Speaker 1: I'm Clayton English and I'm Greg Glad and this is
Speaker 1: a War on drugs quick fix. All right, Clayton, what's
Speaker 1: going on? Man? What's up? Man? We got another quick
Speaker 1: fix for the people. We do have another quick fix
Speaker 1: for the people, and this one is kind of a
Speaker 1: follow up after our Johan Harry episode. Amazing Guests really
Speaker 1: got into kind of the nitty gritty how this all started,
Speaker 1: where the incentives lie, Like really the groundwork of the
Speaker 1: war on drugs that we're still fighting over one hundred
Speaker 1: years later in this country, right, the basis from which
Speaker 1: it was founded, and it's h is a real shaky foundation.
Speaker 1: You know. We did kind of harp on a lot
Speaker 1: of the problems. But one of the great things about
Speaker 1: I love Johan's book because it does get into what
Speaker 1: actually works, what can work, and like where has it worked,
Speaker 1: and so he really gets into a lot of actual
Speaker 1: solutions to these problems when everyone's like, yeah, what do
Speaker 1: you do about you know, people struggling with the addiction
Speaker 1: or the opioid epidemic or all this crime that comes
Speaker 1: from there. And that's one thing about the Johan episode.
Speaker 1: It was great because he gave so much information in solutions,
Speaker 1: and it was just so much that he gave us
Speaker 1: we couldn't even put it all in one episode. So
Speaker 1: that's why we have these quick fixes. And here's more
Speaker 1: with Johan hard Am. I saying his name right, and
Speaker 1: I want to mess up people's name. Okay, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: So people are going to hear this, and they hear
Speaker 1: the problems, but let us know what solutions look like.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's so exciting about this, Clayton,
Speaker 1: is that are incredibly good solutions and we could move
Speaker 1: to them really quickly, and I went to places that
Speaker 1: have done it. So in the year two thousand, Portugal
Speaker 1: had one of the worst drug problems in the world.
Speaker 1: One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which
Speaker 1: is staggering. It's a significantly worse situation than in the
Speaker 1: US at the moment. And every year they tried the
Speaker 1: American way more, they arrested more people, they imprisoned more people,
Speaker 1: they shamed more people, and every year the problem got worse,
Speaker 1: until finally the leader of the opposition and the Prime
Speaker 1: minister got together and they were like, look, we can't
Speaker 1: carry on like this with ever more people being addicted
Speaker 1: to heroin. What are we going to do? So they
Speaker 1: decided to do something really radical, something no one had
Speaker 1: done since Harry Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Speaker 1: They said, shall we ask some scientists what we should do?
Speaker 1: So they looked at all the evidence, they looked at
Speaker 1: rat Park. They took two years, they really did a
Speaker 1: deep dive into this, and they came back and they said, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize
Speaker 1: all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot. But
Speaker 1: and this is the crucial next step, we're going to
Speaker 1: take all the money we currently spend unscrewing people's lives up,
Speaker 1: arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to
Speaker 1: spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.
Speaker 1: The main thing they did was a huge program of reconnection.
Speaker 1: But people with addiction problems say, you used to be
Speaker 1: a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say,
Speaker 1: if you employ this guy for a year, will pay
Speaker 1: half his wages. They spent most of that stuff on
Speaker 1: helping get people into work and on getting people housing,
Speaker 1: and the results were very clear. The best research on
Speaker 1: This was done by the British Journal of Criminology. They
Speaker 1: found addiction felled by more than fifty percent, overdose rates
Speaker 1: felled by more than eighty percent, HIV transmission among drug
Speaker 1: users felled by ninety percent, massive fall in street crime, prostitution,
Speaker 1: and one of the ways you know it worked really well.
Speaker 1: It's hardly anyone in Portugal wants to go back. And
Speaker 1: this is something I saw all over the world. When
Speaker 1: you propose going beyond the war on drugs, it's hugely controversial, right,
Speaker 1: people think it's crazy, and then people see it in
Speaker 1: practice and it's not perfect. They still got some problems
Speaker 1: in Portugal, to be sure, but there's such a drastic
Speaker 1: improvement the support becomes extremely high. And this is what's
Speaker 1: so encouraging and maddening, is that the alternatives work. Right.
Speaker 1: If you treat people with addiction problems with love and compassion,
Speaker 1: and you give them very practical help, targeted help to
Speaker 1: change their lives that are loving and compassionate, you maximize
Speaker 1: your chances of them having a good life and not
Speaker 1: causing problems for the society. And if you just beat
Speaker 1: the shit out of them in the way that our
Speaker 1: systems do, you increase the chances of them having a
Speaker 1: terrible life or dying and causing problems for the rest
Speaker 1: of the society. Sometimes we say, oh, it doesn't work. Well,
Speaker 1: that's true, but that's way understating how done. What we're
Speaker 1: doing is. It's not that it doesn't work, is that
Speaker 1: it makes the problem worse. Right right, I'm Greg Glad
Speaker 1: and I'm Clayton English and this has been a war
Speaker 1: on drugs Quick Fix, Thanks for listening.