March 20, 2023 • 5 mins
Johann Hari tells Clayton and Greg how Portugal kicked its heroin habit.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Clayton English and I'm Greg Glad and this is
a War on drugs quick fix. All right, Clayton, what's
going on? Man? What's up? Man? We got another quick
fix for the people. We do have another quick fix
for the people, and this one is kind of a
follow up after our Johan Harry episode. Amazing Guests really
(00:21):
got into kind of the nitty gritty how this all started,
where the incentives lie, Like really the groundwork of the
war on drugs that we're still fighting over one hundred
years later in this country, right, the basis from which
it was founded, and it's h is a real shaky foundation.
You know. We did kind of harp on a lot
of the problems. But one of the great things about
(00:42):
I love Johan's book because it does get into what
actually works, what can work, and like where has it worked,
and so he really gets into a lot of actual
solutions to these problems when everyone's like, yeah, what do
you do about you know, people struggling with the addiction
or the opioid epidemic or all this crime that comes
from there. And that's one thing about the Johan episode.
(01:04):
It was great because he gave so much information in solutions,
and it was just so much that he gave us
we couldn't even put it all in one episode. So
that's why we have these quick fixes. And here's more
with Johan hard Am. I saying his name right, and
I want to mess up people's name. Okay, yeah, all right.
(01:28):
So people are going to hear this, and they hear
the problems, but let us know what solutions look like.
One of the things that's so exciting about this, Clayton,
is that are incredibly good solutions and we could move
to them really quickly, and I went to places that
have done it. So in the year two thousand, Portugal
had one of the worst drug problems in the world.
(01:50):
One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which
is staggering. It's a significantly worse situation than in the
US at the moment. And every year they tried the
American way more, they arrested more people, they imprisoned more people,
they shamed more people, and every year the problem got worse,
until finally the leader of the opposition and the Prime
minister got together and they were like, look, we can't
(02:11):
carry on like this with ever more people being addicted
to heroin. What are we going to do? So they
decided to do something really radical, something no one had
done since Harry Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
They said, shall we ask some scientists what we should do?
So they looked at all the evidence, they looked at
rat Park. They took two years, they really did a
(02:31):
deep dive into this, and they came back and they said, Okay,
here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize
all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot. But
and this is the crucial next step, we're going to
take all the money we currently spend unscrewing people's lives up,
arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to
(02:52):
spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.
The main thing they did was a huge program of reconnection.
But people with addiction problems say, you used to be
a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say,
if you employ this guy for a year, will pay
half his wages. They spent most of that stuff on
helping get people into work and on getting people housing,
(03:12):
and the results were very clear. The best research on
This was done by the British Journal of Criminology. They
found addiction felled by more than fifty percent, overdose rates
felled by more than eighty percent, HIV transmission among drug
users felled by ninety percent, massive fall in street crime, prostitution,
and one of the ways you know it worked really well.
(03:35):
It's hardly anyone in Portugal wants to go back. And
this is something I saw all over the world. When
you propose going beyond the war on drugs, it's hugely controversial, right,
people think it's crazy, and then people see it in
practice and it's not perfect. They still got some problems
in Portugal, to be sure, but there's such a drastic
improvement the support becomes extremely high. And this is what's
(04:01):
so encouraging and maddening, is that the alternatives work. Right.
If you treat people with addiction problems with love and compassion,
and you give them very practical help, targeted help to
change their lives that are loving and compassionate, you maximize
your chances of them having a good life and not
causing problems for the society. And if you just beat
(04:23):
the shit out of them in the way that our
systems do, you increase the chances of them having a
terrible life or dying and causing problems for the rest
of the society. Sometimes we say, oh, it doesn't work. Well,
that's true, but that's way understating how done. What we're
doing is. It's not that it doesn't work, is that
it makes the problem worse. Right right, I'm Greg Glad
(04:45):
and I'm Clayton English and this has been a war
on drugs Quick Fix, Thanks for listening.
I'm Clayton English and I'm Greg Glad and this is
a War on drugs quick fix. All right, Clayton, what's
going on? Man? What's up? Man? We got another quick
fix for the people. We do have another quick fix
for the people, and this one is kind of a
follow up after our Johan Harry episode. Amazing Guests really
(00:21):
got into kind of the nitty gritty how this all started,
where the incentives lie, Like really the groundwork of the
war on drugs that we're still fighting over one hundred
years later in this country, right, the basis from which
it was founded, and it's h is a real shaky foundation.
You know. We did kind of harp on a lot
of the problems. But one of the great things about
(00:42):
I love Johan's book because it does get into what
actually works, what can work, and like where has it worked,
and so he really gets into a lot of actual
solutions to these problems when everyone's like, yeah, what do
you do about you know, people struggling with the addiction
or the opioid epidemic or all this crime that comes
from there. And that's one thing about the Johan episode.
(01:04):
It was great because he gave so much information in solutions,
and it was just so much that he gave us
we couldn't even put it all in one episode. So
that's why we have these quick fixes. And here's more
with Johan hard Am. I saying his name right, and
I want to mess up people's name. Okay, yeah, all right.
(01:28):
So people are going to hear this, and they hear
the problems, but let us know what solutions look like.
One of the things that's so exciting about this, Clayton,
is that are incredibly good solutions and we could move
to them really quickly, and I went to places that
have done it. So in the year two thousand, Portugal
had one of the worst drug problems in the world.
(01:50):
One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which
is staggering. It's a significantly worse situation than in the
US at the moment. And every year they tried the
American way more, they arrested more people, they imprisoned more people,
they shamed more people, and every year the problem got worse,
until finally the leader of the opposition and the Prime
minister got together and they were like, look, we can't
(02:11):
carry on like this with ever more people being addicted
to heroin. What are we going to do? So they
decided to do something really radical, something no one had
done since Harry Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
They said, shall we ask some scientists what we should do?
So they looked at all the evidence, they looked at
rat Park. They took two years, they really did a
(02:31):
deep dive into this, and they came back and they said, Okay,
here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize
all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot. But
and this is the crucial next step, we're going to
take all the money we currently spend unscrewing people's lives up,
arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to
(02:52):
spend all that money instead on turning their lives around.
The main thing they did was a huge program of reconnection.
But people with addiction problems say, you used to be
a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say,
if you employ this guy for a year, will pay
half his wages. They spent most of that stuff on
helping get people into work and on getting people housing,
(03:12):
and the results were very clear. The best research on
This was done by the British Journal of Criminology. They
found addiction felled by more than fifty percent, overdose rates
felled by more than eighty percent, HIV transmission among drug
users felled by ninety percent, massive fall in street crime, prostitution,
and one of the ways you know it worked really well.
(03:35):
It's hardly anyone in Portugal wants to go back. And
this is something I saw all over the world. When
you propose going beyond the war on drugs, it's hugely controversial, right,
people think it's crazy, and then people see it in
practice and it's not perfect. They still got some problems
in Portugal, to be sure, but there's such a drastic
improvement the support becomes extremely high. And this is what's
(04:01):
so encouraging and maddening, is that the alternatives work. Right.
If you treat people with addiction problems with love and compassion,
and you give them very practical help, targeted help to
change their lives that are loving and compassionate, you maximize
your chances of them having a good life and not
causing problems for the society. And if you just beat
(04:23):
the shit out of them in the way that our
systems do, you increase the chances of them having a
terrible life or dying and causing problems for the rest
of the society. Sometimes we say, oh, it doesn't work. Well,
that's true, but that's way understating how done. What we're
doing is. It's not that it doesn't work, is that
it makes the problem worse. Right right, I'm Greg Glad
(04:45):
and I'm Clayton English and this has been a war
on drugs Quick Fix, Thanks for listening.
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