CHASING THE SCREAM-Johann Hari

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ten percent off your first purchase. Waespase build it beautiful. Thank you agree to this interview, Johann, Thank you very much. I just want to do the synopsis of the book as we normally I normally do.

are not what we think they are. Addiction, is not what we think it is, and the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our t television screens for so long. In Chasing the Scream, Harry reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit man in Mexico

searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovered that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade, and ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack with remarkable results. Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war, in our hunger for drugs and in our

attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial and consequential questions of our time. The book that we're featuring this evening is Chasing the Scream. The first and last days of the War on Drugs with my special guest journalist and author Johann Hari. Thank you for agreeing to this interview, and let's get right into this incredible book.

in writing a book like that for lots of reasons. Really, one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to and as I got older, realizing we had addiction in my family, and then other relatives becoming quite serious addicts.

And I guess when I realized the centenary was coming up, as you said, from reading the instruction, I just realized there was so many basic questions I didn't understand about this question, like why were drugs banned in the first place, Why do we continue with this strategy of punishing drug users and addicts, What do the alternatives really look like?

And what really causes drug use and drug addiction? And I kind of was realizing that in a way, I didn't think I was going to get the answers to those questions by arguing with people, by looking for arguments. What I wanted to do was go and sit with people whose lives have been changed by this approach one way or another, and a kind of crazy mixture of people.

It turned out to be over the kind of three and a half years I was doing the research and writing the book, and I kind of felt like I was going to find the answers not by arguing, but by sitting with people and listening to them and going back to them again and again, and just trying to see the effects in the real world, not as if we're liking some kind of philosophy seminar, but in the

real world. And I think part of the problem with this whole question is so many of the people involved in this have been totally dehumanized, you know, whether it's drug users, drug dealers, cops. You mentioned that the guy I interviewed who was the only person to ever be at the heart of the deadliest Mexican drug cartel and get out and live to tell his story, albeit he

lives in a very terrible way. And I kind of guess I just wanted to listen to those people and tell their stories, their human stories, in the hope that the best way to deal with dehumanization is to rehumanize people, and the way you rehumanize people is just to tell

what their lives are like. And I kind of felt like if most people I knew could have met Gino, the incredible transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn, that I got to know the three as former pract dealer, for example, or one of the extraordinary former street attic time that has started a revolution in Vancouver that completely transformed the city. I felt like they wouldn't be able to think about the drug war in the same way.

of two people. One there was a doctor in California called Henry Smith Williams who was nobody's idea of a liberal, but he treated addicts both before drugs were banned and then after. He was not very sympathetic to addicts. It wasn't a particularly nice man actually to start it, but he noticed something that really struck him. When drugs were legal, he had patients who had addiction problems. They were a bit like alcoholics today. Their lives were diminished, but most

of them had jobs, most of them had lives. Most of them there were not significant numbers of people dying of overdoses. Then drugs were banned for reasons I got back to in a minute, which had nothing to do with protecting the addicts. And what he noticed is suddenly all sorts of problems got dramatically worse. When you bann drugs that don't disappear. They're transferred from doctors and pharmacists

to armed criminal gangs. Those armed criminal gangs will fight to control the patch, but more harmfully, even more harmfully for the addicts themselves. They massively increased the price. They jacked it up by a foul percent, and that meant that the addicts who'd previously been able to go to the local corner store to get there, to get their drugs at the local dime store, had to suddenly pay this massively inflated price. A lot of the women became prostitutes,

a lot of the men started committeeing property crime. Also, the drugs started to be massively adulterated because criminals you can't set help and say they inspectors in to check criminals smuggling, smuggling things across the country. So you saw a massive increase in death among addicts. And Harry Smith Williams was really struck. The doctor in California was really struck by this. He actually started to campaign against the drug warm. We forget that this was a massively contested

thing when it came in. It's not that the drugs were banned easily. There was a massive protest all over the United States. Twenty thousand doctors had to be rounded up and arrested in charge because they insisted on carry on trying on giving drugs to addicts, because they could see what a disaster the drug war was. That the mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of the heroin prescribing clinic and says, you will not shut this down.

In he was a popularly elected mayor. So this is a massively contested film, and which makes you think, well, why we're drugs banned? Then if it caused such a disaster, why were they ban And what's fascinating is is completely not for the reasons we think of if you'd said to me four years ago, why we're drugs banned? I would have guessed, well, people would give them the reasons that most people would give now. We don't want people to become addicted, we don't want kids to use drugs.

That kind of thing that barely comes up in a debate. The debate is overwhelmingly as they saw it, African Americans and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs and attacking white people. It was a massive race panic. There was a belief that African Americans were using cocaine and

attacking white people all over the South. It is, in fact the reason given why many sheriffs increase the caliber of the bullets they used is one person said in an official statement, the cocaine N word sure is hard to kill. This seems really odd the way I tell it this is really hard for me to get to understand it. So the way I tell it in the book is through the story Billy Holliday and how she was stalked and basically helped to be killed by the

guy who launched the drug war, Harry Anslinger. Yeah, in nineteen thirty nine, Billy Holliday stands on stage in New York City, and she sings the song Strange Fruit, which your readers will know, your listeners will know, is a song against lynching. And you got to understand how God daughter Lorraine Father explained to me. You've got to understand how shocking that was. Right, Billy Holliday wasn't allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel show, to

go through the service elevator. She was African American. To stand in front of a white audience at a time when most songs were like tweet things like PS I Love you, and to sing a song about lynching was viscerally shocking. And that night, according to Billy's biographer and Julia Blackburn, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics says to her stop singing this song. The man running at Harry Anslinger, I think is the most influential person that no one's

ever heard of. He basically invented the modern drug war. He took over the Department of Olcohol Prohibition just as ourcohol prohibition is ending, and he needed to find a new cars and picks drugs. And he was driven by two really intense things hatreds. One was of addicts in the other words of African Americans, and Billy Holiday to him with like the symbol of everything that had gone wrong.

And Billy Holliday because she had grown up at Baltimore when it was a divided sixty segregated the city, and she had allowed into a lot of stores when she was a little girl. She had promised herself when she was a little girl, she was never going to bow her head to any white man. And she basically said, screwzy, I'm going to sing my song. And that's when the stalking of her that leads to her death begins.

hatred and fear of addiction. So tell us where this title of this book was derived from and that earliest compulsion that was born in Harry Anslinger.

wife is screaming. And the farmer says, go to the store. Goes, take our horse and cart, go to the store, goes fast as he can buy the opiates, bring them back to us. So Harry Anslinger speeds there. He gets there as quick as he can. He comes back, he gives the woman the opiates, and the woman calms down and she stops screaming. And Harry Anslinger all his life was haunted by this memory, and really haunted by his memory

of that scream. And you know, the tragedy for me is in his belief that he was stopping those screams, he was actually creating an extraordinarily large number of screams instead. The other fascinating thing is another thing that Harry Anslinger learned where he was a boy, where he was fritishly prescient, actually is he worked on the railroads as a young man. He was quite impressive in some ways, and it's from a pretty poor background. He insisted on working on the

railroads and go to school every morning. He and rose up and he worked with Italian railroad workers and knew that they were terrified at something called the Mafia. And this is hard to remember now that the Mafia was regarded as a deranged conspiracy theory. Like jae Goehoov denied his whole life that the Mafia even existed, it would be regarded the way we would regard like a kind of a truth or a Bertha or something. And Ansinger

absolutely assisted on the reality of the mafia. And he was one of the first major American lawyenforce of people to really prove that the Marfia existed. Now, the great tragedy of Harry Ansinger as he believes he's at war with the mafia, actually he transferred this whole mess of industry to them. He gave the mafia the biggest boast they've ever had in America to roll. The drug trade is incredibly lucrative trade. So there's a kind of irony

in that. I mean, Henry Smith Williams, the doctor who he destroyed, saw how much the mafia benefits from it, and he assumed that Harry Ownslinger must be in the pay of the mafia because the mafia were doing so well out of of Anslinger's policies. Actually, that was that was wrong, and you can understand why hers Smiths and Llans brought that.

comedy film. That's that's that's based on Ansling as propaganda. He was a big fan of that, and he latched into this case of a boy in Florida called Victor Lacater, which was a massive story at the time, huge, one of the biggest stories in America. Basically, Victor Lacarter was a young man in his early twenties, I believe who hacked his family to death with an axe and an finger. Announces, right, this is the result of him having smoke marijuana. We

need to ban marijuana, We need to press on. And the Hirst Newspapers, which is the kind of Fox News of its day, massively runs with this story. Years later, as I explaining the point, someone goes back and actually looks at this guy's psychiatric fast bit to look, there's no evidence he even use marijuana. He had congener troll insanity in his family. His family had actually been told to put him in a secure unit years before, and they insisted on keeping him my home. But the hysteria begins.

Anslinger is a genius taking the fears that are coursing through a society and really getting them to run through the kind of lightning conductor of his department. And it's using these fears and these hysterias and these largely full stories that Anslinger builds the modern drug wall.

it was like. And when she was ten years old or eleven maybe I think she was raped and by a stranger, and when the police came, they accused her of being a prostitute. And the guy who wrote her was punished that she was punished for longer. She was sent to this reform at Treeby. It would the incredibly brutal nuns who locked because she was disobedient, locked her overnight with a dead body. She ran away. She ran

away to Harlem to find her mother. Her mother was working in a brothel, and Billy Holder, at the age of fourteen, starts working in this brothel, being raped for money alongside her mother. When a police captched her again again, she's

sent to prison. You know, think about the insanity of that, and Billy Holiday just needed to stun her grief, I think, and when, as I was saying before, you know, when the Federal bureaunarcotics start to stalk her, Harry anythink I hated employee and African Americans, but you couldn't really send a white guy in hard lot to stalk Billy Holliday.

So he employs this guy called Jimmy Fletcher, who was an African American agent, And Jimmy Fletcher spent two years following her, and he watches her and he gets to know where he dances with her, and because she was so amazing, Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her and his whole life. He felt ashamed of what he did to her. He buss she's pot on trial, she said. The trial was called the United States Versus Billy Holliday, and that's how it fell. And she sent to prison.

And when she gets out, she can't perform because you needed a license to perform anywhe where alcohol was serves, and Anslinger had it denied to her. He also got her husband and pimp, a disgusting now called e Liwis Mackay, to start informing on her to to Antlinger, and her friend Jolanda Beavan said to me, I'm paraphrasing the exact words are in the book. That'sthing like, what's the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing they love, and you know, to take

away singing from Billie Holliday was incredibly cruel. She found. She went wherever they would have her, but it was very hard, and she relapses. Of course, how could she not in that situation when she's in her early forty She collapses in New York City and she's taken to hospital. The first hospital turns her away, and the second hospital takes her and she says to one of her friends that the narcotics agents aren't finished with her. She said, they're going to kill me in there. Don't let them.

They're going to kill me in there. And I interviewed the last surviving person to be in that room where she died. They handcuffed her to the bed. They arrested her, even though they knew she had liver cancer. They arrested her on her deathbed. They took away all her flowers or her record player, didn't let her friends in to see her. One of her friends managed that Mainley Dusty managed to insist that she was given methadone because she got into withdrawal. She started to recover. Then they cut

off the methadone and she died. One of her friends said that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life. But the thing that to me, it really helped me to think about this and to think about the addicts in my own life. You know, Billy Holliday never stopped singing that song. No matter what they did to her, she found somewhere to sing it. She would go anywhere they'd have her. And to know that addicts can be heroes. To know that addicts can be so strong.

You know, there's the strength of just carrying on when you're in terrible pain. And then there's the strength of what Billy Holliday did. You know where while we're talking, people all over the world are listening to Billie Holiday and feeling stronger, and that really happened me. I think it also to helps us to that story, helps us to understand the madness of what we do to adics. You know, I went out with a chain gang in Arizona of women who are forced to go out wearing

T shirts saying I was a drug addicts in Big Graves. Right, those women are never going to work again in the legal economy. What we do did to Billie Holiday, we're doing all over the developed world. We give Alex criminal records, which is crazy. Take suffering people and make them suffer more, and I hope that will make them stop. But also it helps to sound the racial don Alex and the drug water. At the same time that Clary Anslader finds out that Billie Holidays an addicts, he finds out that

Judy Garland is a heroin addicts. He tells Judy Garland she's going to be fine, that she should take slightly longer vacations and reassures this studio that everything's okay. You know, spot the difference that racism comes right through to the present day. African Americans are non more likely to be drug dealers than anyone else, but they make the overwhelming majority of people who go to prison for it. You know, bost dynamics still at work now.

like considering attacking him a big kitchen knife. And Anna Rostein was always going to be a psycho, right, But Arnold Rothstein was handed one of the biggest industries in the United States. And it was fascinating me because when I was trying to recover the story of you know, you can recover the story of Harry Anslinger because he kept records. I wanted to talk stories how drug dealing was created. But Arna Rothstein, you know, drug dealers don't

have archives, right. But it really fascinated me because I was able to reconstruct it. Partly because Arna Rostin so owned the NYPD, he actually would give quite open interviews where he talks about what he was doing. And also his wife Carolyn wrote a really fascinating memoir that was very hard to track down, but once I did find it was super interesting. Out of Rostin was an extremely

cold and arrogant man. He rises through at least time when he's seventeen and basically becomes a kind of professional gambler that he quite quickly realizes the people who really winning gambler and the people who owned the casinos. So he sets up these casinos. But what he's a genius that initially is rigging vets. So he would bribe jockeys, he would bribe horse racing people, and he was probably still now most famous for rigging the nineteen nineteen World Series.

He bribed the I think it was the Boston Red Sox to throw the game and made a fortune from that. Now, when drugs the band, Arna Rostin is a smart guy. He can see a business opportunity when it's coming. He knew that alcohol proddition was great, but it wasn't going to last forever. And he really latches onto the drug trade and he the first one to kind of really industrially import drugs and just kind of murder loads of people. He buys the police to the point where he's really

above the law. At one point he actually shoots it to NYPD officers and is mysteriously acquitted. My favorite, this serious story about Arna Rothstein is he does this drug deal with a guy called Captain Alfred Lowenstein, who was the third richest man in America, like kind of like the Bill Gates was the richest man in the world. Sorry,

kind of out the Bill Gates of this time. He was so rich he was a Sinnanthea that when the Germans sees Belgium during World War One, Lowenstein offered to buy it back from them, but terms abou how richie was. He was a buy Belgium. And it comes to New York and with Rothstein he signs the biggest drug deal in history, and he flies back to Europe and when the plane lands, Lowenstein isn't on it, and the crew say, oh, he went to the toilet and fell out. Not seem

very plausible. Presumably whatever money Arna Roskin got in that drug deal she kept gives you a sense of who Arna Rostin was. And Asten is killed in nineteen twenty nine, but we don't know who buys. He's shot one day outside of the Park's Central Hotel in Manhattan.

Creates a war for drugs if you think about it, right, if you and me go into the local liquor store and the Toronto you know, when you're in a Winnipeg, if we go to the liquor store and we try to steal the beer or the vodka, they're just gonna call the cops, right, and the cops will deal with us. If we got up to the local weed dealer or the local coke dealer and tried to steal their goods, obviously they can't bring the police. The police would arrest them.

So they have to be violent and they have to be terrifying in order to stop people screaming with them. They don't have any recourse to the law. So it creates what the sociologists polut bourgeois calls a culture of terror. And the first person to really see that is Rothstein. You have to be terrifying, and you don't want to be having shootouts, so you want to be theatrically scary. And Rosteine is killed and it'll I think of that almost like the you know, like the killing of the

Archduke third Nan in Sarajevo. It's the first bullet in this global war, because what you get then is Arna Rossby does not die. Arna Rostin just gets to increasingly insane and psychotic versions of Ana Rostine. It's like Darwinian evolution armed with a little baggly of crack, because every gangster who kills the next one has to be tougher and harder than the one before. So Aarna Rostein, I mean, wouldn't last two hours in Siodajuarrez, where I went to

do research in northern Mexico. You see this going up through the crypts and the bloods. Pablo Escabad Chapel Busman that you have this increasingly insane dynamic where there's an advantage, And I really learned that most from the serial killer I interviewed Rossalio Reta. I went to a prison in

Tyler County in Texas to interview him. He grew up in Laredo on the border of Basically Laredo is on the Texas side in Luevo Laredo is on the Mexican side, but they're basically the same city with a border between them, the kind of a highly artificial border between them. And when he was thirteen, kids used to kind of go across the border all the time, because you know, candies

and sodas were cheaper there. And when he was thirteen, in circumstances got are disputed, but no one dispeates it happened. He joins the zetas, the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, and between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, he kills around seventy people, seven zero through beheading through. I mean horrendous. It was very fascinating. Posis go to meet him. I go to this this prison, and it was kind of weird.

I was only meant to have a short period of time with him, but the guard said to me, oh, I like your accident, because stay as long as you want. So he also said to me, which I thought was slightly weird. They said, well, obviously you know he's killed seventy people. We can't leave your words like he's killed them to people. We can't leave you on your own with him the priming room. And then they just left

came back like two hours later. It slightly annoying. His story was super interesting about to understand, it's really one of the very few people in the world you can tell what life is like on the inside of a Mexican drug cartel and how that works.

what he's trained in. Specifically, Yeah, it's really grim.

everywhere they put the head right there. The head still moves, makes faces and everything. I think the nerves you can see inside the bone, everything's moving. It's like they've got worms. I've seen it move when it's on the ground. If he's making a screaming face. It stays like that. Sometimes sometimes it slacks off. What you're taught in these camps are the techniques of how to dissolve bodies, how to

behead people, how to use the maximum possible violence. The camp's slogan is if I retreat, kill me, And that's really what he learns. He's kind of kept coked up. Him and his friends Jesse and Gabriel, who are also from Laredo, they've kept coked up. You never know where you're going to go. He worked for a guy god Miguel Trevino, who later became the head of the Votives, and you're basically sent to kill people. You don't know

who you're going to be sent to kill. I go through the story in the book of what exactly what he did and how he did it. You know, he

regardless as very he kind of tells two stories. So he basically once he's in he's taken to this this that first day he's taken to this Vata workspace because about thirty people tied up and to one side they've got an oil drum and they just burn them alive and to the other side of people being cut to pieces and La Zetas usually they're there to torture other gang members or anyone who kind of angers them in order to find out safe houses, the routes, who they

work for, what they do, that kind of thing. And after they're dead, they they turn their bodies into what's called guiso, which is the Spanish word for stew. They kind of put them in kind of acid and dissolve them. And so Rosalio is taken there. Now he says that he was kind of kidnapped, forced to go there and made to kill someone. And once you're in, you're in. What the prosecution said against him is, you know, he

wanted to sign up, he wanted to go. He was really excited to be a Zeta, certainly when he first arrested. That what he says, he kind of talks he's incredibly hyped up and amped up and compares himself to James Bond, and you know, but one of the things that's fascinating as well, and say, it restruck me. When I went to Huarez, I was shown around by this guy called Julian Cardona. He's an amazing journalist. He's the Routers correspondent in in Huira's And it's really really in some ways Aui's.

You know, it looks like any other it looks like a normal American city. There's a KFC and a Wendy's and a you know, you can buy a flat screen TV, and you know, it feels very familiar. And then you discover that the murder conviction rate is two percent, so and that two percent didn't do it, you know, but it really struck me with julianne I said to him.

At one point, after two days in he kept introducing me to people who'd been killed by the police, and I said, you know, Julian, this is important, but I've got to meet people who've been killed by the cartels. And they said, oh, Johan, you don't understand huire Is. Now, if the cartels want to kill someone, they just pay the police to do it. They aren't separate forces. And

Rossalio told me that as well. He would very often go out with the police carry out the massacres, the police work for the Zoties, and the reasons that you imagine a housing project in I don't know, well, thinking about where Gino lived, right, housing projects and burns for Booklyn, Where you know, let's say five to ten percent of the economy is in the hands of on criminal gang selling drugs, that housing project is going to be a miserable place to live. In Huarez, it's seventy percent of

the economy seven zero percent. So the cartels can out beard of the state. They can pay better wages than the stake, so they basically become the state. And the way I kind of kind of hit me is like, imagine if the Crypts and the Bloods employed the LAPD to work for them and therefore took over Los Angeles. That's basically what happened, and Rosalio really lived that. You know, they were the law. And what they're doing is they're

torturing people, They're they're killing people. They send messages written in human flesh. You know. The cartels are the system of signals. So if you betray the cartel, they shoot you in the neck. If you talk too much, they shoot you in the mouth. If you're a spy, they shoot you in the ear, and it's like everybody is

like a bill billboard advertising with your cartelophon auspicious. And it's really important to understand this isn't just like I don't know, saw movie style psychopathy, right, This isn't Jeffrey Dharmer. This is the result of the system that we've created.

If you've got a system where a really popular product is in the hands of armed criminal gangs who compete to control that market and have no recourse to the law to protect their property, what happens is the way they compete is if you are the person who's prepared to push a moral boundary a little bit further, if you're prepared to be that little bit more terrifying, you

gain a brief competitive advantage. So if you are, for example, the first person who says, we're not going to just kill the other side, we're going to kill their wives, you get a brief advantage. If you say, you know what, we're not going to kill their wives, we're going to kill their pregnant wives, then you get an advantage. If you say, you know what, we kill their pregnant wives

and put it on YouTube, then you get an advantage. Say, you know what, We're going to cut off their faces, so their faces onto a football and send the football to their family. Thing that actually happened. Again, you get a brief competitive advantage. That's really important to understand. This is not just psychopathy, although clearly the people involved are deranged.

It's it's the product of the system we created. Milton Friedman said, you know that the Number prize winning economist Milton Friedman said al Capone was the product of alcohol prohibition, the crypts and the bloods of the products of drug prohibition. I would add the zetas now as a product of that. And part of what went wrong with Rossalio. And one of the reasons why he's he got out actually is because he was so coked up and so amped up by all this killing, he actually started just kind of

randomly killing people. He threw a hand grenade into a nightclub. And the vaders don't want you just random They don't want to employ Jeffrey Dharma, right. Their violence is psychotic but targeted, and that's how Rosalio had to get out. Again, this is disputed. He claims that to get out he shot himself in the leg. He certainly has a bullet wound in his leg and showed it to me. He has he shot himself on the leg and the hope that they would go, Okay, well you can just leave now,

but of course they didn't. He kind of he claims he had to kind of kill his way out, and then he contacts them, the American police, and they're getting back over the border and he testifies, and he's serving two consecutive life sentences. He's in his mid twenties and he's due to being out when he's in his eighties. He lives in constant solitary confinement because the minute they let him out among the prison population, he's immediately stabbed.

Because anywhere all these other prisoners who are in there, mostly in their for life anyway, know that their family or get a huge amount of money from the datas. And even the guard said to me on the way in something like the exact words or on the website, saying like it'd be nothing for these people to take a contract out on him here, you know. So it was really fascinating to get the insight into and Rosalio

was right to get out when he did. Jessin and Gabriel his two friends who grew up with They were killed soon after by the Zotas. They call these kids, these child soldiers. The Zetas call them the expendables, which is exactly exactly right.

that I couldn't really understand very well at first. If you're me, step down, If you step out of once we finish this recording down, if you step out into the street and you're hit by a car, God forbid, and you break your hip, you'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given Quite likely, you'll be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually incredibly strong heroin. It's much stronger heroin than you ever get on the streets.

Because it's medically pure, you'll be given it's quite a long period of time. That's happening in every hospital anyone is listening to this semi one in the develop anywhere in the developed world. That's happening, right, And if what we believe about addiction is right, that addiction is caused

by a chemical hook in the drug. But like if you, me, and the next twenty people listening to the show, if we all use heroin together for twenty days, on day twenty one, we'd all be heroin addicts because our body would start to physically need the heroine. If that story is right, what should happen to those medical and what should happen to those people in hospital, they should come out as addicts. They should be trying to score on

the streets. That never happens. Virtually never happens. You really notice your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip replacement operation. So I didn't quite know what to do with this until I went to vancouvera and lots of you know, I know you're Canadian as well,

lots of the heroes of my book a Canadian. And I met this extraordinary man called Bruce Alexander, who's a professor in Vancouver, and Bruce explained to me the story of that addiction that we've all come to believe, and that Bruce used to believe, comes from a series of experiments that we've done earlier in the twentieth century. They're really simple experiments. Your listeners can do them at home. I they're feeling a little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you

give it two water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced would either heroine or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself. So there you go. That's our theory of addiction. In the seventies, Bruce comes along and says, well, on a minute, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except take the drugged water. Let's do this differently. So Bruce built rat Park. Rat Park is like Heavens for rats.

Anything your rat could want, it's got in rat Park. It's got loads of nice food, it's got loads of colored balls, it's got loads of friends, it can have loads of sex. Anything a rat wants it's got. And it's got both the water bottles. It's got drugged water and normal water. But here's what's fascinating in rat Park. The rats don't like the drug water. They hardly ever use it. They never overdose, and they never use in

a way that looks compulsive. There's a really interesting human example of exactly the same principle that was going on, which we can tell about in a minute. But what Bruce says is this shows that both the right wing theory of addiction and the left wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right wing theory of addiction is, you know, it's a moral failing you party, too hard, you become a headnist, all that stuff. The left wing theory is

it's a disease that takes over your brain. You've become helpless. What Bruce says is it's not your morality, it's not your brain, it's your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. Human beings need to bond with each other. We need to be connected. If you can't bond with the people around you because you're cut off, because you're traumatized, or for whatever reason, you will bond with something that

gives you pleasure. You will connect with something that might be drugs, that might be pornography, that might be a roulette wheel. But human beings are bonding creatures and we need to bond. The human example that was happening at the same time, which is fascinating, and this forces us to rethink not just the drug war, but actually, I think a lot about our society. The human example is called the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, twenty percent

of all American troops we're using heroin regularly. And if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried because they thought, oh my god, We're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets at the United States when the war ends because they believe the old theory of addiction. And what happened. They came home and they virtually all stopped. You know, the overwhelming majority of ninety five percent just stop. Don't

go to rehab, they don't go into withdrawal. They just stop. Because if you're taken out of a hellish pestonential jungle where you don't want to be and you could be killed at any moment, and you go back to a nice life in Wichita, Kansas, that's the equivalent of being taken out of the first page and being put into ra part. And it's force us to think about, well, why help me to think about the people in my

life who are addicts? Why are so many? Why are so many of our fellow citizens unable to get through life without being drunk? Well, you know, you and me, we could be drunk now right, we could be drinking vodka. We're not sure because we've got something we want to be present of present with in ourllgy. We've got jobs we love, we've got people we love, We've got things

we want to do. Addicts can't bear to be present in their lives because their lives have become unbearable for one reason or another, and we've got a drug war that's built on the idea that we should make them suffer more. Dabel Marte, an amazing doctor who works with hard worked with hardcore addicts, and Vakuva said to me something like, if you wanted to design a system that would keep people addicted, you would design the system we have, you know, think about what we did to Billie Holiday.

So yeah, and that really blew my mind. I didn't there any of this really before I started.

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on the BC Safe Injection site. Story So why don't you first talk about because I think that this will be very dramatic to see the difference. Talk about Arizona and Marcia Powell cooking in a cage, and then we'll talk about the safe injection site in Portugal.

in who the world I loved them. When I went to Arizona, I interview a woman called Donna Leone Hamm, who is a works on amazing woman who works on prisoners rights in Arizona, and I asked her one of my standard questions, which is like, tell me about something that shocked you in the time you've worked on this, And she's going through this long list, and somewhere down the list she said, there was the time they put that woman in a cage and cooked her. That was bad.

And then she carried on and I said, sorry, Donna, could you go back a second? It was almost called Marsha Pale about hinting. Very little was no when I started doing in search for the book, except that she was a woman in her forties who kept being busted either for having met or for prostituting herself to get mess.

And one day in two thousand and nine, she wakes up in PERivale Prison in Arizona, which is not run by j R. Piela should point it out, and she was suicidal and the doctor refused to believe her, and they'd take her out, and they put her in a holding cage, which is literally a cage exposed to the desert. Right this is Arizona. And they left her there and she cried, and she begged for water. She messed herself as she collapsed, and by the time they called an

ambulance she had been cooked. No one was ever criminally punished, thought it was done to Marsha Pale. And I then went and tracked down the father of her children and got this story of her life, which was very like Billie Holiday's life. She had been thrown out when she was thirteen, She'd lived on the beach, she'd almost certainly been a child prostitute again, a person who was trying to stun her pain, and thought that this was done to her. She'd actually had a period of her life

when she'd got clean. She was clean for more than a year. She went back to Arizona to get her kids back because they had been taken into care by the state, and she was busted for an old marijuana conviction, and her whole life unreveled again. And I compare that to the places I went to which had gone beyond the War on drugs. You mentioned Vancouver. There's an incredible story there about how a homeless street addict started and

uprising in Vancouver that completely changed the city. In the year two thousand, there was a homeless street addict called Bud Osborne was watching his friends die all around him. People would use behind dumpsters because she didn't want the cops to see you. But obviously the cops can't see you, and you start to ode, no one can see you, and you're found like a day later, you're dead. And Bud thought a hap to do something about this, but he also thought, I'm just a homeless junkie. What can

I do? But Bud had a really simple idea. He just said, why don't we got together a group of the addicts and just when we're not using, which is most of the time, why don't we have a schedule where we're parade up and down the alleyways and if we spot someone oding, we'll just call an ambulance. And

they started to do it. It goes on for a few months and the overdose rates started to really fall on the downshand inside, which your listeners will know, is an area where a huge number of addicts in it. And that was great in itself, but partly it meant the addicts start going on, maybe we're not the kind of pieces of rubbish people, so we are maybe were

people who could do something positive. They started to turn up public meetings where they were discussing like the menace of the addicts, and they'd sit at the back and after a little wile they'd put their hand and say, oh, I think they're talking about. Oh, is there anything we could do differently? And sometimes people would be appalled, and sometimes people would say, oh, you leave your needles lying around. So they said, fine, we'll extend the patrol and we'll

collect the needles. And they started doing it. What was amazing. Bud started to learn that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they'd opened safe injecting rooms where people could go and use the heroine legally and be monitored by doctors, and they've been a huge fall in the death rate. And Bud realize, well, we have to have this in Vancouver. But there hadn't

been anything like it in North America since Antwinger. And so they started to stalk the mayor of Vancouver, who was a right wing, very wealthy businessman called Philip Owen, pitching Mitt Romney and you've got the idea a man who said that had actually be taken contained at the

local military base, right. And for two years, everywhere philipo In goes in public, they just stalk him, and they carry a coffin, and the coffin says something like, who will dinext Philippo In before you open a face injecting drug room? And after two years of this they're starting to lose heart and one day Philippo In his eternal credit, says,

who the hell are these people? And he goes in cognito to the downtown in side and he meets a load of addicts and then he goes to meet Milson Friedman and they're by prize winning economist to explain how the drug war works in him. And Philippoune comes back and he holds the press conference and he has the chief of police, the coroner, and an addict, and he says, I'm never going to talk about addiction again without having addicts with me. And we're going to open the first

safe injecting drug room in North America. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. We're going to turn things around. And they opened the first safe injecting drug room in North America. And it's been ten years now. I should say Philippollim was deselected by his own political party because I was so horrified by

what he'd done. And it's ten years now. It's ten years when I went there, overdose has fallen by eighty percent eight zero percent an average wise expectancy on the downtown. He side it up by ten years. And when I was, you know, not long after, I got to know him quite well and interviewed him a lot. Bud Osborne, the addict who'd started this uprising, died and they sealed off the streets of the downtown inside where he had lived homeless,

and they had this incredible memorial service for him. And there were a lot of people in the crowd that day who knew that they were alive because of what Bud started doing. I'd tell you to anyone who thinks of this, who thinks about the drug war, this is a bad policy, that this is so big, this we're so powerless. We all feel powerless. Sometimes I'd say, you are so much more powerful than you know. Bud was a homeless street addict. He started an uprising and has

completely transformed his city. There's so much we can do about this. What happened to Rosalio, what happened to Billie Holiday, what happened to all these people? None of this has to happen. We can choose an alternative if we want to.

tell us what we'll genuinely do with this problem. And the panel came back and it said, decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack a whole lot. But and this is the crucial next step, use all the money we currently spend on arresting drug addicts, imprisoning drug addicts, trying drug addicts, to take all that money and spend it on really good drug treatment. And it's not really what we think of as drug treatment of in North America and Western Europe.

Partly it's things like rehabbing psychological support, which are useful, but mainly it's it's it's drug treatment. That learns the lesson of rap park. It's drug addiction that is geared entirely towards reconnecting addicts with society. If you think about what we were saying about why you and I are not drunk now, it's because we've got something to do. The goal of the Portuguese the criminalization was to make sure that every addict had some purpose in their life.

It's going to wake up for in the morning. So one of the things that's one of the main planks of it is just subsidized jobs. So you used to be you're a smack addict, you used to have a used to be a mechanic. They'll go to a garage and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we will pay half as wages. You know that. Micro loans for addicts to set up businesses was another big thing, and again the results in it's been nearly fifteen years,

injecting drug uses down by fifty percent. Five zero percent overdose is massively downtage of the transmission supposed to be down. One of the most moving into views was as Americle crowdfig wearer, who was led to the opposition to the ending the drug war in Portugal, and it was said a lot of things that a lot of your listeners all the totally understanding they be thinking. He said, surely if he's the top drug cop. He said, surely, if we do criminalize, we'll have a massive increase in drug

use and all the problems that come with it. And what he said to me was the exact words are on the website. He said, everything I said would happen didn't happen. Everything I said would happen didn't happen, and everything the other side said would happen did And he talks about how he regretted that he spent twenty It was a shame that he spent twenty years arresting drug users, and he hope the whole world followed Portugal's example.

the next week, there's less rape in your town. If you're a cop and you arrest a drug dealer, well there's no less drug dealing. Everyone knows that. But something even weird that happens. The murder rate actually goes up, and Lee couldn't really figure it out, but then she kind of realized what you do is you trigger a turf war. What you have is if you have a patch controlled by a gangster and you kill, you knock

out that gangster. You rival drug gangs will fite each other for it, and huge numbers of people die in the crossfire, and of course dealers die. So Lee now spent quit the police force, retrained as a lawyer and now spends her time. What is such an amazing person getting the criminal records whatever she can quash the people for drug convictions.

place where boss where he could live. And the reason when he could watch legalize marijuana and did legalize marijuana is because he saw supply roots for drugs move around the whole time, right, and he knew if there's a huge crackdown on the Mexican border and the supply route moves and starts to go through Uruguay, they were completely defenseless. They've got a weak military. There's no military that could defend in mexicag quite strong military, you can't defend against it.

And he said the only thing we can do to protect ourselves is to legalize. So he became the first president since Antlinam's crusade to fully legalize marijuana. The same thing has happened in Colorado and Washington. The only time I ever saw my father cry was the day my dad had lived in Berlin for a long time and I came home when I was ten years old and he was watching the Berlin Wall come down and he was crying and he thought, I'd never thought i'd see this.

And when I heard the result from Washington and Colorado they voted to legalize marijuana, that came into my mind and it felt like the first axe swung into the Berlin Wall of the drug war, and I think this whole thing is going to come down. And that doesn't mean, obviously that we're going to have all drugs available to all people. No one wants them to be a crack isle in CBS. We have different kinds of regulation for different kinds of drugs. So Switzerland has legalized a heroine

for addicts. That doesn't mean you can go into the store and buy it. It means if you're an addict, you'll be assigned to a clinic and you can go into the clinic and use it there and you can't take it out. And they have had no faithful overdoses from heroines if they started doing that in those clinics, none an overdose rate off zero. In your sense of how well these policies work when you.

they're sick, right, That was the pro gay position. So like gay marriage, we didn't even ask for that, No one even had a concept of that. It would have seemed like saying you want to live on Mars. Right. A lot some of those people who started that riot lived to see the introduction of gay marriage. Things can change in unimaginably positive ways. We are you know, we're in the equivalent of ninety sixty three with ending the drug war, not the equivalent of you know, twenty twelve.

But you know, I think we'll live to see the end of this. We're a an adoption of policy where you have liberty for drug users who are not harmed and love and compassion for add that shopen to turn their lives around.

make them suffer more. You know, in Arizona, in that prison intense city, I went to one of the solitary confinement blocks, which they call the whole, and these women are just shut in there for a month at a time, and I suddenly thought, oh my god, this is the closest you could possibly get to a literal human recreation of those first cages that guarantees that people stayed addicted. You know, the whole model we've had about how to

deal with addicts. I think I'll be remembered like you know, like bedlam, like putting mentally, or people in cages so people can go and look at them. You know. So there's no one solution for addiction. It's an incredibly complex phenomenon. We need to have a very broad menu. Some of it needs to be you know, subsidized jobs like in Portugal. Some of it needs to be prescription for people who

can't stop, like in Switzerland. Some of it needs to be twelve step programs and you know, support for sobriety. You know to the people who want that, and that can be fantastic to have a very broad range of options. Anyone who tells you there's one solution for connected for addictiona to Charlatan. But the underlying core of it is to help people connect and bond and phone.

talking about legalization of all drugs as a concept. How important is the marijuana legalization movement and success to this entire movement.

drugs being available, like marijuana should be available. So if you think about we already have all the existing modes of regulation we need. We regulate alcohol one way, we regulate sleeping pills another way. Right, you can't just go into cvs and buy really powerful sleeping's actually got bad jet bag at the moment I wish I could know you can't have to go to the doctor to get a prescription to that. So obviously works differently with different drugs.

So with marijuana, with I would suggest ecstasy and certain party drugs, you could regulate them like alcohol. Clearly, with something like heroin you would regulate it much more like sleeping pills, or actually have the Swiss model which is easily tied to the sleeping pills, but you have to go to a clinic to use it. There's a debate about what you would do about things like crack and mess,

which are clearly very physically destructive drugs. With something like that, what I would recommend would be probably and we need to experiment very cautiously that some variant on what they have in Vancouver, what you do is you'd have safe spaces where you could go and get those drugs that you wouldn't be allowed to leave while you are under

the influence of them. I really recommend that, given that the reality is that people are doing it anyway, we want them to use it in a place where there's doctors, where they can be given support, where they need given help to stop, where they can where they're not chaotic, and on the streets. I think that would probably be the best model. So legalization is pro impoint to some legalization as a way of regulating and controlling because at

the moment what we have is total anarchy. Unknown criminals sell unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, with disastrous consequences for everyone. We need to restore. We need to restore the order that prevails before the drug war. We need to go back to the situation that Henry Smith Williams knew about and kind of run the clock backwards on that.

connect with you, I know you're on Facebook. Tell us how people can connect with you, tell us about your website and what they might find there.

is the you know, gives you loads of updates. You can watch loads of interviews with me where I've talked about this. And I just want to thank you Doan for reading the book so closely. And actually I was hugely influentating true crime genre. But some of the books that I most loved as a teenager, there's an amazing true crime books that I shouldn't really recommending other people's books. I'll be cald off but by my publisher. But there's

an extraordinary British and true crime writer. I'm sure you know his work, Brian Masters. He's most best known for that amazing biography of Dennis Nilsen. But actually he wrote a book that I really hope this will in print called She Must Have Known The Trial of Rosemoe West, which is about a trial of the wife of a British serial killer who's a self a serial killer, which is a really incredible book. And I'm sure that this book has a lot of the DNA of true crime

because I just love true crime. I think it's a fascinating and brilliant and a hugely underrated genre.

and I couldn't quite figure it out. I would go to these places where drugs have been legalized, and I would speak to the people involved, and weird feeling and I couldn't I couldn't place it. And after a little while, I suddenly thought, oh, I'm bored. Suddenly they've taken this thing that seems so violent and they've made it boring.

What an amazing achievement. You know that actually what happens une of the drug war is you get you know, like one of the guys, that guy, I think it was Steve Fox, who then the Colorado legalization campaign, said something like in an interview not not with me, said something like, you know, we you know, we spent all these years arguing about gang something I'm paraphrasing. So we spent all these years arguing about gang warfare and killing

and slaughter. Now we spend our time arguing about what the size of the font on a brownie package should be. That's what happens when the end of you know, it becomes the nows you know, which is which is exactly how it should be.

want to thank you very much. The first and last days of the war on drugs. Thank you very much, Johann Hari for coming on and talking about Chasing the Scream.