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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week,
Speaker 5: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good evening, Good evening, Hi Dan,
Speaker 5: how are you doing?
Speaker 4: Good evening, Johanna. Thank you for agreeing to this interview,
Speaker 4: to this interview now, thank you for doing it.
Speaker 6: I really appreciate that. Would it be better to have
Speaker 6: spoken on headphones?
Speaker 4: I think you should. Maybe you have speakers on. We're
Speaker 4: having an echo here, an echo here.
Speaker 6: I'll hang on. Let me see if I hang on
Speaker 6: a second, if I my headphones on it MN stop.
Speaker 5: How about now?
Speaker 6: Have you got that postill?
Speaker 4: That sounds great?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 4: Let me just do the introduction and we normally do.
Speaker 4: I want to just mention that this episode of True
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Speaker 4: Thank you agree to this interview, Johann, Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: I just want to do the synopsis of the book
Speaker 4: as we normally I normally do.
Speaker 6: Sure. Let me just America who can say my name
Speaker 6: correctly as well?
Speaker 4: Okay, Johan, it's Johann Hari.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're a very rare perston who gets it right
Speaker 6: first time.
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you. Let me just introduce this incredible book.
Speaker 4: It is now one hundred years since drugs were first
Speaker 4: banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary,
Speaker 4: journalist Johann Hari sot Off on an epic three year,
Speaker 4: thirty thousand mile journey into the War on drugs. What
Speaker 4: he found is that more and more people all over
Speaker 4: the world have begun to recognize three startling truths. Drugs
Speaker 4: are not what we think they are. Addiction, is not
Speaker 4: what we think it is, and the drug war has
Speaker 4: very different motives to the ones we have seen on
Speaker 4: our t television screens for so long. In Chasing the Scream,
Speaker 4: Harry reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people
Speaker 4: across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war.
Speaker 4: They range from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching
Speaker 4: for her mother, to a teenage hit man in Mexico
Speaker 4: searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovered
Speaker 4: that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday
Speaker 4: was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade,
Speaker 4: and ends with the story of a brave doctor who
Speaker 4: has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis
Speaker 4: to crack with remarkable results. Chasing the Scream lays bare
Speaker 4: what we really have been chasing in our century of
Speaker 4: drug war, in our hunger for drugs and in our
Speaker 4: attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change
Speaker 4: how you think about one of the most controversial and
Speaker 4: consequential questions of our time. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 4: this evening is Chasing the Scream. The first and last
Speaker 4: days of the War on Drugs with my special guest
Speaker 4: journalist and author Johann Hari. Thank you for agreeing to
Speaker 4: this interview, and let's get right into this incredible book.
Speaker 6: Great, thank you.
Speaker 4: Now, Johanna. In two thousand and two, you announced on
Speaker 4: your website that you were going to write your very
Speaker 4: first book about the War on drugs. Please tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit about your professional journalism background, and because
Speaker 4: I do know that this was not the first time
Speaker 4: that you wrote about the War on drugs in your journalism,
Speaker 4: so tell us about your professional background before that so
Speaker 4: that we can have an adequate background as to how
Speaker 4: you came to this to write this incredible book.
Speaker 6: Well, it was twenty twelve I put it in, not
Speaker 6: two thousand and two. But it's really interesting because I mean,
Speaker 6: sorry enough, for many years I've been a newspaper columnist,
Speaker 6: and I'd written about the War on drugs, and I'd
Speaker 6: written about it in what I think of as quite
Speaker 6: a polemical way. I would argue about why we should
Speaker 6: change the policy we had. And I wasn't really interested
Speaker 6: in writing a book like that for lots of reasons. Really,
Speaker 6: one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake
Speaker 6: up one of my relatives and not being able to
Speaker 6: and as I got older, realizing we had addiction in
Speaker 6: my family, and then other relatives becoming quite serious addicts.
Speaker 6: And I guess when I realized the centenary was coming up,
Speaker 6: as you said, from reading the instruction, I just realized
Speaker 6: there was so many basic questions I didn't understand about
Speaker 6: this question, like why were drugs banned in the first place,
Speaker 6: Why do we continue with this strategy of punishing drug
Speaker 6: users and addicts, What do the alternatives really look like?
Speaker 6: And what really causes drug use and drug addiction? And
Speaker 6: I kind of was realizing that in a way, I
Speaker 6: didn't think I was going to get the answers to
Speaker 6: those questions by arguing with people, by looking for arguments.
Speaker 6: What I wanted to do was go and sit with
Speaker 6: people whose lives have been changed by this approach one
Speaker 6: way or another, and a kind of crazy mixture of people.
Speaker 6: It turned out to be over the kind of three
Speaker 6: and a half years I was doing the research and
Speaker 6: writing the book, and I kind of felt like I
Speaker 6: was going to find the answers not by arguing, but
Speaker 6: by sitting with people and listening to them and going
Speaker 6: back to them again and again, and just trying to
Speaker 6: see the effects in the real world, not as if
Speaker 6: we're liking some kind of philosophy seminar, but in the
Speaker 6: real world. And I think part of the problem with
Speaker 6: this whole question is so many of the people involved
Speaker 6: in this have been totally dehumanized, you know, whether it's
Speaker 6: drug users, drug dealers, cops. You mentioned that the guy
Speaker 6: I interviewed who was the only person to ever be
Speaker 6: at the heart of the deadliest Mexican drug cartel and
Speaker 6: get out and live to tell his story, albeit he
Speaker 6: lives in a very terrible way. And I kind of
Speaker 6: guess I just wanted to listen to those people and
Speaker 6: tell their stories, their human stories, in the hope that
Speaker 6: the best way to deal with dehumanization is to rehumanize people,
Speaker 6: and the way you rehumanize people is just to tell
Speaker 6: what their lives are like. And I kind of felt
Speaker 6: like if most people I knew could have met Gino,
Speaker 6: the incredible transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn, that I got
Speaker 6: to know the three as former pract dealer, for example,
Speaker 6: or one of the extraordinary former street attic time that
Speaker 6: has started a revolution in Vancouver that completely transformed the city.
Speaker 6: I felt like they wouldn't be able to think about
Speaker 6: the drug war in the same way.
Speaker 4: Now, before we introduce this fascinating cast of characters that
Speaker 4: really clearly demonstrate this story that unfolds in this Chasing
Speaker 4: the Scream, Let's talk about the state of legalization of
Speaker 4: drugs in the world prior to nineteen fourteen, and tell
Speaker 4: us about the Harrison Act and how we are going
Speaker 4: to enter into the one hundred year century of this
Speaker 4: drug war. Tell us about that initiative to criminalize all drugs.
Speaker 6: It's really interesting this, right, it's hard to think about.
Speaker 6: Drugs were legal for almost all of human history, right,
Speaker 6: So nineteen thirteen, if you're an American, you could go
Speaker 6: to a local store and you could buy opiates, you
Speaker 6: could buy cocaine based products. And the way I tell
Speaker 6: the story of how that changed is really through stories
Speaker 6: of two people. One there was a doctor in California
Speaker 6: called Henry Smith Williams who was nobody's idea of a liberal,
Speaker 6: but he treated addicts both before drugs were banned and
Speaker 6: then after. He was not very sympathetic to addicts. It
Speaker 6: wasn't a particularly nice man actually to start it, but
Speaker 6: he noticed something that really struck him. When drugs were legal,
Speaker 6: he had patients who had addiction problems. They were a
Speaker 6: bit like alcoholics today. Their lives were diminished, but most
Speaker 6: of them had jobs, most of them had lives. Most
Speaker 6: of them there were not significant numbers of people dying
Speaker 6: of overdoses. Then drugs were banned for reasons I got
Speaker 6: back to in a minute, which had nothing to do
Speaker 6: with protecting the addicts. And what he noticed is suddenly
Speaker 6: all sorts of problems got dramatically worse. When you bann
Speaker 6: drugs that don't disappear. They're transferred from doctors and pharmacists
Speaker 6: to armed criminal gangs. Those armed criminal gangs will fight
Speaker 6: to control the patch, but more harmfully, even more harmfully
Speaker 6: for the addicts themselves. They massively increased the price. They
Speaker 6: jacked it up by a foul percent, and that meant
Speaker 6: that the addicts who'd previously been able to go to
Speaker 6: the local corner store to get there, to get their
Speaker 6: drugs at the local dime store, had to suddenly pay
Speaker 6: this massively inflated price. A lot of the women became prostitutes,
Speaker 6: a lot of the men started committeeing property crime. Also,
Speaker 6: the drugs started to be massively adulterated because criminals you
Speaker 6: can't set help and say they inspectors in to check
Speaker 6: criminals smuggling, smuggling things across the country. So you saw
Speaker 6: a massive increase in death among addicts. And Harry Smith
Speaker 6: Williams was really struck. The doctor in California was really
Speaker 6: struck by this. He actually started to campaign against the
Speaker 6: drug warm. We forget that this was a massively contested
Speaker 6: thing when it came in. It's not that the drugs
Speaker 6: were banned easily. There was a massive protest all over
Speaker 6: the United States. Twenty thousand doctors had to be rounded
Speaker 6: up and arrested in charge because they insisted on carry
Speaker 6: on trying on giving drugs to addicts, because they could
Speaker 6: see what a disaster the drug war was. That the
Speaker 6: mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of the heroin
Speaker 6: prescribing clinic and says, you will not shut this down.
Speaker 6: In he was a popularly elected mayor. So this is
Speaker 6: a massively contested film, and which makes you think, well,
Speaker 6: why we're drugs banned? Then if it caused such a disaster,
Speaker 6: why were they ban And what's fascinating is is completely
Speaker 6: not for the reasons we think of if you'd said
Speaker 6: to me four years ago, why we're drugs banned? I
Speaker 6: would have guessed, well, people would give them the reasons
Speaker 6: that most people would give now. We don't want people
Speaker 6: to become addicted, we don't want kids to use drugs.
Speaker 6: That kind of thing that barely comes up in a debate.
Speaker 6: The debate is overwhelmingly as they saw it, African Americans
Speaker 6: and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs and
Speaker 6: attacking white people. It was a massive race panic. There
Speaker 6: was a belief that African Americans were using cocaine and
Speaker 6: attacking white people all over the South. It is, in
Speaker 6: fact the reason given why many sheriffs increase the caliber
Speaker 6: of the bullets they used is one person said in
Speaker 6: an official statement, the cocaine N word sure is hard
Speaker 6: to kill. This seems really odd the way I tell
Speaker 6: it this is really hard for me to get to
Speaker 6: understand it. So the way I tell it in the
Speaker 6: book is through the story Billy Holliday and how she
Speaker 6: was stalked and basically helped to be killed by the
Speaker 6: guy who launched the drug war, Harry Anslinger. Yeah, in
Speaker 6: nineteen thirty nine, Billy Holliday stands on stage in New
Speaker 6: York City, and she sings the song Strange Fruit, which
Speaker 6: your readers will know, your listeners will know, is a
Speaker 6: song against lynching. And you got to understand how God
Speaker 6: daughter Lorraine Father explained to me. You've got to understand
Speaker 6: how shocking that was. Right, Billy Holliday wasn't allowed to
Speaker 6: walk through the front door of that hotel show, to
Speaker 6: go through the service elevator. She was African American. To
Speaker 6: stand in front of a white audience at a time
Speaker 6: when most songs were like tweet things like PS I
Speaker 6: Love you, and to sing a song about lynching was
Speaker 6: viscerally shocking. And that night, according to Billy's biographer and
Speaker 6: Julia Blackburn, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics says to her
Speaker 6: stop singing this song. The man running at Harry Anslinger,
Speaker 6: I think is the most influential person that no one's
Speaker 6: ever heard of. He basically invented the modern drug war.
Speaker 6: He took over the Department of Olcohol Prohibition just as
Speaker 6: ourcohol prohibition is ending, and he needed to find a
Speaker 6: new cars and picks drugs. And he was driven by
Speaker 6: two really intense things hatreds. One was of addicts in
Speaker 6: the other words of African Americans, and Billy Holiday to
Speaker 6: him with like the symbol of everything that had gone wrong.
Speaker 6: And Billy Holliday because she had grown up at Baltimore
Speaker 6: when it was a divided sixty segregated the city, and
Speaker 6: she had allowed into a lot of stores when she
Speaker 6: was a little girl. She had promised herself when she
Speaker 6: was a little girl, she was never going to bow
Speaker 6: her head to any white man. And she basically said, screwzy,
Speaker 6: I'm going to sing my song. And that's when the
Speaker 6: stalking of her that leads to her death begins.
Speaker 4: Now you talk about you introduce Harry Anslinger, and you
Speaker 4: call Harry Anslinger part of this three characters of drug prohibition.
Speaker 4: If it was a Mount rushmore'd be Harry Anslinger. And
Speaker 4: we'll get to Arnold Rothstein and also Billie Holiday. So
Speaker 4: the title of your book is Chasing the Scream. It's
Speaker 4: very interesting. Tell us about Harry Anslinger in his first
Speaker 4: hatred and fear of addiction. So tell us where this
Speaker 4: title of this book was derived from and that earliest
Speaker 4: compulsion that was born in Harry Anslinger.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's fascinating. When Harry Anslinger was a little boy,
Speaker 6: when he was looked like he was ten or eleven.
Speaker 6: He's grown up in a town called Altoona, a kind
Speaker 6: of rural parent in Pennsylvania. And near where he lived
Speaker 6: there was a farmer and his wife, and the farmer's
Speaker 6: wife had an opiate addiction. And one day Harry Anslinger
Speaker 6: goes to this house and the farmer says, the farmer's
Speaker 6: wife is screaming. And the farmer says, go to the store. Goes,
Speaker 6: take our horse and cart, go to the store, goes
Speaker 6: fast as he can buy the opiates, bring them back
Speaker 6: to us. So Harry Anslinger speeds there. He gets there
Speaker 6: as quick as he can. He comes back, he gives
Speaker 6: the woman the opiates, and the woman calms down and
Speaker 6: she stops screaming. And Harry Anslinger all his life was
Speaker 6: haunted by this memory, and really haunted by his memory
Speaker 6: of that scream. And you know, the tragedy for me
Speaker 6: is in his belief that he was stopping those screams,
Speaker 6: he was actually creating an extraordinarily large number of screams instead.
Speaker 6: The other fascinating thing is another thing that Harry Anslinger
Speaker 6: learned where he was a boy, where he was fritishly prescient,
Speaker 6: actually is he worked on the railroads as a young man.
Speaker 6: He was quite impressive in some ways, and it's from
Speaker 6: a pretty poor background. He insisted on working on the
Speaker 6: railroads and go to school every morning. He and rose
Speaker 6: up and he worked with Italian railroad workers and knew
Speaker 6: that they were terrified at something called the Mafia. And
Speaker 6: this is hard to remember now that the Mafia was
Speaker 6: regarded as a deranged conspiracy theory. Like jae Goehoov denied
Speaker 6: his whole life that the Mafia even existed, it would
Speaker 6: be regarded the way we would regard like a kind
Speaker 6: of a truth or a Bertha or something. And Ansinger
Speaker 6: absolutely assisted on the reality of the mafia. And he
Speaker 6: was one of the first major American lawyenforce of people
Speaker 6: to really prove that the Marfia existed. Now, the great
Speaker 6: tragedy of Harry Ansinger as he believes he's at war
Speaker 6: with the mafia, actually he transferred this whole mess of
Speaker 6: industry to them. He gave the mafia the biggest boast
Speaker 6: they've ever had in America to roll. The drug trade
Speaker 6: is incredibly lucrative trade. So there's a kind of irony
Speaker 6: in that. I mean, Henry Smith Williams, the doctor who
Speaker 6: he destroyed, saw how much the mafia benefits from it,
Speaker 6: and he assumed that Harry Ownslinger must be in the
Speaker 6: pay of the mafia because the mafia were doing so
Speaker 6: well out of of Anslinger's policies. Actually, that was that
Speaker 6: was wrong, and you can understand why hers Smiths and
Speaker 6: Llans brought that.
Speaker 4: Now. It's also when I talked about his first hatred
Speaker 4: in his first fear, and you talked to what you
Speaker 4: touched on really what people think the War on drugs
Speaker 4: really was stemmed from. But really, when we talk about
Speaker 4: Harry and his and his racism towards Mexicans and blacks,
Speaker 4: tell us about how he the catalyst the story that
Speaker 4: really helped him sell this war on drugs involving Mexicano.
Speaker 6: There were lots of stories. I mean one, so he
Speaker 6: had initially said that tannabis was not harmful, not addictive,
Speaker 6: he wasn't bothered about it, but protaine and heroin were
Speaker 6: really very much here in the United States at the time,
Speaker 6: so it's kind of hard to sustain a massive government
Speaker 6: department around this. Harry Anslinger suddenly announces that marijuana is
Speaker 6: worse than heroin. People may have seen the movie refer Madness,
Speaker 6: the kind of which is now regarded as like a
Speaker 6: comedy film. That's that's that's based on Ansling as propaganda.
Speaker 6: He was a big fan of that, and he latched
Speaker 6: into this case of a boy in Florida called Victor Lacater,
Speaker 6: which was a massive story at the time, huge, one
Speaker 6: of the biggest stories in America. Basically, Victor Lacarter was
Speaker 6: a young man in his early twenties, I believe who
Speaker 6: hacked his family to death with an axe and an finger. Announces, right,
Speaker 6: this is the result of him having smoke marijuana. We
Speaker 6: need to ban marijuana, We need to press on. And
Speaker 6: the Hirst Newspapers, which is the kind of Fox News
Speaker 6: of its day, massively runs with this story. Years later,
Speaker 6: as I explaining the point, someone goes back and actually
Speaker 6: looks at this guy's psychiatric fast bit to look, there's
Speaker 6: no evidence he even use marijuana. He had congener troll
Speaker 6: insanity in his family. His family had actually been told
Speaker 6: to put him in a secure unit years before, and
Speaker 6: they insisted on keeping him my home. But the hysteria begins.
Speaker 6: Anslinger is a genius taking the fears that are coursing
Speaker 6: through a society and really getting them to run through
Speaker 6: the kind of lightning conductor of his department. And it's
Speaker 6: using these fears and these hysterias and these largely full
Speaker 6: stories that Anslinger builds the modern drug wall.
Speaker 4: Now Billy Holiday is this other central figure in this,
Speaker 4: And so tell us about Billy Holiday a little bit.
Speaker 4: You talk about it in your book, about her early
Speaker 4: life and why she might have chose drugs as some
Speaker 4: sort of pain soother So tell us about Billy Holiday
Speaker 4: and now Harry Enslinger and her lives collide.
Speaker 6: Well, you're totally right, and it was incredibly moving. I
Speaker 6: tracked down everyone I could find he's still alive, who
Speaker 6: knew Billy Holiday. And I looked at the existing work
Speaker 6: on her as well, and it was so heartbreaking. Billy
Speaker 6: Holiday grew up in a part of Baltimore called Pigtown.
Speaker 6: It's the last part of the United States to not
Speaker 6: have a sewage system. Because she's some sense of what
Speaker 6: it was like. And when she was ten years old
Speaker 6: or eleven maybe I think she was raped and by
Speaker 6: a stranger, and when the police came, they accused her
Speaker 6: of being a prostitute. And the guy who wrote her
Speaker 6: was punished that she was punished for longer. She was
Speaker 6: sent to this reform at Treeby. It would the incredibly
Speaker 6: brutal nuns who locked because she was disobedient, locked her
Speaker 6: overnight with a dead body. She ran away. She ran
Speaker 6: away to Harlem to find her mother. Her mother was
Speaker 6: working in a brothel, and Billy Holder, at the age of fourteen,
Speaker 6: starts working in this brothel, being raped for money alongside
Speaker 6: her mother. When a police captched her again again, she's
Speaker 6: sent to prison. You know, think about the insanity of that,
Speaker 6: and Billy Holiday just needed to stun her grief, I think,
Speaker 6: and when, as I was saying before, you know, when
Speaker 6: the Federal bureaunarcotics start to stalk her, Harry anythink I
Speaker 6: hated employee and African Americans, but you couldn't really send
Speaker 6: a white guy in hard lot to stalk Billy Holliday.
Speaker 6: So he employs this guy called Jimmy Fletcher, who was
Speaker 6: an African American agent, And Jimmy Fletcher spent two years
Speaker 6: following her, and he watches her and he gets to
Speaker 6: know where he dances with her, and because she was
Speaker 6: so amazing, Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her and
Speaker 6: his whole life. He felt ashamed of what he did
Speaker 6: to her. He buss she's pot on trial, she said.
Speaker 6: The trial was called the United States Versus Billy Holliday,
Speaker 6: and that's how it fell. And she sent to prison.
Speaker 6: And when she gets out, she can't perform because you
Speaker 6: needed a license to perform anywhe where alcohol was serves,
Speaker 6: and Anslinger had it denied to her. He also got
Speaker 6: her husband and pimp, a disgusting now called e Liwis Mackay,
Speaker 6: to start informing on her to to Antlinger, and her
Speaker 6: friend Jolanda Beavan said to me, I'm paraphrasing the exact
Speaker 6: words are in the book. That'sthing like, what's the cruelest
Speaker 6: thing you can do to a person is to take
Speaker 6: away the thing they love, and you know, to take
Speaker 6: away singing from Billie Holliday was incredibly cruel. She found.
Speaker 6: She went wherever they would have her, but it was
Speaker 6: very hard, and she relapses. Of course, how could she
Speaker 6: not in that situation when she's in her early forty
Speaker 6: She collapses in New York City and she's taken to hospital.
Speaker 6: The first hospital turns her away, and the second hospital
Speaker 6: takes her and she says to one of her friends
Speaker 6: that the narcotics agents aren't finished with her. She said,
Speaker 6: they're going to kill me in there. Don't let them.
Speaker 6: They're going to kill me in there. And I interviewed
Speaker 6: the last surviving person to be in that room where
Speaker 6: she died. They handcuffed her to the bed. They arrested her,
Speaker 6: even though they knew she had liver cancer. They arrested
Speaker 6: her on her deathbed. They took away all her flowers
Speaker 6: or her record player, didn't let her friends in to
Speaker 6: see her. One of her friends managed that Mainley Dusty
Speaker 6: managed to insist that she was given methadone because she
Speaker 6: got into withdrawal. She started to recover. Then they cut
Speaker 6: off the methadone and she died. One of her friends
Speaker 6: said that she looked like she had been violently wrenched
Speaker 6: from life. But the thing that to me, it really
Speaker 6: helped me to think about this and to think about
Speaker 6: the addicts in my own life. You know, Billy Holliday
Speaker 6: never stopped singing that song. No matter what they did
Speaker 6: to her, she found somewhere to sing it. She would
Speaker 6: go anywhere they'd have her. And to know that addicts
Speaker 6: can be heroes. To know that addicts can be so strong.
Speaker 6: You know, there's the strength of just carrying on when
Speaker 6: you're in terrible pain. And then there's the strength of
Speaker 6: what Billy Holliday did. You know where while we're talking,
Speaker 6: people all over the world are listening to Billie Holiday
Speaker 6: and feeling stronger, and that really happened me. I think
Speaker 6: it also to helps us to that story, helps us
Speaker 6: to understand the madness of what we do to adics.
Speaker 6: You know, I went out with a chain gang in
Speaker 6: Arizona of women who are forced to go out wearing
Speaker 6: T shirts saying I was a drug addicts in Big Graves. Right,
Speaker 6: those women are never going to work again in the
Speaker 6: legal economy. What we do did to Billie Holiday, we're
Speaker 6: doing all over the developed world. We give Alex criminal records,
Speaker 6: which is crazy. Take suffering people and make them suffer more,
Speaker 6: and I hope that will make them stop. But also
Speaker 6: it helps to sound the racial don Alex and the
Speaker 6: drug water. At the same time that Clary Anslader finds
Speaker 6: out that Billie Holidays an addicts, he finds out that
Speaker 6: Judy Garland is a heroin addicts. He tells Judy Garland
Speaker 6: she's going to be fine, that she should take slightly
Speaker 6: longer vacations and reassures this studio that everything's okay. You know,
Speaker 6: spot the difference that racism comes right through to the
Speaker 6: present day. African Americans are non more likely to be
Speaker 6: drug dealers than anyone else, but they make the overwhelming
Speaker 6: majority of people who go to prison for it. You know,
Speaker 6: bost dynamics still at work now.
Speaker 4: Another central figure in this because we talk about that
Speaker 4: incredible consequence of you know, just the attic the user
Speaker 4: being caught up in this drug war, but also what
Speaker 4: do you say the drug war delivers this this incredible
Speaker 4: unregulated market to organize crime. So you talk about organized
Speaker 4: crime back in the beginning of this in nineteen after
Speaker 4: nineteen fourteen, and then you also talk about the Zetas
Speaker 4: in Mexico present day. So let's go back to Arnold
Speaker 4: Rostein and how came.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Anna Rossin is such a fascinating man. If Harry
Speaker 6: Anslinger is the inventor of the modern drug war, Arnold
Speaker 6: Rothstein is the inventor of modern drug dealing. When he
Speaker 6: was three years old, his father, who was a very
Speaker 6: respected Orthodox Jewish trader, walks into the nursery and his
Speaker 6: home and he sees Arnold Rostein, he was three years old,
Speaker 6: standing over his younger brother with a knife, you know,
Speaker 6: like considering attacking him a big kitchen knife. And Anna
Speaker 6: Rostein was always going to be a psycho, right, But
Speaker 6: Arnold Rothstein was handed one of the biggest industries in
Speaker 6: the United States. And it was fascinating me because when
Speaker 6: I was trying to recover the story of you know,
Speaker 6: you can recover the story of Harry Anslinger because he
Speaker 6: kept records. I wanted to talk stories how drug dealing
Speaker 6: was created. But Arna Rothstein, you know, drug dealers don't
Speaker 6: have archives, right. But it really fascinated me because I
Speaker 6: was able to reconstruct it. Partly because Arna Rostin so
Speaker 6: owned the NYPD, he actually would give quite open interviews
Speaker 6: where he talks about what he was doing. And also
Speaker 6: his wife Carolyn wrote a really fascinating memoir that was
Speaker 6: very hard to track down, but once I did find
Speaker 6: it was super interesting. Out of Rostin was an extremely
Speaker 6: cold and arrogant man. He rises through at least time
Speaker 6: when he's seventeen and basically becomes a kind of professional
Speaker 6: gambler that he quite quickly realizes the people who really
Speaker 6: winning gambler and the people who owned the casinos. So
Speaker 6: he sets up these casinos. But what he's a genius
Speaker 6: that initially is rigging vets. So he would bribe jockeys,
Speaker 6: he would bribe horse racing people, and he was probably
Speaker 6: still now most famous for rigging the nineteen nineteen World Series.
Speaker 6: He bribed the I think it was the Boston Red
Speaker 6: Sox to throw the game and made a fortune from that. Now,
Speaker 6: when drugs the band, Arna Rostin is a smart guy.
Speaker 6: He can see a business opportunity when it's coming. He
Speaker 6: knew that alcohol proddition was great, but it wasn't going
Speaker 6: to last forever. And he really latches onto the drug
Speaker 6: trade and he the first one to kind of really
Speaker 6: industrially import drugs and just kind of murder loads of people.
Speaker 6: He buys the police to the point where he's really
Speaker 6: above the law. At one point he actually shoots it
Speaker 6: to NYPD officers and is mysteriously acquitted. My favorite, this
Speaker 6: serious story about Arna Rothstein is he does this drug
Speaker 6: deal with a guy called Captain Alfred Lowenstein, who was
Speaker 6: the third richest man in America, like kind of like
Speaker 6: the Bill Gates was the richest man in the world. Sorry,
Speaker 6: kind of out the Bill Gates of this time. He
Speaker 6: was so rich he was a Sinnanthea that when the
Speaker 6: Germans sees Belgium during World War One, Lowenstein offered to
Speaker 6: buy it back from them, but terms abou how richie was.
Speaker 6: He was a buy Belgium. And it comes to New
Speaker 6: York and with Rothstein he signs the biggest drug deal
Speaker 6: in history, and he flies back to Europe and when
Speaker 6: the plane lands, Lowenstein isn't on it, and the crew say, oh,
Speaker 6: he went to the toilet and fell out. Not seem
Speaker 6: very plausible. Presumably whatever money Arna Roskin got in that
Speaker 6: drug deal she kept gives you a sense of who
Speaker 6: Arna Rostin was. And Asten is killed in nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 6: but we don't know who buys. He's shot one day
Speaker 6: outside of the Park's Central Hotel in Manhattan.
Speaker 5: What is it?
Speaker 6: Fifty seven Broadway, I think, And you know the police
Speaker 6: are basically too scared to investigate. And what's fascinating to
Speaker 6: me is you really see the dynamics of the drug wall.
Speaker 6: You know, there's a writer called Charles Bowden is sad
Speaker 6: they died recently, who's pointed out the war on drugs.
Speaker 6: Creates a war for drugs if you think about it, right,
Speaker 6: if you and me go into the local liquor store
Speaker 6: and the Toronto you know, when you're in a Winnipeg,
Speaker 6: if we go to the liquor store and we try
Speaker 6: to steal the beer or the vodka, they're just gonna
Speaker 6: call the cops, right, and the cops will deal with us.
Speaker 6: If we got up to the local weed dealer or
Speaker 6: the local coke dealer and tried to steal their goods,
Speaker 6: obviously they can't bring the police. The police would arrest them.
Speaker 6: So they have to be violent and they have to
Speaker 6: be terrifying in order to stop people screaming with them.
Speaker 6: They don't have any recourse to the law. So it
Speaker 6: creates what the sociologists polut bourgeois calls a culture of terror.
Speaker 6: And the first person to really see that is Rothstein.
Speaker 6: You have to be terrifying, and you don't want to
Speaker 6: be having shootouts, so you want to be theatrically scary.
Speaker 6: And Rosteine is killed and it'll I think of that
Speaker 6: almost like the you know, like the killing of the
Speaker 6: Archduke third Nan in Sarajevo. It's the first bullet in
Speaker 6: this global war, because what you get then is Arna
Speaker 6: Rossby does not die. Arna Rostin just gets to increasingly
Speaker 6: insane and psychotic versions of Ana Rostine. It's like Darwinian
Speaker 6: evolution armed with a little baggly of crack, because every
Speaker 6: gangster who kills the next one has to be tougher
Speaker 6: and harder than the one before. So Aarna Rostein, I mean,
Speaker 6: wouldn't last two hours in Siodajuarrez, where I went to
Speaker 6: do research in northern Mexico. You see this going up
Speaker 6: through the crypts and the bloods. Pablo Escabad Chapel Busman
Speaker 6: that you have this increasingly insane dynamic where there's an advantage,
Speaker 6: And I really learned that most from the serial killer
Speaker 6: I interviewed Rossalio Reta. I went to a prison in
Speaker 6: Tyler County in Texas to interview him. He grew up
Speaker 6: in Laredo on the border of Basically Laredo is on
Speaker 6: the Texas side in Luevo Laredo is on the Mexican side,
Speaker 6: but they're basically the same city with a border between them,
Speaker 6: the kind of a highly artificial border between them. And
Speaker 6: when he was thirteen, kids used to kind of go
Speaker 6: across the border all the time, because you know, candies
Speaker 6: and sodas were cheaper there. And when he was thirteen,
Speaker 6: in circumstances got are disputed, but no one dispeates it happened.
Speaker 6: He joins the zetas, the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, and
Speaker 6: between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, he kills around
Speaker 6: seventy people, seven zero through beheading through. I mean horrendous.
Speaker 6: It was very fascinating. Posis go to meet him. I
Speaker 6: go to this this prison, and it was kind of weird.
Speaker 6: I was only meant to have a short period of
Speaker 6: time with him, but the guard said to me, oh,
Speaker 6: I like your accident, because stay as long as you want.
Speaker 6: So he also said to me, which I thought was
Speaker 6: slightly weird. They said, well, obviously you know he's killed
Speaker 6: seventy people. We can't leave your words like he's killed
Speaker 6: them to people. We can't leave you on your own
Speaker 6: with him the priming room. And then they just left
Speaker 6: came back like two hours later. It slightly annoying. His
Speaker 6: story was super interesting about to understand, it's really one
Speaker 6: of the very few people in the world you can
Speaker 6: tell what life is like on the inside of a
Speaker 6: Mexican drug cartel and how that works.
Speaker 4: This is what I found the most fascinating and probably
Speaker 4: the most are relevant to this this audience, and it
Speaker 4: is the most profound example of the misstep understatement I know,
Speaker 4: but the extrapolation or the evolution from Rastein to the Zetas.
Speaker 4: So tell us more about this camp, because you take
Speaker 4: us right into what he says is when he's thirteen,
Speaker 4: he's gone instead of going to a summer camp like
Speaker 4: a lot of kids, he goes to this kind of
Speaker 4: camp and his train tell us what he sees and
Speaker 4: what he's trained in. Specifically, Yeah, it's really grim.
Speaker 6: When he was fifteen years old in two thousand and five,
Speaker 6: he goes to this this summer camp, it's Aseeta training camp.
Speaker 6: I'll just read you one of the quotes from him.
Speaker 6: People can hear the full quotes on Chasing the Screen
Speaker 6: dot com, but they can hear the interview with him
Speaker 6: and some of the things he said. But he's talk
Speaker 6: he's telling me about heading. There's times I've seen it
Speaker 6: done with a saw. Blood everywhere when they start to
Speaker 6: hit the jugular and he just clicks his fingers. It's
Speaker 6: everywhere they put the head right there. The head still moves,
Speaker 6: makes faces and everything. I think the nerves you can
Speaker 6: see inside the bone, everything's moving. It's like they've got worms.
Speaker 6: I've seen it move when it's on the ground. If
Speaker 6: he's making a screaming face. It stays like that. Sometimes
Speaker 6: sometimes it slacks off. What you're taught in these camps
Speaker 6: are the techniques of how to dissolve bodies, how to
Speaker 6: behead people, how to use the maximum possible violence. The
Speaker 6: camp's slogan is if I retreat, kill me, And that's
Speaker 6: really what he learns. He's kind of kept coked up.
Speaker 6: Him and his friends Jesse and Gabriel, who are also
Speaker 6: from Laredo, they've kept coked up. You never know where
Speaker 6: you're going to go. He worked for a guy god
Speaker 6: Miguel Trevino, who later became the head of the Votives,
Speaker 6: and you're basically sent to kill people. You don't know
Speaker 6: who you're going to be sent to kill. I go
Speaker 6: through the story in the book of what exactly what
Speaker 6: he did and how he did it. You know, he
Speaker 6: regardless as very he kind of tells two stories. So
Speaker 6: he basically once he's in he's taken to this this
Speaker 6: that first day he's taken to this Vata workspace because
Speaker 6: about thirty people tied up and to one side they've
Speaker 6: got an oil drum and they just burn them alive
Speaker 6: and to the other side of people being cut to
Speaker 6: pieces and La Zetas usually they're there to torture other
Speaker 6: gang members or anyone who kind of angers them in
Speaker 6: order to find out safe houses, the routes, who they
Speaker 6: work for, what they do, that kind of thing. And
Speaker 6: after they're dead, they they turn their bodies into what's
Speaker 6: called guiso, which is the Spanish word for stew. They
Speaker 6: kind of put them in kind of acid and dissolve them.
Speaker 6: And so Rosalio is taken there. Now he says that
Speaker 6: he was kind of kidnapped, forced to go there and
Speaker 6: made to kill someone. And once you're in, you're in.
Speaker 6: What the prosecution said against him is, you know, he
Speaker 6: wanted to sign up, he wanted to go. He was
Speaker 6: really excited to be a Zeta, certainly when he first arrested.
Speaker 6: That what he says, he kind of talks he's incredibly
Speaker 6: hyped up and amped up and compares himself to James Bond,
Speaker 6: and you know, but one of the things that's fascinating
Speaker 6: as well, and say, it restruck me. When I went
Speaker 6: to Huarez, I was shown around by this guy called
Speaker 6: Julian Cardona. He's an amazing journalist. He's the Routers correspondent
Speaker 6: in in Huira's And it's really really in some ways Aui's.
Speaker 6: You know, it looks like any other it looks like
Speaker 6: a normal American city. There's a KFC and a Wendy's
Speaker 6: and a you know, you can buy a flat screen TV,
Speaker 6: and you know, it feels very familiar. And then you
Speaker 6: discover that the murder conviction rate is two percent, so
Speaker 6: and that two percent didn't do it, you know, but
Speaker 6: it really struck me with julianne I said to him.
Speaker 6: At one point, after two days in he kept introducing
Speaker 6: me to people who'd been killed by the police, and
Speaker 6: I said, you know, Julian, this is important, but I've
Speaker 6: got to meet people who've been killed by the cartels.
Speaker 6: And they said, oh, Johan, you don't understand huire Is. Now,
Speaker 6: if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay
Speaker 6: the police to do it. They aren't separate forces. And
Speaker 6: Rossalio told me that as well. He would very often
Speaker 6: go out with the police carry out the massacres, the
Speaker 6: police work for the Zoties, and the reasons that you
Speaker 6: imagine a housing project in I don't know, well, thinking
Speaker 6: about where Gino lived, right, housing projects and burns for Booklyn,
Speaker 6: Where you know, let's say five to ten percent of
Speaker 6: the economy is in the hands of on criminal gang
Speaker 6: selling drugs, that housing project is going to be a
Speaker 6: miserable place to live. In Huarez, it's seventy percent of
Speaker 6: the economy seven zero percent. So the cartels can out
Speaker 6: beard of the state. They can pay better wages than
Speaker 6: the stake, so they basically become the state. And the
Speaker 6: way I kind of kind of hit me is like,
Speaker 6: imagine if the Crypts and the Bloods employed the LAPD
Speaker 6: to work for them and therefore took over Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: That's basically what happened, and Rosalio really lived that. You know,
Speaker 6: they were the law. And what they're doing is they're
Speaker 6: torturing people, They're they're killing people. They send messages written
Speaker 6: in human flesh. You know. The cartels are the system
Speaker 6: of signals. So if you betray the cartel, they shoot
Speaker 6: you in the neck. If you talk too much, they
Speaker 6: shoot you in the mouth. If you're a spy, they
Speaker 6: shoot you in the ear, and it's like everybody is
Speaker 6: like a bill billboard advertising with your cartelophon auspicious. And
Speaker 6: it's really important to understand this isn't just like I
Speaker 6: don't know, saw movie style psychopathy, right, This isn't Jeffrey Dharmer.
Speaker 6: This is the result of the system that we've created.
Speaker 6: If you've got a system where a really popular product
Speaker 6: is in the hands of armed criminal gangs who compete
Speaker 6: to control that market and have no recourse to the
Speaker 6: law to protect their property, what happens is the way
Speaker 6: they compete is if you are the person who's prepared
Speaker 6: to push a moral boundary a little bit further, if
Speaker 6: you're prepared to be that little bit more terrifying, you
Speaker 6: gain a brief competitive advantage. So if you are, for example,
Speaker 6: the first person who says, we're not going to just
Speaker 6: kill the other side, we're going to kill their wives,
Speaker 6: you get a brief advantage. If you say, you know what,
Speaker 6: we're not going to kill their wives, we're going to
Speaker 6: kill their pregnant wives, then you get an advantage. If
Speaker 6: you say, you know what, we kill their pregnant wives
Speaker 6: and put it on YouTube, then you get an advantage. Say,
Speaker 6: you know what, We're going to cut off their faces,
Speaker 6: so their faces onto a football and send the football
Speaker 6: to their family. Thing that actually happened. Again, you get
Speaker 6: a brief competitive advantage. That's really important to understand. This
Speaker 6: is not just psychopathy, although clearly the people involved are deranged.
Speaker 6: It's it's the product of the system we created. Milton
Speaker 6: Friedman said, you know that the Number prize winning economist
Speaker 6: Milton Friedman said al Capone was the product of alcohol prohibition,
Speaker 6: the crypts and the bloods of the products of drug prohibition.
Speaker 6: I would add the zetas now as a product of that.
Speaker 6: And part of what went wrong with Rossalio. And one
Speaker 6: of the reasons why he's he got out actually is
Speaker 6: because he was so coked up and so amped up
Speaker 6: by all this killing, he actually started just kind of
Speaker 6: randomly killing people. He threw a hand grenade into a nightclub.
Speaker 6: And the vaders don't want you just random They don't
Speaker 6: want to employ Jeffrey Dharma, right. Their violence is psychotic
Speaker 6: but targeted, and that's how Rosalio had to get out. Again,
Speaker 6: this is disputed. He claims that to get out he
Speaker 6: shot himself in the leg. He certainly has a bullet
Speaker 6: wound in his leg and showed it to me. He
Speaker 6: has he shot himself on the leg and the hope
Speaker 6: that they would go, Okay, well you can just leave now,
Speaker 6: but of course they didn't. He kind of he claims
Speaker 6: he had to kind of kill his way out, and
Speaker 6: then he contacts them, the American police, and they're getting
Speaker 6: back over the border and he testifies, and he's serving
Speaker 6: two consecutive life sentences. He's in his mid twenties and
Speaker 6: he's due to being out when he's in his eighties.
Speaker 6: He lives in constant solitary confinement because the minute they
Speaker 6: let him out among the prison population, he's immediately stabbed.
Speaker 6: Because anywhere all these other prisoners who are in there,
Speaker 6: mostly in their for life anyway, know that their family
Speaker 6: or get a huge amount of money from the datas.
Speaker 6: And even the guard said to me on the way
Speaker 6: in something like the exact words or on the website,
Speaker 6: saying like it'd be nothing for these people to take
Speaker 6: a contract out on him here, you know. So it
Speaker 6: was really fascinating to get the insight into and Rosalio
Speaker 6: was right to get out when he did. Jessin and
Speaker 6: Gabriel his two friends who grew up with They were
Speaker 6: killed soon after by the Zotas. They call these kids,
Speaker 6: these child soldiers. The Zetas call them the expendables, which
Speaker 6: is exactly exactly right.
Speaker 4: Now on, I don't want to make it sound to
Speaker 4: the audience that this is not an optimistic book, but
Speaker 4: and yet it really is. And there's really some really
Speaker 4: nice stories in here of success and again optimism and hope.
Speaker 4: So let's talk about one of the most profound stories
Speaker 4: in here about the rat experiments of before, of probably
Speaker 4: in the seventies, concerning drugs and rats, and your friend
Speaker 4: doing the rat experiment in rat Park. So tell us
Speaker 4: about that.
Speaker 6: If you had said to me four years ago, I
Speaker 6: don't know what causes herrorin addiction, I would have looked
Speaker 6: at you like you were a little bit simple minded,
Speaker 6: and I would have said, well, horrorin causes her in addiction. Right,
Speaker 6: it seems kind of obvious. For one hundred years, I've
Speaker 6: been told a story about addiction that's become basically our
Speaker 6: kind of common sense. And I certainly believed believe that.
Speaker 6: I mean, we had addiction in my family. I had
Speaker 6: strong reasons to believe it's explained to me, I think
Speaker 6: that I couldn't really understand very well at first. If
Speaker 6: you're me, step down, If you step out of once
Speaker 6: we finish this recording down, if you step out into
Speaker 6: the street and you're hit by a car, God forbid,
Speaker 6: and you break your hip, you'll be taken to hospital
Speaker 6: and you'll be given Quite likely, you'll be given a
Speaker 6: lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually incredibly strong heroin.
Speaker 6: It's much stronger heroin than you ever get on the streets.
Speaker 6: Because it's medically pure, you'll be given it's quite a
Speaker 6: long period of time. That's happening in every hospital anyone
Speaker 6: is listening to this semi one in the develop anywhere
Speaker 6: in the developed world. That's happening, right, And if what
Speaker 6: we believe about addiction is right, that addiction is caused
Speaker 6: by a chemical hook in the drug. But like if you, me,
Speaker 6: and the next twenty people listening to the show, if
Speaker 6: we all use heroin together for twenty days, on day
Speaker 6: twenty one, we'd all be heroin addicts because our body
Speaker 6: would start to physically need the heroine. If that story
Speaker 6: is right, what should happen to those medical and what
Speaker 6: should happen to those people in hospital, they should come
Speaker 6: out as addicts. They should be trying to score on
Speaker 6: the streets. That never happens. Virtually never happens. You really
Speaker 6: notice your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by
Speaker 6: her hip replacement operation. So I didn't quite know what
Speaker 6: to do with this until I went to vancouvera and
Speaker 6: lots of you know, I know you're Canadian as well,
Speaker 6: lots of the heroes of my book a Canadian. And
Speaker 6: I met this extraordinary man called Bruce Alexander, who's a
Speaker 6: professor in Vancouver, and Bruce explained to me the story
Speaker 6: of that addiction that we've all come to believe, and
Speaker 6: that Bruce used to believe, comes from a series of
Speaker 6: experiments that we've done earlier in the twentieth century. They're
Speaker 6: really simple experiments. Your listeners can do them at home.
Speaker 6: I they're feeling a little bit sadistic. You get a
Speaker 6: rat and you put it in a cage, and you
Speaker 6: give it two water bottles. One is just water and
Speaker 6: one is water laced would either heroine or cocaine. If
Speaker 6: you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the
Speaker 6: drugged water and almost always kill itself. So there you go.
Speaker 6: That's our theory of addiction. In the seventies, Bruce comes
Speaker 6: along and says, well, on a minute, we're putting the
Speaker 6: rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do
Speaker 6: except take the drugged water. Let's do this differently. So
Speaker 6: Bruce built rat Park. Rat Park is like Heavens for rats.
Speaker 6: Anything your rat could want, it's got in rat Park.
Speaker 6: It's got loads of nice food, it's got loads of
Speaker 6: colored balls, it's got loads of friends, it can have
Speaker 6: loads of sex. Anything a rat wants it's got. And
Speaker 6: it's got both the water bottles. It's got drugged water
Speaker 6: and normal water. But here's what's fascinating in rat Park.
Speaker 6: The rats don't like the drug water. They hardly ever
Speaker 6: use it. They never overdose, and they never use in
Speaker 6: a way that looks compulsive. There's a really interesting human
Speaker 6: example of exactly the same principle that was going on,
Speaker 6: which we can tell about in a minute. But what
Speaker 6: Bruce says is this shows that both the right wing
Speaker 6: theory of addiction and the left wing theories of addiction
Speaker 6: are wrong. The right wing theory of addiction is, you know,
Speaker 6: it's a moral failing you party, too hard, you become
Speaker 6: a headnist, all that stuff. The left wing theory is
Speaker 6: it's a disease that takes over your brain. You've become helpless.
Speaker 6: What Bruce says is it's not your morality, it's not
Speaker 6: your brain, it's your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation
Speaker 6: to your environment. Human beings need to bond with each other.
Speaker 6: We need to be connected. If you can't bond with
Speaker 6: the people around you because you're cut off, because you're traumatized,
Speaker 6: or for whatever reason, you will bond with something that
Speaker 6: gives you pleasure. You will connect with something that might
Speaker 6: be drugs, that might be pornography, that might be a
Speaker 6: roulette wheel. But human beings are bonding creatures and we
Speaker 6: need to bond. The human example that was happening at
Speaker 6: the same time, which is fascinating, and this forces us
Speaker 6: to rethink not just the drug war, but actually, I
Speaker 6: think a lot about our society. The human example is
Speaker 6: called the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, twenty percent
Speaker 6: of all American troops we're using heroin regularly. And if
Speaker 6: you look at the news reports from the time, they
Speaker 6: were really worried because they thought, oh my god, We're
Speaker 6: going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the
Speaker 6: streets at the United States when the war ends because
Speaker 6: they believe the old theory of addiction. And what happened.
Speaker 6: They came home and they virtually all stopped. You know,
Speaker 6: the overwhelming majority of ninety five percent just stop. Don't
Speaker 6: go to rehab, they don't go into withdrawal. They just stop.
Speaker 6: Because if you're taken out of a hellish pestonential jungle
Speaker 6: where you don't want to be and you could be
Speaker 6: killed at any moment, and you go back to a
Speaker 6: nice life in Wichita, Kansas, that's the equivalent of being
Speaker 6: taken out of the first page and being put into
Speaker 6: ra part. And it's force us to think about, well,
Speaker 6: why help me to think about the people in my
Speaker 6: life who are addicts? Why are so many? Why are
Speaker 6: so many of our fellow citizens unable to get through
Speaker 6: life without being drunk? Well, you know, you and me,
Speaker 6: we could be drunk now right, we could be drinking vodka.
Speaker 6: We're not sure because we've got something we want to
Speaker 6: be present of present with in ourllgy. We've got jobs
Speaker 6: we love, we've got people we love, We've got things
Speaker 6: we want to do. Addicts can't bear to be present
Speaker 6: in their lives because their lives have become unbearable for
Speaker 6: one reason or another, and we've got a drug war
Speaker 6: that's built on the idea that we should make them
Speaker 6: suffer more. Dabel Marte, an amazing doctor who works with
Speaker 6: hard worked with hardcore addicts, and Vakuva said to me
Speaker 6: something like, if you wanted to design a system that
Speaker 6: would keep people addicted, you would design the system we have,
Speaker 6: you know, think about what we did to Billie Holiday.
Speaker 6: So yeah, and that really blew my mind. I didn't
Speaker 6: there any of this really before I started.
Speaker 4: Now, before we get into showing the dramatic difference in
Speaker 4: how some countries have chosen to look at addiction, I'd
Speaker 4: have to just talk about Squarespace just for a second,
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Speaker 4: Build it Beautiful, Johann, let's talk about the dramatic stories
Speaker 4: that you have of the difference in approaches you touched
Speaker 4: on the BC Safe Injection site. Story So why don't
Speaker 4: you first talk about because I think that this will
Speaker 4: be very dramatic to see the difference. Talk about Arizona
Speaker 4: and Marcia Powell cooking in a cage, and then we'll
Speaker 4: talk about the safe injection site in Portugal.
Speaker 6: When I went to Arizona, I asked one of my
Speaker 6: standard questions, partly because the prison part of the prison
Speaker 6: system there is run by Michael Joe Apio, who is
Speaker 6: the personal disciple of Harry Anslinger, which is partly what
Speaker 6: I wanted to don. And Joe Apia's place lit up
Speaker 6: when I mentioned Harry Anslinger. He was thrilled. But someone
Speaker 6: in who the world I loved them. When I went
Speaker 6: to Arizona, I interview a woman called Donna Leone Hamm,
Speaker 6: who is a works on amazing woman who works on
Speaker 6: prisoners rights in Arizona, and I asked her one of
Speaker 6: my standard questions, which is like, tell me about something
Speaker 6: that shocked you in the time you've worked on this,
Speaker 6: And she's going through this long list, and somewhere down
Speaker 6: the list she said, there was the time they put
Speaker 6: that woman in a cage and cooked her. That was bad.
Speaker 6: And then she carried on and I said, sorry, Donna,
Speaker 6: could you go back a second? It was almost called
Speaker 6: Marsha Pale about hinting. Very little was no when I
Speaker 6: started doing in search for the book, except that she
Speaker 6: was a woman in her forties who kept being busted
Speaker 6: either for having met or for prostituting herself to get mess.
Speaker 6: And one day in two thousand and nine, she wakes
Speaker 6: up in PERivale Prison in Arizona, which is not run
Speaker 6: by j R. Piela should point it out, and she
Speaker 6: was suicidal and the doctor refused to believe her, and
Speaker 6: they'd take her out, and they put her in a
Speaker 6: holding cage, which is literally a cage exposed to the desert.
Speaker 6: Right this is Arizona. And they left her there and
Speaker 6: she cried, and she begged for water. She messed herself
Speaker 6: as she collapsed, and by the time they called an
Speaker 6: ambulance she had been cooked. No one was ever criminally punished,
Speaker 6: thought it was done to Marsha Pale. And I then
Speaker 6: went and tracked down the father of her children and
Speaker 6: got this story of her life, which was very like
Speaker 6: Billie Holiday's life. She had been thrown out when she
Speaker 6: was thirteen, She'd lived on the beach, she'd almost certainly
Speaker 6: been a child prostitute again, a person who was trying
Speaker 6: to stun her pain, and thought that this was done
Speaker 6: to her. She'd actually had a period of her life
Speaker 6: when she'd got clean. She was clean for more than
Speaker 6: a year. She went back to Arizona to get her
Speaker 6: kids back because they had been taken into care by
Speaker 6: the state, and she was busted for an old marijuana conviction,
Speaker 6: and her whole life unreveled again. And I compare that
Speaker 6: to the places I went to which had gone beyond
Speaker 6: the War on drugs. You mentioned Vancouver. There's an incredible
Speaker 6: story there about how a homeless street addict started and
Speaker 6: uprising in Vancouver that completely changed the city. In the
Speaker 6: year two thousand, there was a homeless street addict called
Speaker 6: Bud Osborne was watching his friends die all around him.
Speaker 6: People would use behind dumpsters because she didn't want the
Speaker 6: cops to see you. But obviously the cops can't see you,
Speaker 6: and you start to ode, no one can see you,
Speaker 6: and you're found like a day later, you're dead. And
Speaker 6: Bud thought a hap to do something about this, but
Speaker 6: he also thought, I'm just a homeless junkie. What can
Speaker 6: I do? But Bud had a really simple idea. He
Speaker 6: just said, why don't we got together a group of
Speaker 6: the addicts and just when we're not using, which is
Speaker 6: most of the time, why don't we have a schedule
Speaker 6: where we're parade up and down the alleyways and if
Speaker 6: we spot someone oding, we'll just call an ambulance. And
Speaker 6: they started to do it. It goes on for a
Speaker 6: few months and the overdose rates started to really fall
Speaker 6: on the downshand inside, which your listeners will know, is
Speaker 6: an area where a huge number of addicts in it.
Speaker 6: And that was great in itself, but partly it meant
Speaker 6: the addicts start going on, maybe we're not the kind
Speaker 6: of pieces of rubbish people, so we are maybe were
Speaker 6: people who could do something positive. They started to turn
Speaker 6: up public meetings where they were discussing like the menace
Speaker 6: of the addicts, and they'd sit at the back and
Speaker 6: after a little wile they'd put their hand and say, oh,
Speaker 6: I think they're talking about. Oh, is there anything we
Speaker 6: could do differently? And sometimes people would be appalled, and
Speaker 6: sometimes people would say, oh, you leave your needles lying around.
Speaker 6: So they said, fine, we'll extend the patrol and we'll
Speaker 6: collect the needles. And they started doing it. What was amazing.
Speaker 6: Bud started to learn that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they'd
Speaker 6: opened safe injecting rooms where people could go and use
Speaker 6: the heroine legally and be monitored by doctors, and they've
Speaker 6: been a huge fall in the death rate. And Bud realize, well,
Speaker 6: we have to have this in Vancouver. But there hadn't
Speaker 6: been anything like it in North America since Antwinger. And
Speaker 6: so they started to stalk the mayor of Vancouver, who
Speaker 6: was a right wing, very wealthy businessman called Philip Owen,
Speaker 6: pitching Mitt Romney and you've got the idea a man
Speaker 6: who said that had actually be taken contained at the
Speaker 6: local military base, right. And for two years, everywhere philipo
Speaker 6: In goes in public, they just stalk him, and they
Speaker 6: carry a coffin, and the coffin says something like, who
Speaker 6: will dinext Philippo In before you open a face injecting
Speaker 6: drug room? And after two years of this they're starting
Speaker 6: to lose heart and one day Philippo In his eternal credit, says,
Speaker 6: who the hell are these people? And he goes in
Speaker 6: cognito to the downtown in side and he meets a
Speaker 6: load of addicts and then he goes to meet Milson
Speaker 6: Friedman and they're by prize winning economist to explain how
Speaker 6: the drug war works in him. And Philippoune comes back
Speaker 6: and he holds the press conference and he has the
Speaker 6: chief of police, the coroner, and an addict, and he says,
Speaker 6: I'm never going to talk about addiction again without having
Speaker 6: addicts with me. And we're going to open the first
Speaker 6: safe injecting drug room in North America. We're going to
Speaker 6: have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. We're
Speaker 6: going to turn things around. And they opened the first
Speaker 6: safe injecting drug room in North America. And it's been
Speaker 6: ten years now. I should say Philippollim was deselected by
Speaker 6: his own political party because I was so horrified by
Speaker 6: what he'd done. And it's ten years now. It's ten
Speaker 6: years when I went there, overdose has fallen by eighty
Speaker 6: percent eight zero percent an average wise expectancy on the downtown.
Speaker 6: He side it up by ten years. And when I was,
Speaker 6: you know, not long after, I got to know him
Speaker 6: quite well and interviewed him a lot. Bud Osborne, the
Speaker 6: addict who'd started this uprising, died and they sealed off
Speaker 6: the streets of the downtown inside where he had lived homeless,
Speaker 6: and they had this incredible memorial service for him. And
Speaker 6: there were a lot of people in the crowd that
Speaker 6: day who knew that they were alive because of what
Speaker 6: Bud started doing. I'd tell you to anyone who thinks
Speaker 6: of this, who thinks about the drug war, this is
Speaker 6: a bad policy, that this is so big, this we're
Speaker 6: so powerless. We all feel powerless. Sometimes I'd say, you
Speaker 6: are so much more powerful than you know. Bud was
Speaker 6: a homeless street addict. He started an uprising and has
Speaker 6: completely transformed his city. There's so much we can do
Speaker 6: about this. What happened to Rosalio, what happened to Billie Holiday,
Speaker 6: what happened to all these people? None of this has
Speaker 6: to happen. We can choose an alternative if we want to.
Speaker 4: Now, let's talk about before we talk about another incredible
Speaker 4: character that Lee Maddocks in the US and our transformation
Speaker 4: in thinking. Let's go to Portugal with this again, real
Speaker 4: life experiment in decriminalization of all drugs. So let's tell
Speaker 4: us about Portugal and how they came to this and
Speaker 4: what was their state before this? You talk about their
Speaker 4: heroin rates and their addiction problem. So tell us about Portugal.
Speaker 6: In the year two thousand. By the year two thousand,
Speaker 6: Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe.
Speaker 6: Of the population was addicted to the heroin, much worse
Speaker 6: than anything in the US. And every year they tried
Speaker 6: the American way, they cracked down harder, they arrested more people,
Speaker 6: and every year the problem got worse. So finally they
Speaker 6: set up the panel of scientists and doctors led by
Speaker 6: an extraordinary man called Kwau Gulau, and they basically said, look,
Speaker 6: tell us what we'll genuinely do with this problem. And
Speaker 6: the panel came back and it said, decriminalize everything from
Speaker 6: cannabis to crack a whole lot. But and this is
Speaker 6: the crucial next step, use all the money we currently
Speaker 6: spend on arresting drug addicts, imprisoning drug addicts, trying drug addicts,
Speaker 6: to take all that money and spend it on really
Speaker 6: good drug treatment. And it's not really what we think
Speaker 6: of as drug treatment of in North America and Western Europe.
Speaker 6: Partly it's things like rehabbing psychological support, which are useful,
Speaker 6: but mainly it's it's it's drug treatment. That learns the
Speaker 6: lesson of rap park. It's drug addiction that is geared
Speaker 6: entirely towards reconnecting addicts with society. If you think about
Speaker 6: what we were saying about why you and I are
Speaker 6: not drunk now, it's because we've got something to do.
Speaker 6: The goal of the Portuguese the criminalization was to make
Speaker 6: sure that every addict had some purpose in their life.
Speaker 6: It's going to wake up for in the morning. So
Speaker 6: one of the things that's one of the main planks
Speaker 6: of it is just subsidized jobs. So you used to
Speaker 6: be you're a smack addict, you used to have a
Speaker 6: used to be a mechanic. They'll go to a garage
Speaker 6: and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year,
Speaker 6: we will pay half as wages. You know that. Micro
Speaker 6: loans for addicts to set up businesses was another big thing,
Speaker 6: and again the results in it's been nearly fifteen years,
Speaker 6: injecting drug uses down by fifty percent. Five zero percent
Speaker 6: overdose is massively downtage of the transmission supposed to be down.
Speaker 6: One of the most moving into views was as Americle
Speaker 6: crowdfig wearer, who was led to the opposition to the
Speaker 6: ending the drug war in Portugal, and it was said
Speaker 6: a lot of things that a lot of your listeners
Speaker 6: all the totally understanding they be thinking. He said, surely
Speaker 6: if he's the top drug cop. He said, surely, if
Speaker 6: we do criminalize, we'll have a massive increase in drug
Speaker 6: use and all the problems that come with it. And
Speaker 6: what he said to me was the exact words are
Speaker 6: on the website. He said, everything I said would happen
Speaker 6: didn't happen. Everything I said would happen didn't happen, and
Speaker 6: everything the other side said would happen did And he
Speaker 6: talks about how he regretted that he spent twenty It
Speaker 6: was a shame that he spent twenty years arresting drug users,
Speaker 6: and he hope the whole world followed Portugal's example.
Speaker 4: Now we talked about I did introduced Lie Maddock Maddox
Speaker 4: and how did she become a soldier in the war
Speaker 4: on drugs. That's a fascinating story of your book, and
Speaker 4: I don't want you to go too far into it,
Speaker 4: but what motivated her to go get so seriously involved
Speaker 4: and then what was the event that changed her direction
Speaker 4: drastically in this.
Speaker 6: Warlee Maddox signs up to be a cop in Baltimore
Speaker 6: and Maryland because her best friend is murdered by what
Speaker 6: she believes is a drug gang, and Lie Maddox has
Speaker 6: so motivated, I want to a corupt these drug gangs.
Speaker 6: I want to destroy them, and she becomes a militant
Speaker 6: drug warrior. She's like Harry Anslinger's dream girl. But Lee
Speaker 6: Addix is an honest person and she notices two things.
Speaker 6: One is they only really bust black people, and secondly,
Speaker 6: the if you're a cop and you arrest a rapist,
Speaker 6: the next week, there's less rape in your town. If
Speaker 6: you're a cop and you arrest a drug dealer, well
Speaker 6: there's no less drug dealing. Everyone knows that. But something
Speaker 6: even weird that happens. The murder rate actually goes up,
Speaker 6: and Lee couldn't really figure it out, but then she
Speaker 6: kind of realized what you do is you trigger a
Speaker 6: turf war. What you have is if you have a
Speaker 6: patch controlled by a gangster and you kill, you knock
Speaker 6: out that gangster. You rival drug gangs will fite each
Speaker 6: other for it, and huge numbers of people die in
Speaker 6: the crossfire, and of course dealers die. So Lee now
Speaker 6: spent quit the police force, retrained as a lawyer and
Speaker 6: now spends her time. What is such an amazing person
Speaker 6: getting the criminal records whatever she can quash the people
Speaker 6: for drug convictions.
Speaker 4: What's interesting too, is that you introduce her to an
Speaker 4: organization called LEE. Just briefly tell us about leip.
Speaker 6: Leap was something Lee was already engaged with. That it
Speaker 6: sounds for law enforcement against prohibition, and I would really
Speaker 6: recommend anyone checking out their website. There an extraordinary They
Speaker 6: are former cops, former judges, former prosecutors who has fought
Speaker 6: the drug war and seen from the inside that it's
Speaker 6: a disaster and we need to regulate the market in
Speaker 6: drugs and reclaim it from armed criminal gangs.
Speaker 4: Now a practical example of that you put in the
Speaker 4: book about Uruguay. So tell us how Uruguay came to
Speaker 4: legalize marijuana and how that, what that model looks like
Speaker 4: and what was the result.
Speaker 6: I think to be President Mohica is such an incredible man.
Speaker 6: Mahika was the leader of the kind of guerrilla resistance
Speaker 6: in Uruguay in the seventies. He was imprisoned by the
Speaker 6: dictatorship and kept at the bottom of a well for
Speaker 6: two years and he emerges to become a hugely popular politician.
Speaker 6: He's like the Mandela of South America. And he lived
Speaker 6: in a shack the whole time he was president. I
Speaker 6: went to the shack. There's no exaggeration to say Stephen
Speaker 6: Harper David Cameron would not keep their shoes in the
Speaker 6: place where boss where he could live. And the reason
Speaker 6: when he could watch legalize marijuana and did legalize marijuana
Speaker 6: is because he saw supply roots for drugs move around
Speaker 6: the whole time, right, and he knew if there's a
Speaker 6: huge crackdown on the Mexican border and the supply route
Speaker 6: moves and starts to go through Uruguay, they were completely defenseless.
Speaker 6: They've got a weak military. There's no military that could
Speaker 6: defend in mexicag quite strong military, you can't defend against it.
Speaker 6: And he said the only thing we can do to
Speaker 6: protect ourselves is to legalize. So he became the first
Speaker 6: president since Antlinam's crusade to fully legalize marijuana. The same
Speaker 6: thing has happened in Colorado and Washington. The only time
Speaker 6: I ever saw my father cry was the day my
Speaker 6: dad had lived in Berlin for a long time and
Speaker 6: I came home when I was ten years old and
Speaker 6: he was watching the Berlin Wall come down and he
Speaker 6: was crying and he thought, I'd never thought i'd see this.
Speaker 6: And when I heard the result from Washington and Colorado
Speaker 6: they voted to legalize marijuana, that came into my mind
Speaker 6: and it felt like the first axe swung into the
Speaker 6: Berlin Wall of the drug war, and I think this
Speaker 6: whole thing is going to come down. And that doesn't mean,
Speaker 6: obviously that we're going to have all drugs available to
Speaker 6: all people. No one wants them to be a crack
Speaker 6: isle in CBS. We have different kinds of regulation for
Speaker 6: different kinds of drugs. So Switzerland has legalized a heroine
Speaker 6: for addicts. That doesn't mean you can go into the
Speaker 6: store and buy it. It means if you're an addict,
Speaker 6: you'll be assigned to a clinic and you can go
Speaker 6: into the clinic and use it there and you can't
Speaker 6: take it out. And they have had no faithful overdoses
Speaker 6: from heroines if they started doing that in those clinics,
Speaker 6: none an overdose rate off zero. In your sense of
Speaker 6: how well these policies work when you.
Speaker 4: Introduce them, this book is not only just chronicle the
Speaker 4: facts of the last one hundred years. It is a
Speaker 4: call to action. And you also describe the historical fight
Speaker 4: in June nineteen sixty nine Stormwall Inn in Greenwich, Greenwich Village,
Speaker 4: and what Barack Obama had said about that. Tell us
Speaker 4: about what he said, and why you have included in
Speaker 4: why you think it has a parallel to that.
Speaker 6: That's so interesting. Yet, if you think about you have
Speaker 6: two thousand years of gay people being persecuted horrifically, and
Speaker 6: one day in ninety sixty three, a bunch of drag queens.
Speaker 6: Hard to think of a more despised and marginalized group
Speaker 6: just one day they're like, you know what, You're not
Speaker 6: going to treat us like this anymore, and they start
Speaker 6: to riot. And you've got to remember, in ninety sixty three,
Speaker 6: the pro gay position was to say they're not evil,
Speaker 6: they're sick, right, That was the pro gay position. So
Speaker 6: like gay marriage, we didn't even ask for that, No
Speaker 6: one even had a concept of that. It would have
Speaker 6: seemed like saying you want to live on Mars. Right.
Speaker 6: A lot some of those people who started that riot
Speaker 6: lived to see the introduction of gay marriage. Things can
Speaker 6: change in unimaginably positive ways. We are you know, we're
Speaker 6: in the equivalent of ninety sixty three with ending the
Speaker 6: drug war, not the equivalent of you know, twenty twelve.
Speaker 6: But you know, I think we'll live to see the
Speaker 6: end of this. We're a an adoption of policy where
Speaker 6: you have liberty for drug users who are not harmed
Speaker 6: and love and compassion for add that shopen to turn
Speaker 6: their lives around.
Speaker 4: One of the things you really talk about in stress
Speaker 4: in this book is that the theory and again we
Speaker 4: talked about it in a rat Park, but the practical
Speaker 4: solution to addiction, no matter if we use that word
Speaker 4: or discount that word, but if we just use it
Speaker 4: for the practical purposes of this argument, what is the
Speaker 4: most single thing that we have to deal with, And
Speaker 4: as illustrated in the rat Park experiment with addiction and
Speaker 4: trying to cease addiction or reduce the opposite.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite
Speaker 6: of addiction is connection. When you are a connected person
Speaker 6: with healthy and thriving connections in your life that nourish
Speaker 6: you and make you feel good and give you meaning
Speaker 6: you want to be present in your life. I've seen
Speaker 6: this with the addicts I love. I've seen this in Portugal.
Speaker 6: I've seen this in Switzerland. We have a model that
Speaker 6: thinks that the way to deal with addicts is to
Speaker 6: make them suffer more. You know, in Arizona, in that
Speaker 6: prison intense city, I went to one of the solitary
Speaker 6: confinement blocks, which they call the whole, and these women
Speaker 6: are just shut in there for a month at a time,
Speaker 6: and I suddenly thought, oh my god, this is the
Speaker 6: closest you could possibly get to a literal human recreation
Speaker 6: of those first cages that guarantees that people stayed addicted.
Speaker 6: You know, the whole model we've had about how to
Speaker 6: deal with addicts. I think I'll be remembered like you know,
Speaker 6: like bedlam, like putting mentally, or people in cages so
Speaker 6: people can go and look at them. You know. So
Speaker 6: there's no one solution for addiction. It's an incredibly complex phenomenon.
Speaker 6: We need to have a very broad menu. Some of
Speaker 6: it needs to be you know, subsidized jobs like in Portugal.
Speaker 6: Some of it needs to be prescription for people who
Speaker 6: can't stop, like in Switzerland. Some of it needs to
Speaker 6: be twelve step programs and you know, support for sobriety.
Speaker 6: You know to the people who want that, and that
Speaker 6: can be fantastic to have a very broad range of options.
Speaker 6: Anyone who tells you there's one solution for connected for
Speaker 6: addictiona to Charlatan. But the underlying core of it is
Speaker 6: to help people connect and bond and phone.
Speaker 4: Meaning with all the efforts of organization like Leap and
Speaker 4: all the people and in the awareness of citizenry and
Speaker 4: now in the last one hundred years and growing in momentum,
Speaker 4: you have the Colorado and the Washington State initiatives. You
Speaker 4: have the Opposition party in Canada as a main platform
Speaker 4: for the next election is legalization of marijuana. With all
Speaker 4: those efforts, what does the marijuana initiative itself, because we're
Speaker 4: talking about legalization of all drugs as a concept. How
Speaker 4: important is the marijuana legalization movement and success to this
Speaker 4: entire movement.
Speaker 6: Oh, it's massively, massively important. It's like, you know, it's
Speaker 6: like if you think about the day, rights of all
Speaker 6: goes in stages, and you know you have things like
Speaker 6: decriminalization of hondosexuality is the first step, and you end
Speaker 6: with gay marriage and the complete leader the achievement of
Speaker 6: the girls. Some what time of time were talking about
Speaker 6: legalizing all drugs, trying to reiterate that doesn't mean all
Speaker 6: drugs being available, like marijuana should be available. So if
Speaker 6: you think about we already have all the existing modes
Speaker 6: of regulation we need. We regulate alcohol one way, we
Speaker 6: regulate sleeping pills another way. Right, you can't just go
Speaker 6: into cvs and buy really powerful sleeping's actually got bad
Speaker 6: jet bag at the moment I wish I could know
Speaker 6: you can't have to go to the doctor to get
Speaker 6: a prescription to that. So obviously works differently with different drugs.
Speaker 6: So with marijuana, with I would suggest ecstasy and certain
Speaker 6: party drugs, you could regulate them like alcohol. Clearly, with
Speaker 6: something like heroin you would regulate it much more like
Speaker 6: sleeping pills, or actually have the Swiss model which is
Speaker 6: easily tied to the sleeping pills, but you have to
Speaker 6: go to a clinic to use it. There's a debate
Speaker 6: about what you would do about things like crack and mess,
Speaker 6: which are clearly very physically destructive drugs. With something like that,
Speaker 6: what I would recommend would be probably and we need
Speaker 6: to experiment very cautiously that some variant on what they
Speaker 6: have in Vancouver, what you do is you'd have safe
Speaker 6: spaces where you could go and get those drugs that
Speaker 6: you wouldn't be allowed to leave while you are under
Speaker 6: the influence of them. I really recommend that, given that
Speaker 6: the reality is that people are doing it anyway, we
Speaker 6: want them to use it in a place where there's doctors,
Speaker 6: where they can be given support, where they need given
Speaker 6: help to stop, where they can where they're not chaotic,
Speaker 6: and on the streets. I think that would probably be
Speaker 6: the best model. So legalization is pro impoint to some
Speaker 6: legalization as a way of regulating and controlling because at
Speaker 6: the moment what we have is total anarchy. Unknown criminals
Speaker 6: sell unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark,
Speaker 6: with disastrous consequences for everyone. We need to restore. We
Speaker 6: need to restore the order that prevails before the drug war.
Speaker 6: We need to go back to the situation that Henry
Speaker 6: Smith Williams knew about and kind of run the clock
Speaker 6: backwards on that.
Speaker 4: I agree, and I want to thank you for the
Speaker 4: incredible amount of research and time and effort that you
Speaker 4: put into this book. And like I said previously, this
Speaker 4: is not just a book chronicling some facts. This is
Speaker 4: a real call to action and to get involved. So
Speaker 4: as you do put in the book, you leave a
Speaker 4: website for people that want to get involved, So could
Speaker 4: you give us that address? And if they want to
Speaker 4: connect with you, I know you're on Facebook. Tell us
Speaker 4: how people can connect with you, tell us about your
Speaker 4: website and what they might find there.
Speaker 6: Great, so Chasing the Screen dot Com. There you can
Speaker 6: listen to the interviews with all the people that I've
Speaker 6: been talking about, so the serial killer in Aquia, the
Speaker 6: serial killer who from Mexico, Mesaali Aresa, and I think
Speaker 6: President Mexica, a whole range of people. And you can
Speaker 6: also find actually, if people want to get involved, there
Speaker 6: things they can do. Also, there's a Facebook page for it,
Speaker 6: which is just the Facebook pages Chasing the Screen, which
Speaker 6: is the you know, gives you loads of updates. You
Speaker 6: can watch loads of interviews with me where I've talked
Speaker 6: about this. And I just want to thank you Doan
Speaker 6: for reading the book so closely. And actually I was
Speaker 6: hugely influentating true crime genre. But some of the books
Speaker 6: that I most loved as a teenager, there's an amazing
Speaker 6: true crime books that I shouldn't really recommending other people's books.
Speaker 6: I'll be cald off but by my publisher. But there's
Speaker 6: an extraordinary British and true crime writer. I'm sure you
Speaker 6: know his work, Brian Masters. He's most best known for
Speaker 6: that amazing biography of Dennis Nilsen. But actually he wrote
Speaker 6: a book that I really hope this will in print
Speaker 6: called She Must Have Known The Trial of Rosemoe West,
Speaker 6: which is about a trial of the wife of a
Speaker 6: British serial killer who's a self a serial killer, which
Speaker 6: is a really incredible book. And I'm sure that this
Speaker 6: book has a lot of the DNA of true crime
Speaker 6: because I just love true crime. I think it's a
Speaker 6: fascinating and brilliant and a hugely underrated genre.
Speaker 4: Well I think that's what I always talk about, is
Speaker 4: that true crime genre really is history. It's just a
Speaker 4: specific I guess, it's still just history. And so as
Speaker 4: this book really clearly explains you, you really get a
Speaker 4: reminder of the history. And so all tied in what
Speaker 4: I found interesting is last week's episode was murder inc
Speaker 4: And so when you talked about Arnold Rastein, the most
Speaker 4: prolific group of murderers were had their opportunity in nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty to nineteen forty because of prohibition, so and.
Speaker 6: Drug we have transferred. Yeah, you're totally right. We've transferred
Speaker 6: one of the biggest industries in the world into the
Speaker 6: hands of some of the worst people in the world.
Speaker 6: And we don't have to do that. Would you rather
Speaker 6: the drug trade was controlled by Rossalio Rita and his
Speaker 6: bosses or by your local doctor. And it was so
Speaker 6: striking to me, the tremendous sense of relief. I thought
Speaker 6: when I went to places going after the drug war
Speaker 6: and I couldn't quite figure it out. I would go
Speaker 6: to these places where drugs have been legalized, and I
Speaker 6: would speak to the people involved, and weird feeling and
Speaker 6: I couldn't I couldn't place it. And after a little while,
Speaker 6: I suddenly thought, oh, I'm bored. Suddenly they've taken this
Speaker 6: thing that seems so violent and they've made it boring.
Speaker 6: What an amazing achievement. You know that actually what happens
Speaker 6: une of the drug war is you get you know,
Speaker 6: like one of the guys, that guy, I think it
Speaker 6: was Steve Fox, who then the Colorado legalization campaign, said
Speaker 6: something like in an interview not not with me, said
Speaker 6: something like, you know, we you know, we spent all
Speaker 6: these years arguing about gang something I'm paraphrasing. So we
Speaker 6: spent all these years arguing about gang warfare and killing
Speaker 6: and slaughter. Now we spend our time arguing about what
Speaker 6: the size of the font on a brownie package should be.
Speaker 6: That's what happens when the end of you know, it
Speaker 6: becomes the nows you know, which is which is exactly
Speaker 6: how it should be.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And I think this is going to be part
Speaker 4: of that broader recognition. I think for everybody from a
Speaker 4: grandmother suffering from an illness and has given their first brownie,
Speaker 4: or everybody that's affected by an arrest and like you say,
Speaker 4: unemployable and leads to all kinds of incredible problems. The
Speaker 4: drug war has to end. And I applied you for
Speaker 4: this extraordinary, very pure leaky her incredible effort to be
Speaker 4: able to put this book together, Chasing the Scream. I
Speaker 4: want to thank you very much. The first and last
Speaker 4: days of the war on drugs. Thank you very much,
Speaker 4: Johann Hari for coming on and talking about Chasing the Scream.
Speaker 6: That was a massive pleasure.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Thank you, and you have a great evening.
Speaker 6: Great and Danishton Brian Masters is still alive. You know.
Speaker 6: I can try to find his details for you if
Speaker 6: you want. He would be a great interview if you.
Speaker 4: I would love that. I'm a big fan of his
Speaker 4: book about Dennis Nielsen, and if you look at my
Speaker 4: background you'll see why.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that book about Rosemary West is just absolutely extraordinary.
Speaker 6: I'll see you back together. He must be I think
Speaker 6: he's nearly.
Speaker 4: Ninety, but he.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll try to try that business in Dan. Will
Speaker 6: you also send me a link when it's all sweet whenever?
Speaker 6: Good to you to the interview. Is that okay?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I will send you all those details. Well, Johann,
Speaker 4: very thank you very much, thanks for this incredible interview,
Speaker 4: and you have a great night for.
Speaker 6: Thanks don you see.
Speaker 4: Thanks, goodbye, good bye.
Speaker 6: M