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Speaker 1: change their lives that are loving and compassionate, you maximize

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Speaker 1: your chances of them having a good life and not

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Speaker 1: causing problems for the society. And if you just beat

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Speaker 1: the shit out of them in the way that our

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Speaker 1: systems do, you increase the chances of them having a

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Speaker 1: terrible life or dying and causing problems for the rest

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Speaker 1: of the society. Sometimes we say, oh, it doesn't work. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's true, but that's way understating how done. What we're

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Speaker 1: doing is. It's not that it doesn't work, is that

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Speaker 1: it makes the problem worse. Right right, I'm Greg Glad

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Speaker 1: and I'm Clayton English and this has been a war

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Speaker 1: on drugs Quick Fix, Thanks for listening.