Quick Fix 8 | What Do Solutions Look Like?

follow up after our Johan Harry episode. Amazing Guests really got into kind of the nitty gritty how this all started, where the incentives lie, Like really the groundwork of the war on drugs that we're still fighting over one hundred years later in this country, right, the basis from which it was founded, and it's h is a real shaky foundation. You know. We did kind of harp on a lot

of the problems. But one of the great things about I love Johan's book because it does get into what actually works, what can work, and like where has it worked, and so he really gets into a lot of actual solutions to these problems when everyone's like, yeah, what do you do about you know, people struggling with the addiction or the opioid epidemic or all this crime that comes from there. And that's one thing about the Johan episode.

It was great because he gave so much information in solutions, and it was just so much that he gave us we couldn't even put it all in one episode. So that's why we have these quick fixes. And here's more with Johan hard Am. I saying his name right, and I want to mess up people's name. Okay, yeah, all right. So people are going to hear this, and they hear the problems, but let us know what solutions look like.

One of the things that's so exciting about this, Clayton, is that are incredibly good solutions and we could move to them really quickly, and I went to places that have done it. So in the year two thousand, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the world. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is staggering. It's a significantly worse situation than in the

US at the moment. And every year they tried the American way more, they arrested more people, they imprisoned more people, they shamed more people, and every year the problem got worse, until finally the leader of the opposition and the Prime minister got together and they were like, look, we can't carry on like this with ever more people being addicted

to heroin. What are we going to do? So they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since Harry Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. They said, shall we ask some scientists what we should do? So they looked at all the evidence, they looked at rat Park. They took two years, they really did a deep dive into this, and they came back and they said, Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize

all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot. But and this is the crucial next step, we're going to take all the money we currently spend unscrewing people's lives up, arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to spend all that money instead on turning their lives around. The main thing they did was a huge program of reconnection. But people with addiction problems say, you used to be

a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say, if you employ this guy for a year, will pay half his wages. They spent most of that stuff on helping get people into work and on getting people housing, and the results were very clear. The best research on

This was done by the British Journal of Criminology. They found addiction felled by more than fifty percent, overdose rates felled by more than eighty percent, HIV transmission among drug users felled by ninety percent, massive fall in street crime, prostitution, and one of the ways you know it worked really well. It's hardly anyone in Portugal wants to go back. And

this is something I saw all over the world. When you propose going beyond the war on drugs, it's hugely controversial, right, people think it's crazy, and then people see it in practice and it's not perfect. They still got some problems in Portugal, to be sure, but there's such a drastic improvement the support becomes extremely high. And this is what's so encouraging and maddening, is that the alternatives work. Right.

If you treat people with addiction problems with love and compassion, and you give them very practical help, targeted help to change their lives that are loving and compassionate, you maximize your chances of them having a good life and not causing problems for the society. And if you just beat the shit out of them in the way that our systems do, you increase the chances of them having a terrible life or dying and causing problems for the rest

of the society. Sometimes we say, oh, it doesn't work. Well, that's true, but that's way understating how done. What we're doing is. It's not that it doesn't work, is that it makes the problem worse. Right right, I'm Greg Glad and I'm Clayton English and this has been a war on drugs Quick Fix, Thanks for listening.