I Don't Know About That - The War On Drugs with Johann Hari

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

In this episode, the team covers the war on drugs with the help of Johann Hari. Thanks to our sponsors Blue Chew (offer code Jim), Keeps (www.keeps.com/idontknow.com), Shipstation (offer code Jim), and Policy Genuis. Check out Johan’s website and book on The War on Drugs: www.chasingthescream.com Follow Johann Hari on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari/?hl=en Follow I Don’t Know About That on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/idkatpodcast/?hl=en Follow Us: Jim Jefferies Website: www.jimjefferies.com Jim Jefferies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimjefferies/?hl=en Jim Jefferies Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JimJefferies/ Jim Jefferies Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimjefferies?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Forrest Shaw Website: www.forrestshaw.net Forrest Shaw Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forrestshaw/ Forrest Shaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/forrestshaw   Kelly Blackheart Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellyblackheart/   Jack Hackett Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Jack_hackett/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello, welcome to I Don't Know About That with Jim Jefferies. I'm Jim Jefferies. I'm here with Forrest Shore and Kelly Zabinski. Yep. How are you doing? We're all wearing our masks and our gloves, social distancing and all that type of stuff. I don't really need it with you, Forrest, because you've been quarantining at my house for some of it.

Yeah. And all the sex we've had, this is all just for show. What they're doing so that you don't ride in and go, oh, how irresponsible of you for not wearing masks. We don't kiss, though. Yeah. I heard that there was a young homosexual man who was quite irresponsible, a friend of a friend,

who he's still going out and having sex with everyone because he says that he can't get it because he's on the HIV medicine that they're giving people. What? Yeah, so I don't know about that. I don't know. Episode over. It's probably how irresponsible you were in the first place

that got you into this trouble. Probably you should seek some medical advice. So we should get HIV. Maybe, I'm surprised Trump hasn't said that yet. He reckons the HIV medicine, I know they're giving people HIV medicine and also the malaria medicine at the moment. Our friend Michael Yo had it. He said that he was like

a guinea pig. They just kept on feeding him different things. Yeah, his video is heartbreaking. What I'm enjoying is the bandanas because you get Instacart. Now at my house, I've got a little video screen when someone rings the doorbell. And there's nothing better than two blokes in scarves

tied around their mouths going, I've got a package for you. And you're like this. You're like, oh, thank you so much. I was in the bank the other day. There's people with bandanas look like bank robbers. They come in like this. I'd like some money, please. There's my card.

It's just a nice thing that we're doing. Yeah, I went to the store yesterday and felt like I should have a gun or something. There was something very Wild West about this where I feel like we should rob people. I think that's coming. I think that's coming if we don't fix it. I think there's a bit of looting coming our way.

Not a lot of looting. The human race has impressed me, by the way. We've done all right. We've done all right we've done all right well done humans i thought we'd handle this way worse this brings me into the part of the show where uh we would um give out your tour dates that's funny the next conceivable tour that i think i'll definitely be doing is January in Australia, 2021. That's about them. There'll probably be gigs before then. I hear that the Midwest is,

I hear the Garth Brooks is doing a whole stadium tour in July. What? And he's not canceling Garth Brooks doing a, it's called killer redneck tour. And aptly named. Yeah. And, and he's,

and wait, is it really called killer redneck? No, I made that up. It's not called Redneck Tour. Aptly named. Yeah. Wait, is it really called Killer Redneck? No, I made that up. It's not called Killer Redneck. But what happens is Garth Brooks is just saying, fuck it, and he's going out on tour. Well, so, you know, just keep checking out jimjeffries.com for eventual tour dates. And you have a special coming out this summer, right?

Yeah, I've got a special coming out June or July, I believe. I'll try to trick you. Also, at jim jeffries on ig and keep up with announcements of the new tour dates cancellations um our podcast instagram is at idkat podcast which is i don't know about that if you didn't understand what that was podcast idk at podcast on ig dm us on there with any topic suggestions you have for the show and um real quick if you want to go over what the show's concept is jim for us well the concept is this is i think well i used to think i knew a lot about a lot of things and then the internet was invented and it turned out i didn't know much about anything

but this the podcast the concept is you know that guy in the bar, the Cliff Clavin of this world that carries on and talks and talks and talks. And before the internet, you used to think they were a genius. And now you just think they're full of shit. So I'm the type of fella that I'll give any conversation, any topic a go. I'll just give it a go and see if I know anything. And then if you prove me wrong, I'll say, well, I don't know about that. And I'll walk away with my little victory of saying, maybe you're right.

Maybe you're wrong. There's no way to prove it. No prizes involved. Yeah, no prizes involved. So you'll give me a topic. There'll be an expert on each episode. When the expert comes on, I'll try to guess who that expert is and what they do for a living. Then you will tell

me the topic of their expertise. Then I will tell you everything that I know about that topic. And Forrest, do you have a scoring system? I do. Yeah. So we will, the expert will grade you on a scale of one to 10 on accuracy. And then Kelly will grade you on confidence and I will grade you on believability, one through 10. And we add those all up. And if you get anywhere between 26 and 30, you're already an expert on it.

So, cause the maximum could be 30. Between 20 and 25, baby Einstein, 13 through 19, run of the mill, seven through 12, you're an Instagram model, and 0 through 6, you're a vegetable. And also, the both of you, you have the information in front of you. You know about the topic. You've spoken to the person. Ordinarily, we'd have Jack Hackett here as well,

but Jack Hackett rang me up a couple of days coughing and wheezing, hung up the phone, and then I haven't heard from him since. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not going to say anything. Rest in peace, Jack. R.I.P., Jack. You need a need a new assistant yeah we're all having hard times all right so uh all right let's let's go to our guests for this week's episode um you can see him on the screen yes all right so hi so uh johan i'm not gonna give you his last name just in case you know um he uh this is what we do you and we call this judging a book by its cover it's a real quick Hi, Jim. Hi. So, Johan, I'm going to give you his last name just in case.

This is what we do, Johan. We call this judging a book by its cover. It's a real quick segment, and Jim likes to play this game in many different facets. My favorite hobby is judging people. Yeah. I love to judge people. Just by the way they look. Just by the way.

Me and Forrest sit at the airport. We play a game called Would You Be Friends With That Person? It's another one. It's like would you – everyone plays yes or no to to fucking people we play that all day in our head when we're walking along yes no yes no yes no yes yes no no no right but try doing it with would you be friends with this person now i'm looking at johan i could be friends with johan yeah i reckon me and him could be mates i don't know if we'd be tight, but, you know, he's got books in the background. He's got a haircut that's a solid haircut, not pretentious in any way.

He's wearing black. I'm a big fan of wearing black. All right, so you could be friends with him. But now you're going to have to guess what he is an expert in or what we're going to be talking about today, for instance. So you get to ask him three yes or no questions. So you just answer yes or no. I'm going to use what i can see he has a book in the background called 1948 or six there's book called 1946 that was something that the world war was well you gotta ask him a yes or no question no no okay um god uh do you uh do you work with numbers

not really no occasionally sort of right right right right uh is your is your field of expertise an exact art or is it something that has a lot of probabilities and guesswork in it? The second. All right. So, okay. So take your guess, and then Johan will reveal it. I'm going to say that he's an expert in economics.

Wrong. I was going to say I had wrong ready to go because I just knew you didn't know. You were really quick on that. Well, I don't know, maybe. But for a specific today, you might know something about economics, Jan. But please introduce yourself and tell us what you're here to talk about today. I'm very glad that you looked at my face and thought that because recently my niece, who was six years old, was drawing me and my mother.

And she looked at me very seriously. And she said, you know, you know, when children draw adults, they just do a really big circle and a really small face in the middle. And I said, yeah. And she said, that's not actually a good way to draw adults. Adults don't actually look like that. And I thought, oh, that's good. She's learning about like perspective and stuff. That's brilliant. And then she said, but the great thing about you is you actually do look like that so my picture is really it's like fuck you that's why she's out of my will anyway i'm a writer uh alex your producer asked me on because i wrote a book called chasing the scream which is about addiction and the drug

war and how we need to understand them both very differently that's economics economics i mean that's economics the the drug war. Without drugs, the economy just falls to bits. Well, we'll get into that. My old economics teacher did not regard me as good at economics, and basically said I should stop doing it as a subject. They would be sadly crying at your comment. All right.

Well, thanks for being here, Johan. And like I said, he's written on other things and investigated other things, but that's what we're talking about today. What do you want to know about the drugs? Just about drugs? Well, I'll ask you some questions. So what we're going to do now is we're going to see how much Jim knows

about the war on drugs and, and some addiction questions and things like that. And then you know, on, you can give him a scale from one to 10 and how accurate you think he is at the end. Um, and we'll do the other two confidence,

believability, and don't worry about insulting him. If you give him a low number, it's not an issue. I'll be fine. Yeah, yeah. So let's just start with that, Jim. Like what are the origins of the United States war on drugs?

The war on drugs in America, you see, that really kicked off in the 80s with the Just Say No program from Nancy Reagan. She got right into that that's your modern day war on drugs but if you want to go further back on the war of drugs you can go right back to prohibition when they got rid of alcohol because that was a bad thing for the people and they did that in the in the 19 fuck me uh that's the 1920s, Al Capone? No, it's later, the 1940s, Al Capone and all that? Sure.

Okay, so was that right, Al Capone? Right, so the drugs that you've had a war on, you've had a war on marijuana, cocaine, heroin, you had ecstasy, mushrooms, all the fun ones you've had a war on. You had a war very briefly on the alcohol, but you rescinded that. That was in the constitution and then you took it out. Because I always use that as an example of how you can amend an amendment, right? So that was actually taken in and out of the constitution. Or they put an extra amendment in to nullify the other amendment. That had something to do with the sixth amendment.

Okay. Okay. Was that the sixth one? You're just saying things now. I don't know. I am saying things, yeah. All right. Now, the...

Wait, what's the sixth amendment? It was something to do with, right? It was like, you can't have alcohol. And then the Sixth Amendment was like, go on. You're already wrong on that. But that's good. You guessed Sixth Amendment. Go on, have a bit.

You think it was in the Bill of Rights prohibition? That's the first 10. The prohibition was in the Constitution. It is. And then it was taken out. Correct. But it's later on. But it's OK.

Yeah, on the 12th. The 12th. Sure, 12th. The 12th. Don't say the 13th, because that one's slavery. And you don't want to get that one confused. You wait for the episode where we talk about that. I'm down on all of that.

I know when that happened. Anyway. Okay, keep going, sorry. So with the drugs, right, a lot of them started off as legal things, right? LSD was a scientific thing in the 70s that they used to give to people who had some mental health issues or whatnot and they gave it to them to give them more clarity but then like all fun things the government went ah people are enjoying it make it illegal right ecstasy or MDMA the the active

chemical in ecstasy right was given to married couples so they'd fuck more. Oh. Right? That's what I remember. I've heard this. Whilst taking ecstasy, someone has told me this. And so what happened? That's what they said.

That's what they said. They were like, hey, take this so you can fuck more. Married couples, we're not getting along. Me and you, we're a married couple. We're not getting along. Got it. Here's some ecstasy. You take some ecstasy.

And what happened what happened people started enjoying it on another scale and the government went stop having fun and so they took that away as well now weed has been around since the dawn of time jesus probably smoked weed marijuana has been around forever cocaine has been was invented i know that that himmler was on cocaine in world war ii so i'm going to say that cocaine's been around see for 200 years okay in an active way where people have been snorting cocaine i'm going to say 200 years of cocaine snorting and that was the one where reagan came in we're just saying no And what happened with the war on drugs is- It's very well thought out. They started- Yeah, I don't know.

What they started doing is they would get- If you got caught with drugs, you would get life sentences, which now they're trying to revoke because there's people in prison now that have sold a bit of weed, which is legal now here in California, that had 25-year sentences. And so that's something that happened in the 80s. Everyone reckons Reagan was great. And it turns out that bigger sentencing and all that type of stuff

doesn't do anything on the war of drugs. It doesn't change a single thing. It doesn't stop people from selling drugs or buying drugs or whatever because, you know, if you have drugs in your person, I know people who have taken drugs. I've met people who have taken drugs. Myself, never taken drugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what people say but if you get caught carrying it you could lose like your green card and i know people who had green cards i had one myself right and that's a constant pressure over you while you've got the green card and then uh but you still do it anyway so the war on drugs doesn't work is my point it doesn't work because people are still going to take drugs because you think you're going to get away with it. And making a sentence, because if you give someone a five-year sentence for selling cocaine, right, or you give them a 25-year sentence,

people aren't going to go, oh, I was willing to go to prison for five years. No one wants to do any of this stuff. The assumption is they'll never get caught. Well, hold on. Now you're in the world of opinion. So we just wanted to get the facts that you knew in the war on drugs and stuff i think i'll find those effects okay okay i'm not saying that they aren't um but uh all right let's take a moment and um go over everything you said and then uh there's one more question i want to

ask you just before we go i just went to drink through me tell us everything you know about drug cartels and narco traffickers just just just briefly tell us all right so the biggest drug cartel of all time is your narcos and that's your pablo escobar and he uh he lived down in columbia and he had a village there called uh medellin and he made all the cocaine and he used to fly it up with uh in planes and then tom cruise movie where they used to dump them from underneath from the little hatch down into mostly florida places like that where you grew up like they're the drug capitals yeah well florida definitely yeah florida and all those redneck bits down the bottom they all dump the drugs so they try to get them up through Mexico or whatever. But Colombia, that's your biggest cartel,

and they make the cocaine. Your heroin, that comes from your Afghanistan. Afghanistan's main crop is the heroin. They make the poppies that make the heroin, and that probably has something to do with 9-11 and why we had fights with them. What about weed? Where does all the weed come from?

The weed comes from here in California. It's grown here. It's always been grown here. I think the weed was never brought in. I think we just had it, right? We just had it. In Australia, we have a big smack problem. Cocaine is about $350 a gram,

where over here it's about $50 a gram. And the reason it's so expensive in Australia is because the only cocaine that gets in there is in condoms up people's arses, and that's the only way we do it because we don't have the plants. But we do have a lot of speed, and we have a lot of meth. Anything that you can make in a lab, Australia goes crazy for because we're an island. Let's stop there.

You've said a lot of stuff. A lot of good stuff. We can say some more stuff later. We can ask you some more questions later, but I think've said a lot of stuff um we can we can we can say some more stuff later we can ask you some more questions later but i think there's a lot of stuff there and i see johan is getting uneasy by your answers i don't know maybe he's not maybe i'm reading into that but uh yeah how did jim do hey let's take a break real quick we'll be right back this episode is sponsored by bluetooth guys let's talk about sex good sex now you can increase your performance and get that extra confidence in bed listen up blue chew.com

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ShipStation.com. Make ship happen. And we're back. How did Jim do on a scale of 1 to 10, do you think, in his answers there? Do you think he was pretty accurate? I would say Jim impressively got the moral core and the basic arc of all the arguments correct.

Correct. Got quite a lot of details wrong, but that's okay. I would give Jim 8.5. I think he did really well. See, that's like how I fundamentally know Jim eight and a half. I think he'd do really well. See, that's like how I fundamentally know what sex is, right? But I get some of the details wrong when I'm actually doing it. Like I get that the clitoris is at the top end of the hole, but I don't know how hard I'm meant to rub it,

but I know that some women enjoy it being rubbed. You see what I mean? Depends what position you are in, too, for the top or the bottom. All right. What do you think about confidence, Kelly? Scale it to one to ten. I mean, insanely confident, obviously.

I think he's a ten on confidence. I think he's going to crush confidence. I think I might be giving tens this entire show. It's because I'm on cocaine. Believability. There were so many things you said that i know are wrong uh you know are wrong what do you know about bloody drug trafficking no well just things like i've never taken drugs you know things like that uh i don't believe that um the sixth amendment uh

jesus smoked weed um i'm not saying j smoked weed. We've always had weed here. We just had it. I'm saying that at the last supper, you're telling me there wasn't a joint? There wasn't a joint? Did they smoke anything back then? Because I know Native Americans were smoking shit in pipes and all that type of stuff, right?

Maybe. I'm giving you a.5 on believability. You're telling me that there wasn't a joint at the last supper? that's what i'm telling you how i don't know this is not the right climate to grow weed i don't think but um so so you have a total score of 19 it's not bad that means here was there was there surely there's a half point missing next i gave him eight and a half i gave him a half point yeah yeah. And I gave him a 10. Yeah, unbelievability. So I like that you're keeping up with it, Johan. Thank you. Because it is very important that we get this right.

So you're just running the mill. I've done it. But that's pretty good. You're right on the top end. You're almost a baby Einstein. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. But I didn't want to give you a baby Einstein

because I don't feel like you're baby Einstein. So Johan, can you please just talk to us a little bit about the origins of the war on drugs? So just quickly, wasn't baby Einstein like a mor moron wasn't that the whole thing that you have when you've got a stupid kid you go oh well einstein didn't talk till he was five yeah but he but he'd still he'd still be pretty smart yeah he would come teenage einstein there's a smart chap i'm baby einstein's an idiot we're probably going going to change the categories each time. Just so you know, baby Einstein's just sitting around going,

Oh, the world can't even walk. It's like an idiot. Can't walk. It's shit. Baby Einstein's shit in his pants. Well, you know,

but he's, he's doing it. So like we said, your baby hindsight. So y'all, and we're going to let you speak for a little bit here. What, if you can please tell us like, you the origins of the the united states i learned a lot about this for kind of a quite

personal reasoning that um one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not be able to and i didn't understand why then but as i got older i realized we had addiction in my family and like a lot of people I was trying to figure out what I could do nothing seemed to be working in that situation so I ended up for my book Chasing the Scream going on this big journey all over the world ended up being kind of three years and 30,000 miles I wanted to go to places that had really harsh policies towards people who use drugs people who had places had the most compassionate policy. So I went to Portugal, where they legalized, sorry, where they decriminalized all drugs, and Switzerland, where they legalized heroin. And just met a crazy mixture of people from a transgender crack dealer

in Brooklyn to hit man for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel. And I learned a huge amount. But I guess the core of what I learned in response to the first thing you asked, which is about the origins of the war on drugs, I mean, I learned I learned so much drugs aren't what we think they are addiction isn't what we think it is legalization isn't what we think it is but I guess in terms of the origins of the war on drugs it's kind of surprised me because I thought so Jim was a bit off in but there's basically right about if you go right back to prohibition. I thought without really thinking about it, I thought that drugs would have been banned when they were mostly in the 1930s. So the reasons that we would give now. Right. You don't want kids to use drugs. You don't want people to become addicted. What's fascinating when you go back is that stuff never came up.

That's not why drugs were banned. Right right and i opened my book with this moment in history that i think tells us a lot so in 1939 billy holiday walked on stage in a hotel in midtown manhattan and she sang a song called strange fruit which obviously later became famous it's a song against lynching it's an incredibly powerful thing to do they didn't even let her walk through the front door of that hotel because she was African-American. So to stand up in front of a mixed race audience and sing this song was incredibly powerful. And that night, Billy Holladigger got a warning from a man named Harry Anslinger, who was the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And they said, stop singing this song. And it might seem like a weird place to open the

book. You think, well, what's that got to do with the war on drugs? It's got everything to do with why the war on drugs began and why it continues. So Harry Anslinger, and this is where Jim was totally right, Harry Anslinger took over the Department of Alcohol Prohibition just as prohibition was ending. And he wanted to keep his department going. And so he invented the modern war on drugs. He's in fact the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs. And he wanted to keep his department going. And so he invented the modern war on drugs. He's in fact the first person to ever use the phrase war on drugs. And he built it around two intense hatreds that he had. The first was of African-Americans. He was so racist that he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s, right?

He used the N-word so often. You really got to go for it, eh? Yeah, you have to be so fucking racist. And the second group he really hated was people with addictions, right? And to him, Billie Holiday was a symbol of everything he hated. She was an African-American woman singing this song. She had a heroin addiction because she'd been horrendously raped as a child for many times, and she was trying to deal with the pain of that.

And when Billie Holiday gets this warning from Harry Anslinger, she basically said, fuck you. I'll sing my song. I've got a right to do this. At that point, Harry Anslinger resolved to destroy her. He employed an agent called Jimmy Fletcher to follow her everywhere she went. He hated employing black people, but you couldn't really send a white person to follow Billie Holiday around Harlem. It'd be kind of obvious.

So he was black, the guy that he employed. What was his name again? Sorry. Jimmy Fletcher. Fletcher. Okay. He must be very hated in the black community, right? years oh so he was black this guy that he employed what was his name again sorry jimmy flatcher flat oh okay he must be very hated in the black community right that's fascinating well it's fascinating so jimmy flatcher follows her around for two years um and billy holiday was so amazing that he fell in love with her and his whole life he felt really ashamed of what he did next he arrests her she's put on trial the trial was called the united states versus billy

holiday she said that's how it fucking felt she's sent to prison she doesn't sing a word in prison but the cruelest thing this comes back to what jim was saying is what happened next so when she got out anywhere you to anywhere if you wanted to perform anywhere where alcohol was sold you had to have a license it's called a cabaret performer's license and slingers men make sure that she doesn't get it. This is what we do to addicts all over the world today, right? We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them and getting back to a decent life.

In that situation, Billie Holiday relapses. A few years later, she collapses. She's taken to hospital. The first hospital won't even take her in because she's got an addiction problem. The second one does. She's diagnosed with quite bad liver cancer and Anslinger's men come in and they arrest her on her hospital bed they handcuff her to the hospital bed and she starts to go into the heroin withdrawal so the doctors give her methadone she starts to recover um 10 days later they cut off the methadone on

Anslinger's assistance and Billie Holiday died the next day and to me this is a story that tells us so much partly about how why the war on drugs began right it was always about persecuting people with addiction problems and disproportionately persecuting did she did she die from the withdrawals or did she die from the cancer what what did she die she was already weak with liver cancer but heroin withdrawal is like a flu so giving someone who's weak with cancer a flu right it can can kill them how long how long is because i've been told that heroin withdrawal is is worse than any illness you can have people say it looks like death you'd rather die plus even if you massively varies and there's

a bit of a mythology about this so some people do have very bad heroin withdrawals. For most people who withdraw from heroin, it's like the flu, right? And also depends how long you've been using and so on. But just to say one last thing about Billie Holiday, you know, to me, the most important thing I took from this story is, you know, how do I put it, no matter what they did to Billie Holiday, she always found somewhere to go and sing that song. She would go to the worst parts of the Deep South. She would sing Stretch Fruit. No matter what they did to her, she didn't let them break her. And to me, it really helped me with the people I love who've got addiction problems to think about. And there were lots of other people I met on this journey for the book that taught me this as well. How unbelievably heroic Billie Holiday was and how many people with addiction problems were. You know, Billie Holiday never stopped being addicted, right? We only tell one heroic story in this culture about addiction, which is that people recover. And that is heroic. And everyone who does that should be proud of

themselves. But Billie Holiday never recovered in the way that we think of it. She was still a hero. Every day, all over the world, people listen to Billy Holiday's music and they are made stronger. And every day all over the world we still follow, with a few honourable exceptions, the drug policies laid out by Harry Anslinger and it makes people weaker and this conflict between them really continues.

Now with Harry Anslinger? Yeah. Anslinger, yeah. With Harry Anslinger, he makes these policies. Now did these policies, because the policies, Australia was very, growing up in Australia, felt very much the same as here in America. If you got caught with drugs, you're in a lot of trouble, you know, and Britain didn't feel that much different.

Was this the first place? Was America the first place to have these draconian measures that then spread across the world, or was the rest of the world already sort of doing this it's a really good question yes it was and anslinger actually managed to impose this so um the u.s goes first on most of the bans and most countries didn't follow because the results in the u.s were a disaster after they banned drugs deaths from drugs went up the whole trade was transferred to armed criminal gangs,

used to be controlled by pharmacists and doctors, and most countries didn't follow. So Anslinger's pressuring from the 1920s for every other country in the world to adopt it, and most didn't. Then you get to after the Second World War, where the world is in ruins and the US is the sole remaining standing superpower.

At that point, the US imposes these rules in other countries. They say, basically, if you don't join the drug war, we'll cut off access to trade. We won't give you aid. When the government of Thailand, opium had been legal in Thailand forever, right? The government of Thailand said, we don't want to do this. This is a good idea. Hasn't been good for your country. It won't be good for ours.

And Anslinger said, these were his his exact words i've made up my mind don't try to confuse me with the facts and to me that could be the motto for the whole drug war the world over right so before before the the drug war came in you're saying after the second world war when the other countries started taking over things could you buy cocaine and heroin in shops or anything like that? Or was it just... Yeah. So the most popular way of consuming these products were bought from pharmacies.

So the most popular way of consuming opium was in something called Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which you would go and buy. They were cocaine-based products. One was called Vin Mariani, which was cocaine-laced wine. It was consumed by Queen Victoria, the Pope. There were some problems related to drugs prior to the prohibition of drugs. But it's worth noting all of the problems got significantly worse after they were banned.

And we can see this at the other side of the drug war. Once you decriminalize and legalize in the places that I went to, you can see it's not perfect. But these problems radically fall and reduce. Is that wine on eBay? Has anyone got like a bottle? It sounds delightful. Is there still a bottle of that? Queen Victoria, the Pope used to say,

what a confident Pope was. Yeah, yeah, no one's fucking kids. We're all good here. We're all good here. You're good. I'm good. I'm good. Right.

So I always know that the whole fable of the original coca-cola had a little bit of cocaine in it um is there any other stories of stuff like that yeah so it was the same from the coca plant the same the same extract but i also think it helps us to understand hang on hang on i just got i was arguing with forest this before. Is the flavor cola from a plant? Is Coke, is there a cola, is the cola nut? This is a separate episode, I'm sure. What do you mean? They put cocaine in Coca-Cola.

Not that they put Coca-Cola in it. What is the flavor of cola in a Coke? It comes from the cola bean. No, I wasn't arguing about this. I think I was arguing about whether there was cocaine and Coca-Cola. No, no, no. There was cocaine and Coca-Cola, but where does the favorite cola come from? I don't know.

This is a different person. I know this isn't your specialty, but is there a cola bean? I don't think so. No one knows where cola comes from. Is it a synthetic-tasted thing? I don't know. I thought it says caramel flavoring in there. No one knows where cola comes from. Is it a synthetic-tasted thing? I don't know.

I thought it says caramel flavoring in there. No, that's now, but originally it was like a nut. It must not have been good, but they changed it. That was pilled down. Anyway, so back to the war on drugs. So the war on drugs really started. It's a cola nut. It's a cola nut.

So thank you. Whoever I was having a fight with last week about this. You had a fight? I had a disagreement. It could have been my girlfriend. He's very bored. I could have looked it up, but I chose not to. Now, so really the war on drugs happened in the 1940s.

Now, as you said, we've got places like Portugal, which is completely drugs aren't really existent at all there. No, they're existent. Anyone can take them. They're not illegal in Portugal, correct? So it's important to just explain how it works. So in the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the world.

So 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, right? Wow, that is crazy. Yeah, it's extraordinary. And every year they tried the American way more. They arrested more people. They punished more people. And every year the problem got worse

until finally the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they were like, we can't go on like this. What are we going to do? They decided to do something really radical, something no one had done in the 70 years since Harry Anslinger. They said, should we ask some scientists what we should do? So they set up a panel of scientists

and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know, Dr. Hua Gu Lao. And they said to them, you guys go away, look at the best science, figure out what would actually solve this problem, and come back and we've agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend. So the panel went away. They looked at loads of evidence, including an amazing experiment about addiction that i can tell you about later if you like and they came back and they said okay decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot but and this is the crucial next step to take all the money we currently spend on fucking people's lives up on chasing them arresting theming them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around. Interestingly, it wasn't really what we think of as addiction

treatment in the US and Britain, right? So there's a little bit of residential rehab that has some value. Biggest thing was a big program of reconnection for the people with addiction problems. So big program of job creation. Say you used to be a mechanic. They go to a garage. They say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The job was to say, the goal was to say to everyone in Portugal with an addiction problem, we love you. We value you. We're on your side. We want you back. And by the time I went to Portugal, the results were in. Addiction was down by more than 50%. Overdose deaths are down by 80%. Portugal went from being quite near the top of the European Union's drug problems league table to the very bottom. And one of the ways you know it works so well is nobody in Portugal wants to go back. I went and interviewed a guy called

Juan Figueroa, who led the opposition to the decriminalization when it first happened, right? He was the top drug cop in the country. And at the time, he said what loads of people understandably think when you propose decriminalizing all drugs, which is surely if we do this, we'll have a massive increase in drug use, we'll have kids using drugs, it'll be a nightmare. He said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other i said would happen didn't happen and everything the other side said would happen did and he talked about how he felt really ashamed of what he'd that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalization fucking people up is there

is there people in portugal that are still kicking back against this like my father you could never convince of this you could never tell him that giving them jobs and paying half their bills, that would just make him angry, a policy like that. It's really interesting, yeah. Because he would say, why should I have to pay their bills because they're addicts? And, you know, I understand people's theories as well. Sometimes people get a little bit annoyed when, I always find it funny when someone goes, I'm a recovered drug addict and everyone claps. And I i feel like going we never clap the people who just never

took the drugs to begin with why don't they get a little bit of a i've never taken drugs well done like as someone who has had friends who have taken drugs i i no personal experience yeah why why do we always why do they get rewarded so much? Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it's an interesting question, Jim, because lots of people think this. My dad's very similar to your dad. My dad makes Donald Trump look like Oprah. But I think one thing that helps us.

I'm so sorry. Why does he black him up? Like how bad's your dad? My dad would regard it as too liberal to black up. If you want to um think about that because implicit in the what you've said totally understandably lots of people and i used to think like this is that what addiction is is just someone who used too many drugs right that's really one of the biggest things i learned but the research for my book it was hard for me to

get my head around for a while was i had had profoundly misunderstood what addiction is. So if you'd asked me when I started doing this research, whenever it was eight years ago, what causes, let's say heroin addiction, because that was in some people close to me, I would have looked at you like you were an idiot. And I would have said, well, obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction, right? The clues in the name. We think, you know, if you guys kidnapped the next 20 people to walk past your studio in LA and you injected them all with heroin every day for a month like a villain in a Saw movie at the end of that month they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason there are chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need and at the

end of that month they'd all have you know the desperate physical hunger for these hooks that's why we call it being hooked right the first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something not right about that is when it's explained to me in britain where i am if i step out into the street when i finish talking to you guys and i get hit by a truck and i break my head you'll be addicted to it you'll always want to step in front of exactly i'm going to be craving that truck high ever since i'll get taken to hospital and i'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's medically pure heroin. It's much better than the shit I could buy on the streets.

People in British hospitals are given medically pure heroin for quite a long time. If any of you have a British grandmother and she's had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother has taken a lot of heroin, right? Right. If what we think about addiction is right that it's mainly or entirely driven by the chemical hurts what should be happening to all these grandmothers in british hospitals some of them should be leaving hospital addicted right this has been studied very carefully it never happens and when i learned

that i just thought that can't be right how could you have a situation where you have someone in a hospital bed being given loads of really powerful heroin? They don't become addicted. You've got someone in the alleyway outside who's actually taking a much weaker form of heroin who does. It didn't seem to make sense. And I only began to understand it. And it goes to the point you were, I think, getting at, Jim.

When I went to Vancouver and met an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who's really transformed how we think about addiction. So Professor Alexander explained to me this theory we have in our heads, addiction is caused mainly by the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. You guys could try them at home if you feel a bit sadistic. All you need is a bit of heroin, a needle, a belt and a spoon. stick all you need is a bit of heroin a needle a belt and a spoon i've never understood the spoon because i've got shaky hands because of drinking in my 20s right i got shaky hands how do you

fucking if you're a drug addict how do you keep the spoon steady you should have like a little tiny saucepan where it won't spill over the edge this is a really important innovation in heroin use that i'll recommend to all the addicts i know but the but the but just to say about you know what i'm talking about i think i'm like a sippy cup no no no just like a itty bitty saucepan like like it still holds the same as me but it's got upward edges not just a little curved in thing you can still put the needle in and pull it out you can still heat up on it little heroin saucepans that brings us to our new sponsor little heroin saucepans one one group of people you could have recommended the heroin saucepans to are the people the the this people do this experiment because just to say it very quickly that the this idea

that the drug the addiction comes mainly from the chemical hooks comes from these experiments that are really simple you take a rat you put it in cage, and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself by overdosing within a week or so, right? So there you go. That's our story. But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute minute the rat is put alone in an empty cage it's got nothing to do except use these drugs it's got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats what would happen if we did this differently so he built a cage that he called

rat park which is basically heaven for rats they've got loads of friends they've got loads of cheese they can have loads of sex they've got colored balls anything a rat could want in life and they get to dob in their mafia friends exactly and they've got both the water bottles the the normal water and the drugged water and of course they try both this is the fascinating thing in rat park they don't like the drugged water that much none of them use it compulsively none of them ever overdose there's lots of human examples but what this shows us is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety the opposite of addiction is connection the core of addiction the core of addiction is about uh being in so much pain that you don't want to be present in your life right

so addiction is a mental thing where boredom or pain or whatever that you want to fight against rather than i want to make this even better exactly which is very different to drug use there's 90 of drug use is not addiction 90 of drug use is you use the drug to make your life better you snort a line of coke to have more fun or whatever or you drink some alcohol or whatever it is i remember when i was taking too much ecstasy i got to that stage where i went and saw the phantom menace and i i went i'll pop a pill and i'm like they spend like a hundred million dollars on special effects and i'm thinking but what if i watch it on ecstasy yeah then this film will really kick off yeah i did that with oh

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at policygenius.com. That's policygenius.com. All right, we're back. We're talking about addiction. The drug war is based on the idea of someone's got an addiction problem. We need to punish them and shame them to give them an incentive to stop. But once you see that pain is the driver and the fuel, you can see actually far from solving the problem, it makes it worse. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying i was a drug addict while members of the public mock them and jeer at them i love a bachelorette party wait hold on they the public's allowed to mock them yeah yeah this was sheriff joe arpaio we. We know all about Sheriff Joe.

We've heard all about him. I love when they do that. They do criminals. There was a kid in Australia who shot lifted in Target and they made him wear a t-shirt and said, I shot lifted in Target or something like that. He had to walk around the store.

Then those t-shirts got so popular, I think Target started selling them. Other kids wanted to look like they were tough nuts. So what did they have to do? They were on a chain gang. I should make it. Well, yeah. I mean, it's just you realize, you know,

sometimes people say, oh, that doesn't work. The truth is much worse, right? Those women have had fucking horrendous, traumatising lives. When you talk to them, they're in terrible pain. By the time they leave that prison, they're even more broken, even more traumatised. They've turned to even more drugs. If you look at, you can compare places, right?

You can compare the countries that have policies based on shame and punishment. The US, for example, what is happening? The worst addiction epidemic in the modern world, right? Opioid crisis is killing almost too many people as car accidents now. Compare that to the countries that adopted radically different approaches. We already talked about Portugal. Switzerland legalized heroin for people with addiction problems more than 15 years ago, since that they have had zero overdose deaths on legal heroin in the country, zero, not one person, right? So you have to look at the comparison. At some point, we have to stop following the places that have disastrously failed and realize that the only policies that actually work are ones based on love and compassion. That's true when it comes to addiction, but actually, weirdly, although you can tell it's close to my heart i don't actually think that's the biggest moral issue around um around the drug war the biggest moral issue is the violence caused by prohibition and it comes back to you mentioned

al capone which was right on the money gym when you ban drugs they don't disappear right they're transferred from doctors and pharmacists to armed criminal gangs right and this creates a huge amount of violence if you left the studio i mean it'd be hard now because of covid19 but in a normal time if you left the studio and you tried to steal a bottle of vodka right the store would catch you and the store would call the police so it'd be easy to do now you got your mask on yeah i've never been more ready to steal vodka in my entire life no fingerprints okay well then this analogy is flawed in this in this unusual historical situation but you can do anything if the store caught you they'd ring the cops so the cops would come and take your way so that

store doesn't need to be violent they don't need to be intimidating they've got the law to uphold their property rights right okay now imagine you wanted to steal a bag of coke or a bag of meth right obviously the person selling that can't call the cops right they've got to fight you but they don't want to be having a fight every day so they've got to establish a reputation for being so frightening that you wouldn't fuck with them in fact they've got to establish their place in the neighborhood through violence oh there's nothing worse than being sold drugs that aren't drugs kelly you've probably been here right when you buy like a bag of cocaine and it turns out to just be like talcum powder or something like that and then you're like ah fuck i got ripped off you have no recourse i actually years and years ago went to buy drugs

with a friend who's famous who we all know right yeah and the person sold him the drugs and took a photo with him and they were and they were fake drugs yeah it's like what do you get that's a ballsy move yeah you're gonna call them up and be like yeah because you it's exactly what you're saying you have no recourse you can't go hey don't call the police and this is kind of like what we when we got on talking about like the cartels and the narco traffickers of it's like that they like that's like ultraviolence, right? I spent a lot of time with cartel members and I actually became friends with Pablo Escobar's son, who's an amazing, you should have him on your show,

but you might figure out quite quickly who he is because he looks exactly like Pablo Escobar. And his name is Pablo Escobar Jr.? That's actually his name, you have to change it. I guess it is Pablo. He said to me the only thing my dad truly feared was the legalization of drugs, right? The war on drugs creates a war for drugs.

It creates this huge amount of violence. It transfers the trade. And legalization reclaims the trade from those armed criminal gangs. But wouldn't have he been the guy that could have opened up his marketplace? Like, I've got the most amount of cocaine plants you know i i they would have still made money though right but there's less money right i mean i don't know i think i don't know he controlled that you go by mine he controlled the trade through violence he mainly controlled the also the government bodies would start making you get a license and they when you were made to get

a license they could deny you getting a license i'm sure i think for for escobar there wasn't wasn't most of it at at the end of it just about power anyway because they had made so much money that it's not like the money was the important part they were losing money just from being buried in the dirt right like i assume that's like from running things the power if you look at why he was killed when he was killed pablo escobar so the day he's killed bill clinton goes on television says it's a great victory for the war on drugs actually what happened is pablo escobar was killed because the rival cali cartel paid the colombian military and police to do it and then they immediately took over his entire trade so what was presented as a victory in the war on drugs was actually a victory for one group of murderous gangsters

over another. And this is the truth. You're never going to get rid of the drug trade, right? It's inconceivable. That's not the debate, right? It's ludicrous fantasy. Okay, so what's the idea behind it? Okay, so you're saying we can never get rid of it.

What is the idea behind... Okay, so my mother passed away almost a year ago today, right? And at the end, she was on heroin for the last two weeks. She was just on morphine the whole time. And it dawned on me that it's not a bad way to go, the morphine. Like if you're on morphine, you're in a lot of pain, they're just pumping you full of morphine for the last couple of weeks. It's a pretty chill way to leave this planet, right?

You're lucky to die a heroin addict right but i know what you're saying they're not really addicts and all that type of stuff because i think now was okay because that's pure heroin that's going in morphine is morphine pure heroin am i correct in saying that your mother would have been given would have been in australia would have been diamorphine which is pure heroin pure heroin right so that's the clean stuff now now most of the overdoses and stuff correct me if i'm wrong happened because the drugs aren't pure is that correct not most but a lot of harm is caused by the fact that the drugs aren't pure whatever they're cut with or what have you so how far like so in a legalized world so what they're doing in portugal is that all pure drugs now or is there still a secondhand market?

Or are the shops opening? Are they just decriminalized in the sense that you can take drugs and we're not going to arrest you? Or are they actually selling the stuff? So there's a difference between, you've gone to a really important distinction. There's a difference between decriminalization and legalization. So decriminalization is where you don't punish people for using drugs, but they still have to go to armed criminal gangs to get them. Legalization is where you open up some legal route to get the drug. But that doesn't necessarily mean, of course, you can go into a shop and buy it for every drug. But there's some legal routes. So think about Switzerland, right? In Switzerland, I spent a lot of time there

reporting on this. In Switzerland, if you're a heroin addict, you're assigned to a clinic, you go to that clinic, you're given your heroin, that's medically pure heroin, you can't take it out with you, partly because they want to watch you as you use it, partly because they don't want you to resell it on the street. And then you leave to go to your job, because you're given loads of support to get housing, work, and so on. And one of the things that was really striking to me in those clinics in Switzerland, is, you know, you can stay on that program as long as you want. There's never any pressure to cut back your dose or stop using, but almost everyone does

cut back and stop. And I'm thinking of Rita Mange, who's the psychiatrist who runs it, like, well, how can that be? Because we're told the drug takes you over, you need more and more of it. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and she said well we help them so their lives get better and as their lives get better they don't want to be anesthetized so much right but so that's important because that's a model of legalization so there that is you are given the drug right that's a legal route but it's not there isn't like a heroin aisle in cvs right in switzerland it's there's different legal routes for different drugs. Okay, this is probably a bad thing to say, but I'm not confident.

I just touched my face. I'm not confident that I would, if heroin was made legal, I'm pretty confident I'd give it a go. Because this is the thing, I never really took weed. You've known me for a long time. I never really took weed.

I was in alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. They made weed legal. They put a shop at the end of my street. I never really took weed. I was an alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. They made weed legal. They put a shop at the end of my street. I take weed almost daily now. It's been a big turning point for me. And it's also, it's gotten me off alcohol. I hardly drink anymore. I hardly drink anymore.

That is so important what you just said, right? Which is that actually, if you look at what happens when you decriminalize or legalize, some drug use goes up, it's important. But what seems to happen is some drug use goes up it's important but what seems to happen is that alcohol use goes down so what you have is a certain amount of intoxication that people want in the society correct and the actual intoxicant they choose i'm not that bothered what your intoxicant is right it's not really my concern um the the question is um so actually

sometimes people go oh cannabis has been legalized and there's been this level of increase, which is true and important to talk about. But it's followed by a corresponding decrease in alcohol. And this seems to be true across the board. What you get when you legalize is not an increase in drug use, but a shifting pattern of drug use where some drugs decline and other ones improve. Well, I'm just saying if they legalize ecstasy then i will probably take a lot more ecstasy and get off the weed and then i'll take the cocaine to get off the ecstasy and then the heroin it's like the idea of we've got snakes in our town so you bring in a mongoose and then the mongoose is here oh no you got to bring in the end we have gorillas how do we get rid of them

i feel like with the really intense things they've always regulated portugal and switzerland actually what happened is in both cases after the decriminalization and legalization there was a significant decline in drug related problems partly because actually most the the heaviest drug use is addictive use and you can deal with that using the money that we're currently using to fuck people up but in a sense there's a truth to what you're saying because the reality is we've had a hundred years almost a hundred years where we experimented in one way of responding to drugs and only one way right what we need to have are experiments all over the world in alternatives and maybe we'll try some alternatives and they'll be worse than what we've got now seems hard to imagine given

that opioids are the almost the single biggest killer of Americans. But, okay, let's try. Let's try all the alternatives. Yeah, but that brings us to that. I've always found, coming from Australia, where we had gutter drugs, speed and meth and all that type of stuff, right? Synthetic drugs that were made for us. And then I come over to America. I never experienced people being addicted to Oxycontins and stuff.

It wasn't as prevalent. I found out my mother used to take a lot of oxycontins and stuff it wasn't as prevalent i found out my mother used to take a lot of oxycontins but um but i that was never a thing where that always seemed like a really sort of weird american phenomenon this whole like i'm addicted to a prescription painkillers so and people would argue that prescription painkillers are somewhat legal and that's the biggest problem we have here in America. Well, if you look at when do they, there's several things to say about that. The first is to say, when do they become problematic? Right. So let's say I've got an OxyContin addiction, right?

And I go to my doctor and I say, you know what? I've realized actually I'm not taking this for my back pain. I'm taking it because I'm addicted because my life is bad and I've got a lot of trauma. At that point, by law, my doctor has to throw me off my prescription meds. They by law have to. Otherwise, they can be busted as a drug dealer. And lots of doctors in the United States have been sent to prison for prescribing for addiction, right? Most of the problems are happening at that.

Not all of them. It's important to say not all. But most of the problems are happening at that bridging point when they're thrown off it and they can no longer access a legal supply. The most important thing to say about the opioid crisis is where is it happening, right? People have been told a story, you mentioned Nancy Reagan before in Just Say No, people have been told a story about the opioid crisis that is grossly simplistic and a bit like the Nancy Reagan story from the 80s. So Nancy Reagan explained the so-called crack epidemic by saying, okay, a group of uniquely evil drug dealers

have come along and sold a uniquely powerful drug to these people and it has taken them over. That was the story, right? We all know now that was way too simplistic, but we've basically adapted that story. We now say uniquely evil group of drug dealers who happen to be the big pharma, who are indeed scum, have sold this uniquely powerful drug

and it's taken people over. If that was true, opioid addiction would be highest where access to opioids is highest. So everyone on the faculty of Harvard has really good medical insurance and they could all get legal opioids tomorrow. Opioid addiction on the faculty of Harvard is really low low people in west virginia through no fault of their own do not have good health insurance in the main and opioid addiction is off the scale in west virginia what's actually

happening is the best experts on this professor angus dayton and professor and case have called these deaths of despair right everyone is's horrible to live in virginia west virginia especially yeah right it's not through no fault of the people there they've been strict you know well they could move they could move you always say they couldn't move that is that is my my most right wing thing that i have going for me i i am the most when i hear about about water and flint why i move i lived in britain i lived in australia i lived here i was never rich i had no fucking money yeah but you didn't have three kids and you weren't like they were i didn't acknowledge three kids sure it's not as easy to move as you think no but it is easy you can live

in a fucking caravan it's not easy it's not easy at all america's your mother your mother's elderly these are the only people you know this is the you know my mother was elderly that's why yeah but you can't even if you wanted to move to la let's say and then try and like rent something here you couldn't find a place to rent i'm not saying you have to live in la i'm just saying there's a lot of bits of america that are cheaper that you okay look fuck drugs don't even worry about drugs don't even worry about this this is I'm not saying you have to live in LA. I'm just saying there's a lot of bits of America that are cheaper. Okay, look, fuck drugs. Don't even worry about drugs.

Don't even worry about this. This is what I'm going to say to Americans. It's a big country. Why are you living in a place where you have to shovel your fucking driveway? If you live in a place with snow, we're in the morning, you get a shovel so you can get into your car. I just have no respect for you. What are you thinking? You can live anywhere.

You can live in fucking Hawaii. You've got a shitty job and you're shoveling snow? Have a shitty job and live near a beach. Stop trying to convince people to move to LA. Not LA. Oh, definitely don't come to LA. Not LA. There's plenty of places.

You drive up and down the coast of California, you'll find some little fucking... It's expensive, California. California is expensive as hell. Go live in Portland. Go live in the place where they film The Goonies. In Oregon? Astoria?

Yeah, Oregon. Astoria, Oregon. Go live in Astoria, Oregon. Lovely. Hey, Yoann, I have a question. Sure. So which TV show or movie do you think portrays the cartel the best? Because there's so many TV shows

and movies that have cartel influence, whether it's Breaking Bad or Ozark. I just finished watching Ozark. I always watch it and I'm like, is this really how it is? I mean, I know you don't know. Ozark isn't real. There's no system.

Martin Bird, he goes like this this he goes oh don't kill me don't kill me i'll move down to the ozarks and i'll be able to flip money because everyone here is looking at me in chicago and they're like oh man that's a good plan and then he goes down there and he goes oh yeah what i'll do is i'll buy a strip club and a local hotel and then everyone in town knows him in five seconds and the fbi are hanging down they're just staring at him all day and the cartel like oh that martin bird fuck it he came up with a good plan he just fucks the whole town it's the most unrealistic anyway i'm on season three don't tell me what happens season three is great uh but you know

i don't know like how much how many shows or movies or anything you've seen but is there anything that you were like wow that seems to ring more true? You know, because I spent a lot of time with some cartel people, I spent time in Juarez just after the peak of the madness there. I was a bit carteled out by the end of having got... And so I was a bit resistant to watching some of the TV about it. I remember the first... In my book, Chasing the Scream,

I tell the story of this guy who was a hitman for the Mexican drug cartels called Rosario Reto, who I got to know. He butchered or beheaded about 70 people. Are you supposed to tell us that? Sorry? Are you supposed to tell us that? Yeah, yeah, it's okay.

He's in prison. He can't kill us. Kelly's been a husband to the tigers. Sorry to eat oil. When I went to interview him, so the way the guard goes, like, so obviously he butchered or beheaded 70 people, so I can't leave you alone with him. And I was like, good.

I'm pleased to hear that. So I sort of sit down. And about five minutes in, they fucking left me with him. I was like, anyway, fortunately he's quite small and scrawny. Oh, yeah, like that's going to stop him. He's also psychotic.

How small were these 70 people? I didn't know you were such a tough guy. Yeah, so I could fucking take him, couldn't I, son? Small, little, scrawny, Mexican fucking fellow with a... Start poking him in the chest. He actually killed all the people he butchered or beheaded. He killed between the ages of 13 and 17. He was properly screaming.

He was massively... Wait a minute. Are they the big people who are fucking over the cartel, 14 to 17-year-olds? Probably, I guess. They call them expendables. So they have a little army of what they call expendables who are the young kind of kids they have.

They're clearly like child soldiers in Africa, basically. So it's like 14 year old 17 year old sylvester sloan john claude van damme mosaic chris tom chris yeah you can take him so i'm sorry to answer a question that i think breaking bad was in some ways a pretty actually yeah pretty good representation of the ways violence works under the war for drugs and i was watching about thinking about you know walter white's story in a world of legalization pablo escobar's son said to me if drugs had been legal my dad would have been a used car salesman and none of you would have heard his name right and in a similar way what's you know because some people go oh well

these people would have been violent anyway right and it's true there are some people who are currently in the drug trade who for whatever reason are sociopathic and would have committed acts of violence anyway but there is no alternative system that would have given rosalia retta you know enormous number of machine guns and the means to go and massacre and butcher and behead Pablo Escobar's son. What does he get up to now? What's his job? Is it just like being Pablo Escobar's son? Does he just go around and chat about being Pablo Escobar's son? No sandwich artist at Subway.

It's interesting because he's a really fascinating guy. He lives in Buenos Aires. He asked to meet when I asked to meet him. He said, yeah, come to a Burger King. And he gave me an address. So I was the only person sitting in a children's play area, Burger King with Pablo Escobar's sign up.

It's like a weird fucking stress stream. But he now runs a shoe business. A shoe what? It's the unglamorous answer. Yeah. Shoe business. A shoe business. Like he polishes them at airports or?

No, he manufactures them. Manufactures them. So what's the brand of shoes if I want some Escobars? I'm not actually sure what it's called. I'll email you he makes crocs he's the croc come on his family's committed a lot of crimes but they wouldn't go that far yeah yeah they cost like us five grand and if you cut into the heel no one knows that but here's some i have some quick hitter questions for you all right i'm

gonna ask jimny see if he knows the answer. And then maybe you know the answer. I think you probably know the answer. So we'll see. Which president of the United States declared a war on drugs, Jim? Ronald Reagan. Nope. You got that right.

Do you know the answer? I got the answer. But it's. I know you think it's Nixon. It's not. Oh, that's not the answer I had. Eisenhower. Yeah, it's not.

I was going to say Nixon. Our producer gave me that answer way to go alex you suck now what's the president then which one um but there were lots of presidents before uh it's not clear who was the first person to use the phrase but nixon ramped it up massively so you can say washington that's why that's why he had all those wooden teeth it was the myth okay uh here's this one i got what percentage of federal inmates have been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious offense and what there so what actually so who who is in prison their most serious offense is a drug offense yeah Yeah, what percentage of federal inmates have been convicted? I'd say 80%.

That's a little bit lower than that. I don't know. It says 45.5%, but I got this from Alex again, so who knows? You could be wrong. You could all be wrong. It's about around half. Yeah, around half, but that's what I used to say in my joke when I used to say the old, I'm not going to say what it is.

So if we stop the war on drugs, our prisons ease up, and then we're all good. I got to tell you, my favorite TV show is Locked Up Abroad. I love a Locked Up Abroad. Fuck, I love a Locked Up Abroad. But sometimes I like ones where they're thrown into a South American prison and they're just thrown in there and there's no guards or anything, and then they have to live.

And then there's the people who lie a bit, and they're just like this, yeah, I just beat up 10 people and I never got raped yeah yeah sure you're sure now i'm just there was a one in greece remember where they just were like in an olive orchard and they're like we just got in this boat to god yeah yeah that one yeah in greece where it's like it's like we made the chicken coop into a ladder yeah right? And you could fold the chicken coop out and then you could climb over the wall. And then there was a boat sitting there. So we got in that and we rode.

And then there was another one. There was like these young blokes who got locked in prison and they dug a hole, but then they cracked into the sewerage. And so they sent like a meth addict down into the sewerage to plug the hole and he just swam through shit. And he did it though. He did it. And he did it though he did it and he got a hit of meth from it so good for him all right next question um all right we have one more

and then i'm gonna i want to ask uh okay so for every 100 000 people who use alcohol 650 die as a result for every 100 000 people who use cocaine how many die as a result don't know what year this is from uh i i have to think it's higher than alcohol i have to because i know that i know the effects on it feel a lot more but i don't know if you use it because because we're saying because because you don't have alcohol overdoses i know you can you can drink yourself to death in one sitting people die from alcohol though i know but the alcohol deaths are more of a prolonged liver damage came in after years and years of abuse 650 out of 100 000 for alcohol how many out of 100 000 for cocaine you're talking about like pure cocaine or shit that's cut just give a

fucking number just a thousand a thousand a thousand a thousand a thousand yeah i don't know i mean i do know but i don't you know i, it's lower. Did you ask a question that you didn't have any questions? No, no, no. I don't know. I was actually asking you for a question. I just, I'm having, I had a brain problem there. It's four. You'd be a great quiz master.

You'd be like, game show, we're far and short. What South American country is known as Pablo Bla? I don't know. And then they go, is it Argentina? And then they cut back the forest. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It could be go, is it Argentina? And then they cut back the forest. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

It could be. It could be. There's no reason why it wouldn't be. I'm going to give you partial point, half point. What I meant to say is the answer is four, as again, Alex has given to me.

So I don't know, Alex. What you meant to say was four instead of I don't know? That's four. Four out of 100,000. That's radically less. Because you've got to be honest, Jimmy,

you're saying it's a lot less alcohol long term. That's true. But those are alcohol deaths, right? I mean... Cocaine, you feel like you're going to die when you take too much of it. Yeah, but the thing is, I don't... So what we're saying is, I can go back into that. It's been years.

It has been years. So I don't know. Did I give up something that wasn't hurting me? Yeah, I think you did, honestly. I'm getting a message from Alex that that was actually taken from Johan's site, and he's called me a dick. Alex did too. Can I get the source?

A lot of Alex's statistics just come from thoughts that he had. This is from Johan. That's why you had an answer for this as well but so you were saying so it is less than so and most drugs are going to be less than alcohol not all of them or is that yeah yeah well alcohol's uh so professor david not who's uh was the former chief scientific advisor on drugs in britain um did the breakdown and uh alcohol is the second deadliest drug per per person obviously far more people use alcohol but it's per person who uses it wait the second most number one's heroin yeah all right so would you still do heroin i've never done heroin never tried but if it was

legalized you'd still do it ah if it was legalized and it was pure i don't know i wouldn't mind just i wouldn't mind knowing what all the fuss is about i know the curiosity is there he's always got me my parents were the strictest parents ever my mother was the strict other other kids used to go oh fuck you your mom man like my mom was the strictest parent that you could believe but on everything if i was late or as this or as that i had to in certain ways i had to act and things that i did wrong and a lot of pressures from my childhood right but my mother for whatever reason i was allowed to get fucked up drunk at 14 never in the house my parents never gave me

my parents weren't those cool parents that were like we'd rather you drank in front of us so we know what you're doing but i was off in the park just getting fucked up drunk at 14 and my parents never said shit i used to come home drunk like on the regular and they knew they knew and i asked my mom years later about it and i said why and she goes oh well i knew i couldn't stop you and it's like you stopped me doing everything yeah you stopped me doing everything i was never allowed to do anything my my childhood was so strict except for this one thing. And so now being a parent, I have this, how strict am I going to be with my son? And now with weed being legal.

And how strict are you going to be? I think I'm going to be pretty strict. I think I'm going to be pretty strict. Like not at all, zero tolerance? Look, I'm not going to fucking murder the i think i'm not at all zero tolerance i look i'm not going to fucking murder the kid if he gets caught doing something stupid i'm going to try to talk through it but i'm not going to have this whole hey if you want to do it around the house bring your friends over i'm not going to be that fucking parent it's going to be hard though because

there's a lot of footage it's going to be hard because there's a lot of footage including this exact podcast you haven't said you did anything you've never done anything i've never done anything about when you think about kids it's interesting i always think about i interviewed this really conservative cop in new jersey called fred martins who had an epiphany he wouldn't use such fancy word as epiphany but he had an epiphany about drugs one day he was in in 1973 he was staking out a car parking in wayne new jersey he was staking out a car park in Wayne, New Jersey. He was staking out a dealer. And a kid came up to him, like I think a 10 or 11-year-old, and said, hey, mister, I'm not allowed to buy alcohol. Will you go into that store and buy me some booze?

And Fred said, ah, fuck off, get out of here. So the kid walked up to the dealer and bought some drugs from him instead. Dealers don't check ID, right? And Fred had this epiphany. He's like, oh like oh actually when something is legal it puts a barrier between kids and drugs that otherwise doesn't exist right so everyone agrees you know kids shouldn't be using drugs obviously it's bad for the developing brains and so on and actually if you want to protect your kids the most sensible thing you can do is end

the drug war and get drugs back from armed criminal gangs you actually don't give a shit how old their customers are and get it into the hands of licensed um businesses and pharmacies i understand that theory but it didn't alcohol was legal it didn't stop me from getting alcohol australia doesn't crack down yeah aussies and british people we don't crack down very much on on selling to underage people if you think about the the US, a lot of American fortune was really hard. It was really hard. When I was a kid, we could still get,

it was a mission to get it. It was like really hard. And then. Oh, I just, I got my brother's driver's license when it had expired. And I just said it was me. Very clearly wasn't me.

It was a different person. You could find places where you could do it. There was a guy that would sell us like porn magazines when we were under 18. And he was just a guy that didn't care. But also wasn't me it was a different person you could find places where you do it there was a guy that would sell us like porn magazines when we were under 18 and he was just a guy that didn't care yeah but also wasn't that to the point earlier that like then he'd ring you up and ask how you'd be like he cared about something like but earlier we're talking about like when you ban things it makes people want to use them more right so it's like you have those kids in high

school where like what your mom did where it's like she didn't care but she wasn't going to facilitate it that's probably the best thing she could have done for you because you were you didn't necessarily have to go out and be super rebellious about it like yeah i turned out great well like when you think about other countries where they're where their drinking age is so much lower it seems like they have a a smaller problem with um underage drinking than we do in the States. So that has to be some sort of correlation. The 21 age is ridiculous. It's insane. And people always use the example of if you can go to war.

No, it's if you can do porn. That's the example. Because you're going to need the alcohol and the drugs. If you can have 10 men stand around you and jack off on your face legally, legally, give that girl a beer yeah i'm telling you give that girl a beer she's gonna need something harder than a beer yeah like like

this whole like if you can fight for your country no there's plenty of shit you can do at 18 that is pretty fucking horrendous yeah and you're not allowed to have a beer no and also i found i found when i when i when i met americans okay i i think that the 21 age is why you all go so crazy in fraternities and there's all the problems there and because you all have to drink in house parties we don't have fraternities in australia and britain in the same way they have clubs in oxford or whatever but it's not the same yeah where there's people jelly wrestling all those because we've already had three years on you where we've gone out to bars and we weren't the coolest person in the room we were the youngest

person in the room where we were sort of just had to watch our p's and q's yeah because we didn't want to act like a fucking idiot where in colleges here everyone goes to a house party and your most responsible person's like 20 22 yeah right and of course you're gonna have fucking idiots well that's the thing i started drinking really early but with my brother it's like so i knew my by the time i got to college i knew my body enough that i never drank too much that i was getting sick or doing any of that stuff so i trained okay so johan do you have do you have a quick like uh fact for us that somebody could tell at a dinner party that would make them look like they're educated on this topic yeah kind of like the you know what what Jim talked about, talked about at the beginning,

like where we still want to have something that you could say to someone that people might not know, that might be obscure or interesting or might not be mainstream. I would say Switzerland legalized heroin 16 years ago, and since then there have been zero heroin overdose deaths on legal heroin in the whole country. That is remarkable. More people have had heroin overdoses since we started having this

conversation in the U S by a long way than have died in 16 years in Switzerland. Yeah. But could it be because they have good chocolate? Like the Americans have dog shit chocolate. What year was that then? So you said 16 years ago, but what year? It was done in 2004. So the whole country, you said 16 years ago, but what year? It was done in stages in the debate about when it began. So the whole country, it was 16 years ago.

So 2005. Yeah, I know it's... It sort of began a little bit before that. I know, Jim, but I'm saying... The math is so difficult. It's 2003. No, no, no.

I'm saying it so you remember it in your head so you're not like, 16 years ago and it's five years from now, like a jackass. They've even gotten their little knives.

They've got a little spoon that comes out. They added that to their little knives. They've got a little spoon that comes out. They added that to the Swiss Army knife. That would be amazing. That's going to be our first piece of merch for this podcast. A little needle comes out and a little spoon.

I couldn't get by without a Swiss Army knife. There's a little tiny belt that comes out the bottom. But no spoon, just a saucepan you said it's i'm telling you heroin saucepans i've watched so many do people really use spoons is that accurate what i want to see on tv okay so they put the heroin in right they boil it up they get like the end of a toothpick or something and they sort of mix it around or whatever right and they boil on a spoon it would boil in a little saucepan here's a

question for you if you want to find all the people who deal drugs this is how you do it right i've cracked it go to the manufacturers who make ziploc bags that would only fit a quarter in the tiny one yeah those ziploc bags they can't can't go, yeah, we're selling millions of these. And then they're like, what are you selling for? Bead shops? People have beads? So why have you put skulls and crossbows and fucking spiders on the back of them? I've seen one with the Michael Jordan logo.

Just a bit of fun? You find those Ziploc bag people and you'll find all the drug dealers. That's where you've got to trace it back. I'm telling you, plastic. Plastics, you get rid of plastic, you get rid of drugs. Because you get rid of plastics, you get rid of the syringes, you get rid of the little Ziploc bags. People can't cut with credit cards because it used to be razor blades, right?

If you rock up to a party with a mirror and a razor blade, you're a fucking psychopath, right? Like if you need your cocaine that finely dusted, a credit card's fine. But tell you, plastics, that's the real problem. Allegedly, you've never done any drugs. I've seen people do it. I once had a girlfriend who there was other people doing drugs

at the party, right? Not me. I was getting angry. And these other people at the party were doing drugs. And someone else said to this girl, and I was like a third date with her, said, do you want some blow? And she wanted to be cool around me. I don't think she'd ever taken it because of what happened next.

She went down with the rolled up note in her nose and she blew outwards, blowing all the cocaine off the table. I was the one who had brought her to this party and I just stood there going, ah, oh, well, it's good seeing you all. It's good seeing you all. And then God bless her. She was like, why is it called blow and i go it is confusing it is confusing that it's not called suck you think the stuff should

be called suck inhale quickly inhale would you like some inhale but they call it fucking blow and the poor lass she blew it all onto the carpet and that was the end and it was a poor comedian's party so it was like one gram being stretched out over nine people and uh later did she give you a blow job and they need to know how that went i can't remember i went on a few dates with her she was nice girl i don't you know i can't remember i'm sure i got i had sex with i'm sure i got a blow job out of it yes did she blow on it she didn't blow yeah see why is it called a blow job yeah that's true that's true why is it called cunnilingus that's my longest word my two longest words in this world are bukkake and cunnilingus bukkake is like six letters yeah but i can spell it oh gotcha it's more than six b-u-k-k-a-k-e

seven okay all right um so uh you don't want to you don't want to play me in Scrabble if all the Ks are being taken out of the bag. All right, Jim. So we're going to do one thing here real quick, Johan, where we have a real quick segment called I Do Know About This. Jim has given Kellyanne a bunch of topics he claims to know a lot about. And we're going to ask you some quick questions, quick answers. All right?

Okay. Theme parks is today's topic that you said you know about theme parks I've been to a lot of theme parks I don't know if I know historical well that's not what you told us so what does Epcot stand for European countries of

purpose you didn't even get the right letters he just put E-P-C-O-T. It's a theme park, you know. I know what it is. It's a theme park where you travel around the world. It stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. That's the worst bit of all of Disney is Epcot. It's got

two rides in it. It's dog shit. One of the countries they try to show you at Epcot is Canada. Yeah, they have all the countries there. There's noralia world they've got fucking canada yeah and it's like people like hey because that was the idea was before because it was in the 60s it was before like everyone could do plane travel and most americans had never been outside of america and so they said what you do is you come to disney world you see this thing

and then you can travel around the world in a few hours you can see everything and then they go what country should put there ah someone's got a stuffed moose and some maple syrup shove that over there with a mountie da da all right what was the first theme park to have its own currency uh i want to say tivoli in Copenhagen. No, Legoland. Legoland! Yeah, Tivoli. It has the Legos. Yeah, that's the currency. Yeah. And then there's just to kind of tie it into this.

There's a theme park in Mexico. Yeah. Where you can do a specific thing. It's not drug trafficking, but it's probably inappropriate, as I would say. It's called... Oh, is this the one where you can have the sex with the donkeys i've seen the poor man that's not a theme park

you can pay money to have a horse fuck you or something there's a donkey there's a mexican theme park that's they just fake border crossings with a seven and a half mile night hike for only 18 for a person really you get fake border crossing and they're like, you can get caught halfway through? Yeah, they have people that pretend they're border patrols and they catch you. Supposedly it's really difficult, but I guess there was a lot of backlash because people were like, you're training people

to cross the border and they're like, no, no, no, we would make it way more difficult. I think the backlash would be just even pretending to be a refugee. It's like a white person going to do this. When you get over the board, you get handed money and a job, and then you start

shagging like an American woman. And you're like, yeah, America! And then like... And you see in the future when your sons become the president. Alright. So, uh,

Johan, thank you for being on. Uh, I don't know about that. I don't know if there's anything specifically you want to promote. Um, what's the name of your book? Oh yeah.

So if, uh, people got a lot of time to listen to things at the moment. So actually a lot of the people we've talked about, like the hit man for the deadliest Mexican drug hotel, Bruce Alexander, who did this amazing experiment about addiction. You can listen to the audio of loads of these people for free on the book's website it's chasing the scream it's

like scream as in ah not screen scream chasing the scream.com and you can see where to get the book the audio book the ebook where to follow me on social media take a quiz to see how much you know about these subjects probably know as much as Jim. But you can test yourself. And yeah, cheers. Thank you to chasingthescream.com. Cheers. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that's been another episode of I Don't Know About That.

And remember, if you're at a party and someone says something and you're a little bit confused, you can always say, well, I don't know about that. And you can just walk away. We'll talk to you next time. Hey, everybody.

Jason Ellis here from the Jason Ellis Show podcast, reminding you that my podcast, new episodes every Wednesday, downloadable where all podcasts are available come see my friends Michael and Kevin as we talk to you about what's awesome what sucks fitness fighting parenting life spin kicks lgbtq community how to defend yourself against the shark if it attacks you out of nowhere and much much more so come join us