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War on Drugs · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:03
  You're listening to Why we Do what we Do. Welcome to Why We Do
• 0:16
  what we Do. I am your enlisted host, Abraham, and I am
• 0:20
  your veteran host Shane. We are a psychology podcast in the Trenches, and
• 0:25
  we usually talk about psychology things, the things that people do, the animals
• 0:28
  do, and mathematical models and diagnoses and all kinds of fun stuff. And
• 0:32
  sometimes we talk about policies that governments put in place that just not only don't
• 0:38
  work, but sometimes backfire significantly. Yeah, and that is our topic for
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  today in our continued and ongoing suite of episodes on addiction, both in substances
• 0:48
  and behavioral addictions, and today more substances than anything. And sometimes we like
• 0:52
  to do a little bit of history, and history is always fun, and
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  I think this one's got a lot of nice, fun historical things going on
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  in it. And today we are talking about the war on drugs. If
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  you are our age then you are probably familiar with that term. Many of
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  us have signed our DARE contracts and violated them time and time again. But
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  it is one of those things. As we start talking about this, you're
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  gonna see how impactful the war on drugs has been. On our culture today
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  and like in not great ways, We're gonna spend some time on that.
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  And people may have heard like war on drugs, war on poverty, war
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  on crime. There's like all kinds of wars that the government has since waged
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  on various hypothetical entities that aren't actually entities. Yeah, and none of which
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  I think have really worked. But to go back to something you said,
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  is he said sometimes we talk about history. I would actually argue, and
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  I've been thinking about this for a while now that I think you could make
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  the case that we're almost more of a history podcast than anything. Yeah,
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  we spend a lot of time talking about it. Yeah, we do.
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  And the reason that I think that that makes sense for what we do is
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  because when we talk about why we do what we do, it's rooted in
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  historical context. Right, So we unpack essentially how we got here, and
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  that usually is all it takes, is just understanding what were the variables that
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  got us to this point. They were like, well that's why, Okay,
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  bye, Oh are we rebranding as a history podcast? I think we've
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  always been one and we've just never really admitted it. Oh yeah, I
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  guess it's fair I think, yeah, oh man, you just blew my
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  mind. Okay, all right, I'll reconcile that as we talk more.
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  I got into this for a psychology, not the history. But here we
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  are. I'm gonna have to revise my opening statement of where a historical psychology
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  podcast. I love it. I love it. Anyway, if you're listening
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  to this on the day that it publishes, well thank you for joining us.
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  We're happy to have you here. And it is April seventeenth probably or
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  some other day that you're listening to it. But the time that we're intending
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  this to be available is April seventeenth, and that is Banana Day. Aha,
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  And it's also Bat Appreciation Day. Apparently there's a lot of bad stuff
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  going on this month. Wasn't that last week? No, that was bad
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  Appreciation Week. They get a week and a day. I mean, I
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  love bats, but yeah, in April, Bat's rule. But like,
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  yeah, what's going on here? I mean, I wonder if this was
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  a response to COVID, Like everybody's like, no, no, no,
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  no, no, no, no, don't blame the bats. The bats
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  were fine. It was the people eating the bats that caused the problem.
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  Keep talking about the bats Well. Relatedly, it's blah blah blah week.
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  Uh huh. It's also Ellis Island Family History Day. Oh that's a really
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  good one. Actually, yeah, I kind of almost want to spend some
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  time just on that. I wonder we might need to revisit Ellis Island Family
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  History Day at some point in the future, because yes, Ellis Island apparently
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  is closed now metaphorically speaking, not literally. I think you can still go
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  there. Uh. Anyway. It is Herbalist Day, Yes it is.
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  It's also National Bookmobile Day. I love mobile books. It is National Cheeseball
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  Day I found out. Oh yeah it is. Yes. It's also National
• 3:53
  Kickball Day, which is always a blast. It is International Haiku Poetry Day.
• 3:59
  Oh what is five seven five? That's three five seven five or five
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  seven nine seven five, however you write haiku. It's School Librarian Day,
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  so be kind. I always think back to Miss Berber, who is my
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  elementary school librarian, and she was wonderful. It is World Hemophilia Day for
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  those vampires out there, I guess for the ones who are afraid of blood.
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  Yeah yeah, no, that would be hemophobia. Yeah, that would
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  be hemophobia. Yeah right, yeah, could you imagine vampire is afraid of
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  blood. That would be a rough existence. Yeah, dragons is like,
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  oh no, but the blood of the good. It's an astronomy week,
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  Oh the stars. It is National Green Week. It is, and it
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  is also Undergraduate Research Week, which means not just relying on YouTube for your
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  research. Indeed, and one more I found that I definitely think is worth
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  highlighting is that it is Animal Cruelty and Human Violence Awareness Week. Yes,
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  don't be cruel to people, or yeah, be kind kind of all living
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  things, pretty low hanging fruits type of ask. Anyway, we like to
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  read off the days just as a sort of a fun, trivial celebration and
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  acknowledgment of all the weird stuff that we like to think about and do and
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  say, and sometimes the really important causes that people have championed and assigned a
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  particular date to them. But as I said, we're going back in history
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  because we're exploring this very bizarre concept about the war on drugs. And before
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  we get started on that, I would just like to say, if you
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  like to support this show, you can join us on Patreon. You can
• 5:30
  pick up sub merch or leave us a rating, review, subscribe, tell
• 5:33
  a friend or end a war and call it why we don't do what we
• 5:36
  don't do in war and give us some credit for that. Yeah, but
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  we'll talk more about the ways you can support us at the end of today's
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  discussion. What Shane was the war on drugs? Ah, So, the
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  War on drugs is actually not a war. It was a set of federal
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  policies that focused on combating the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs that
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  had been made illegal. This was a global campaign actually, so it wasn't
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  just the United State thing. There's a global campaign that included the United Nations
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  and various governments. The aim of this war, as you might, I
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  mean, you might figure this out just from the name, but it was
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  to directly tackle drug related issues that included production, trafficking, dealing, and
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  use of drugs. Resources were created, allocated, reallocated, and put into
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  efforts to try and reduce the negative impacts of drugs on communities. That's being
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  charitable, I think, but that was more or less the stated intention of
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  the policies. Yeah, what was said in what was done are two very
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  different things, and you're gonna see that it gets real dark along this path.
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  Now, parts of the War on Drugs were also set up to help
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  reallocate resources back into communities that were ravaged by drug related crimes. So you'll
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  see that some monies that were collected or properties and resources that were repossessed as
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  part of the War on drugs tended to go back to or at least ideally
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  went back to the communities to help rebuild those communities in those spaces. But
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  it doesn't really work like that, and you're going to see the problem.
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  You know, we haven't actually given a sort of trigger warning at the top
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  of any of these addiction type episodes, and it's possible that we should have
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  been doing this all along, but I would like to say trigger warning for
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  this one. We're going to be discussing not only the use of illicit drugs,
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  not favorably necessarily, but we're also going to be talking about harm that
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  has happened to people, and I think some other particularly difficult to handle topics,
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  including things like racism and classism and elitism and bigotry and all kinds of
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  bad things happening. As you said, this does get a little bit dark,
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  So if you're sensitive to those topics, this might not be one that
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  you want to try and sit through. But if you can handle it,
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  then be prepared for the darkness. And let's do a pre war breakdown.
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  One of the questions we had to ask as we were talking about the War
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  on drugs is how we even got here. And prior to the start of
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  this quote unquote war, unregulated drug use became a rampant issue in the United
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  States. You know, many many years before now that being said, drug
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  use has existed since humans have discovered that plants make us feel a certain way,
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  right, So, like, this is not a new thing. But
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  what started to happen was when more powerful drugs started to get developed and misuse
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  started to kind of become more prevalent. This idea of a kind of like
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  a problem started to emerge, a societal problem. So what end that happening
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  was morphine began to rise, the use of it. That actually led to
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  the development of heroin. Right, So morphine was started to use be of
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  use in certain circles. Then heroin started to kind of develop out of that,
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  and the US actually saw a rise and reported addiction to heroin following the
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  Civil War, where many wounded soldiers were given opiates to treat battlefield wounds and
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  they would come bring that home and they would start using it pretty regularly.
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  To be fair, also, a lot of prescription drugs like morphine had a
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  very similar effect. They had a high potential for abuse, and cocaine was
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  pretty readily available at this time as well, right, And I think that
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  it was not considered in the scope of of the government's responsibility to manage that
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  sort of thing, and that people were sort of given carte blanche to if
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  they were called medical professionals, and minister those as needed as requested, and
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  sometimes that was like my wife is being hysterical, please prescribe something for her,
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  And so then they would be basically poisoning them with high amounts of opiates
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  and sedatives. There'd be people, as you said, who would have traumatic
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  injuries for war that would become addicted to painkiller type opiates. So anyway,
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  the opiates began to spread into standard practice, with physicians using opiates to treat
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  chronic pain. They would use them on irritable babies. Uh huh, you
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  got a crying baby, and give them some really hardcore drugs. It was
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  used for asthma, bronchitis, insomnia, nervousness, hysteria, menstrual cramps,
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  morning signals, GI issues, and even the vapors, the vapors, the
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  consumption. Every time I think of like Civil War area era, I can't
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  think of anything other than the accent that Val Kilmer does in Tombstone when he's
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  doak holiday. He's like, I'll be a huckleberry. Now here's the thing.
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  At the time, most of what was prescribed was a drug called Laudanum,
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  which was a powdered opiate concoction and could be purchased over the counter.
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  You could just go buy heroin over the counter, and heroin is also available
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  in coft syrup form. And then cocaine started showing up as an anesthetic as
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  well, so it was used in a lot of medical spaces in these pretty
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  powerful drugs, and it makes sense that we started seeing a little bit of
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  an addiction rise. Sure, this abundant availability of powerful drugs led to what
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  some described as a quote unquote first opioid crisis. In the eighteen eighties,
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  addiction began to increase, with an estimated as much as one in two hundred
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  Americans addicted to opiates. Most of these reporting addiction were women, which was
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  sixty percent, and then white, middle to upper class people. So it's
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  kind of always, i think, been a drug of the classes, if
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  you will. Yeah, but yes, so that's how it actually originally began.
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  As I said, it was not in common for is to go to
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  a doctor and say, you know, my wife is being hysterical or I
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  can't control her or whatever, and then the doctor would give them laudanum that
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  they would simply administer their wives, and that would be a way that people
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  dealt with it. And I think that the problems with that should be abundantly
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  cleared just by the way that I'm talking about it. But if not,
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  then let me put it in this phrasing, that's terrible. Yeah, for
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  folks who did not get that, Yeah, it's a real problem. I
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  want to point out too, And I want to be really clear about this,
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  and I'm so glad that we did talk about this. Most of those
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  reporting addiction were women. We're also white folks, and we're also middle to
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  upper class folks. That is going to be a narrative that's going to come
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  up as we talk about those war on drugs and where it goes later and
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  some of the concerns with that, so city and state regulations began to take
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  hold and restrict prescriptions and access to opioid products around this kind of this quote
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  unquote opioid crisis. So, for instance, Pennsylvania passed an anti opioid laws
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  early as eighteen sixty. Eighteen seventy five saw San Francisco began to push fines
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  in jail time for visiting opioid dens. And there's no way, there's no
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  way that could be racist, right, Like, there's no way that any
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  of that could be racist. There's just that's a drug problem, right yeah,
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  I mean, how could it be really, it's just talking about these
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  drugs. So let's just read this quote here that I think really shows how
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  not racist it is. Quote many women and young girls, as well as
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  young men of respectable family were being induced to visit Chinese opium smoking dens,
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  where they were ruined morally and otherwise. End quote. Oh that's a good
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  turn. Woops. Maybe while we digest that, it's probably worth taking a
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  break because surprise, racism is here, and once again, whoops, back
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  from the hopefully not racist ads who knows hard to escape. I think,
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  sometimes particularly in the never mind let's move on. So at the time,
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  there was this major anti Chinese sentiment because many Americans started believing that it was
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  Chinese immigrants were coming to the United States and taking their jobs. Good lord,
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  history repeats itself. You know, it's just something's never changed. Unfortunately,
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  I know. This led to the Congress at the time passing the Chinese
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  Exclusion Act. Just to be clear, this act was called the Chinese Exclusion
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  Act in eighteen eighty two, which actually effectively reduced Chinese labor immigration and prevented
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  those pesky workers from coming in and taking the jobs. Whoever, those workers
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  were coming in and taking their jobs that only Americans really wanted, right,
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  Yeah, you can't see my eye roll, but I imagine you can hear
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  it at least, because again, this is just twenty twenty four, but
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  with like steam trains, steampunk twenty oh no, oh man, that is
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  uh yeah, we never escaped it. It's just kind of always here,
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  always been the thing. Where number one where number one, I mean the
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  name of this. This was in eighteen eighty two. In nineteen oh nine,
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  the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act was passed, which prohibited opium from anything other
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  than medicinal purposes, but a federal ban on recreational use, and this was
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  followed by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in nineteen fourteen, which aimed to regulate
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  opium and coca derived products as well. And I think may have I remember
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  this is the one that had something to do also with like transporting them or
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  sending them via the postal service or something. But there, Yeah, there's
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  a whole sort of slew of these that were all very directly targeted at that
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  population, specifically out of fear mongering more than any actual practical concern over like
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  what was going on. Right, you start kind of seeing at this point
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  in time, they're trying to tamp down on the use of any of these
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  these drugs. But then what happens World War One, and as you can
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  imagine, the use of opium led to many soldiers becoming addicted. Same with
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  a civil war. It was used in battlefield treatments. And this actually led
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  to an international focus on creating drug control treaties and policies. So you saw
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  kind of after World War One there was a big movement towards international collaboration around
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  enforcing and treating and addressing drug related issues. So we've basically got this.
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  We have now a history of establishing criminalization of these different substances that seems to
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  be working. Great. So in nineteen nineteen, the US passes the Eighteenth
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  Amendment, which is where we got prohibition. Yay. This was another example
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  of like criminalizing melica's substance use. The National Prohibition Act or the Volstead Act
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  was put into place to federally ban alcohol, and so like, right,
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  gangbusters totally work. Nobody drinks now, right right? Right? Yeah?
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  Yeah, I can't imagine a lot of cities ended up with a really powerful
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  mafia base as a result of boot legging and speakeasies and all the fun stuff
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  that goes along with prohibition. But well, that's a conversation for a different
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  day. Maybe we'll just do prohibition and talking about how abstinence doesn't work.
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  Ah, I don't know that'd be fun episode. Maybe yeah, maybe?
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  All right, So in nineteen thirty it was deemed an unequivocal failure prohibition and
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  was eventually repealed with the twenty first Amendment. What happened to make them change
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  your minds? Well, the Great Depression, for one, and international stressors
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  that eventually led to world War two, so Great Depression World War two.
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  People can't drink, people are stressed out, and they were finding that it
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  wasn't working for the country. So consumption actually didn't decrease either, organized crime
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  increased, antax revenue related to alcohol sales were entirely lost. It was a,
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  to put it lightly, a colossal failure. Like it couldn't have been
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  more of a failure. It was basically like it was this moral crusade with
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  zero thought put into it of like, ah, yeah, of what's going
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  to happen when we suddenly just changed binge this part of like people's lives that's
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  so readily available already, Like how do we roll this out? What does
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  enforcement look like? And like it was just moral panic, moral outrage put
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  in a federal law and let's call it liberty, right, Like that's been
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  such a thing for so long anyway, Just huge disaster then not uncommon and
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  not the last time that it will happen either, as obviously, I mean,
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  we're going through this right now, we're leading up to the stuff.
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  So yeah, it's a mess. We won't bore you with more details on
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  all the things that keep coming up to the war, but in the time.
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  Between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventies, we did see some major events that
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  are worth at least enumerting real quickly. Yeah. So in nineteen thirty there
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  was a development of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and then in nineteen thirty
• 17:47
  five FDR decided that narcotics were worse than we thought and decided to put some
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  acts and extended some acts in place to allow state seizure of drugs and to
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  impart penalties on those in possession of illegal drugs. This particular is a huge,
• 18:02
  hugely important step in this history. Yeah, it definitely sounds like it
• 18:04
  as soon as essentially I have every time they sort of increase the government's power
• 18:08
  to try to regulate this stuff and enforce criminalization of these things. In nineteen
• 18:15
  forty four, the LaGuardia Committee determined that cannabis wasn't bad at all and contradicted
• 18:19
  government claims to the contrary. So that led to the widespread availability of cannabis
• 18:25
  because the government listened to their professional opinions. Wait, that's not what happened.
• 18:29
  These government completely ignored them. No, Yeah, they completely ignored them,
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  didn't do anything with it, and just rushed it under the rug.
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  Now, in the nineteen fifties, there were major movements to begin banning drugs
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  due to quote, white suburban grassroots movements end quote, and they actually decided
• 18:44
  worries about teenagers getting pulled into drug use. So several acts were passed in
• 18:48
  relation to that. Now, again, white suburban grassroots movements. Any implications,
• 18:53
  any concerns with that statement, I would imagine that y'all are probably gleaning
• 18:57
  the same things that we're here, but yeah, probably not. Probably not
• 19:02
  great. Also, cited worries about is very different than cited evidence of yes,
• 19:07
  So that is yes, fear mongering one oh one, right there,
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  uh huh uh huh. In nineteen sixty one, the UN comes together for
• 19:15
  the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is a treaty ratified in
• 19:21
  nineteen sixty seven that aim to regulate and punish drug production and trafficking internationally.
• 19:26
  So we have a whole worldwide coalition of attempting to criminalize drugs. Yeah.
• 19:30
  I wonder how much of that was brought on by the fact that people just
• 19:33
  didn't like hippies. Not zero amount of it. Somebody was like, oh,
• 19:41
  I hate hippies, these heshers, ah, somebody like right before Woodstock
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  had seen like, I don't know, Jimmy hendrixs are the doors and was
• 19:48
  like I hate this and tried to get rid of all of it. That
• 19:52
  was it. Maybe the villain from uh, I don't know, from Dirty
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  Dancing, all right, So this brings us to nineteen seventy Richard Dixon signs
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  the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which is just rolls off the
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  tongue. This is going to go back to the episode that we talked about
• 20:07
  on Tough on Crime. So Nixon had a tough on crime type of mentality
• 20:11
  when it came to drugs, and he decided to go after drugs and all
• 20:14
  of this stuff just really really hard. But what did this act do?
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  First, it made simple possession of felony, So it criminalized any legal drug
• 20:23
  at a very high level, right, which that means, like you know,
• 20:26
  in the United States a lot of times felons can't even vote. So
• 20:30
  I want you to start seeing kind of a thread emerge as we kind of
• 20:33
  talk about this, and there's an aspect of this that is worth considering of
• 20:37
  what was defined as a drug and there's sort of these classes of substances and
• 20:41
  what substances fell into those classes, and cannabis marijuana is one of those.
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  Like having a blade of a leaf of a cannabis plant could end you in
• 20:52
  prison and like remove your right to vote. Yeah. Absolutely. Another part
• 20:56
  of this policy is that first offenses carried a maximum of one year in prison,
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  so again they wanted really harsh sentencing for minor nonviolent crimes, and penalties
• 21:07
  for trafficking drugs included imprisonment for life. Yeah, so talk about harsh.
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  Funding was provided to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for treatment,
• 21:15
  rehab in education, so there was at least some funding going to those spaces.
• 21:21
  Would you pronounce the acronym of Department of Health, Education and Welfare as
• 21:25
  do uh oh, yeah, I absolutely would Mountain dew or why we do
• 21:29
  what we do? Mountain do do do? There were no knock powers granted
• 21:34
  to federal drug agents, meaning that they could simply enter a place without any
• 21:38
  warning. We've definitely seen how well that has gone in recent years, with
• 21:41
  many people dying unnecessarily when polices have raided the wrong houses, scared the crap
• 21:47
  out of occupants, who then fired at the police thinking that their house was
• 21:49
  being broken into, and god, it's so complicated, like everybody has drugs,
• 21:55
  everybody's entering people's homes. What a disaster this is. Somebody thought this
• 21:59
  was a good idea somewhere along the line. Anyway, it's at least partially
• 22:02
  started in nineteen seventy. They also started, as part of this act,
• 22:06
  started looking at record keeping, So they started looking at doing better job reporting
• 22:08
  and record keeping for controlled substances as defined by the government, what can be
• 22:14
  considered scheduled drugs, like schedul class drugs and all that. So all that
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  is is now in place. You've got harsher penalties, you've got more documentation
• 22:22
  around stuff, you've got some funding somewhere, but you've got these really really
• 22:26
  intense penalties for any possession, any trafficking anything at all. I mean you're
• 22:33
  talking anywhere between up to a year to life in prison for any of these
• 22:37
  charges. Now, without being so incredibly smug and sarcastic about it, you
• 22:41
  can imagine that essentially the intention of this was to make it so that the
• 22:47
  penalization for anything drug related was so severe that people would then make the choice
• 22:53
  not to engage in those drug related activities. It would at least reduce the
• 22:57
  number of people in the amount in the extent to which this was happening.
• 23:02
  So I think that then is coming at this from the perspective of understanding humans
• 23:07
  do a thing. The only way we know how to control what they're doing
• 23:12
  is to punish the crap out of their behavior, right, And we're going
• 23:15
  to use the biggest, heaviest, most nail laden bat that we can find,
• 23:19
  and we're just going to want to use that to enforce as our punisher
• 23:25
  to try and change this behavior that's happening. So that's essentially the kind of
• 23:30
  philosophy that is brought to this humans zoo bad or thing that we are calling
• 23:34
  bad. The only way to change the thing that we're calling bad is to
• 23:37
  punish them as severely as we possibly can. That's essentially the mentality of this,
• 23:42
  right, So let the battle begin. During the conflict in Vietnam,
• 23:47
  Morgan Murphy and Robert Steele, they visited soldiers and found an alarming rate of
• 23:52
  heroin addiction among military forces in the area. They brought this concern back to
• 23:56
  the US and discussions around expanding anti drug abuse measures began, and this is
• 24:00
  where we actually see the quote that brings us to the term the war on
• 24:06
  drugs, and this is directly for Nixon. Nixon said, quote, present
• 24:08
  efforts to control drug abuse are not sufficient in themselves. The problem has assumed
• 24:14
  the dimensions of a national emergency. If we cannot destroy the drug medicine America,
• 24:18
  then it will surely in time destroy us. And so this quote kind
• 24:22
  of goes on, we'll kind of talk about that in a second, but
• 24:25
  he's kind of already kind of doing a little bit of fear mongering around this
• 24:27
  and saying we can't destroy it. If we let it continue, it will
• 24:32
  destroy us. So we've got to get to them first. And Nixon continued
• 24:34
  this messaging, eventually citing drugs as quote America's public enemy number one end quote,
• 24:41
  a phrase that I think will eventually be adopted almost as a badge of
• 24:45
  honor for some people in the same news conference, who went on to say,
• 24:48
  quote, in order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary
• 24:52
  to wage a new, all out offensive end quote. He had at this
• 24:56
  point declared war on drugs, man. And you know this, I think
• 25:02
  this is a huge turning point for this entire thing, and just we've already
• 25:06
  kind of talked about some of the problems with the legal aspects of this,
• 25:11
  the acts that are developed, how it's we haven't even really talked about how
• 25:14
  it's impact in communities, but we've kind of talked about how this is shaped
• 25:17
  up over the course of almost one hundred years. At this point in time.
• 25:19
  By the time Nixon shows up, this has been something that has been
• 25:23
  a present worry in the US for at least one hundred years, right,
• 25:27
  So at this point in time, this is just somebody who's taking an age
• 25:32
  old issue and turning it into a much bigger issue. But one of the
• 25:36
  age old issues that we often face, especially in this world that we're dealing
• 25:40
  with in current twenty twenty four is marketing and ads. So we got to
• 25:44
  deal with that for a second. Okay, So what we've been talking about
• 25:53
  now is Nixon is declaring an all out offensive on drugs, citing i think
• 26:00
  essentially the use of heroin in the military and particularly during the Vietnam War,
• 26:04
  as a reason that this is going to destroy our country if we don't declare
• 26:08
  war on this thing. And so there are some fallout more or less,
• 26:14
  or maybe a better way to say that this kick started several programs, many
• 26:18
  of which are still around today and even departments. And one of those is
• 26:22
  the creation of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Drug Enforcement Administration
• 26:26
  or DEA through specifically executive presidential orders. Yeah, and now, when Reagan
• 26:33
  took office, Ronald Reagan, he actually pushed for an increase in the focus
• 26:37
  on this war. He said, quote, we're taking down the surrender flag
• 26:40
  that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up a battle flag.
• 26:45
  So he's kind of reinforcing that idea of like, this is an actual
• 26:48
  war and we're going to take the offensive at this point in time, and
• 26:51
  we're going to attack these problems now. And we'll get into this either in
• 26:56
  this episode or another or both. But there are some data onlike drug overdose
• 27:00
  deaths and use that we'll see what the before and after timeline looks like as
• 27:07
  a part of these efforts. I don't want to spoil it too much,
• 27:10
  but let's suffice it to say didn't necessarily go the way that they were thinking
• 27:14
  it was going to now, not even close. So under the Reagan administration.
• 27:18
  Again, this is Ronald Reagan, who I believe was elected in eighty
• 27:19
  one, took offfin eighty two, or he's elected in eighty two took office
• 27:22
  in eighty three. Either way, he was the president for the vast majority
• 27:26
  of the eighties, all the way u until nineteen eighty eight when George w
• 27:32
  h George Yeah, the one that threw up on the ambassador, Yeah,
• 27:37
  and got beat up by Homer Simpson. I think it was eighty one to
• 27:38
  eighty eight. Then that that he was the president. Anyway. Under his
• 27:42
  administration, there was a push to increase the budget to fight this epidemic of
• 27:47
  drugs to ninety five million dollars in the year nineteen eighty four. And this
• 27:51
  include involving the CIA and US military interventions. So, just to be clear,
• 27:59
  there was a push to increase budgets on drug enforcement programs that included military
• 28:03
  involvement. And what you saw was military involvement inside of drug adult communities,
• 28:10
  right, So like you saw military involvement show up in cities where drug use
• 28:15
  was cited as a major concern. But let's talk about this even further.
• 28:19
  So in nineteen eighty four, Reagan signs the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. This
• 28:23
  allows even harsher penalties for cannabis already more like harsher than they already were back
• 28:29
  when they were signed in the nineteen seventies. This act allowed for the seizure
• 28:32
  of assets as part of penalties, and so any proceeds from gained assets were
• 28:37
  shared among agencies. So that doesn't sound like a bad thing, right,
• 28:41
  break the law, lose your stuff, right that that kind of makes sense.
• 28:44
  But as of twenty nineteen, thirty six point five billion dollars worth of
• 28:49
  assets have been seized and reallocated into agency budgets. Here's what this means.
• 28:55
  This means that when somebody in the community, somewhere in the community, when
• 29:00
  some government agency intervenes and they intervene on based on some drug charges, and
• 29:04
  they seize whatever properties as a result of those related crimes, whatever properties,
• 29:10
  whatever assets they sees, can go and be sold, and that money just
• 29:15
  goes right back into government funding. So let's say you had a car that
• 29:19
  you were using to traffic drugs. Well, you get in trouble, you
• 29:22
  get charged, they take your car, they sell your car. That money
• 29:25
  goes back into the budget of the people that just arrested you, and they
• 29:29
  get that money. They get that tens of thousands of dollars or however much
• 29:32
  it cost. Right, So, I don't know, does anybody see any
• 29:34
  sort of like conflict of interest in that? Maybe some problems with that.
• 29:38
  I can imagine there's some issues. Yeah, there's a big incentive now for
• 29:41
  essentially anybody who is doing any kind of enforcement to go after everyone, particularly
• 29:48
  if there's money involved. Now important caveat though, there are laws, and
• 29:53
  there are people who are protected by those laws. So people who are particularly
• 29:57
  wealthy, even if they may have access to and use a lot of drugs,
• 30:02
  also have access to and use a lot of lawyers. And so it's
• 30:06
  actually harder to go after the bigger fish well, who will have more assets
• 30:10
  that can be seized because they are so well protected. And so it's easier
• 30:15
  to go for a bunch of little seizures of assets from small, defenseless people
• 30:19
  who may not have very much but also aren't going to put it much of
• 30:22
  a fight than it is to go after the big ones that are going to
• 30:26
  put up a lot of a fight and who you may not actually be able
• 30:29
  to get anything from and even potentially lose money too. So they've really stacked
• 30:33
  the incentives in a way that's likely to result in a lot of targeting people
• 30:37
  who don't have a lot to lose to begin with. And we'll get more
• 30:41
  to that in unpacking how this all played out. Right, Another part of
• 30:45
  this kind of campaign and this war on drugs, we started to see just
• 30:49
  Say No. Anybody who's our age is familiar with just Say no. It's
• 30:52
  all about peer pressure, right, Yeah, just Say No is a public
• 30:56
  campaign and the youth that's part of drug resistance programs. The idea was that
• 30:59
  you did need is to come to peer pressure when you get offered you quote,
• 31:03
  just say no. I've said yes to so many things not work.
• 31:10
  Yeah, I mean again, the this is just such a fundamental misunderstanding of
• 31:15
  behavior and circumstances. It's like not thinking at all about any part of the
• 31:21
  process that has someone make that choice. And it was like, doesn't matter
• 31:23
  at all, doesn't matter how you got there, it doesn't matter what the
• 31:26
  reinforcing consequences are. All that matters is that you have something that you can
• 31:30
  do and that the government tells you there's a thing that you should do and
• 31:36
  that should be enough. And I'm like God, and what fantasy world do
• 31:40
  you live? Yeah? So this is essentially a marketing campaign, right,
• 31:45
  This is like it's we're going to try and push this easy slogan, best
• 31:52
  part of our thing, And so the propaganda starts. As part of the
• 31:55
  ongoing initiatives to scare the shit out of everyone. There began to be this
• 31:59
  narrator that focused on the increased use of one specific drug, the archetype of
• 32:05
  all bad things. Because even though Heroin kicked this off, crack cocaine is
• 32:09
  where this really shifted. So the stories of crackheads began to show up in
• 32:15
  the media per the direction of the Reagan administration, who knowingly played up the
• 32:20
  harmful effects of the drug, really emphasizing here are all of the major downsides,
• 32:24
  and crack was even declared the issue of the Year as part of this
• 32:30
  propaganda media campaign. So it was a very one sided. Not to say
• 32:36
  that like we need to really extol the meritorious delights of cocaine in any way,
• 32:42
  but I think it whenever you're doing some kind of informational campaign. What
• 32:47
  we have seen time and time again, and this was actually part of the
• 32:51
  lesson learned, was their propaganda here is that lying backfires badly. Yes,
• 32:57
  right, like you need to be factual. If you portray misinformation, people
• 33:01
  figure that out, right, Like, it's not that hard, right,
• 33:05
  And so if you try and lie, then pretty much your entire message gets
• 33:07
  dismantled. And they were so hell bent on the destruction of cocaine, is
• 33:13
  like, and honestly, you could throw cannabis in there too, but I
• 33:15
  mean cocaine was really their primary target, the worst possible thing that you could
• 33:21
  do. That. Like, I think that it became kind of transparent that
• 33:24
  it is almost like you don't know what you're talking about, right. Another
• 33:28
  important note inside of this, there are lots and lots and lots of discussions
• 33:32
  about how the DEA and the CIA were both involved in introducing crack cocaine into
• 33:38
  majority black communities, like that was something that they actively had programs around and
• 33:45
  did. And there were talks of government alliances with CIA, which has a
• 33:49
  history of destabilizing other government bodies. So the CIA and themselves has already done
• 33:52
  some shady shadow work and that's all documented. That's not me getting on my
• 33:57
  conspiracy theory high hort or anything like that. Want to be clear, there
• 34:00
  are there's evidence in release documents of the CIA doing these types of things.
• 34:04
  It's been found time and time again that the CIA has directly conducted drug trafficking
• 34:09
  operations or been complicit in the act of procuring and distributing potent drugs into specific
• 34:15
  communities. That is documented. So weird, the War on drugs does more
• 34:20
  racism? Who would have thought, yes? And I mean this is not
• 34:25
  like this is still a basic tactic that's used today. It is to they
• 34:30
  will seed the field with the components of a problem so that they can fuel
• 34:35
  outrage to get people behind their problem, right yeh. And we just saw
• 34:39
  this play out in the United States, who they were passing the toughest,
• 34:44
  most severe immigration reform laws that they had ever passed. The bill was introduced,
• 34:49
  both parties were willing to sign it, and the bill died because they
• 34:54
  realized they could use this as a political issue to try and get more of
• 35:00
  their officials elected by fearmongering on the issues of immigration. And so they were
• 35:05
  like, we want this problem to continue so that we can use your outrage
• 35:10
  to gain votes and stay in power. That's their tactic. And they did
• 35:14
  the same thing here with this war on drugs, saying and so the war
• 35:16
  raged on. But what of the impact, So here are a few other
• 35:21
  things that we should note. The American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU wrote a
• 35:25
  report called, quote the Drug War is the new Jim Crow end quote.
• 35:30
  What they found is that the US black incarceration rates were vastly disproportionate compared to
• 35:37
  white drug crimes. States back this up. Currently, black Americans are thirteen
• 35:40
  point four times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than white Americans. And
• 35:45
  that's you control for the fact that you're looking at what is the representative sample
• 35:52
  of people who are in this population, and you look at the same exact
• 35:55
  type of crimes they are being prosecuted for, and people who are black are
• 35:59
  being, you know, arrested more often and prosecuted more often, even if
• 36:02
  you have people who are doing the same things with the same drugs who are
• 36:07
  white. So they're getting lower sentences or none at all if they're white,
• 36:09
  and they're getting harsher sentences and longer for smaller offenses if they're a black.
• 36:15
  And that's also been very well established in the research at this point, right,
• 36:19
  absolutely, so some other things, drug charges can result in the loss
• 36:22
  of someone's right to vote, custody of their children, and seizure of personal
• 36:25
  property. We kind of established a couple of those things. But the two
• 36:29
  thousand annual drug control budget for the year two thousand in the United States was
• 36:32
  eighteen point four billion dollars, half of which half of which was spent just
• 36:37
  on law enforcement. So we're spending a lot of money every year to fight
• 36:42
  something that's not really working. Now, I think it's fairly clear we tend
• 36:45
  to have a slightly left of center leaning political orientation on this show. But
• 36:51
  here's I think the position that I've always will and always have taken is that
• 36:54
  of like the scientific position, right, And there are plenty of times that
• 36:59
  like Democrats do the thing that is not or the left leaning folks whoever they
• 37:02
  are, do the thing that is not the science informed position. And so
• 37:07
  the Obama administration implemented a variation of this very same approach called tough but smart,
• 37:13
  and so it's important to highlight the differences between the sort of tough on
• 37:16
  crime war on drugs and the tough but smart view. So here we'll go
• 37:21
  through the list really quick. It's that's the list. All they did was
• 37:24
  stop calling it. That was great. I love that. Thank you for
• 37:34
  that. All they did was stop calling it the war on drugs, and
• 37:38
  they just felt that that was a productive way to do it. But it
• 37:42
  was really the same failed policies that had been in place all along. Yeah,
• 37:45
  I mean, I think the closest they did there was one small change,
• 37:49
  and it was under the Affordable Healthcare Act, and that actually increased access
• 37:52
  to drug treatment programs. Now that's not to say that those drug treatment programs
• 37:55
  were all super effective or super useful or anything like that, but there is
• 38:00
  at least access, which I think is an overall net gain compared to any
• 38:05
  other administration that's been working on this. I think that that's a start in
• 38:07
  the right direction. That's true, But that's really the only thing that that
• 38:12
  happened under the Obama administration. Yeah, that's fair, and that's true.
• 38:15
  So I think, you know, perfectly happy to be critical of anybody who
• 38:19
  does stupid things. That was a stupid thing. Yeah, absolutely all right.
• 38:22
  But again, what it comes down to over and all, and as
• 38:25
  I've said, the scientific view is like, did it work? What's the
• 38:30
  effect if it was the case that we declare our war on drugs? And
• 38:32
  the overall effect is we have fewer people die that by itself, is victory
• 38:37
  enough to say, all right, there's something to this here. We have
• 38:39
  fewer people die, fewer people are using drugs, we have less crime.
• 38:44
  All of that would imply that we have a successful program. Any one of
• 38:49
  those would be good factors. But honestly, like I said, if you
• 38:52
  just had fewer deaths, that would be good enough for me to say,
• 38:54
  victory, we have a successful policy here, right, And you're going to
• 38:59
  find out that that's not what happened. Not only did we have just as
• 39:02
  many, if not more deaths, we also had the issue of a higher
• 39:06
  incarceration rate than we have ever had in the history of the United States.
• 39:08
  So none of it worked. And as a matter of fact, in twenty
• 39:12
  eleven, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which was a third party group
• 39:15
  comprised of former government officials, released their report updating the world on the status
• 39:21
  of the War on Drugs, and you know what they said, The global
• 39:23
  War on Drugs has failed. So over the past two administrations in the United
• 39:29
  States, new laws have been passed to begin to undo some of the damage
• 39:31
  that was done over the years. They decided to start with cannabis. The
• 39:36
  Federal Decriminalization Approval of medicinal cannabis access and reinvestment of impacted communities. And that's
• 39:43
  at least with just that, and that is one of the more commonly used
• 39:45
  of all of the substances. But just weed. Yeah, that's it.
• 39:50
  That's really the biggest change has happened so far in repairing all the damage that
• 39:54
  was done. There are some states that have decriminalized all drugs, and we'll
• 39:58
  talk about a little bit about that too, But how about how this impacts
• 40:00
  the US specifically. So, drug offences are the leading cause of arrest of
• 40:04
  the US, with nearly one million arrests per year. These rest are often
• 40:08
  impactful for black, Latino and Indigenous people, as well as low income homes.
• 40:14
  So the majority of people that get arrested for drug related charges are usually
• 40:17
  people of color or people of low socioeconomic status. I know that we've talked
• 40:22
  about this before and it's not worth getting on the soapbox here, but I
• 40:25
  think always thinking about what is the point of imprisonment? Are we looking at
• 40:30
  retribution? Is it from a safety angle? Like what are we trying to
• 40:34
  do here? And I really have always seen it as like as having a
• 40:37
  function of safety, Like there are certain people who whatever has had them arrive
• 40:43
  at the place that they're at. We don't know that we can effectively prevent
• 40:45
  them from doing more harm. Right with nonviolent crimes like drug use and possession,
• 40:52
  they weren't doing any harm. It just seems like a totally unnecessary use
• 40:55
  of our time and resources to prosecute to that to the point of imprison But
• 41:00
  we'll get to that in another discussion. Right. Another thing that's like absurd
• 41:04
  about this is that not only is this something that I think it could quite
• 41:07
  easily argue should not result in incarceration, but right now, one in five
• 41:13
  incarcerations out of nearly two million, are arrested for drug offenses. Like twenty
• 41:17
  percent of people who are incarcerated are in therefore drug related offenses, right and
• 41:22
  the majority of them are for cannabis. So like it's not even like a
• 41:27
  lot of the other things, so which you know, I can go down
• 41:29
  the street and go buy weed now legally, yeah, but there's people in
• 41:32
  jail for it. So that is an absurd thing. Now, another thing
• 41:37
  that's important to note, and I think this is a very real thing,
• 41:39
  but we will talk about this as we kind of unpack statistics and stuff around
• 41:44
  this type of thing. Fatal overdoses have increased to over six hundred percent or
• 41:47
  buy over six hundred percent between twenty and one and twenty eighteen. So there
• 41:52
  is an increase in use in health adverse conditions, deth being one of those
• 41:57
  health averse conditions. This is kind of starting to increase over time. Now
• 42:00
  how much of that is actually attributed to the drug of choice or some other
• 42:05
  medical condition that's worth unpacking from a statistical standpoint, But we are seeing an
• 42:09
  increase in drug related deaths over this time. And we'll actually be talking very
• 42:15
  soon, I think actually in the next episode about it. Wasn't gonna give
• 42:19
  it away, but I'll just say on harm reduction specifically, and in looking
• 42:22
  at some of the numbers, six hundred percent is on the very very very
• 42:24
  low end how much of an increase we've seen it is actually, and you
• 42:30
  know up to twenty twenty one, it is it has risen even considerably over
• 42:32
  that. So, yeah, there's a lot that's happening right there. The
• 42:37
  current budget for the War on Drugs is forty seven billion dollars. Now.
• 42:40
  The DEA alone costs three point three billion dollars to operate annually. So when
• 42:45
  people are looking for all the ways that the government spends tax payer money on
• 42:50
  things that maybe they feel are not necessary to the functioning of a healthy society,
• 42:57
  this is one place I think we could certainly aim our sites at and
• 43:00
  say do we need this much though? Right, Yeah, it's a lot.
• 43:07
  Another thing too that I found really interesting as we were doing this one
• 43:09
  is that drug offenses were actually the second most common cause of deportation, first
• 43:14
  being I legal entry in twenty nineteen, but the second most common cause of
• 43:17
  deportation is drug related defenses possession, trafficking, distribution, and stuff like that.
• 43:22
  Interesting. There's a really interesting study from Cohen and all on twenty twenty
• 43:27
  and they showed that despite the overall impact of the War on drugs, systems
• 43:31
  and kind like undoing some of that stuff, things like the just say no
• 43:35
  policy and all that stuff, like when they started doing all that, systems
• 43:37
  still enact really problematic policies. So employment, education, housing, public benefits,
• 43:43
  family regulations, drug treatment systems, and healthcare systems all have very strict
• 43:47
  anti drug policies, even with kind of rolling back and decriminalizing some of those
• 43:53
  things on the federal level. So these policies can actually result in lifetime barriers
• 43:59
  for someone for some possessions. So for example, like if I were somebody
• 44:01
  who wanted to actually, you know what, I can use my example of
• 44:05
  my job now, so the place I work at is really great. But
• 44:08
  if you know, I had a charge, let's say I had like a
• 44:10
  drug possession charge on my background screening, I wouldn't be able to work and
• 44:15
  build for services on Medicaid because there are some restrictions to being able to work
• 44:21
  on federal programs with background screenings that have criminal like a felony on that background
• 44:24
  screening. Wow, and that might have happened. I could have done that
• 44:28
  when I was twenty one and I'm thirty eight now, and that would still
• 44:30
  follow me. I would have to work and do all the legal kind of
• 44:32
  mumbo jumbo to like undo that to get that away and to be able to
• 44:37
  work on those funding sources. So like, these types of things can have
• 44:39
  long lasting effects for families and for people without even just for something as simple
• 44:45
  as having too much weed on me. Well, let's transition to something that
• 44:47
  hopefully has short term lasting effects and then is rapidly out of your system.
• 44:52
  And that is the ads. Okay, So getting back to our topic here
• 45:02
  in terms of what is the actual sort of science here. And I think
• 45:07
  you could think about this as historically, what has happened, where has it
• 45:13
  got us, and what can we do about it now? And I think
• 45:15
  in reflecting on where the drug wars have gotten us, I think the original
• 45:22
  aim was I mean, even its inception, like the development of this was
• 45:27
  myopic at best. The goal was to reduce or remove opportunity, but it
• 45:31
  didn't actually at all think about the complex systems and which drug use existed.
• 45:37
  Particularly in the early iterations of this, like they were really really silly,
• 45:42
  and then they started to put in policies where they did start to think through
• 45:45
  I think, I believe anyway, the different sort of parts of the system
• 45:51
  and levels where drug exist. But they still weren't thinking about some of the
• 45:54
  most important parts, which are why are people choosing to use drugs in the
• 45:59
  first place, and like what could we do to help them make different choices?
• 46:05
  Besides a stupid poster that says just say no, right right anyway,
• 46:09
  So that's that's I think where where it sort of started and where it sort
• 46:14
  of got us, right, And you know, as we kind of look
• 46:16
  at some of these issues too, social issues, just like minority groups in
• 46:20
  situations like that, folks, folks who self medicate for mental health concerns in
• 46:25
  poverty specifically, like we see these types of situations, minority groups mental health
• 46:31
  poverty are often reporting more drug related crimes. Crimes then remain with that person
• 46:37
  and ultimately what ends up happening is it produces limited opportunities for work and ultimately
• 46:42
  maintains poverty systems. So this issue of this tough on drugs type of policy
• 46:47
  ends up really only impacting the folks that are in systems that kind of perpetuate
• 46:53
  that issue. So you want to fight the war on poverty, then here's
• 46:57
  a great way to do it. Decriminalize drugs and take those off people's records
• 47:00
  and let them vote. Because I can guarantee you right now you would have
• 47:04
  an entirely different outcome if you could allow people to participate in the systems in
• 47:07
  which they are being incarcerated in. So, you know, you have this
• 47:09
  a huge issue where the folks that are being targeted are disproportionately targeted compared to
• 47:15
  folks that have money or you know, are white. We'll say, you
• 47:17
  know, I mean, those are huge, huge problems, and I think
• 47:21
  there does need to be there's a lot of strategic support that I think needs
• 47:24
  to be put in place because what we have seen is simple decriminalization. There's
• 47:30
  been some caveats to that that I think will need to unpact probably in another
• 47:32
  discussion, right but looking at decriminalization, harm reduction policies and comprehensive treatment programs,
• 47:38
  they've fared a lot better at addressing the issue with drugs than simply abstinate
• 47:43
  and based education systems such as DARE and certainly more than harsh penalties have ever
• 47:47
  done to try and combat the issue that can come with addiction thing. Because
• 47:52
  I think one of the things you know that people have always said is they're
• 47:57
  like, well, we don't want to make cannabis legal because you don't want
• 48:00
  like your surgeon like getting high before they go into the surgery, or your
• 48:05
  pilot getting high sure before flying a plane. I'm like, do you think
• 48:08
  that they were just like on the edge waiting, like I can't wait till
• 48:12
  I legalize weed so they can get high and then fly this plane. I'm
• 48:15
  like, let's look at you. I'm like, you the politician is like,
• 48:19
  the only reason you're not hopelessly addicted to something is because it's currently illegal.
• 48:23
  You're like, I would be smoking marijuana all day every day, but
• 48:25
  it's illegal and I'm a law abiding citizen, therefore I will not use I'm
• 48:30
  like, nobody is like that. There are so few people that are that
• 48:35
  rule governed exactly that I'm like, in these systems, the people who are
• 48:38
  like going to use drugs, they find a fin way. Otherwise we wouldn't
• 48:43
  have to deal with this, right, right, And it's like, otherwise
• 48:45
  the systems would work perfectly. So like, just making it legal doesn't mean
• 48:50
  that or making it not criminalized at least doesn't mean that you should expect a
• 48:54
  huge spike in use of this because so few people are holding out on it
• 48:59
  because it's illegal, you know, right, And there is more to unpacking
• 49:01
  that we'll get to in a minute, but I just feel like it's worth
• 49:04
  pointing that out. As somebody who has a medical card, I think about
• 49:07
  this, and I think, like, okay, so let's say Florida decriminalized
• 49:12
  all drugs. There's not a part of me that goes, oh good,
• 49:15
  it's legal, now let me go do heroin, right, Like I have
• 49:17
  no interest in doing that, right, but people who are interested in doing
• 49:22
  heroin are gonna go do heroin, whether it's legal or not. So like,
• 49:24
  it doesn't make any sense, it's ridiculous, Okay, anyway, So
• 49:28
  let's talk about I think the simple behavioral science perspective. We already know that
• 49:31
  addressing behavior on this like fundamental functional level, on the outcomes based level,
• 49:37
  is far more effective than punishing it. Teaching somebody what to do instead of
• 49:40
  doing the problem is way better than punishing the problem by itself. If we
• 49:45
  can give an equivalent or closely related alternative skill that organism, that person is
• 49:50
  more likely to maintain skills in that teaching and beyond the teaching context in which
• 49:53
  we've taught them. So we teach them to do something better, and they're
• 49:55
  more likely to do that by going forward. But if we punish that behavior,
• 50:00
  all we're doing is creating a context in which there is one an alternative
• 50:02
  that hasn't been learned, which is created in itself a behavior vacuum. Right,
• 50:07
  So we've taken away a behavior, or try to take away a behavior,
• 50:09
  but now we've been we've left this gap where a behavior doesn't exist and
• 50:13
  two, the person develops a healthy dislike for whoever is punishing them, So
• 50:16
  they're going to spend a lot of time in counter coercion and counter control fighting
• 50:22
  back against the system that's punishing them. So it makes sense that you know
• 50:24
  you're going to have a hard time with some folks who are incarcerated. Why
• 50:29
  would they treat you nice when you're punishing them for no reason, or at
• 50:31
  least for some silly reasons. So I think I think it's important just to
• 50:35
  know that, like, it is always better to teach something to do instead
• 50:37
  than it would ever be to just punish a behavior forever. Yes, And
• 50:42
  I do think a lot of people are going to hear this and say like,
• 50:44
  yeah, but and they'll have a list of things, And some of
• 50:45
  those things include that, like, we're not advocating that we should have no
• 50:52
  systems to try and decrease the use of drugs, right, I think that
• 50:57
  we are actually advocating strongly the opt I think we need systems to address the
• 51:01
  use of drugs and other list substances, particularly before they become a dependency,
• 51:07
  and particularly before they cause death. To do that, what we need to
• 51:10
  do is consider what are the circumstances under which someone makes that choice in the
• 51:15
  first place, and can we get to them there at that point before they've
• 51:19
  ever made the leap. And if they're at a point where they're choosing drugs
• 51:22
  because they're trying to mitigate pain, then we need a better healthcare infrastructure to
• 51:27
  ensure that they can get treatment for their pain in a way that does not
• 51:29
  result in them choosing that as their alternative that is affordable, it's accessible,
• 51:34
  and that they know how to get it and use it reliably, and also
• 51:37
  like probably treat whatever condition is causing them chronic pain if they're using it because
• 51:42
  of like peer pressure or the like these social groups and particularly I think of
• 51:45
  like drug cartels, then like what we need is we need better systems where
• 51:50
  people can We need whistleblower laws to protect them. We need places where people
• 51:52
  can shelter and support and ways that we can educate the community to help them
• 51:58
  be able to fight against that. And I think we do need to be
• 52:00
  on lookout, on the lookout for people who come into the country with that
• 52:04
  intention. And like again A yeah, but that I hear is like,
• 52:07
  let's look at I think it's I was seeing a news report about this,
• 52:10
  it's either Montana or Wyoming. I want to say it's Montana. There's an
• 52:14
  indigenous reservation there of American Native people. It has like more fentanyl than the
• 52:21
  rest of the state put together, and it's way up in Montana. And
• 52:24
  there is essentially a few reasons for this. One of them is that the
• 52:29
  Native Indigenous peoples have been so stripped of their power to do any kind of
• 52:35
  regulating and enforcement of their borders, of their people, of the laws inside
• 52:38
  of them, and from getting any kind of help from the government, that
• 52:42
  they are way understaffed to combat the problem right. A second reason is that
• 52:47
  what has happened is they can sell fentanyl for way more than it's worth the
• 52:52
  further they have to go from the border to get there, and so it's
• 52:57
  created a sort of market vacuum in a place with little oversight a regulation.
• 53:00
  I think a third reason is because that they are able to push fentanyl in
• 53:06
  a way that, like often people are sort of forced to even become addicted
• 53:09
  to it. Almost are like a lot of peer pressure with these social campaigns
• 53:14
  that have essentially nothing combating them, Like it is open season for cartels to
• 53:19
  send people to the to this reservation and that does actually filter out into the
• 53:23
  rest of the state to some point. And so like fentanyl, I think
• 53:27
  that being one of the ones that people are most worried about. And this
• 53:30
  is the reason that we actually saw the state of Oregon is reversing its decriminalization
• 53:35
  of drugs, and it's because there's been a massive increase of overdose deaths,
• 53:38
  almost exclusively due to fentanyl. But they also there was a huge unpacking that
• 53:44
  Like what happened was when they voted to decriminalize those drugs, that was the
• 53:50
  only piece of the infrastructure they had ready to go that slammed into place immediately.
• 53:54
  It took almost a year for them to get any of the other mental
• 53:59
  health count support systems up and ready to go to support that transition. It
• 54:02
  like all the other systems that needed to go in place to ensure that they
• 54:07
  could get people safely transitioning, we're not ready to go when decriminalization went into
• 54:12
  effect. So it was just like really poor planning and execution. And on
• 54:15
  top of that, you have this like the fentanyl that's getting into the country,
• 54:20
  the synthetic opioid that is extremely dangerous that's essentially making it onto the streets,
• 54:24
  and that people they don't have a way to even know if that's what
• 54:28
  they're getting. Most people, as far as I know, aren't making the
• 54:30
  choice to ingest that substance. So I think the yah butts that are around
• 54:34
  this understandable as they are, are rooted in the fact that we didn't have
• 54:37
  the comprehensive approach that we would have advocated for to ensure that we could mitigate
• 54:43
  the use of drugs and ensure that people are able to make those choices safely.
• 54:47
  Yeah, I think you absolutely nailed it. Every time I get on
• 54:51
  like this super long soapbox, I talked so long you'd think that I'm not
• 54:53
  even breathing. I had that thought. I was worried, like he's turning
• 54:58
  blue in the face, but he just keeps going. Well, I'll stop
• 55:01
  and catch my breath and sadly let the advertisers do their thing. All right,
• 55:13
  let's finish up. You definitely need to take the center stage here because
• 55:15
  if people keep listening to me, they're going to stop listening to our podcast.
• 55:19
  So here are some other interesting tidbits in Shane narration, which is better
• 55:23
  than Abraham narration. For some tad points in the eighteen nineties, you could
• 55:29
  actually purchase a syringe and either cocaine or heroin from the Sears catalog. It
• 55:32
  was in the catalog that you could disorder from. That's amazing. Yeah,
• 55:36
  I thought that was pretty great. In nineteen fifteen, the narrative around drug
• 55:38
  use focused on black communities and how drugs resulted in superpowers for people who use
• 55:43
  them. And this was actually a thing that led to things like yeah,
• 55:45
  yeah, great, right, And The New York Times is actually one of
• 55:49
  the major publishers writing about this, writing about users in black communities who were
• 55:53
  using drugs and gaining superpowers as a result of that. Cool, you know,
• 55:59
  all right, Up until point, the US government has spent at least
• 56:02
  one trillion dollars on the War on drugs and drug related policies for it not
• 56:07
  to work. So there's that. That's a lot. That's so much money.
• 56:09
  Eighty percent of opioids globally produced are consumed by Americans. Wow, So
• 56:16
  that's impressive. I know, we're number one, we're number one. Legalizing
• 56:22
  cannabis could save the United States seven point seven billion dollars a year for law
• 56:25
  enforcement costs and reduce the prison population by nearly half. Wow, that would
• 56:32
  reduce by several more billion dollars and in addition, I think would just overall
• 56:37
  reduce the rates of crime, and they would be presumably earning tax money for
• 56:43
  this, that would actually help cover some of the deficit that exists in the
• 56:45
  first place. Right Exactly, it's absurd that why they don't consider that.
• 56:50
  But you know, it's a moral issue. It's a moral fight. The
• 56:52
  war on drugs is a moral fight. It was never a statistics battle.
• 56:54
  It was never research. That is money that cannot be unspent. Right exactly,
• 57:00
  Oh my god, what a mess. Yeah, okay, so that
• 57:04
  was the war on drugs. I think the take home of this is that
• 57:07
  there has been a colossal failure. It has been a failure by pretty every
• 57:09
  metric you could use to call it a failure. We've had more overdose deaths
• 57:14
  than ever following the War of drugs. We have the highest incarceration rates,
• 57:17
  I believe, of any democratized country in the whole world, and throughout all
• 57:22
  of history. We spend the most money of this and still have some of
• 57:24
  the highest consumption rates. We have had high rates of use, We've had
• 57:30
  huge amounts of racism, and disproportionate inequities created like this I think could tangentially
• 57:38
  be linked to things like the housing crisis, to unemployment, to homelessness.
• 57:45
  There is a wide ranging list of effects that could be tied in one way
• 57:50
  or another to these failed policies that have done nothing. Like you might be
• 57:53
  hearing this and thinking, like, why are we still doing this? The
• 57:57
  reason is there is still an enormous contingent of politicians who are pushing that addiction
• 58:04
  is a morality issue that is best addressed with punishment contingencies from the government,
• 58:10
  and that like that is the best and possibly only way to solve this issue
• 58:15
  is to continue to hit it harder. And they have convinced a large chunk
• 58:20
  of the American population that that is so, and they are wrong. It
• 58:24
  is not so. It is not working. This has just been an utterly
• 58:30
  failed experiment and how to do Like if there was a textbook on how to
• 58:35
  do things wrong, just like follow the history of the War on drugs.
• 58:38
  Yeah, like, you could almost not have done it more wrong than they
• 58:42
  did. This is I think should be a wake up call to the rest
• 58:45
  of us that, like, whatever direction we've taken on this so far,
• 58:49
  change course, like you almost couldn't make things worse than you've made them up
• 58:52
  to this point, right, So like like anything else is better than this.
• 58:57
  It's hard to like you basically opened a wound, filled it with like
• 59:01
  gangrenous bacteria, and then rubbed saltan and just kept poking with sticks to make
• 59:06
  sure it stayed fresh. Like literally anything you do at this point would be
• 59:09
  better. So I think there's a lot of things that we could do,
• 59:14
  and I think addressing you know, good scientists who understand how to leverage human
• 59:19
  psychology and behavior to put in policies that are most likely to result in effective
• 59:23
  changes is the best line of defense they could possibly have moving forward. Yeah,
• 59:28
  I mean, I think the only take on point I have at this
• 59:30
  point in time is with all that information and everything that we've just talked about,
• 59:35
  drugs one, Yeah, that's what it is. I mean, that's
• 59:37
  what it is. Like West, we lost the war on drugs. Drugs
• 59:39
  won, and it's because we didn't have a fundamental understanding of how any of
• 59:44
  it worked on a simple level, And you know, that's just what it
• 59:49
  came down to. We just we lost it. The politicians failed this one
• 59:52
  because like psychologists measure for a long time that this was not going to work,
• 59:57
  and I think have been beating that drum, particularly those of us in
• 59:59
  the sort of science arena, would have never advocated that this was the position
• 1:00:04
  that policies took. So, yeah, you're right. The final take home
• 1:00:07
  is that war on drugs we lost drugs one. If we was like the
• 1:00:10
  people on the other side of that war, I don't know, right exactly,
• 1:00:15
  Yeah, United States government lost absolutely. Okay, who man, there's
• 1:00:21
  a lot to deal with. If you would like to tell us anything about
• 1:00:23
  the war on drugs, anything that we got wrong, that we got right,
• 1:00:25
  you would like to send us heaping amounts of praise, you should definitely
• 1:00:29
  do that. Reach out to us at directly by emailing us at info at
• 1:00:31
  wwdwwdpodcast dot com, leave us a rating and reviewer. Whoever you listen to
• 1:00:37
  podcasts like subscribe, send this to a friend, et cetera. You can
• 1:00:39
  also join us on Patreon. We certainly appreciate all the support that you would
• 1:00:44
  want to and would give us there, and the list of people who have
• 1:00:46
  already made that leap that we are just ever grateful to includes Mike m Meghan
• 1:00:52
  Leyla Mike t, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia,
• 1:00:55
  Brian, Ashley, Kiara, Christy and Michelle. Thank you all so
• 1:01:00
  much. Yeah, we love y'all. Moment of silence for appreciation of those
• 1:01:05
  wonderful people. Okay, that was the moment before we move on. I'd
• 1:01:10
  also like to let everyone know, if you're joining us for the first time,
• 1:01:13
  thank you so much for being here. I hope you got something out
• 1:01:15
  of this episode. Please stick around for a moment because we're about to recommend
• 1:01:19
  some really fun things and recommendations. They're just fun. You get to hear
• 1:01:22
  like, I wonder what those people really enjoy and we're gonna tell you.
• 1:01:24
  Yeah. But I also like to thank my team of people because writing in
• 1:01:27
  fact checking come from Shane and myself. And Shane, thank you so much
• 1:01:30
  for recording with me today and specifically for putting together this fantastic episode that we
• 1:01:36
  just recorded anytime, Thank you for having me my pleasure, My pleasure.
• 1:01:39
  And also the person who helps put this audio into a string of sounds that
• 1:01:43
  are worth listening to and works his editing magic is Justin Greenhouse. Our social
• 1:01:47
  media coordinator is Emma Wilson. With whom you will be speaking if you contact
• 1:01:51
  us on social media, and she will sort of put us in touch with
• 1:01:52
  you. So she's our filter for the craziness that can sometimes happen when people
• 1:01:58
  use social media platforms. But we're on all of the normal you can reach
• 1:02:00
  us there. But I think that that is all that I have. Is
• 1:02:02
  there anything that I missed or anything you like to add before we recommend some
• 1:02:07
  things not on my end? All right, then let's get to some recommendations.
• 1:02:17
  Recommendations, all right, So I'm gonna recommend something that I don't normally
• 1:02:22
  do. This year, I've been trying to say yes to more things,
• 1:02:24
  and I decided to say yes to this thing. And I went to a
• 1:02:30
  local farm and it's called amber Brook Farms and it's out of it's in Eustace,
• 1:02:34
  Florida. Do you know where Eustace is? I don't either, so
• 1:02:36
  it's fine, no. So it's so Eustace is somewhere in the middle of
• 1:02:40
  the state. There are probably like fifteen people that live there. But it's
• 1:02:45
  beautiful because the drive out there is very old Florida. So it's like Spanish
• 1:02:47
  moss, big oak trees, a lot of like you know, bodies of
• 1:02:52
  water that are definitely full of deadly alligators and stuff. So definitely the reason
• 1:02:54
  we went out to this farm is because they were doing their annual blueberry festival
• 1:03:00
  easter celebration type of thing, and so blueberries are coming into season, strawberries
• 1:03:05
  are growing out of season, and you go and it's like kind of a
• 1:03:07
  U pick farm. You can go and pick the pick the berries and the
• 1:03:10
  strawberries, and you can go get some onions if you want, and there's
• 1:03:14
  sunflowers. Well, they did this big easter thing and they had food trucks
• 1:03:17
  out there and they had a candy cannon, which you know, they fired
• 1:03:22
  hard candy into the sky and let it rain down on kids, which is
• 1:03:25
  such a bad idea. That's so Florida. Yeah, they had you know,
• 1:03:32
  some slides on the property, They had ice cream. It was just
• 1:03:36
  a really great time and I got to spend a few hours out there just
• 1:03:38
  to kind of grab some blueberries. And I had some of the blueberries this
• 1:03:42
  morning and they were delicious. So strong recommend if you liked something that's like
• 1:03:46
  fun and kind of like an easy, care free day, it's a beautiful
• 1:03:50
  way to go. Wow, that's amazing. Blueberries have got to be one
• 1:03:52
  of my most favorite of all things. So because they're the best. They're
• 1:03:57
  so good, I mean, just right off the bush I can't even imagine.
• 1:04:00
  And something so wonderful, all right, Amberbrook Farms. That was a
• 1:04:01
  high cell. That makes me want to go to Florida right now, just
• 1:04:04
  to enjoy the wonder that is. Describe. Let's go. That sounds really
• 1:04:08
  good, Okay, I'm recommending an app that I discovered recently. I like
• 1:04:13
  to read a lot, and I also am extremely busy, and I have
• 1:04:15
  a hard time reading. But I spend a lot of time doing something that
• 1:04:18
  does not involve that involves my eyes but does not necessarily involve my ears.
• 1:04:23
  A lot of sitting in traffic, a lot of like doing chores, sometimes
• 1:04:26
  exercising. And so what I was conflicted by is I couldn't read articles while
• 1:04:31
  I did those things, and so I would choose to read articles instead or
• 1:04:34
  books or whatever. And I found this app. It's called Speechify, and
• 1:04:39
  it is a definitely hardcore freemium app. It will not do very much if
• 1:04:43
  you don't pay for it, but I don't pay for it, and I
• 1:04:45
  still find it useful. If you do pay for it. You can have
• 1:04:48
  Snoop Dogg read articles to you, and that sounds amazing, So I am
• 1:04:53
  highly tempted to pay for it just for that. There's other voices, is
• 1:04:56
  like Gwyneth Paltrow, but I mean, you're doing it for Snoop Dogg.
• 1:04:59
  Let's be real. So of course, yeah, I would definitely pay for
• 1:05:01
  it just for that if I wasn't so cheap, But that is an option
• 1:05:05
  on there. Otherwise, you have the free version that just reads you in
• 1:05:08
  a sort of very computer robotic sounding voice that doesn't quite know how to articulate
• 1:05:12
  many words. I will say it's not good at reading articles, but it's
• 1:05:16
  better than not reading articles for me at least. Yeah. So basically,
• 1:05:21
  you download a PDF and it just literally reads all the text that's on that
• 1:05:25
  page top to bottom. Many articles are published in columns. It will most
• 1:05:28
  of the time do those columns correctly, but sometimes it won't. But it
• 1:05:31
  will also like every time read the header, footter in page numbers, and
• 1:05:34
  like every single reference that is I have referenced in their in citation and footnotes.
• 1:05:39
  So it's a lot, but like I was able to get through like
• 1:05:42
  six articles in a day, and that was up from zero that I would
• 1:05:45
  have gotten through if I hadn't been using this, because I wouldn't have had
• 1:05:47
  time to read, like sit down and actually read that many with my eyeballs.
• 1:05:50
  Yeah. So I have found it useful enough to want to recommend it
• 1:05:54
  to people who feel like they can tolerate a computer voice reading things badly at
• 1:05:58
  them to at least get through our So if that's the thing, check it
• 1:06:01
  out. It's possible that the sort of enhanced version does a better job at
• 1:06:04
  reading them correctly. I don't know. I haven't tried it, but again,
• 1:06:08
  it's snoop dogg. So what are you gonna do? That's like your
• 1:06:10
  best nob right? How can you complain exactly? So anyway, that's Speechify
• 1:06:15
  you recommended amberbrook Farms. I think that's what we have. Is there anything
• 1:06:17
  else you'd like that or anything I forgot before we say our goodbyes? No,
• 1:06:20
  I think it covers it. Thank you all so much for listening.
• 1:06:23
  We hope you'd continue to join us on our journey through the addiction sphere.
• 1:06:28
  We have at least a small handful of episodes lined up coming down the road
• 1:06:31
  for you, and I can think of three at the top of my head.
• 1:06:33
  But join us next time for harm reduction. But that's what we have.
• 1:06:38
  So this is Abraham and it's a Shane. We're out see it.
• 1:06:41
  You've been listening to Why We Do what we do. You can learn more
• 1:06:45
  about this and other episodes by going to WWD WWD podcast dot com. Thanks
• 1:06:50
  for listening and we hope you have an awesome day.