Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner on Drugs & Criminal Justice Reform

any type of drug. Welcome Psychoactive listeners. Today's guest is somebody who's playing a really pivotal role in the evolution of American criminal justice, hopefully in a more progressive, thoughtful, evidence based direction. His name is Larry Krasner. He is the District Attorney of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Uh. He was elected four years ago in a shocking victory, and then recently one re election in the Democratic primary, which means he has a very good shot of being the district attorney

for the next four years. So Larry, thanks so much for joining us. Signed Psychoactive. You know I am always happy to be on Psychoactive. Okay, well, we'll get into that issue a little more deeply soon, but let me set the context for the listeners. Right, So, Philadelphia. Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in America. It's about the sixth largest city, like Phoenix or San Antonio, a million and a half people. It's one of the poorer

cities in America. It's probably I think roughly forty black, forty percent white, tent other Asian, Latino, etcetera. It's also a city which has among the higher homicide rates in America and among the higher overdose fatality rates in America.

So it's the city struggling with a lot. And in that context, you have been well, you were, you know, a public defender and a civil rights attorney for thirty years right twenty seventeen, and then launched what appeared to be a quixotic effort to become the district attorney and lo and behold you one. So I'm curious, first, why did you decide to do that back four years ago? Well, you know, the personal history of that is that I was a very active trial lawyer defending indigent meaning broke

people in criminal matters for a long time. But I also did civil rights work and in my civil rights work, I usually represented broke people, black people, brown people who had been in some way mistreated or treated illegally by police. Though that was really kind of what I did, and you know, I tried hard. I got good results. But the way I felt, at age fifty six, having made this my life's work, was that I had gotten justice for individuals, but the entire time the system had gotten worse.

You know, being in court four and five days a week, you don't just do your own cases. You see all of these other cases that are happening while you wait to do yours. And the sense I had was that I was watching this slow motion car wreck, that the people who were in control, we're up for that wreck, and they were just going to keep driving into that wreck, and that there needed to be somebody else who was actually driving this car if we were to go a

different direction. M hm. You know it's funny, I when you talk about the people you're representing, I mean everything from poor black and brown folks and and poor white folks getting busted and hurt, but also act up the AIDS advocacy organization and move on folks on. And then you know, were you and I met or re met.

I just remember a few years ago, the University of Pennsylvania Law School did this big conference on the War on Drugs, and I did the opening keynote address, and you are in the panel right after that, and you surprised me and everybody else, but you said, you know, actually, Ethan, you may not remember for this, but we met thirty

years ago. And it was actually back in around nine ninety four where I was still teaching at Princeton and had brought my class down a drug policy class, down to Philadelphia, down to the you know, down and out Kensington neighborhood to observe and participate on a local semi legal I think it was needle Exchange program, and you were the attorney representing prevention point to needle exchange program.

So I mean this going back to our earliest years of me as an advocate, and you're working as a public defender and lawyer. So you've really been on the right side of these things. But let me go further back than that. Why did you decide to become a public defender? I mean, you're interesting, Like your mom was a devout Christian, your dad was a secular Jew who among other things, wrote crime novels and had among his

admirers the famous detective story writer Ray Chandler. But what was it that caused you to say I'm going to become a public defender back in the mid A So when I came out of law school, I was really fascinated by criminal justice. I've been fascinated by crime since I was probably twelve or thirteen. I think a lot of people are a lot of people go home from their day jobs and they watch crime fiction, you know, they watch c s I, or they watch films, dramatic

films they have to do with crime. Well, I was interested enough that I wanted to do it as a lawyer. But coming out of law school, I was really open to the possibility of being a prosecutor or a public defender. I was not really interested in being a private attorney doing this work, much more interested in being within the public sphere, where I thought the people really were and the activity really was. So I interviewed for both, and

I had offers from both. But what I found in seven as I interviewed, including interviewing at the Philadelphia DA's office, which I now run, is that I felt much more of a connection to the public defenders. You know, I walked out of the interview. There was humor, there was compassion, there was grace, and I walked out of the interviews with most to the prosecutor's offices, and it was it was this very sort of driven approach directed at retribution,

which didn't feel right to me. So I, you know, I chose to be a public defender, not because I thought it was immoral to ever put somebody in jail. I don't think that, But I chose to be a public defender because at that time, I think that was

being on the side of justice. And it's really the same reason why I chose to try to become a prosecutor at age fifty six, after I've done that work for thirty years, and one way or another, I just felt like being on the side of justice in meant trying to be a part of a grassroots movement for progressive criminal justice reform that was all over the country,

a movement in which Philadelphia was wanting to participate. But they needed somebody, you know, they needed a technician, which is really all I am, and that's really all that.

You know, some people I admire very much, like Kim Fox in Chicago, or Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, or you know, I could go on and on, but you know, we're technicians, were technicians for a grassroots movement that right now in the United States has elected and re elected progressive prosecutors in ten percent of uh, you know, all of its voting area, by which I mean ten percent of all voters have at this point chosen a progressive to make

decisions about criminal justice. And that number is up from basically zero, and it's up from basically zero in a short period of time. So it is definitely where we are all going. Yeah, I mean, Larry, you mentioned this broader progressive prosecutor movement, and you mentioned Kim Fox in Chicago. There's you know, Mosley in Baltimore, There's Rachel Rawlins in Boston, Suffolk County. So this really is a growing thing. You know.

For me, I think part of why I do what I do is my consciousness of my own father being born in Berlin and Hitler come into power when he was five and having a flee Germany when he was eleven with his family to save his life. But you know, I was asking you before, you know, you have a mother who's a devout Christian and a father who I

think you described just being secular and moral. But when you look at who you are what you are, do you see them and who they were as having played this helping explain why Larry Krasner is who he is in terms of both the public defense thing and the progressive prosecution. Really easy for me to psychoanalyze you, Ethan, but are harder to do it to myself. I'm sure did play a role. Yes, you know, the values in the home were more about people than they were about money.

For example, the values in the home were more about being known for doing good things because you did good things, then pretending you did good things. It was more about compassion, you know that it was in some ways about competition with other people. And the fact is, you know, because my dad was the child of immigrants from uh the Ukraine, there were Russian Jews, there was that, you know, being chase out of a country with torches and pitchforks leaves

an impression. Because he and basically an entire group of sixteen male cousins nearly all served in World War Two, they pretty strong feelings as people who were coming from Jewish culture, and in some cases who were religious, they had pretty strong feelings about having one group of people trying to exterminate them from the planet. So, you know,

you do pick up those things. But the other thing that happened, um, there many things happened, but my father became physically disabled later in his life and it very much affected his ability to bring home money. And the consequence was that we had public benefits at certain times. Right, So when you go through that, you experienced that. You know, I was in public schools and they made some wise choices.

So I ended up in public schools in inner city St. Louis and public schools outside of Philadelphia that were excellent public schools. But when you grow up under those circumstances, you come to understand that, how do I put it, poverty is not a flaw. And that's kind of where this starts. I mean, I saw that either in your book or this is a wonderful documentary Philly d a about you and your office in the campaign and trying to implement these changes, which I highly recommend to our listeners.

And I guess mad it's the book where you talked about having gotten and involved and maybe even met your wife working on access to housing services in New York, So I could see you had that progressive orientation early on. But let me ask you this, and if you can't answer it, I understand. But one of the other things that shape me was going to college and starting a smoke weed and wondering why I was a criminal for that or the occasional mushroom trip. Did you also have

these experiences in high school or college? I mean, were you were you doing drugs? You're a few yars younger than me, but this was, you know, the late seventies, it was a pretty liberal time. What was your own experience with this sort of illicit behavior that seemed harmful? So, you know, I had my first beer, my first alcohol in college. It's actually the day I arrived at college. My uncle, who was a dean of physics, gave me a beer. And I never smoked weed. All the way

through high school or college. I never did it. People used to gather in my dorm room and they would smoke weed while I was studying because they were my friends. I had no problem with it. I thought that the notion that this was, you know, illegal, was absurd frankly, but I was you know, for whatever reason, maybe it's partly just being kind of broke, but for whatever reason, it was just nothing that I did during that period

of time. Uh huh. Well listen, So you become a public defender in the late eighties with the drug war is just taking off like wildfire, right, and people are getting locked up in droves and prison popiers and is growing enormously. You make the switch to prosecutor to d a uh in seventeen as there is a growing movement for criminal justice reform, and there's even some other folks in Philadelphia. I mean, the mayor is making some noises

and pushing to some in the right direction. Your your predecessor as this your attorney had, you know, made some indications of softening up on marijuana stuff. What was the political climate like f I mean, how did you see the drug war in seventeen as you were becoming chief prosecutor of the city. You know, I had been both a public defender for a few years in Philippi County where there were a ton of drug prosecutions, and then

I was a federal public defender. I did actually federal criminal work, and much of that was cases involving drugs for twenty five years, so I had a pretty front row seat on the war on drugs from seven on. I thought the whole thing was a disaster and the

consequences were ridiculous. You know, you saw relatively young people getting life sentences in federal court because they had a couple of prior convictions of certain types, and the weight of drugs they were involved with with fifty six other people was high enough that they were supposed to spend their entire lives in jail and die or become prolific rats.

And then we had to rely on the mercy of a prosecutor to say less than life is okay judge, while some judge, probably a surly one, acted like life really made more sense. Right, So I had, I had watched that whole thing, and um I came into office and early with every intention of never prosecuting anyone again for possession of marijuana. Some of that road was already laid.

The mayor in Philadelphia before I got into office, had advocated for the use of a ticket, essentially a very low level offense, which was a fine for possessing marijuana, And so he had pushed that point with a lot of resistance, and the d a's office previously had been prosecuting about five to six thousand people a year for simple possession of marijuana. We're not talking about dealing drugs. We're not talking about possessing enormous amounts that someone else

is going to deal later. We're talking about simple possession. So by the time I went in, that was much better. About eight of those cases were no longer being prosecuted. Police were just giving out a ticket. We're down to maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred marijuana possession cases a year. We came in and said, no, we're not going to

do this anymore. This doesn't make any sense. Were we need to deal with shootings, We need to deal with gunpoint robberies, We need to deal with first greefelony apes, the kind of crimes that actually tear apart society, Traumatized people, traumatized communities. We have to deal with that. We do not have time to mess around with a substance that is safer for you than the beer that basically every judge and every cop is going to consume after they

get home from work. Well beer or brown liquor. If you want to talk about dangerous stuff, you know. So that's what we did, and of course there was a commotion, you know, in the same way the mayor suffered all kinds of commotion. We had all kinds of commotion over that,

and then people adapted. Culture changes, people adapt. As we look around right now in Philadelphia, we have a governor who, as soon as he got elected to a second term, started to advocate for the recreational adult use of marijuana. We already had medical use of marijuana under limited circumstances, but as soon as he locked in his second of two terms, the governor started to say, yeah, this is a good idea. We should allow recreational adult use marijuana.

We should tax the hell out of it, use the tax for good purposes. And as I sit here right now, Democrats want it. They're in the minority and the legislatures to the Republicans control the legislature, and believe it or not, Republicans want it. They can't agree on any kind of reasonable gun regulation, they can't agree on whether people's votes should count. But Republicans and Democrats in Pennsylvania agree there

should be recreational day use marijuana. They're just having a different tug of war, which is that Republicans wanted all those taxes to cut other taxes, including taxes for rich people, and Democrats want all those taxes to do what they did in a place like Colorado, which is they wanted to float under funded public schools, especially under funded public schools in places like Philadelphia where you have a high rate of educational failure despite a lot of good teachers,

where you have investment in students that is less than half of the investment in students in suburban areas that are right over the city boundary, for example, the suburban area where I was able to attend a public school. So you know, that's how I felt at the time. I think history is entirely on our side when it comes to marijuana. Yeah, I mean in a way, Pennsylvania is gonna maybe move faster because you're now becoming an outlier.

I mean, just in the last six to nine months, I think New York legalized, New Jersey legalized, Connecticut legalized, Virginia quite surprisingly legalized you know, Delaware, Rhode Island, the edge, Massachusetts done it. So I think the embarrassment of being an outlier and the fact that Pennsylvania's are now going out of state and paying taxes to neighboring states to either weed should hopefully, you know, get the pressure up.

But I guess in a way, right, the leverage you had in that is to basically say to the police, We're not going to prosecute these cases anymore if you arrest people. Is that basically right? Is that where the leverage comes from. The leverage in Philadelphia is that we have complete discretion about what we're going to charge or not.

There are locations where police get to determine what has charged, but the way it works in Philadelphia is they present to the district attorney's office their recommendation of charges and then a packet that is essentially documents summarizing the evidence, and then we make a decision, you know, and the vast majority of cases they submit to us, we are going to charge someone with many of the charge they recommend,

or maybe all the charge they recommend. But you know, what are the beauties of being an elected district attorney in many jurisdictions is it's an executive position where you don't have the log role with anybody, so we get to say yes or no, I'm going to charge this case, yes or no. I'm going to pursue the death penalty, yes or no. We're gonna seek a high sentence or

we're gonna seek probation. We get to make that decision unilaterally. Uh, and more specifically, I get to make that decision unilaterally. So there's power there. You think most people, I mean most of the cops and prosecutors and judges in Philadelphia would now vote for legalizing marijuana. Are we going to count the retired ones? If you count the retired ones, I would say no, no, But the current ones probably is. I think that there are subgroups, maybe younger officers, probably

officers of color, who would vote for it. I think overall they would vote against it, And to be honest, they have a specific financial interest in voting against it because they don't simply get paid to arrest people for whatever it is, having your grass too long, you know, having a turn signal on your car that has chipped. They don't just get paid for doing that job. They get overtime, and they get a lot of overtime for going to court to testify when they're not on shift.

There are officers who are making more money and overtime than they are making for their salary. I mean, honestly, I think if they could arrest people for blue shirts. I'm wearing a blue shirt today, some of them would be mercenary enough to say, hey, it sounds like a good plan. Let's arrest people for blue shirts. I want a beach house, and they would do it. It's not Look,

it's not your average officer. There's a you know, there's a lot of great cops in Philly who actually do think about issues at a level of policy and at a level of a wholesome society. But they have a vested financial interest, just as our public prison industry and our private prison industry have a vested financial interest in locking up everybody for everything forever. We'll be talking more after we here this ad. I saw you quoted as saying it's nice to have the power instead of the outrage.

And you said, we're taking the movements aggressive prosecutor progressive criminal just movement inside, right, So there's real power. And you pointed out that the district attorney is the most powerful player in the criminal justice system, so you have all this leverage. You've accomplished some great things around juvenile justice, and going after bad cops and and pushing back and all this petty bullshit arrest and all of these sorts

of things. But you're dealing with a police department, you're dealing with judges, you're dealing with the state legislature. You're dealing with the bail industry. That I guess has been the fundamental tension you've had to deal with. You have this power, You had an upfront seat for thirty years to how powerful the d A and his full office could be. Yet at the same time you must be incredibly aware of how limited that power has given all

the other players. I am definitely aware of the limitations. But let me tell you why I don't feel too bad about it. All Right, So, we've actually been in office now for three and a half years, and we made clear in our campaign some of the things we cared about. One of them was to try to take a bite out of mass incarceration, meaning having far too

many Americans in jail. America is the most incarcerated country in the world, which is kind of strange when you claim to be the land of freedom, the beacon of liberty, and Philadelphia in particular has a long history of significance in terms of documents and historical events that are around

freedom and there are around liberty. So there's kind of like a fundamental disconnect, right, So, what have we actually been able to accomplish despite the resistance from the judiciary, despite a legislature that is often, you know, looking out for the financial interests of counties that have state prisons. What is our actual achievement Well before the pandemic hit. And I say that because all the statistics are off

due to the pandemic. Pandemic effectively shut down courts, and I'm not going to take credit for that because I think that would be unscientific. But before the pandemic hit, we our administration, our d A's office, because of its recommendations for sentencing, because of its negotiations, because of its charging practices. We had cut future years of incarceration that we're coming out of the court system by in just three years and one of the most incarcerated big cities

in the United States. What about supervisional in probation and parole, which is a closely related issue because minor violations of probation and parole put you back in jail. Well, we were able to cut the future years of supervisional approbation and parole by two thirds. You know, Yes, we saw big declines in our county jail population before the pandemic hit, the sharpest declines that had been seen in a long process of success going back several years to reduce it.

That tells you a little bit. But really what you need to know is what's happening in five years and what's happening in ten years. And what we know is that we have cut all those future years in half in just that period of time. That's power, Okay. It's also power when you say we're gonna have a unit to make sure immigrants are treated fairly and you do it. It's also power when you do not pursue the death penalty in any case, any new case, or any case

on appeal. That's power. It's not absolute power, but we should not have absolute power. It is my hope that's going to happen here is that people who are excited enough to vote when they wouldn't vote before, because they care about criminal justice in a way they haven't cared

about politics for a long time. It's my hope that they'll look at the success in all these different cities, and they won't just elect more progressive prosecutors, but they'll say, you know what, we need to elect a progressive mayor who's going to appoint a progressive police chief, a progressive

police commissioner. We want somebody like that police commissioner in the Twin Cities who took the stand and who testified that what his officer did was wrong, that it was against policy, and supported the position that what one of the people he supervised did was a crime. That's what we want. So we're gonna allow to progressive mayor. And you know what else we want. We're a little sick of all these judges fighting what we want. We're a

little sick of being the most incarcerated country. So with that, and we're going to be able to collect the report card on some of these judges, and when they come up for election, if they don't have a life's history that says they're gonna do a good job, don't vote for him. And when they come up for retention, because many judges who are elected come up for retention, they come up for another term every six years or every

ten years. And we're gonna take the success that we've had and putting progressive prosecutors in a position to do some good things. But we're gonna give them some partners. We're gonna give them police chiefs through mayors, We're gonna give them judiciary through paying attention and not just throwing buttons for names we've never heard of. And we're gonna

hold our legislators accountable as well. And what you're gonna see when that happens, when you go from progressive prosecutor as a one point oh two progressive criminal justice partners is a two point oh is you're gonna see sweeping change all over the country, massive declines in future years of incarceration, and you're gonna see a path over a decade or two to actually get out of us and to a much better place. Yeah. Now, it seems to me one of the greatest threats to the continuing progress

of this movement, which we both support. Full disclosure here, you know I do support Larry. I sent him a little, you know, some money for his campaign reelection. So I'm a huge fan and advocate. But you know, you look at what's happening with homicide rates right in Philadelphia, in my city of New York, and many other places in Philadelphia ranks among the top cities in the country. I don't know about the increase in homicide rate, but in terms of the number of people, your homicide rates are

very high. And when people feel fearful, and I know you're I mean I saw you on TV a few days ago and there was a whole bunch of shootings and killings of Philadelphia. I saw you getting emotional about this stuff. We know, people, even if other crimes, even if petty crimes are not going up, when they see and feel that, they start to freak out. That emotional resistance kind of bubbles up and boils up. But what can you as the d A actually do about high

levels of homicide? I mean, how much power do you have to deal with that issue? Which it seems like a policing issue, It seems like a power of the issue. It seems like a lack of aging. I mean, all these other things. What can you actually do with your powers? So, you know, the situation that we see nationally is kind of fascinating, and it takes us back to a narrative that we have to shake, which is essentially that no matter what happens, you need to be quote tough on

crime unquote. I call it stupid on crime. But no matter what happens, you need to hang them high. No matter what happens, you need to put them in jail and throw away the key. These are phrases that we all recognize that we live with in the United States because we've heard them for so long. So if crime is coming down, and it's been coming down for thirty years, then that's just proof if you listen to conservatives that

being tough on crime work. If crime is going up after thirty years of tough on crime, well that means we need to be tougher and logic this is called a tautology. It basically is that no matter what happens, we come to the same conclusion, just get tough on crime. That is nonsense. The reason part of the reason that Philadelphia has been chronically high in violence. I've been in the area for fifty years, but let's just go back my career, which is thirty three years now. The reason

it has been chronically high is poverty. Philadelphia is the sixth largest city, but it's got the fourth largest police force, and it has a politics that in many ways have been dominated by cops ever since the cop became the mayor of the city Philadelphia named Frank Rizzone some time ago, with a system of policing that was brutal and racist, that's what he was all about. And the legacy of those essentially thirty years of quote tough on crime unquote

approaches rather than addressing poverty, has been chronically high. Violence in the sixth largest city with the fourth largest police departments analogus in many ways to Chicago, where you have another outsized police department. The police department proportionately is bigger

than the population of the city. And yet in Chicago, which does not have identical poverty problems, that's a much more prosperous city, but it has pockets, It has neighborhoods where violence is quite high, where the poverty is very similar to what we're seeing in Philadelphia. What is clear from these two cities is that just having more police officers and just putting an infinite amount of money into policing doesn't solve these problems at all, and so we

have to look at something that will actually work. There is no doubt in my mind, and there's at this point no doubt in the minds of more than two out of every three Philadelphias. And I say that because that's what the vote was in May, in a showdown between basically conservative approaches to prosecution of policing and our approach, and we overwhelmingly won. There's no doubt that what people believe in is prevention. What they believe in is serious

investment in community based organizations. And they believe in this even in the face of record high numbers of killings with guns and record high numbers of shootings in Philadelphia. Now, what's happening in Philly has actually happening all over the country. Of the fifty largest cities, the average increase in gun violence last year was incredibly high. Philadelphia was slightly less than that. Actually we were slightly less than that terrible

average increases. There are cities even this year where they're experiencing a one plus increase in gun violence. Philadelphia right now is having a terrible time. We're up about there's one city that's at close to and it's increase in gun violence. The important thing to recognize is many of the cities with the highest increases have traditional prosecutors and

traditional approaches to policing. There is absolutely no correlation and no connection whatsoever between the policies of these prosecutors and what's happening in terms of the level of increase of crime. The crime increases endemic all over the country, even in rural areas, even in suburban areas, although to a lesser extent as you might expect. But you know, I think that that in many ways should illustrate for everyone that prosecutors have very little impact on the currents of homicides.

The truth is that police have a lot less impact on the occurrence of homicides than many of their chiefs or their mayors would like you to think. Rudy Giuliani didn't fix anything, and frankly, it's a good thing they took away his law license. He never should had it. But he didn't fix anything with illegal stopping first all over the country. He just made it worse by breaking relationships between communities and police, so police can't get witnesses anymore for all kinds of cases. I do sort of

look forward to the data. Rudy Giuliani is behind bars, Larry, But let me, I want to get into the drug stuff for the rest of the this thing. But the

one last question on the homicide thing. You know, there's this article that was published recently by the former judge and now law professor Paul Cassell about the Minneapolis Effect, and he makes the argument that if you look at these dramatic jumps in homicides and shootings around the entire country, that one significant explanation is that basically the cops are kind of like, you know, saying, hey, with all the

Black Lives Matter stuff, defund the police. We're just not going to be sticking our next out on all this rough policing. And we're dealing with rough on men and guns, and if you don't have our back, we know we're gonna take it easy. And that helps explain why you see substantial jumps. What's your response to that, to Cassell's argument to that? You know, I actually know a little bit about Paul Cassell. I think we went to the

same law school a couple of years apart. As best I can tell, he's dedicated his career to uh authoritarian approaches to policing. He spent most of his early career trying to get rid of Miranda, which is laughable at many levels. And now and now what Now it's Um, it's the fault of Black Lives Matter that we have poverty in major cities. It's the fault of Black Lives matter that when black people are killed, cops can't solve those cases. Sure, Paul, Okay, whatever you say, you don't

detect that at all in the department. I mean, if you're asking me, do I think that there are some bums in uh in police departments who will look for any excuse not to work and get paid. Yeah, there are. I mean, I'll tell you something right now, in Philly, we have a crisis of police officers who are gaming

the system to claim that they are injured on duty. Somehow, magically, the Philadelphic Police Department has gone from a rate between two and four of police officers being so injured on duty that they cannot work to oh my goodness, what happened? And when you start to dig into it, what you find is that they're financially better off if they don't work. And what you find is there's no accountability coming from the doctors who screened these things and from the union

that has been unaccountable in Philly forever. Yeah, there are some cops who are bumps. Okay, there are some prosecutors who are bumps, including prosecutors in my office right now. But the notion that we should all pander two police officers who are paid to serve the community by making sure no one talks about their rights too loudly, because oh my goodness, what if the people who are supposed to protect us exercise right they don't have, which is to not do the work and take the money home.

I mean, I just I just don't get that. That's called being afraid of the people who serve you, as opposed to expecting something from the people who serve you. Let's take a break here and go to an add Okay, well, let's let's get into drugs now, um a little more deeply. Obviously, I watched that Philly DA. Virtually the first words out of your mouth are about let's cut marijuana arrest and let's stop even the possession arrest for small amounts of

other drugs. So you know, you get this stuff. You're about decriminalization, You're you're doing the right thing. You're describing what you know, mass supervision. The problem probation system is the evil twin and mass incarceration and the drug stuff

and drug type. I mean, I really admire that. But what I really admired is that even today, when you talk to people in the criminal justice system about harm reduction, the basic public health human rights, you know, pragmatic approach dealing with drugs, a lot of criminal justice folks don't

even know harm reduction. And you provided a leadership role when the discussion started to happen around setting up a safe injection side or supervised injection facility or or what's now called over those prevention centers, which for our listeners they should know, they're basically like a needle exchange with a back room with a nurse where people can safely inject drugs that they're still buying on the black market. I mean, you became a powerful advocate for that and

really moved this issue forward. Why well, that goes back to when you and you and I were both little kids playing out there in the street. It goes back to nineteen probably something like that, maybe early. It goes back to a period of time when I became interested in activists who are working around issues of HIV and AIDS during the crisis that we all suffered at that time, a public health crisis. The time when we had to talk about harm reduction in terms of stopping the spread

of that virus. Look where we are now, right back in a similar position. And because HIV and AS were spreading so quickly among intravenous drug users, some very idealistic people took a lot of risks and formed something called prevention point. It wasn't a needle exchange, and yes it was illegal in the minds of most people at the

time that that was occurring. The Attorney General of Pennsylvania, the statewide prosecutor of Pennsylvania, was swearing he was going to arrest them, indict them, and lock them up, which is why I was there as a criminal defense attorney, meeting with clients, seeing what they were doing, so that I could understand how to defend them. The whole story gets more ridiculous because he went to jail and they

didn't because he liked bribes, whatever, you know. But there was also some good news, which is a rather centrous mayor at the time named Ed Rendell, now a mainstay of the Democratic National Committee, an old friend of Bill Clinton. He understood this, and to his credit, he supported as mayor that prevention points should exist and that it should be normalized that we're going to give out clean needles so we can stop the spread of HIV and AIDS.

And that is what has happened in Philadelphia. Prevention points still exists. It's in a building now, it's not at a card table anymore. It gives out millions of needles. It hasn't ended drug addiction by any means, but there have been waves and waves and waves of infection with HIV and AIDS that have been prevent it as the direct result of that kind of activity. And you know, and in my mind, that is sort of an encapsulated

version of what harm reduction can be. Obviously, another step in this, and I've had the good fortune to be able to travel with a bunch of other progressive prosecutors to British Columbia, to Berlin, actually to Portugal and to

see it. But another step in this is to recognize that when we're dealing with opioids in particular, and we're dealing with fentanyl, which has changed the game in many ways when it comes to fatal overdoses because it is so toxic and it it is so frightening, and how it's used at the street level when we're dealing with that. I mean, I can't escape the reality that four people die every day in Philadelphia. Every day. I used to say three, Now I say four. How is it possible

to say, yeah, let's not do anything. Let's just let them die behind dumpsters by themselves, stop breathing, Let's let their brains cook from lack of oxygen. Let's say that's that's okay. Uh. You know, we have to prevent harm. People cannot get into treatment reclaim their lives. They can't do that if they die. It's really not complicated. You have to try to keep people alive. They may not be your children, but there's somebody's kids. M you know. I mean, I like the way that you went abroad.

I mean I think I saw you shortly after you came back from Lisbon. A little side on this thing. As I was prepping for this interview, I came across the fact that your father actually co authored a report fifty years ago whatever called Drug Trip Abroad about American drug users living in London and Amsternam back in the seventies. It was a funny little thing. And then thinking about

you going to these other places. But I'm curious did these trips to these other places have a significant impact on you or did they basically confirm things that you already knew. I would say both. The book you're referring to, Drug Trip Abroad, was actually a book that my father, who, when he wasn't being an author, was trying to make a living as a freelance writer. It's something that he wrote for a couple of University of Pennsylvania professors a

very long time ago. I guess this would have been in the mid nineties seventies probably, But um, the ideas that we're talking about now are not brand new. They were ideas that were out there quite some time ago. You know. I think when you walk into Insight, which is one of the locations where people who use drugs can go to use it under the watchful eye of someone who's going to make sure they don't overdose, or if they do overdose, it's gonna make sure they get

medical treatment. Right when you go in there and you see it, it's not this scary thing. Part of what's difficult in the United States. They've never seen it, so they imagine there aren't evil doctors who are coming up to inject you when you can't even inject yourself. You know, what you actually see when you go and looks kind of like a hair salon. You have a whole bunch of stainless steel booths that are kept clean where people

come in on a schedule. They bring the drugs that they would otherwise use on the street behind a dumpster, you know, in some flaphouse by themselves. They bring it into the space and they go and they use their drugs themselves while somebody keeps an eye on them. And if they start to nod off, they start to fall asleep,

they start to have restricted breathing. The first thing that the person who was there, who has trained the insight employee will do is they'll go and they'll rub their shoulders or shake their shoulders try to wake them up. If that doesn't work, they're gonna rub their stardom to try to wake them up. If that doesn't work, they're gonna bring oxygen, you know, like football players use on

the sidelines in America. They're gonna bring them oxygen over and if that is not working, and there's still a problem because for example, with these you know, street dealers putting together wild mixes of who knows what and who knows what proportions they have ingested far too much for

their system. Then there will be no lockso nar can There will be you know, a chemical inhalent or injection which can bring them right back by blocking the opioid receptors, or you're gonna have an ambulance calm and take them to the emergency room. In many ways, this is nothing more than a lobby for the emergency room. But it just makes sure that where it's not necessary to be in the emergency room, we take care of it out here. You know, people don't die in these places. Simply put.

It's like people die in the street the time, but they don't die in supervised injection sites, or as I call them, harm reduction centers. Some of these centers you can actually walk upstairs and there is detoxification when you're ready for it and when you want it. You know, this is not just a way of saving lives, it's also a way of reducing harm to the outside community by providing services like toilets and by making sure that

you know, certain diseases are not spreading unnecessarily. But it's also a really good way to get people into treatment. It is a positive all around. And that's why if you talk to cops in Vancouver, the older ones, the ones who were there when there were so many fatalities in the street and they had to move so many fatalities themselves, will tell you they but some of the younger police officers who never saw how horrible it was,

some of them don't get it. Yeah, I mean for our listeners, you know, when Larry's talking about nobody's dying in one of these over those prevention centers. And also the fact that they reduce public nuisance and they've used them that as you know, syringes being left around the neighborhood. It's all grounded in dozens of scientific studies, peer reviewed, published and taught journals. Larry, I'll tell you when I was traveling around Europe at some points in visiting a

whole bunch of these safe injection sites. I went to the one in Zurich and one of the sites was actually on the second floor of a building where the first store was a police station. And I asked a few of the harm induction folks I was with, I mean, what do you think about that? And they said, it's great. The police are supportive of us. You know, it was it was a different sort of context, you know, Larry Uh. I mean, obviously, you just won this big victory and

the Democratic primary two to one. It's almost certain you'll become re elected for d A. Obviously running for mayor. I mean, you can't say I'm gonna run from Alior now because You've still gonna win your re election here. But it is pretty clear that to be in that position would allow you the opportunity to hire the police chief.

I mean, you would not control the d AH, you would not control the judges, but it does have the capacity to address at an even bigger level the issues and the reasons why you became a d A. Yes, well, look, I'm a car mechanic. I'm not the only good car mechanic out There. Are so very dedicated and and actually very progressive people in city government now, and you know a few of them would like to be mayor. And then there's some people with a much more traditional centrist

or conservative viewpoint and want to be mayor. What I really need is a friend to the causes we are pursuing as mayor. What I really need is a legislature where we have friends who are trying to do the right thing instead of trying to fill up their state prisons for their own economic benefit and their own political benefit. That's what we really need. This is far too much for any one of us to do. A lot of good car mechanics out there. I'm looking for my NASCAR team.

We need a whole bunch of good car mechanics. And when we get that going, we're gonna win the race. Okay, well, last question. That was very politic answer. But here's my

last question for you. And I know this is funny moment in Philly, DA where you're you're being interviewed together with your wife and there's a question to you about what something was like, and you got us giving this technical answer you and you describe yourself a technician, and your wife goes, hey, Larry, they're talking about emotion here right, Well,

here's the question. I mean, here you are on the other side, public defender, civil wise layer for thirty years, and now you're the chief prosecutor, and you've got to put people behind bars, and not just people committing murders, but you know, you've got to represent the interests of law enforcement. Maybe there's even people your office is prosecuting who you used to represent personally, And I want to know. I mean, I related. It's a psychoanalysis sort of question.

But when you sit back and you think, how has Larry Krasner changed over the last four years? I mean, your passion, your progressive sentiments are obvious their parents, You're never giving that up. But are there subtle ways you think in which you've evolved as a human being, or in your viewpoints, or what tugs at your heart as a result of these past four years in the in the d A C. You know, I think there are I think that I came to the office as an

experienced advocate, but I was the outsider advocate. I was against I was against a bad system. I was against a bad decision. I was against a bad policy. And you can speak in what you know, as you refer to as a prophetic voice. When you're doing that, you can be very absolutist. When you actually have to make decisions and the clock is ticking and you know that four people could die today from overdoses, that's tricky. Now you have to be strategic. Now you have to push

it out too far. Maybe the you know, the sweeping comment you wanted to make is when you cannot make, that gets difficult. I also came with really no experience in politics other than helping some people win. When you're in politics, I mean, sometimes you discover how wonderful people are. Sometimes you find out how petty they are, how actually you have to be transactional in a way that's not your nature because you haven't lived as a transactional person

for many, many years. You know, that's something I have had to learn. It's something I am learning and trying to tell the difference between the ones who are transactional and need to be addressed in a certain way and the elected leaders who actually are more transformational. They're trying to do things and you have common ground with them.

That gets But you know, it's like anything else. I suppose in a perfect world you could have been in a position to do this thirty years ago, but the country wasn't ready, and frankly, I wouldn't have known what to do. It's the thirty years of actually doing this thing that made it possible for me to try to change this thing. You know you mentioned may or a minute ago. Well, okay, we can take someone who actually knows what the hell of criminal justice system is about,

and is it a position to play with it? Or we can take that person and make him a generalist who is dealing with all sorts of things he knows very little about, because that is actually what mayors do, and it's what U. S. Senators do, and it's what presidents do. They have to walk into waters where they really know nothing and they have to rely on other people. You know, to me, not a surprise that most people dislike politicians because they think that they're not so concerned

about the issue. They're more concerned about their own advancement. They're happy to say two things at the same time, etcetera. I feel pretty comfortable being in a position where I know something about the topic from thirty years of being at it. I have a short runway when I can try to fix it, and hopefully I can gather some friends for this cause and then I can get out

of the way and they can continue to make progress. It's, you know, I don't really have enough years ahead of me to try to change in all sorts of profound ways, but I'll try to change fast enough to get something done. Well, Larry, you know, I see progressive prosecutors around the country facing re election challenges and all that, and your two to one victory in the primary not long ago was just inspiring. It seems like a vote of confidence from people in Philadelphia.

Uh so, I hope that bodes well. And quite frankly, what you're doing. I mean, you really are one of my heroes out there, so I so much appreciate it. I wish you all the best of luck and four more years of really changing the city as best you can and providing some forms of leadership for the rest of the country. Thanks so much for being on Psychoactive with me. You are too kind. Ethan. You're my hero too. Actually you're my hero first, but okay, well listen, thanks

a lot, really appreciate it. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures, Alice Williams and Matt Frederick for iHeart Radio, and me Ethan Nadelman Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks to a

Vivit Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments or ideas, please leave us a message at eight three three seven seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three Psycho zero. You can also email us as psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. And if you couldn't keep track of all this, find the information in the show notes. Tune in next time for my conversation with Patrick rad and Kief, whose recent book Empire

Sane exposes how the opioid crisis really got going. So, Patrick, I mean OxyContin hits the market roughly seven or so. What was so special about it? So, OxyContin was a powerful opioid pain killer. It's released in ninety six. It was pure oxycodone, which is a very strong opioid, but with a special coating which allowed it to disperse into your blood stream slowly over the course of a number of hours. And so what this meant is that you can have quite big doses and you start to see

problems almost right away. People are abusing OxyContin by crushing the pills, and you can thereby kind of override that slow release mechanism and get the full dose all at once. But people are also in a doctor's care just finding that they're becoming addicted to the drugs. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it an't miss it.