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make a difference in your community. Welcome
to the Behind the Shield podcast. My name is
James Gearing and this is episode 317 and I am
so excited to bring to you my next guest, Johan
Hari. Now, Johan is the author of Chasing the
Scream and Lost Connections. And if you have
read either of those books, you will know that
he literally has spanned planet Earth, finding
some of the greatest people in the mental health
arena and in the addiction arena. Not only from
a clinical side, but from the people down the
streets, the addicts and people who have found
other ways of overcoming this epidemic that we
have and innovating in certain countries. So
I cannot stress highly enough how much you need
to listen to this episode. The men and women
on the streets, the first responders, the medical
personnel, we see the side effects of mental
illness, and that manifests many times in addiction.
So this needs to be heard by all of us and everyone
else, all the citizens of all the countries around
the world, because there are nations that are
doing incredibly well and having amazing success,
and there are nations that are doing incredibly
poorly, causing a huge amount of violence and
death and magnifying the problem before we get
to that interview as i always say please just
take a moment go to whichever podcast app you
listen to this on subscribe to the show leave
feedback and leave a rating the five -star ratings
truly do make us more visible the people looking
for a project like this and as i've mentioned
this is a free library of information People
like Johan truly have answers that will save
lives around planet Earth. And all I ask you,
the audience, to do is to simply share these
episodes. So with that being said, I introduce
to you Johan Hari. Enjoy. Johan, I want to start
by saying thank you so much for taking the time.
I know you're writing the book at the moment.
I know you're interviewing with other people
as well. But this is a conversation I wanted
to have for, I want to say, since the podcast
started like three plus years ago. So firstly,
thank you so much for taking the time at eight
o 'clock at night in England to come on the Behind
the Shield podcast. Thank you so much. I am actually
basically nocturnal. So this is the middle of
the day for me. So that time is no problem. Also,
I feel like you are someone with a similar problem
to me, which is you're a British person in the
United States. So I'm in the US about half the
year. And I can feel your accent sliding around
in comical ways. Empathize with that. A similar
thing has happened to me. So I once went into
a diner in a place called Cactus, Arizona, when
I was first spending a lot of time in the US.
And I remember it was actually, I think it was
an IHOP actually. And I said to the woman, like,
hi, can I have some pancakes? And she looked
at me and she said, what, what? And I said, can
I have some pancakes? She goes, what? And I said,
can I have some pancakes? She goes, what are
you saying? And this went on for like three minutes.
And then she looked at me very seriously and
she said, do you speak English? And I was like,
people fucking invented it, right? And then I
said, can I have some pancakes? And she was like,
why didn't you just say that at the start? So
that was when I realized I had to adjust my voice.
But now it happens like unconsciously. It's like,
yeah. So anyway, I empathize with you. Yeah,
it's so funny because if my wife was listening
now, she would be laughing her ass off. The number
of times I've gone to a drive -thru, and again,
I'm in America, so I don't get angry about it.
But I'll say, oh, can I have a... Yeah, whatever.
French fries and a burger, please. And I'm sorry,
what? And so I'm like, can I get some French
fries and a burger? And they're like, okay. I
love American accents. I'm very happy for my
accent to be polluted by Americans. I'm delighted.
So now the game is to do different accents, whether
it's a camp one from New York or a southern one.
So I get to play with them now. So the table's
turned. Any American accent I do, it doesn't
matter who I'm trying to be, whether it's Trump
or Oprah or anyone in between, always turns into
Cartman in South Park. Oh, my God. Stop doing
this. Respect my authority. So basically all
my American accents were Converge on Cartman,
which is an unfortunate voice to have. You always
end up with chicken pot pie. Exactly. It's a
tragedy. All right. Well then, so you mentioned
about splitting your time. Where in America is
your other place of... God, I kind of spit my
words out now. Where's your base in the States?
So it totally varies. At the moment, it's Las
Vegas because I'm writing a book about Vegas
and something I'm not meant to talk about it
yet, but something that's been happening in Vegas
and not something good. And yes, I'm spending
a huge amount of time in Vegas and I will be
over the next couple of years. But it's a place
that I absolutely love. I know it polarizes people
and a lot of people are kind of snooty about
Vegas. I absolutely love it. And it's a very
complex and weird and fascinating place and quite
disturbing place in some ways. So, yeah, that's
that's my. Have you been to Vegas? You know,
I haven't yet. And it's somewhere I want to go.
I lived in California, Southern California for
a few years, and that was not too far a drive.
But I do want to get out there. So maybe I'm
being totally presumptive now. But when you're
back out there next, maybe we can do a second
one face to face. I really recommend it because.
And this is a very pretentious reason to recommend
Vegas. There's a million reasons. But the French
philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that Vegas
was the most purely American place. And I think
there's some truth in that. I mean, in some ways,
I think Vegas is a vision of where the world
is headed, for good and bad. So, yeah, I'd definitely
come. It's amazing. And it's never boring. Brilliant,
brilliant. Yeah, so we'll do that. I'll align
going to Vegas as a trip and then maybe a second
interview for us as well. Excellent. Okay, well
then the other half. So where is your base in
England now? Oh, I'm from London. So I was born
in Glasgow because my mother's Scottish. But
they moved here when I was a baby. My parents
had met here in London. They live next door to
each other. And my dad's an immigrant. My dad's
from Switzerland, a tiny little village in the
Swiss mountains. And him and my mother lived
very close to each other, but they didn't speak
the same language. And they had what my mother
calls a series of one night stands, which I tried
to explain is not a concept that makes sense.
It isn't a one night stand. And she got pregnant
and they thought they had to get married. And
then unfortunately, he learned English. And she
often says. He seemed so fucking nice when I
couldn't understand what he was saying. I think
they learned the same language, although they
are still together, intermittently. They've now
been together for 50 years, miraculously. She
said to me once, when I met him, he looked like
Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire. I didn't
realise I'd end up with fucking Marlon Brando
from Apocalypse Now. Very unfortunate. Anyway,
there was a long way of saying. I grew up in
a place called Edgware, which is the end of the
Northern Line, a kind of suburb of London. And
now I live in a different bit of North London,
a kind of swankier bit of North London. But yeah,
this is where I'm from. And I love London. Yeah,
I went to University of North London and I worked
on Hampstead Heath as a lifeguard for a while
on the ponds there. Oh, wow. Amazing. I lived
in Hampstead for a couple of years. Yeah, it
was weird living in Hampstead because I went...
I lived on Brick Lane, which for people who don't
know London, is this really bustling, intense
immigrant part of East London. And when I moved
there, it was regarded as a bit of a shithole
and then it really rapidly gentrified. So I lived
there for 10 years in the middle of this kind
of bustling chaos. And I loved it. And then almost
exactly on my 30th birthday, I started finding
noise irritating. Until then, I was like, hey,
this is great. It's always good. People never
stop. And then I was like, shut the fuck up,
everyone. I've got things to do. But they didn't
shut the fuck up. And therefore, I moved to Hampstead,
which is a kind of fancy part of London. And
I've never lived anywhere like that before because
my family didn't have money or anything. And
it was really weird because Hampstead, it was
like moving into a very beautiful old people's
home. you don't ever actually see anyone, right?
It's really weird. Like everyone's in their fancy
houses, but you don't see anyone on the street.
You don't, you know, you don't, it's a very weird
and have that weird sense of, you know, that
kind of class migration sense you get in Britain
where you suddenly like feel slightly out of,
although I've always, it's weird, although my
parents were both from working class backgrounds,
I've always had this weird posh voice. I don't
understand. It's even in childhood videos. It's
really odd. I sound like Stewie from Family Guy.
But my mother's like, what's going on? What are
you talking about? And I'm like, mother, stop
being so absurd. But Hampstead, yeah, it was
too empty and weird and desiccated for me. So
I left in the end. Right. So speaking of childhood,
so obviously we're going to explore mental health
and a whole host of areas. You had touched on
in the book about some trauma. So what was the
lows of your childhood? I'd rather not go too
much into the detail of it because I think it's
one of those things where you can sort of tell
your own story, but you don't want to tell other
people's stories for them. And it's not really
a story I can tell in a great deal of detail
without. disclosing things about other people,
but what I can say is we had a lot of addiction
in my family and a lot of craziness, for want
of a better word, when I was a kid and as I was
growing up. I was mostly raised by my grandmother,
who was an amazing person. She was kind of a
Scottish working -class woman. She'd left school
when she was 13. and had an incredibly hard and
incredibly beautiful life. But I was very interested
in childhood trauma and I've done a lot of work
on it for both my books, the one about addiction,
Chasing the Scream, and the one about depression
and anxiety, Lost Connections. And I guess, I
mean, I learned so much about childhood trauma,
but one of the people who taught me the most
It was an amazing man. You should have him on
your podcast, actually, called Dr. Vincent Felici.
He did this incredible research. He made a huge
breakthrough in our understanding of childhood
trauma. And he did it in a slightly unexpected
way, actually. He wasn't looking for evidence
about childhood trauma at first. What happened
is Dr. Felici is based in San Diego in California.
And he was... approached in the mid -1980s by
Kaiser Permanente, one of the big not -for -profit
medical providers in California. And they said
to him, look, we've got a real problem here.
We need your help. Every year, obesity is getting
worse. And every year, we try giving people diet
advice and nutrition advice. And even sometimes
we give them personal trainers. And nothing is
working. If we give you money, will you just
do blue skies research to figure out what the
fuck is going on and how we can put it right?
So Dr. Felitti agreed and he starts doing this
research and he first didn't really know where
to start. So he began to work with 200 severely
obese people, people who weighed more than 400
pounds. So people whose weight was putting them
in real and imminent danger and people who tried
many other forms of treatment for obesity and
none of them had worked. He starts working with
them and he's thinking, you know, what can I
do? What can I do? One day he has an idea that
seems like and in fact is quite stupid. He asked
himself, what would happen if severely obese
people literally just stopped eating? And obviously
we gave them like vitamin shots so they didn't
get scurvy and we gave them nutritional supplements
so their bodies didn't shut down. Would they
actually lose weight? Would they actually get
down to a healthy weight? So with an absolute
load of support, obviously, and a lot of medical
checks, they started doing this. And incredibly,
at first, it worked. It worked really well. Initially,
there was this big, really drastic reduction
in weight for lots of people. So I'll give you
an example of a woman. I'm going to call her
Susan to protect her medical confidentiality.
It's not her real name. who went down from being
more than 400 pounds to 130 pounds, right? It's
incredible. People are congratulating Dr. Felitti.
Susan's family is saying that he saved her life.
And then one day, something happened that no
one predicted. Susan cracked. She went to KFC
or whatever it was. She started obsessively eating.
And before long, she's back at this really dangerous
weight. Not quite where she'd been, but a dangerous
weight. And Dr. Felitti called her in and he
said, Susan, what happened? What happened? And
she said, I don't know. And she looked really
ashamed. And he said to her, well, tell me about
the day that you cracked, the day you started
eating obsessively again. Did anything unusual
happen that day? It turned out something had
happened that day that had never happened to
Susan. in her entire adult life, she'd been in
a bar and a man had hit on her. Not in a bad
way, not in a predatory way, quite a nice way.
But she felt really frightened and she went and
started obsessively eating. And that's when Dr.
Felitti asked her a question he never thought
to ask any of the obese people he was working
with. He said, when did you start to put on your
weight? And in Susan's case, it was when she
was 12. He said, well... did anything happen
when you were 12 that didn't happen when you
were nine, didn't happen when you were 15, anything
in particular that year? And Susan looked down
and she said, yeah, that's when my grandfather
started raping me. And Dr. Faluti started to
interview everyone in the program. And it turned
out a staggering, a majority of them had put
on their weight in the aftermath of being sexually
assaulted or abused, which is... It first seems
really weird, right? Because that's obviously
much higher than the proportion of the general
population who have been sexually abused. It's
not half, obviously, or more. So it's like, well,
why would that be? Why would being sexually abused
lead to weight gain? And Susan explained it really
well to him. She said, overweight is overlooked,
and that's what I need to be. that this thing,
Dr. Felitti realized, this thing that seems so
irrational, and obviously is bad for you, right,
being severely overweight brings with it all
sorts of challenges to your health. In fact,
for these individuals, it was performing a positive
function, right? It was protecting them from
sexual attention, which was something they had
very good reason to want to protect themselves
from. And Dr. Felitti realized that this thing
that seems so irrational was performing... performing
an important function. But this was like a small
study, right? It's only 200 people, it's hard
to make big conclusions. So Dr. Felitti went
to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, and
got a shit ton of money to do a much bigger study.
So everyone who came for healthcare to Kaiser
Permanente for a whole year in San Diego, the
whole city, no matter what you came in for, schizophrenia,
broken leg, anything in between, was given two
questionnaires. And the first questionnaire asked,
did any of these 10 bad things happen to you
when you were a child? Things like neglect, abuse,
cruelty, that kind of thing. And the second part
asked, Have you had any of these problems as
an adult? And at first it was just going to say
obesity, but luckily for us at the last minute,
they added things like depression, suicide attempts,
all sorts of other problems. And when at first
they added up the figures, they thought they'd
made a mistake. So they added them up again and
they were really stunning. For every category
of childhood trauma you experienced, you were
two to four times more likely to have problems
with depression. addiction and so on. And when
you got into the multiple categories, the figures
exploded. If you had had six categories of childhood
trauma, you were 3 ,100 % more likely to have
attempted suicide and you were more than 4 ,000
% more likely to have an injecting drug addiction.
I mean, those are just staggering figures, right?
You don't get figures like that very often in
epidemiology. Dr. Robert Ander, who's another
one of the scientists who worked on this, said
to me, it made him realize that when someone
is doing something that seems self -destructive,
obesity, addiction, whatever it might be, we
need to stop asking what's wrong with you and
start asking what happened to you. And in my
case, you know, I had experienced some quite,
some very extreme acts from an adult in my life.
And as an adult, I had been quite depressed.
and a lot of the time not all the time and um
until i learned about this science from dr felitti
i didn't i didn't really see the connection it's
not that i was stupid i didn't i would have denied
there was a connection i didn't really think
about it and it's actually i remember when i
went to see dr felitti he's a lovely really incredibly
admirable person feeling really hungry when I
spoke to him and afterwards because I didn't
want to think about the connections between these
childhood events and my trauma it was and some
of the negative feelings I'd had I didn't want
to think about it it felt tremendously painful
but I'm glad I did because of what I learned
later which perhaps we'll get to Yeah, absolutely.
I'd love to explore, interweave the two books
and what you talk about because I think there's
so much to be said. It's interesting with obesity
though. So here I am originally from England,
now moving to the States and not only that, but
becoming a firefighter paramedic. So the last
14 years of my career, we really got to pull
back the curtain on so many fallacies that we're
told. And one of the big things that I talk about
a lot is you know that that for example the pharmaceuticals
i'm not even talking about mental health ones
i'm talking about blood pressure and you know
type 2 diabetes and all these things that though
you take those and then you're going to be better
which is complete myth. We have a huge epidemic.
And from the other perspective I get is I coach
at a local CrossFit gym as well, which is the
proactive side of it. Reactive, I'm sticking
a tube down someone's throat while my partner's
doing CPR. And the other side is we're trying
with other trainers to get people away from that.
But I've got members of the gym that have been
coming for years, training diligently, curious
about changing eating habits, but obviously not
actually manifesting that and one element that
i have to say through all the things that i've
been talking about it really didn't strike a
chord as heavily as it should have is the mental
health element in the obese and the two things
we talk about in america for example is obesity
epidemic and right now our mental health epidemic
and yet no one's really kind of i say no one
there's some people are but the majority of us
are not putting two and two together and understanding
that People say, well, why didn't they stop eating
when they got a little bit heavy? That maybe
this addiction is no different than the opiates
or the social media or the gambling or the porn
or all these other things that people cling to.
But those men and women, food seems to be the
coping mechanism. And then you add the other
layer, as you were saying. You were, as so many
of my guests have had on, abused as a child.
The fact that you don't want to be attractive
to another person after being abused as an innocent
child makes perfect sense. It's tragic, but it
makes perfect sense. Yeah, I think there's a
lot in what you just said that's really important.
I mean, I think it's important to stress a few
things, obviously, that there are all sorts of
medications that are hugely beneficial to people.
Obviously, as a paramedic, you obviously agree
with that. Also, it's worth stressing, this is
not the only cause of the obesity crisis in the
US. I don't think it's actually the biggest.
The biggest cause is the catastrophic food supply
system, which is a very recent invention. It's
why obesity has exploded. And the fact that we
increasingly live in built environments where
it's very hard to walk and cycle anywhere. So
it's hard to because we've created a culture
where it's hard to eat well. And it's hard to
be physically active in healthy ways. And so
the childhood trauma element is very real and
significant to some people. I don't think it's
the biggest determinant. Although you're absolutely
right. If you create a society of people who
are constantly, A, tired, physically tired, and
B, stressed. All of us, when we are physically
tired and stressed out, unless you're very unusual,
some people react differently. But most people...
want to eat more and they want to eat more shitty
food when they're tired and stressed out, right?
Obviously, comfort eating is a very real thing.
So if you create a society where people are chronically
stressed and chronically tired, that in itself
will make, quite apart from childhood trauma,
that kind of ongoing, grinding, low -level trauma
will make people want to eat shittier food. And
you then got a society where the shittier food
is much cheaper, much easier to get. And healthy
food is hard to get. So there's a whole kind
of complex going on there. But I think, yeah,
yeah. So I think I agree with you. I think it's
really important that we think about these things
as interconnected. Yeah. And then, like you said,
you mentioned the word hard. And that's a great
description is it shouldn't be hard for a child
to be able to move around. It shouldn't be hard
for. you know an adult to go to wherever they
get their food from and walk away with clean
meat clean vegetables you know not processed
food but it is you know so the sad thing is you're
right that the label discipline goes on healthy
eating right now which shows you how broken our
system actually is yeah and also that we transfer
the way we try and solve these problems is very
often to just You know, there's this phrase,
some people who criticize self -help use this
really important phrase. They talk about cruel
optimism. So cruel optimism is where you take
a really big problem with big social causes for
a lot of people like depression, obesity, anxiety,
addiction. And in a very upbeat way, you say,
hey, Joey, you can solve this problem for yourself,
right? You say, all you need to do is these three
things and you're going to get better. And there
is a place for individuals to make changes in
their lives. I'm strongly in favor of it. I've
argued for it in my books. But the reason it's
cruel optimism for a lot of people is, to be
honest, in a culture like this, they're going
to be running up a down escalator, right? It's
really, really, really hard. And the biggest
thing we need to do is to change the overall
culture and society, which is something we can
do as citizens. It's happened many times before.
We're all the beneficiaries of these changes.
in the past um you need to you need to actually
change the direction of the escalator right you
need to stop it so that instead of it being hard
to eat well hard to spend time with your children
hard to not be depressed to get your needs met
we need to make it easier to do that and make
a society where that is actually the norm rather
than something you have to fight like the devil
to achieve. And there are all sorts of ways we
can do that. And obviously a big part of my books
are about, okay, how do we do that? Where has
done that? And what kind of evidence can we use
to do that? And I think that's essential. I think
locating the problem at the level of the individual
sounds empowering. And there is a place for it.
Definitely a place for individual changes. But
actually locating it entirely at the level of
the individual is really cruel, right? Look at
a photograph of a beach in the United States
50 years ago. Everyone is what we would now call
skinny or slim. Literally everyone, right? There's
nobody that we would call fat. Now you look at
a beach and, you know, lots of people are very
overweight, right? It's not. The explanation
for that is not that everyone in the United States
just suddenly became individually flawed and
weak -willed. That's an absolutely ludicrous
thing to think, right? Or think about it as simple
as the difference, think about places I've spent
time. The difference between Lexington, Kentucky
and Copenhagen in Denmark. Lexington, Kentucky,
most people are obese in Lexington, Kentucky.
And very few people are obese in Copenhagen and
Denmark, right? Why is that? It's not that Danish
people are somehow, you know, morally better
people than the people in Lexington. It's that
in Denmark, they've got a government that has
prioritised making sure people can get cheap,
fresh, healthy food. They can bike to their work,
you know, and they can walk around their city.
And in Lexington, Kentucky, I mean, I tried to
walk places and it's literally impossible. to
walk other than tiny little bits of Lexington.
And it's really hard to not buy the kind of shitty
food that I find extremely tempting. And it's
very hard to buy fresh and healthy food, especially
if you don't have a lot of money. So I think
with most of the problems that you and I are
going to talk about, most of the big problems
that we face, social problems, they can't be
solved by isolated individuals. But they can
be solved when individuals band together and
collectively change the way we live. Yeah, yeah.
And I think that the perspective I have, and
it's the same with mental health in my profession,
the fire service, is I've actually been very,
very fortunate to have got through my career
without... any real problems however and i've
had ups and downs don't get me wrong but however
i've also been very fortunate to grow up on a
farm in england be exposed to how to cook when
i was young and what real food looks like and
have healthy outlets and have good family dynamics
despite you know a divorce um so overall was
given the tools to to get through it um and the
issue i have is as you said well you know you're
having depression we should just do this this
and this Just because it worked for you doesn't
mean it works for someone else. And if you're
doing well, like I always talk on this podcast,
if you're one of the ones that just is doing
well, if you're staying in shape despite being
a police officer, despite sitting in a car all
day and sleep deprivation, all these things.
Good for you. Now start helping the people that
are struggling. And I think that's what the conversation
is. Just because this one Uber athlete has done
okay and they are genuinely fine mentally and
physically, now you have to become the beacon
for change for other people and work out where
they're stumbling and how we can create an environment
for people to thrive, not fail. I think that's
really true. I would also, and this is something
you'll know more about than I do, but I would
also use a different analogy. So car accidents
are still the biggest cause of death. I mean,
as we're speaking, COVID -19 might have temporarily
overtaken it, but car accidents are the biggest
cause of death in the United States. Sometimes
it level pegs with heart attacks as well. And
so the thing about the problem of car accidents,
which obviously firefighters do incredible work
getting people out of, we don't say the problem
of car accidents... should be solved solely by
isolated individuals, right? We used to do that.
Go back to the 1940s. What they did, basically,
was very little regulation on cars. What they
said was to pedestrians, get out of the way of
the car, and to drivers, drive carefully, right?
And we realised that didn't work very well. It
doesn't work very well. So, and we certainly
don't say to, you know, if someone is mangled
in a car wreck, right, we don't say to them,
Well, it's your job now to, you know, enforce
the speed limit. That's not what we do. This
is a social problem. So we have a social response.
We do a huge amount, right? We have driving tests.
We have speed limits. We have airbags. We arrest
DUIs. There's a massive array of things that
we do as a society to deal collectively with
the problem of car accidents. If we left it up
to isolated individuals and just said, hey, everyone,
I'm going to teach you the skills to avoid speeding
cars, right? The problem would be drastically,
in fact, was drastically worse when we did that
and would be drastically worse now if we carried
on doing that. In a similar way, I think we need
to shift our understanding of depression and
addiction and anxiety so that we have a response
that is more like. how we deal with car accidents.
Of course, once someone is mangled in a car wreck,
you guys do your amazing work at getting them
out of the car wreck, and then they're taken
to hospital, and the people in the emergency
room do amazing work piecing them back together.
But that's not our main response to car accidents.
Our main response... is to do a huge amount of
work so that we don't get to that point, right?
And in a similar way, we need to do something
very similar with depression, anxiety, and addiction.
And there's very good evidence for how we do
that. We should be dealing with the problems
that are causing depression, anxiety, and addiction
upstream way more than we are. Yeah, I couldn't
agree more. Now, our journey separately took
us in front of the same gentleman in Lisbon,
and I want to get to that, but I want to start
at that. Yes. I want to start at the very beginning,
though, because I think one of the most powerful
things for me as a first responder, again, pulling
the curtain back. Not only do I see the failure
in our drug policy in the men and women that
some we save, some that die, but also in our
own first responders. Like in my immediate area
here, I've lost three fellow firefighters to
opiate overdose overdoses alone. That's not counting,
you know, alcohol and all these other other.
forms of addiction as well. And the prison population
side is also staggering. And we talked when we
were going to record last week about both knowing
Tom Eberhardt. The staggering statistic that
in the 70s we had 350 ,000... prisoners and now
we have 2 .3 million prisoners here most of which
are drug related in some way shape or form again
if you're a numbers person shows the huge failure
of the system so if you would i know you've done
this on other podcasts but i think it's so important
to paint the picture can you can you lead people
through the the the beginning of prohibition
with anslinger and billy holiday just so people
have an idea of how this even came about in the
first place It's interesting, I've been thinking
about this a lot the last six months again because
we've been making a meeting out of the story
that opens Chasing the Scream. So I open my book
Chasing the Scream at this moment. I think when
some people first read it, they think, well,
why is he starting a book about addiction and
the war on drugs with this? What's that got to
do with it? It tells you so much about why the
drug war began and why it continues. In 1939...
In a hotel in midtown Manhattan, Billie Holiday,
the great jazz singer, walked onto a stage and
she sang a song called Strange Fruit. A lot of
your listeners will know that song. It's a song
against lynching. It's the idea that in the South,
there's a strange fruit that hangs from the trees
and it's the mutilated bodies, murdered bodies
of African -American men who've been lynched.
And that night, Billie Holiday got a warning.
from the agents of something called the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics that was run by a man called
Harry Anslinger. And the warning said, basically,
stop singing this song. You think that's a weird
place to begin. Why would you begin the story
there, right? So you've got to understand who
this man was and then something about Billie
Holiday. So Harry Anslinger took over the Department
of Alcohol Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition
was ending. So he takes over this huge government
department that's lost the war on alcohol and
is about to have nothing to do. And he invented
the modern war on drugs. He's in fact the first
person to ever use the phrase war on drugs to
keep his department going. And he built it, and
it was absolutely sincere in what he believed
it would help people as well. He built the war
on drugs around two really intense hatreds that
he had. One was a... really deep hatred of African
Americans and Latinos. I mean, he was so racist
that he was regarded as a crazy racist in the
1920s. He used the N -word so often in his official
police memos that his own senator said he should
have to resign. But the second group he really
hated was people with addiction problems. He'd
grown up as a little boy in a place called Altoona.
in Pennsylvania, a small town, our farmhouse,
where the next farm down, the farmer's wife had
an addiction problem, and he was terrified of
her. And to him, Billie Holiday was a symbol
of everything he wanted to destroy. She was an
African and American woman resisting white supremacy,
and she had an addiction problem. But Billie
Holiday, going back to what we were saying, related
to what we were saying before, when Billie Holiday
was 10 years old, A 41 -year -old man called
Wilbur Rich came to collect her and said, your
mother's told me to come and get you and bring
you to her. And he horrifically raped her. And
he was sent to prison for a year. Billie Holiday
was punished much more severely. The police said
that she was, as they put it, a little whore.
They said that she'd led this man on. She was
sent to live in a convent away from her grandmother
who she lived with. And this convent tormented
her. They tried to get her to accept, in inverted
commas, that she had made this man do this. She
refused to do that because it wasn't true. They,
I mean, tormented her in those terrible ways.
To teach her a lesson, they locked her overnight
with the dead bodies. I mean, really horrendously
cruel things. And Billie Holiday had enough sanity
to see that I'm not taking this shit. And she
ran away to be with her mother. But her mother
was working in a brothel in Harlem. And when
Billie Holiday got there, she started kind of
working, again in inverted commas, alongside
her mother. So she was being prostituted. She
was being raped by strangers when she was quite
young, night after night after night. And in
those circumstances, Billie Holiday was terribly
traumatized. And she started seeking out whatever
anesthetic she could get. He initially drank
a lot of alcohol and then used a lot of heroin.
But when Harry Anslinger tells her to stop singing
this song, she effectively said, fuck you, I'm
an American citizen, I'll sing what I damn well
please. And that was when Harry Anslinger resolved
to destroy her. So he hated employing African
-Americans, but you couldn't really send a white
guy into Harlem to stalk Billie Holiday, it'd
be kind of obvious. So he employed an African
-American agent named Jimmy Fletcher. And he
said to Jimmy, follow Billie Holiday everywhere
she goes, track her, document her drug use, we're
going to bust her. And so Jimmy Fletcher, this
is part of the focus of the movie, Jimmy Fletcher
followed Billie Holiday everywhere. And Billie
Holiday was so amazing that he fell in love with
her. And his whole life he felt really ashamed
of what he did next. He busted her. She was put
on trial. She said the trial was called the United
States versus Billie Holiday. And that's how
it damn well felt. The movie is called the United
States versus Billie Holiday. And she was sent
to prison for 18 months. She didn't sing a word
in prison. And when she got out, the cruelest
thing really happened to her, which is that to
perform anywhere where alcohol was served, which
was pretty much everywhere where you could sing.
You needed something that was called a cabaret
performer's license. And Anne Slingham made sure
she didn't get it. One of her friends, Yolanda
Boban, said to me, what's the cruelest thing
you can do to someone is to take away the thing
they love. This is what we do to people with
addiction problems all over the world. You know,
we punish them and shame them and give them criminal
records. And in that circumstance, Billie Holiday
relapsed. One day she collapsed in Midtown, not
very far from where she first saw Strange Fruit.
She was taken to a hospital. First hospital wouldn't
even take her because she had an addiction problem.
Second hospital let her in. And they diagnosed
her with liver cancer. And she didn't have any
heroin in the hospital, so she went into withdrawal,
which is very dangerous if you're as weak as
she was with liver cancer. And her friend, Maylee
Dufty, managed to insist they give her methadone,
which they did. And she got better. And then
after 10 days, Anstinger's rules meant that she
got cut off. And she died the next day. One of
her friends told the BBC that she looked like
she had been violently wrenched from life. And
I think this story is so important for so many
reasons. It tells you about what the drug war
was about right from the start. It was about
racism. It was about destroying people with addictions,
not helping them, shaming them and punishing
them. making their lives worse. But also to me,
it tells something much more important, even
more important, which is, you know, in this culture,
we tell one story about addiction that's admirable,
that people with addiction problems sometimes
recover. And that is indeed admirable. And everyone
listening to your podcast who's recovered from
addiction deserves a huge amount of love and
congratulations. But that's not the only heroic
story about addiction, right? Billie Holiday
never stopped being addicted. She died with an
addiction problem. She was still a hero. You
know, no matter what they did to her, she always
found somewhere to sing Strange Fruit, right?
She would go to the worst parts of the Deep South
where they threw bottles at her, and she sang
her song. I remember, yeah, I didn't put this
in the book. I wish I had. Yolanda Bavan, who's
herself a great jazz singer, who knew Billie
Holiday. said to me, you know, towards the end
of her life, Billie Holiday thought she'd be
completely forgotten. No one would remember her.
And I said to her, what would you say to Billie
Holiday if you could speak to her now? And she
said, I'd say to her, Billie, today I went into
Whole Foods and they were playing your songs.
Nobody forgot you, baby. And I think in some
ways, like this conflict between Billie Holiday
and Harry Anslinger continues, right? most of
the world still follows some version of harry
anslinger's war on drugs and it makes us weaker
and sicker than we need to be and yet all over
the world people listen to billy holiday and
it makes them stronger and it makes them psychologically
richer and it makes them better and uh that conflict
goes on yeah it's it's So, so awful when you
read the book and everyone listening to this,
you need to read Chasing the Scream. Simple as
that. Especially if you're in any sort of first
responder profession where you're a part of the
story. But when you take a step back and look
at... addiction as a mental health problem and
not and i've talked about this on so many episodes
oh it's just a bum just a hooker just uh you
know whatever just a gangbanger but you actually
take into someone's life story from that giggling
little toddler to where they are today sending
someone to prison because they had audacity to
become dependent on a drug is just so nonsensical
and you know we'll get to portugal in a moment
but Fundamentally, it's not working. Say it was
this great experiment. We know now purely from
the numbers of incarcerated men and women that
it is not working. You've been shaming them for
100 years. That has not worked. You told people
to pull themselves together and get over it.
That hasn't worked. So we are at a crossroads
now. And thank goodness there are some countries
that are leading the way where we have to fucking
reinvent this because it has not worked. It's
so broken. It's causing more crime on the streets.
It's causing more of our fellow first responders
to be murdered in the streets. And our citizens
are, you know, are being locked away by the millions,
the millions, because they had the audacity to
be addicted. And it is just, it's crazy. I think
that's true. And I think it's, so sometimes people
say, oh, the war on drugs doesn't work. Truth
is actually quite a bit worse than that. It makes
the problem a lot worse. And it's interesting
because in a way, anyone who's ever loved someone
with an addiction problem, you know, will feel
this conflict in them. And we'll have a kind
of, we all have a Harry Anslinger in our heads
that looks at someone with an addiction problem
and thinks, oh, someone should just stop you,
right? And why are you doing this? But most of
us have a more compassionate part as well. And
I think, you know, something that really changed
my mind about this. You know, I was never in
favour of punishing people with addiction problems
or anything like that, but something that really
helped me to see the madness of quite how harmful
what we do is, is when I kind of learned that
I had actually really deeply misunderstood what
addiction is. So, like I say, you know, we had
addiction in my family, and I had a very clear
story about addiction in my head. which everyone
listening to this podcast will have heard in
some form, which is, let's take heroin addiction,
because that's something that was close to me.
If you'd asked me when I started doing the research
for Chasing the Scream, whenever it was, eight,
nine years ago now, what causes heroin addiction,
I would have looked at you like you were an idiot,
and I would have said, well, the clues in the
name dummy. Obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction.
We've been told this story for 100 years. It's
actually been a big resurgence during the opioid
crisis. I hope we get a chance to talk about
that. It's not totally wrong, but turns out to
be one part of a much bigger picture. So we think,
you know, I'm sitting here in London. We think
if I kidnap the next 20 people to walk past my
apartment and like a villain in a horror movie,
I 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. That there
are chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies
would start to desperately physically crave,
right? That they'd start having this tremendous
physical hunger for heroin. In fact, that's why
we call it being hooked, right? Because you crave
the physical hook. The first thing that alerted
me to the fact that there's something too simplistic
about this story is when it was explained to
me. In Britain, if I step out of this interview
now and I get hit by a truck and I break my hip,
I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given a
lot of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine
is heroin, right? It's medically pure heroin.
It's actually much better shit than I'd ever
score on the streets, right? Because it's pure.
People in Britain are given this drug in hospitals
quite often. If anyone listening to this has
a British grandmother. who's had a hip replacement
operation, your grandmother has taken a lot of
heroin, right? If what we think about addiction
is right, that it's caused primarily or entirely
by exposure to the chemical hooks, what should
be happening to all these people in British hospitals,
right? They should be leaving and trying to score.
Some of them should, right? Granny should be
leaving with this tremendous physical hunger
and so on. This has been studied very carefully.
It doesn't happen, right? And when I learned
that, and read the relevant scientific studies,
I just thought, I can't be right. How could it
be that you would have someone in a hospital
bed being given a shit ton of really powerful,
potent, pure heroin, and they don't become addicted?
And then you've got someone in the alleyway outside
the hospital shooting up actually a weaker form
of the drug, and they do become addicted. I didn't
get it. And I only really began to understand
it when I went to Vancouver and interviewed an
amazing man named Professor Bruce Alexander,
who did an experiment that's really transformed
how people think about addiction all over the
world, including in Portugal, where you ran.
So Professor Alexander explained to me that this
story of addiction that we have in our heads,
that comes primarily or totally from the chemical
hooks, comes from a series of experiments that
were done earlier in the 20th century. They're
really simple experiments. Your listeners can
try them at home if they're feeling a bit sadistic.
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. If you do that, the rat will almost
always prefer the drug water and almost always
kill itself. So there you go, right? That's our
story. But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came
along and said, well, hang on a minute. You put
the rat alone. In an empty cage, it's got nothing
that makes life meaningful for rats. All it's
got is the drug. 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. 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 would want in life is there in Rat Park.
And they've got both the water bottles, the normal
water and the drug water. And this is the fascinating
thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug
water. They hardly ever use it. None of them
use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose.
So they go from almost 100 % compulsive use and
overdose when they don't have the things that
make life meaningful to none when they do have
the things that make life meaningful. Now, there's
lots of human examples that show the same thing
that I can talk about if you like. But what I
realized is, you know, this shows us that the...
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, important
though that is to many people. The opposite of
addiction is connection. You know, the core of
addiction is 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 where we started, which is that.
Why the drug war is such a disaster? The drug
war is based on, if you think about it, it's
been a holiday. The drug war is based on the
idea that if someone's got an addiction problem,
you need to punish them in order to give them
an incentive to stop. But once you understand
that pain is the cause of addiction, pain is
the driver of addiction, you can see that actually
what you're doing is pouring more fuel on the
fire. You're making the addiction worse when
you punish people. So all this drug war infrastructure...
that claims it's about protecting our children.
It doesn't do that. I can talk about how if you
want. That claims it's about reducing addiction.
Actually, it's making addiction worse. Yeah.
And I see that. You see, that's the thing. I
get to see that from the streets and on the East
Coast and the West Coast as a first responder.
And it's... Wait, how do you see it? How does
it become visible? So what you see is, for example,
pulling a sheet over a 14 -year -old boy who's
been murdered in a gang, you know, warfare. You
see the OD that you save in a Dunkin' Donuts
by having to stick a needle in her neck because
she's so atrophied on her AC area, you know,
the normal place we do needles. You see the...
The accidental overdose of the guy who had shoulder
surgery and either forgot or was taking too much.
You see it all over the back. There's so many,
you know, dead people in my little Rolodex of
memories just from 14 years. That's a very short
time. It's the East Coast. It's the West Coast.
And then factoring in the firefighters that I've
lost, you know, personally that weren't the patients.
They were responders and they also were the patients.
And I think that, you know, that's what made
it so powerful. So the backstory of how I ended
up in Portugal. My mother and brother moved to
Portugal about 20 years ago from England, kind
of just created a new foundation out there. And
I started the podcast. And so obviously I was
talking a lot more about just social problems
in general. And she said, did you know they decriminalize
drugs here? And I was like, no, I'd never heard
of that. So I started researching it. Initially,
I was trying to get one of the police officers
from the vice special that they did about it.
But at the end, I just emailed Zhao, Zhao Gulau,
who was the man that spearheaded this incentive.
And I said, I'm going to be out there. Could
I come see you? And he was like, yeah. So I got
to sit down with Zhao the same way as you do.
And I'll obviously let you tell the story. But
I saw it for myself. It wasn't like I read it
in some newspaper article. Having witnessed it
myself and coming from a first responder perspective,
knowing it doesn't work, you know, tell me about
your journey to Lisbon and what you saw them
doing there. I'm so glad you met Shiraz. Isn't
he an amazing man? Oh, so, so nice. And just,
I mean, talk about changing the world. His passion
has saved hundreds of thousands of lives in that
country. Yeah, he's an incredible person. And
he was absolutely central to the change that
happened. I'm interested to hear more about what
you saw there. The way it began is that by the
year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug
problems in the world. 1 % of the population
was addicted to heroin. And every year they tried,
essentially the American way, more. They arrested
more people, they imprisoned more people. And
every year the problem got worse. And one day
the prime minister and the leader of the opposition
got together and they said, look, we can't go
on like this. What are we going to do? So they
decided to do something incredibly radical, something
nobody had done in 70 years. At the drug war,
they said, should we ask some scientists what
we should do? So they set up a panel of scientists
and doctors led by Joao Gulau, who had set up
the first drug treatment center in Portugal after
the fall of the dictatorship in the early 1970s.
And they said to this panel, it was doctors,
social workers and a judge. They said to them,
oh, and some social scientists. They said, you
guys go away. Look at all the best evidence about
addiction. go anywhere you need to go in the
world, take as much time as you need, and we've
agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend.
So it just took it out of politics. So the panel
went away, they looked at loads of things, they
looked at Rat Park, amongst other things, and
they came back and they said, okay, this is what
we're going to do, we're going to decriminalise
all drugs, from cannabis to crack, a whole lot.
But, and this is the crucial next step, We're
going to spend all the money we currently spend
on screwing people's lives up, harassing them,
arresting them, imprisoning them. And we're going
to spend all that money instead on turning their
lives around. And interestingly, it's not really
what we think of as drug treatment in the United
States. So there's some residential rehab that
has some value. But the biggest thing they did
was a big program of meaning and job creation
for people with addiction problems. Say you used
to be a mechanic. they go to garage they'll say
if you employ this guy for a year we'll pay half
his wages they set up a big program to distribute
small loans to people with addiction problems
so they could set up and run businesses about
things that they wanted to do the goal was to
say to everyone with an addiction problem in
portugal we love you we value you we're on your
side we want you back And by the time I went
to Portugal, that had been in place, that system,
for 13 years, and the results were very clear.
Portugal went from being almost at the top of
the European league tables for drug problems
to the very bottom. Overdose deaths were down
by more than 50%. Injecting drug use was massively
down. HIV transmission was massively down. And
one of the ways you know it works so well is
that, you know, Portugal's a democracy. They've
got five big political parties. None of them
want to go back. And I went to interview another
amazing person called Gerard Figueroa, who was
the top drug cop in Portugal at the time of the
decriminalization. And he said what lots of people
totally understandably say when you talk about
decriminalizing all drugs. He said, this is crazy.
What are you talking about? This is going to
cause an explosion in drug use and in children
using drugs and more overdoses. And he said to
me. Everything I said would happen didn't happen.
And everything the other side said would happen
did. And he talked about how he felt really ashamed
that he'd spent so many years shaming and punishing
people under the old system when he saw now that
he could have been helping them all along. And
I think this is something I saw everywhere in
the world that's gone beyond the rule on drugs,
from Uruguay to Vancouver to Switzerland to Portugal.
There's always a pattern. Before it happens,
it's incredibly controversial. And people think
it's madness. And then they see it in practice.
And it's not a magic bullet. They still have
problems in all those places. But the problems
were reduced so significantly that quite quickly,
the things that were regarded as crazy become
seen as just common sense. And the things that
were... The old system of prohibition actually
begins to be seen as what it should be seen as,
which is the radical... crazy option, the one
that doesn't work. Exactly. And I think that
one of the big, big things that Zhao was talking
about was that their big surge came after a lot
of their soldiers came home that were fighting
in one of the African nations. So for all the
first responders, police officers, military listening,
you go send these young men into a place where
they're probably going to see and do some things
that are going to create some sort of mental
trauma. They're leaning on the addiction. Now
they're coming back. So again, now these people
that fought for their country are now being arrested
and homeless and thrown in jail. Instead of looking,
like we've been talking for the last hour, at
this is a psychological issue. So when Zhao explained
that by doing this different way of taking care
of addicts, now the addict, the person who's
looking to reach out, the person who wants help,
can come out of the shadows because they're not
afraid of being arrested. They're not going to
get a criminal record that's then going to prohibit
them from getting a good job and getting back
on the right track. Right now, you're an addict.
Not only do you have your addiction, not only
are you then going to find probably exactly the
same drug in many of the prisons, but once you
get out, you've got that record holding you down
for years and years and years. So as we mentioned
earlier, which of those two systems set a human
being up for success to overcome an addiction
and become a thriving member of society. I often
say to people, you know, because people, you
know, we've all been raised under prohibition.
It can be hard to get your head around some of
these things. I often say to people, when will
you stop smoking? Will it be the week when you
lose your home and you lose your job and your
wife leaves you? Probably not. You'll probably
smoke more, right? Think about the joke in Airplane,
you know. chose the wrong week to quit smoking,
right? You'll probably actually quit smoking
when things are going really well for you and
you're actually, your stress levels are lower
and maybe you're on a beautiful vacation or something
great is going on in your life, right? Why would
it be any different for other addictions? Why
would driving someone into the dirt make them
less likely to want to anaesthetise themselves,
right? And I think you've gone to another really
important thing that I think is probably relevant
to your... to your listeners, which is that what
they found in Portugal, and I spoke to lots of
lots of people in lots of different fields who
said this, is that it transformed the relationship
between the authorities and people who had addiction
problems. So when social workers were going looking,
when doctors and paramedics were going to provide
help, they were no longer part of a machine that
was, you know, criminalising and stigmatising
and oppressing people. Actually, the whole machinery
of the government was about helping people with
addiction problems, not punishing them. And sometimes
we say, you know, oh, you know, we need to be
more compassionate. But it's very hard. I'd say
it's impossible to be properly compassionate
under a system of prohibition for the authorities
to be. But you can't say what you're doing is
a crime and we're going to punish and shame you.
But we're compassionate towards you. Right. Those
are incompatible things. So I think you're right.
And I think about the contrast, you know, not
long after I was in Portugal, I was in Washington,
D .C. And I spent some time with this amazing
woman called Billie Tyler. She's a street nurse.
Her son had died of an overdose a few years before.
And so she did just voluntary street nursing
in D .C., just going and helping people with
addiction problems, needle distribution and things
like that. And never forget, Billy, we were outside
this wooden house in Anacostia, which is one
of the poorest parts of D .C. And Billy talking
about how in this house there were people who,
they had a necrotic tissue around their wounds
where they'd been injecting and gone wrong. And
these people were treated so badly in the hospitals
that they had... what they were doing to deal
with the necrotic tissue is they had got maggots
out of the garbage and they had put the maggots
into their wings because maggots will eat your
necrotic tissue. And I remember sitting there
with her and we could, I can't remember if we
could see it from that spot, but very close by,
you can see the Senate building, right? And I
just thought, we are at the capital of the richest
society there has ever been, right? We're at
the very heart of it. We can see the Senate.
You know, the White House is not far away. And
people are living in wooden houses and putting
maggots into their wounds. This is a crazy situation,
right? And it's a sign of how dysfunctional the
drug war is, that it puts people in this position.
And we don't have to live like this, right? It
was so maddening to me going around the US. for
chasing the screen. And, you know, again, I think
it was after I went, I could be wrong about this,
but I think it was after I went to Portugal that
I went to Arizona. It might have been before.
In Arizona, in Maricopa County, I went 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 mocked them
and jeered at them. This was all overseen by
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who people will remember,
he was actually a personal disciple of Harry
Anslinger. His face lit up when I mentioned Harry
Anslinger. He knew Anslinger well. And Arpaio
was himself later revealed to be a criminal.
He was illegally racially profiling people, and
President Trump pardoned him. But I remember
going out with these women, and you talked to
them about their lives, and they were... like
Billie Holiday, just tales of horrendous abuse.
And just thinking, God, if you were in Portugal,
they'd be giving you loans to set up a small
business. And here you are, you're on a chain
gang being made to dig graves while people honk
and laugh at you. It's so mad. And I think it's
not hard for people to see why those women...
It's not just that the drug war doesn't work,
right? It's that those women are even more broken
and even more humiliated and even more likely
to become addicted. And we know this, right?
We know the open society foundations have done
good research on this. You know, I went to Vietnam
where they make people, you know, people with
addiction problems forced to go into basically
kind of gulags, forced labor camps. They're screamed
at and made to just lift rocks all day. And what
happens? 99 % of them relapse within a couple
of weeks. I mean, for obvious reasons, right?
So at some point, we're going to have to stop
copying the places that have failed, disastrously
failed, and start copying the places that have
succeeded. It's not a coincidence that the United
States has had the worst drug war. Not the worst,
one of the most intense drug wars in the world.
and now has one of the worst addiction crises
in the world, right? That's not such an accident,
right? It's partly, not entirely, there's lots
of other things going on, but it's partly because
of this failed policy. At some point, we have
to start copying the places that succeeded. We
have to start copying Portugal and Switzerland.
And the one thing you can say in defence of the
American drug war is, my God, the United States
government gave it a fair shot. The US has fought
the drug war for 100 years. They've spent a trillion
dollars. A conservative estimate, they've killed
hundreds of thousands of their own citizens.
As you pointed out, rightly, they've imprisoned
millions of their own citizens. In fact, they've
imprisoned a higher proportion of their population
than Stalin or Chairman Mao ever did. And at
the end of all, they've destroyed whole countries
like Colombia and El Salvador and Mexico. And
at the end of all that, In the US, we can't even
keep drugs out of our prisons where we pay someone
to walk around the wall perimeter the whole time.
So good luck with the idea you're ever going
to keep them out of the United States. We've
got to give up on this utopian absurdity that
you can get rid of drugs. There's never been
a drug -free society. There never will be a drug
-free society for as long as humans exist. And
instead, actually, you know, live in the real
world. Yeah, well, a good point that you make,
and it's such a simple comparison, but it's so
true. When alcohol was in prohibition, there
were gangs murdering each other. And as you mentioned,
and I laugh about it, but it's so true. I've
never seen Coors and Miller Lite in a big gang
warfare in the middle of New York. So when you
cut the head off the snake, say you legalize
or decriminalize, depending on which framework
they use. The very people that prey on the weak,
the drug dealers, the drug smugglers, these horrendous
gangs that have come out of this, supply and
demand is the most basic economics. The same
way as you've done with marijuana in Colorado
and some of the other places. I wonder now how
many people succeed selling weed illegally in
those states when you can just go safely, hold
your head up high, go into a dispensary, get
what you need and walk out. So understanding,
seeing the fringe society, seeing the deaths,
the murders, the overdoses, all this that so
many people listening do, you have to reverse
engineer. If you want the crime to stop, you
have to... Stop empowering the criminals and
the criminals currency are the drugs. You take
that over, you make it legal and obviously then
filter all that money, as you said, that we were
spending on the quote unquote drug war and put
it into mental health counseling, job creation,
safe injection sites. You take all the power
away. I can't imagine what the Mexican border
would look like if we decriminalized drugs. You
probably wouldn't even have the immigration problem
that you have because people wouldn't be flooding
out of that country because they're fearing for
their lives. I think it's important to see between
decriminalization and legalization. So decriminalization
is where you stop punishing drug users, but they
still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get
their drugs. Legalization is where you open up
some legal route for them to get their drugs.
And that's different for different drugs. No
one is suggesting there should be a heroin island
in CVS or anything. But there can be legal routes
to heroin that are not that, like as Switzerland
did. We can talk about that if you want. But
you're right. I think you've gone to what I think
is the biggest moral issue around the drug war.
You know, I think as you can tell, what we do
to people with addiction problems is very close
to my heart. That's not actually the worst thing
we do. The worst thing we do is what you're talking
about, which is the violence caused by prohibition.
And if you think about that, if you want to understand
that, just do a very simple thought experiment.
Anyone listening, go and try to steal a bottle
of vodka, right? Just go and try to steal one.
The store that sells the vodka, if they catch
you, they won't shoot you, right? They'll call
the cops. The cops will come and take you away.
So that store doesn't need to be violent. It
doesn't need to be intimidating. It's got the
power of the law to uphold its property rights.
Okay. Now imagine you don't want to steal a bag
of vodka. Let's imagine you want to steal a bottle
of vodka. I'll say it again. Now imagine you
don't steal a bottle of vodka. Imagine you go
and steal a bag of cocaine or a bag of heroin
or a bag of meth, right? Obviously, the person
who sells that in there will be someone in your
neighborhood selling it. can't call the cops,
right? The cops would come and arrest them. They've
got to fight you. They don't want to have a fight
every day, right? So as the many drug dealers
I spent time with for Chasing the Scream explained
to me, you've got to establish a reputation for
being so frightening that no one will be foolish
enough to pick a fight with you, right? So, you
know, you establish your place in the neighborhood.
through intimidation, through fear, through theatrical
acts of violence. As the writer Charles Bowden
put it, the war on drugs creates a war for drugs,
right? Everyone listening to your podcast knows
who Al Capone was. I bet no one listening knows
the name of the head of Budweiser, right, or
the head of Smirnoff. Why is that? There's a
professor at Harvard called Geoffrey Myron. who
has an amazing graph of the murder rate in the
20th century in the United States, massively
shoots up when alcohol is banned and drops like
a stone after alcohol is legalized again, right?
Just like you said, the head of Budweiser doesn't
go and shoot the head of cause in the face, right?
But drug gang, alcohol gangs did fight and did
kill people to extraordinarily high level when
alcohol was banned. What changed? Not the drug.
Alcohol is the same thing it was before and the
same thing after. What changed is the system
of legal regulation around the drug. And you're
absolutely right about it. If you think about
places like Mexico, I mean, I spent a lot of
time in northern Mexico, in El Salvador, in Colombia,
that the scale of the death there and the insane
violence, you know, I spent time with a hitman
for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas,
a guy called Rosario Reta, who, between the ages
of 14 and 17, had butchered and beheaded about
70 people. I remember a funny experience when
I went to interview him. He's in prison now in
Tyler County in Texas. And on the way in, the
guard said to me, you know, obviously we can't
leave you alone with him because he's like beheaded
70 people. I was like, oh, good. Stick around.
Ten minutes into talking to him, I turned around
and realised they'd fucking left me with him.
But anyway, the... Now, Rosario would have been
a troubled person in any situation, but there
is no one who would have given him the means
to butcher and behead 70 people and would have
been able to take over the police in their neighborhood
and mean that the police turned a blind eye because
the police were effectively controlled by the
drug gangs in lots of parts of northern Mexico
if drugs weren't prohibited, right? Pablo Escobar's
son, Sebastian Marroquin, has become a friend
of mine, and he said to me, you know, the only
thing my father ever truly feared... was the
legalization of drugs. If drugs were legal, my
dad would have been a used car salesman and you
would have never heard his name. And that's true.
Yeah, it's so simple. That's what's so hard.
So many discussions I have with people like yourself
and, you know, just great. men and women in their
fields is the answer to for example you know
good good overall health you've got good nutrition
you've got moving a lot obviously you've got
a dream addressing mental health you know uh
trauma but that's it you know it the actual true
solutions are so simple and where it gets screwed
up is when people want to start making money
out of you know item x so now all of a sudden
oh you don't know how to exercise but if you
get my exercise machine and my 12 dvd set i'll
show you how to actually exercise oh you don't
need to you don't need to worry about fresh fruit
and vegetables buy my weight watchers prepared
meals and and i'll feed you for you know what
i mean and that's the problem i think with this
drugs is people have just been the smoke and
mirror to the point where the root cause it's
so freaking simple seems ridiculous now the same
way as people belittled anyone that mentioned
the word organic 20 years ago which organic means
don't spray my fucking food with chemicals you
know so the brainwashing is on on us the citizens
and and the more you know i think you're right
i think there's some you know there's some complexity
in how you think about legalization because we
need to move to a legal regulated ways of accessing
these drugs But that does mean different things
for different drugs. In the same way that, you
know, in California, where you are, I'm sure
it is legal to own a dog, a monkey and a lion.
But I'm sure the rules are different, right?
So for a dog, you just go into a store. For a
monkey, I suspect you need a license. And for
a lion, I'm sure they come and like, you know,
like they should have done with the Tiger King
guy in Oklahoma. I'm sure they come and like
inspect your house and make sure you're not a
crazy person, right? You can't just have a tiger
anywhere, a lion anywhere. In the same way, when
we say that drugs should be legal, of course,
we don't mean... all drugs should be available
in the way that alcohol is right and now i think
there are lots of drugs that should be i think
cannabis should be i think we've been moved to
a license but i prefer a non -profit model but
okay the model we have is a lot better than prohibition
model that's emerging is even though it's a commercial
model is a lot better than prohibition um but
with something like so and i think we should
experiment with that for things like ecstasy
and so on but um That would not be a good model
for heroin, for example. I don't know many. I
mean, there are some very hardcore libertarians
who would just have open cell heroin, but I don't
know many people, even in the drug reform world,
who are in favour of that. So you think, well,
what's the legal route we can allow? And this
is not a theoretical question. So as we mentioned,
my dad's from Switzerland. I spent a lot of time
in Switzerland investigating this because Switzerland
legalised heroin for people with addiction problems.
And it's a model that's really worth thinking
about. So at the same time that Portugal was
having its catastrophic drugs crisis, Switzerland
had a really bad drug problem in the late 90s.
And very high levels of heroin use and overdose.
And they tried all sorts of things. And it was
just a nightmare. And, you know, people might
remember famous scenes in the 90s of like Swiss
parks full of like people injecting each other
in the neck and just really, really heart rending
scenes. And then, so Swiss people tried all sorts
of forms of punishment. And then they got their
first female president, a really incredible woman
named Ruth Dreyfus. It's one of my favorite.
She's my candidate for president of the world.
And Ruth looked at the science, and she'd been
health minister before, so she knew a lot about
this. And Ruth explained to Swiss people, when
you hear the word legalization, What you picture
is like anarchy and chaos. What we have now,
she said, is anarchy and chaos. That's what prohibition
is. Prohibition means unknown dealers selling
unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the
dark, all filled with violence and disease and
chaos. Legalization, she said, is the way we
restore order to this chaos. So like I say, obviously
it's not, she wasn't proposing that you just
go and openly buy heroin from a store in a supermarket
or anything. The way it works is if you've got
a heroin problem, there's all sorts of options
for you. But one of them is that you can be assigned
to a clinic. I spent a lot of time in the one
in Geneva. You go to that clinic, you go there
at seven o 'clock in the morning because Swiss
people believe in doing things insanely early.
And you turn up. You're given your heroin. It's
medically pure heroin. They don't charge you
anything for it. You can't take it out with you,
partly because they don't want you to resell
it on the streets and partly because they want
to check you're okay when you use it. You use
it there. You inject yourself with the needle
they give you, or a nurse can inject you if you
want. One of the interesting things is they will
give you any dose you want, apart from one that
would kill you. There is never any pressure to
cut back. And then you leave and you go to your
job. Because you're given loads of support and
help to get housing, you're given a lot of therapy,
and you're given a lot of support to find a job.
And by the time I went to Switzerland, this program
had been in place for 14 years. And in that time,
according to Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen, who's
the leading expert on this, there have been zero
heroin overdose deaths. on the legal programme.
That's zero, that's nobody. That's more people
have died in the United States of heroin overdoses
by significant amounts since I started talking
to you than have died in all those years, at
that time 14 years. There had been an enormous
fall in street crime. There was some heroin use
outside the legal programme, but that massively
fell because who wants to buy expensive, shitty
street heroin when you can get... free, medically
pure heroin from the government. But to me, the
most surprising thing about this, well, there
were loads of surprising things. Ruth, the former
president, lives opposite this clinic. I think
that tells you something. There's so many interesting
things. I mean, and Switzerland had a referendum
on this. Switzerland is a very conservative country.
I mean, my Swiss relatives make Donald Trump
look like AOC. And yet... 70 % of Swiss people
voted to keep heroin legal. Not because they're
so compassionate, they're not. It's just that
it's so much cheaper and it massively reduces
crime, right? But to me, the most interesting
thing, it's so embarrassing to say because it
shows how little I understood the problem, was
exactly that thing about they'll give you any
dose you want, right? Well, they'll give you
one that will kill you, but any dose. And there's
never any pressure to cut back. And yet, when
I went there, There was almost nobody who'd been
on the program, who was still in the prescription
program, who'd been on it from the start. And
I remember saying to Rita Mangi, the psychiatrist
who ran the program, well, how can that be? Because
we're told these drugs take you over, you need
more and more of them. If you had a free infinite
supply, why would you ever stop? And she looked
at me like I was stupid and she said, well, we
help them. And as their lives get better, they
don't want to be anesthetized so much, which
is kind of painfully obvious once it's explained
to you. But, you know, so, yeah, that's a model
of legalization that's not open sale, you know,
regulated open sale. And I think what we need
to do, we basically had an experiment for 100
years in the entire world. having one option,
which is ban everything, transfer it to criminal
gangs, imprison the users and addicts. Now we
need to have experiments with the alternatives.
And maybe some of the experiments won't work,
right? We'll have to wait and see. But we should
have experiments with all sorts of alternatives,
different models of legal regulation, legal regulated
use. So for some people, that'll be, you know,
not -for -profit cannabis clubs like in Spain.
Some places that will be commercial cannabis
sales. Some places that will be licensed ecstasy
sales. Some places that will be prescription
heroin. Some people in Australia want to experiment
with a prescription form of meth. We need all
sorts of different experiments and then we'll
see. Some of them will work, some of them won't.
It's hard to imagine it will be worse than what
we have now. But if it is, we'll go back. So
far, everywhere that has experimented with the
alternatives, has found that it's been an improvement
and doesn't want to go back which is not to say
it's perfect it's not right but it's a really
significant improvement yeah well then that's
the thing is that other countries have done that
experiment for the rest of the world you know
so it's it's it's happened and people are you
know the cultures aren't the same well no it's
not apples to apples exactly but like you said
you know it's going to be an improvement and
the problem is everyone thinks like you know
Black and white are the only two solutions. Well,
say you shift that needle three quarters of the
way the other way. That is a huge win. In statistics,
that's, you know, in political races, that's
a landslide. But you don't want to try it because
you think that you're, you know, the people in
America are so, so different than the Swiss people
or the Portuguese people. We're all just people
fundamentally. And yes, there are different cultural
things. And we have, you know, such a high level
of crime. illegal, illicit drug use here at the
moment, that, of course, the slope might be a
little less steep than some of these smaller
countries. But the other way, as you said, hasn't
worked. And right now, it's costing us a fortune.
Our first responders are dying. Our citizens
are dying. The prisons are expanding and expanding
and expanding. What have we got to lose? Absolutely
nothing. I think you're right. I would also say...
The US is in a much more advantageous place to
do this than Portugal. Portugal had a worse drug
problem than the United States has at the moment
when it did this. And Portugal is a much poorer
country than the United States, much poorer.
You know, Portugal would be almost the poorest
state in the Union. So, you know, it's not like
Portugal, I mean, Switzerland is a very wealthy
and prosperous society, but Portugal isn't, Uruguay
isn't, you know, there's plenty of places that
have... transitioned away from the drug war that
had less resources than the United States. And
bigger problems. So this idea that the US couldn't
do it for cultural reasons is bullshit. And by
the way, the US used to do it relatively recently.
Most of the existence of the United States, most
of the drugs that are currently banned were legal,
right? And they didn't have worse problems than
they had now. In fact, they had significantly
smaller problems than they have now. That's not...
Only because of the drug war, obviously, there's
all sorts of other changes that have happened.
But I think you're right that the need for it
now is greater than it has, or the need for a
changed drug policy is greater than it's ever
been. Yeah, well, you mentioned the opioid crisis.
I had Sam Quinones, who wrote Dreamland, and,
you know, kind of focusing on the pill mills,
which my state here, I'm actually in Florida
now. The Broward County area of South Florida
was the absolute hub for a lot of those pill
mills. So you had all these Americans, these,
you know, like not people living on the street,
not gangbangers, but actually working people
that were now getting addicted. Then the pill
mills were closed down. Now they're turning to
black tar heroin, which I know that route was
certainly what killed some of my friends that
I lost. Tell me about your perspective on the
opioid crisis. So I like Sam Quinones. I think
he's a good writer. But I think what he wrote
about this is missing a really big part of the
picture. And I'm quite worried about the story
people have been told about the opioid crisis.
Because if you have a story that's too simplistic,
you seek solutions that are too simplistic. So
I think it's worth stepping back a bit. We were
talking before about chemical hooks. Chemical
hooks are real. They're just a small part of
addiction. There's lots of reasons scientists
have shown this, but I'll give you just an example
that everyone will get. So there's an experiment
in chemical hooks that actually some of your
listeners will be taking part in right now. So
people know, scientists know, it's been proven
that if you smoke a lot, the chemical hook that
you become addicted to and physically crave is
nicotine. I think about this a lot because my
mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. There's a
photograph of me and her when I'm six months
old where she's breastfeeding me, smoking and
resting the ashtray on my stomach. When I found
this photo about a couple of years ago, I showed
it to her. I thought she'd be really guilty.
She said, you are a fucking difficult baby. I
needed that cigarette. No wonder you live with
your grandma. So the chemical hook that my mother
would crave if she ever stopped smoking, but
she never would, would be nicotine, right? So
in the late 1980s, nicotine patches were invented.
And there's this huge wave of optimism because
they thought addiction to cigarettes is addiction
to the chemical hook nicotine. Well, nicotine
patches give you all of the nicotine that you
physically crave with none of this awful carcinogenic
smoke. Great, people are going to stop smoking.
And nicotine patches became commercially available.
And what happened? Some people did stop smoking.
The US Surgeon General's report, a major investigation
into nicotine patches, found that 17 % of people,
one 7%, 17 % of highly motivated smokers, given
nicotine patches, stop. That ain't nothing, right?
17 % of people is a lot of people. You map that
across the US population. That saved a very large
number of people's lives. But 17 % is an enormous
way from 100%. Something else is going on for
that other 83 % that isn't just a craving for
the chemical hook, right? And let's remind people
there's a broad agreement that nicotine is the
most powerful chemical hook out there, right?
So now let's think about opioid addiction. dominant
story that has been told to people about the
opioid crisis is this. It's not totally wrong.
It's just way too limited. Basically, a group
of evil drug dealers came along, who in this
case happened to be the Sackler family and the
other big pharma companies. And they gave people
this uniquely powerful drug, and it took them
over, and they had this desperate craving for
the chemical hooks. And that's what their addiction
is. Right. That it came from exposure to the
chemical hooks. Now, the chemical hooks in prescription
opioids are real and you will experience physical
withdrawal if you use them for a while and stop.
And that's not to be underestimated. It's a real
phenomenon. But it's way too simplistic. Firstly,
the vast majority of people who use prescription
opioids do not become addicted. And crucially,
where are the addictions happening? Right. People
on the faculty of Harvard are much more likely
to be able to, well, as a fact, have much easier
access to prescription opioids than any other
part of the population because they have extremely
good health care, right? Extremely good health
plans. Addiction to prescription opioids is very
low on the faculty of Harvard. Might be some,
but it's very low. People in West Virginia. have
very poor medical coverage compared to the rest
of the country, certainly compared to the faculty
at Harvard, and they have amongst the highest
levels of opioid addiction in the country, indeed
in the world, right? If it was just about ease
of access and exposure, that would make no sense.
So what's going on in West Virginia that's not
going on in the faculty of Harvard, right? You
don't have to spend long in West Virginia or
Monadnock in New Hampshire, one of the other
epicenters of the opioid crisis where I spent
some time to see the answer, right? Through no
thought of their own, the people of Monadnock,
the people of West Virginia have been stripped
of the things that make life worth living, right?
Just like everyone has physical needs. for food,
for water, for shelter. Everyone has psychological
needs. You need to have meaningful work. You
need to have a secure future. You need to have
community. You need to feel that other people
see you and value you. And the people of West
Virginia have been humiliated and stripped of
the things that gave them status and meaning,
right? The industries that they worked in, the
whole society they knew has been pulled away
from them. You know, there's a very good study
that showed when a factory closes down, opioid
addictions double in the period after. And if
that was just due to the chemical hooks in the
drug, that would make no sense. But when we understand
the lesson of Rat Park, it makes perfect sense.
The people who've done the best research on this
are professors Angus Dayton and Anne Kay, so
you should totally interview, who call these
deaths of despair, right? Opioid overdose deaths
are at their highest, where non -opioid -based
suicides are highest, where chemical antidepressant
prescriptions are highest. Why would that be,
right? Why would that be an extraordinary coincidence
if those things had no bearing on this, right?
If you strip people of the things that make life
worth living, lots of them will seek to anaesthetise
themselves. If you want to understand why people
are... If you want to understand why people are
taking so many painkillers, you've got to understand
why they're in so much pain. And to tell a simplistic
story, go right back to where we started with
the obesity, right? The sexually abused people
who... who become obese to protect themselves,
right? Dr. Felitti, who did that experiment,
said to me, he realized it's like there's a fire
inside these people and we've been focusing on
the smoke. And I think that analogy works quite
well for the opioid crisis, right? Now, that
is not to dispute that big pharmaceutical companies
behaved appallingly. They lied about these drugs.
They massively understood what they ate. lied
about the risks, which are very real. They created
enormous commercial incentives for doctors to
over -prescribe these drugs. I despise the Sackler
family and the companies that did this. I hope
they lose their fortunes and die in prison. There's
not a moment of apology for these people from
me. But... To say that they are the sole or primary
reason for the opioid crisis is as fatuous as
Nancy Reagan blaming the crack epidemic on crack
dealers. It's way too simplistic a way of thinking
about what's going on. You know, this is a difficult
thing to say, and I don't want to be misunderstood,
but Marianne Faithfull, the great British singer,
who went, annoyingly, she's most famous for having
gone out with Mick Jagger, but I think she's...
Much better than Mick Jagger. She had a heroin
addiction in the late 60s. She was homeless.
She had heroin addiction. And in her memoir,
she says something like, heroin saved my life
because at that point, if it hadn't been for
heroin, I would have killed myself, right? It's
a very challenging thing to say. Marianne Faithfull
is not saying heroin is a good solution to despair,
right? No one thinks that. The truth is these
opioids, people are turning to them because they're
in profound pain, deep, deep pain. And we've
got to understand that pain and deal with that
pain, the underlying causes of that pain. And
if we just pathologize the behavior, it would
be like thinking. I mean, this is this analogy
is going too far, but it would be somewhere in
the direction of thinking that if someone's got
an obsessive compulsive disorder with turning
light switches on and off, the main problem is
with the light switch. It's a misunderstanding
of the origin of the problem. The origin of the
problem is the despair. But what we've done is
we tell such a stigmatized story about depression.
I've heard so many people do this that we, you
know, it's like saying, oh, I got accidentally
hooked. It's a socially acceptable story to tell
about your addiction. Saying I was in a lot of
pain and so I chose to anaesthetise my pain with
the best thing I can find is not a socially acceptable
story, right? Then you're an addict, you put
it on yourself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
all the ugly things that people say. We've got
to have a much more sophisticated understanding
of this problem because if you tell the story,
and I don't want to be unfair to Sam Kanones
because there's a bit more complexity in his
story than that, but if you tell the story, It's
just the evil drug dealers. It's just the pharmaceutical
companies. Well, then the logical solution is
let's shut down what these evil drug companies
have done. Well, what happens when we do that?
We know what happens. I interviewed a guy called
Dr. Hal Voss, who's a doctor in Oklahoma. What
happens if I've got an addiction to OxyContin
because my life is terrible, I'm in profound
psychological distress, and then my doctor cuts
me off because he figures that it's because I've
got an addiction problem? What happens to me?
My life doesn't suddenly get better, right? Because
the drug was my way of trying to treat the problem.
Not a good way, to be sure, but it was my way
of trying to treat the problem. Either I just
then face my agony without any anesthetics, which
is horrendous, or more likely I seek out the
only anesthetic I can buy, which is on the street,
because street oxy is very expensive, at least
as I can explain if you want. Mostly I'll go
and buy street heroin. Right? Which is significantly
more dangerous than OxyContin. Not that there
aren't dangers of OxyContin, because there are.
So a solution that tells people the problem was
just the provision of these drugs will lead to,
logically, a solution, well, let's take the drugs
away. But there is some argument for being cautious
about the initial prescription. I'm in favour
of that. These drugs were overprescribed. By
the way... Almost all drugs are prescribed in
the United States, but that's a separate debate.
But that's not the answer. The answer is Portugal.
The answer is Switzerland. The answer is help
people, right? Help them to turn their lives
around. Just taking away the drug but giving
them no help to turn their lives around is going
to produce a lot of suicide, a lot of despair,
and a lot of heroin, transition to heroin addiction.
Yeah. And I think the analogy to kind of compare
that to is alcohol. Obviously, alcohol is legal,
which is great. But the average person listening,
how many times do you lean on having a drink?
You had a rough day, whatever it is, but you
can easily access it. There's no stigma around
it. You blow off steam with your whiskey or whatever
it is you do, but then you go about your day.
And the other thing with alcohol is it's almost
impossible to kill yourself unless you drown
on your own vomit because you pass out before
you can consume too much. That, again, is also
an underlying mental health thing. I think one
of the biggest elephants in the room in first
responders is alcoholism because it's accepted.
When we go to funerals, we drink. When we go
to celebrations, we drink. It's kind of like
a crafty... unhealthy coping mechanism because
we've allowed it. We've applauded it. But then
there are also men and women that behind that
seemingly social drinking are people that are
really, really hurting. And one of my close friends
who is a firefighter here in Central Florida,
the last time I saw him, he was absolutely in
crisis. He was about to go to a rehab facility
for the third time. And he looked me in the eyes
and said, James, if this doesn't work. It's over,
meaning he was going to take his own life. And
that wasn't opiates. That wasn't any of the illegal
street drugs. That was alcohol. Now, thank God,
the mental trauma that he had gone through, he
found the right combination of a good tribe within
this facility, good counselors that connected
with him. And now he's over a year sober running
a CrossFit facility for people that are either
in addiction or recovering from addiction. So
it's very well to point our fingers at addicts
of illicit drugs, but you also need to look in
the mirror and ask yourself, well, do you use
alcohol as a coping mechanism? Is that the alcohol
or is it because you've seen some horrible things?
You went through some things when you're younger.
You're going through a divorce. You're overworked.
And then flip it around to look at the effects
of your life on your own mental health and what
do you lean on to cope with that? Totally. But
I think what you're saying is totally true and
completely great. Johan, you've been so generous
with your time, but I want to shift to some closing
questions. I know it's getting very late there
in the UK now. Let's talk about the book. So
the first book on addiction is Chasing the Scream.
The more recent one, Lost Connections. Tell people
where they can find those and if you want a little
background behind each one as well. Yeah, if
you go to www .johann. H -A -R -I dot com. That's
me, Johan Hari dot com. You can see about both
my books. So Lost Connections is about what's
causing our epidemic of depression and anxiety
and what we can do about it. And Chasing the
Scream is the book we've mostly been talking
about, which is about addiction and the drug
war. And if you, since people have quite a lot
of time at the moment, shut at home. On the websites
for both of those books, you can hear interviews
for free with loads of the people we've been
talking about. You can take quizzes to see how
much you know about addiction, depression and
the drug war. And you can see where to get the
audio book, e -book or physical book. It's funny,
I was on a podcast a while back and at the end
they said, you know, what's your social media?
And I should say, anyone who wants to find my
social media, you can see where to on that website.
But they said, you know, what's your social media?
What's your Facebook? And I gave it. And they
said, what's your Twitter? And I gave it. And
they said, what's your Snapchat and TikTok? And
I was like, I am a 41 -year -old man. Only 41
-year -old men on TikTok must certainly be pedophiles,
right? I'm like, what do you take me for? No,
I don't have them. Anyway, yeah, so that's where
you can find information about all those things.
Brilliant. Yeah, I think for me, Instagram is
the only one I've had much luck with. I know
Twitter, is that your main handle for you? Yeah,
although I take long breaks because it's such
a poison. Yeah, well, it's funny. That's the
one thing people don't think about with addiction,
but I think social media is definitely up there
with alcohol and opiates. Yeah, totally. Right,
well then, so the... Last question I have for
you because I want to let you go and we found
out where people can find you. What do you do
to decompress? You're doing a lot of writing.
Obviously, you're doing a lot of speaking as
well with interviews. But when you want to blow
off steam, what's your outlets? I'm very bad
at relaxing. I always have been because I grew
up in quite a violent and chaotic environment.
The way I dealt with that, even from when I was
quite a young child, is I would read and write
all the time or watch television. I love television
even now. So I'm quite bad at decompressing.
Until COVID -19 happened, I was in a really nice,
blooming romance. I haven't been able to see
him since all this began. So that helps. I don't
have a huge division between the things that
I like doing and the things that relax me. Watch
lots of movies. I watch lots of television. I
read loads of novels. I read loads of books.
But then those are sort of half work related
anyway. So if people want a tip, I'm watching,
actually, thanks for having me relax in the last
couple of weeks. I'm watching an absolutely brilliant
British TV show that I never, for some reason
I missed the first time it was on. It's called
Ashes to Ashes. Have you ever seen it, James?
I haven't, no. Ashes to Ashes, especially I think
people in your profession would like it. Ashes
to Ashes is a really funny, brilliant TV show.
So it's about a hostage negotiator in 1998 in
Britain who is shot and she wakes up in an 80s
cop show, which is a character in an 80s cop
show, like a kind of like quiet, sexist 80s cop
show. And she realises that this is what her,
she begins to think this is what her subconscious
mind is creating as she's lying there bleeding
and she's got to fight within this 80s cop show
to stay alive. And it's really original. It's
not like profound or anything, but it's just
really a funny, pleasurable, just X, I'm sure
it's on Amazon Prime and places like iTunes.
For someone like, I think you're about the same
age as me, aren't you? I'm 41. Yeah, I'm older.
I'm 46. Ah, well, you're a little good for it.
I'm 41, so for people who grew up in the 80s,
it's a real nostalgia kick as well. So I really
recommend that TV series. It's absolutely brilliant.
And the central actress, Keely Hawes, who's in
the British shows The Bodyguard and Line of Duty,
she is completely brilliant in that show. Brilliant.
Actually, I did watch The Bodyguard. We did have
access to that over here. That was a good show.
I'm just ashamed they cancelled it. She's the
politician in that show. She's the kind of politician
who gets... Oh, I'm about to give a spoiler alert.
She's the one who's protecting. Yeah, exactly.
She's the one who the hot guy from Game of Thrones
is protecting. Exactly. Yeah, she's in that.
She's so good in this. She's so good. I love
that show. Brilliant. Well, I have to put that
on the list then. Thank you. All right. Well,
I'm going to let you go. I sincerely appreciate
you taking the time. When I read the books and
then started listening to you on podcasts, you
know, especially when I realized that we both
met João, the stars aligned. I'm like, this...
This information has to get out to people in
general, but especially the people on the streets,
the firefighters, the medics, the police officers,
to get us to start questioning what we're doing.
And I would love to get with you again. There's
so much more that we haven't even touched on.
I would love to say to your listeners as well,
I know at the moment it must be quite frustrating
in a way to have people say to you at a time
when you're not being given the protective equipment
that you need and deserve. there must be something
i think quite maddening about having people say
you know we so admire your courage and the bravery
of what you're doing because i can imagine my
response would be right thanks for the thanks
for the admiration but give me the protective
equipment right but i i just want everyone listening
to know like it takes a very special kind of
person to run towards danger to risk your body
and your life and your health to protect other
people and especially in the middle of this terrible
crisis you know our governments might be failing
you but ordinary people are cheering you on and
are in real I mean my mother was a nurse my sister
was a nurse ordinary people are in such awe of
what you're doing and and the the bravery of
you guys carrying on in in circumstances like
this so just i'm just and i know i speak for
almost everyone when i just say i'm really really
grateful for what you're for what you're doing
and thank you well thank you i think this is
a great time for us to to look at the nation's
health and i think the mental health needs to
be in that that whole discussion that we're talking
about. And the way you make a nation safer, whether
it's drug addiction or whether it's a virus that
comes around, is having resilient men and women.
And the more that we support groups like the
NHS again and fund these facilities and obviously
the first responders. And then encourage good
nutrition and good fitness and the counseling
environment than the healthier men and women
we're going to have in all the countries of people
listening from now. And hopefully we can bring
solutions to the problems. And that's absolutely
what you're doing. So I thank you back again.
Well, yeah, I'm doing like about one millionth
of what you guys are doing. But thank you so
much. And I really enjoyed this conversation.
Let's do it again. Come to Vegas.