How One Homeless Man Resisted Drug War Nonsense | Joe Rogan and Johann Hari

And something really surprised me learning about the history of all this stuff. At the birth of the drug war, it was intensely resisted, right? Think about here in LA, right? In Los Angeles, there was a doctor called Henry Smith Williams. When heroin was banned, there was a deliberate loophole in the law that said, okay, you can't sell heroin, but doctors can prescribe it to people with addiction problems, just like what happened in Switzerland, right? So here in LA, big heroin clinic, prescribed. Answlinger, it drives him crazy, he wants to shut it down. So the mayor of Los Angeles stands in front of this heroin prescription clinic and says, you will not shut this down. This does a good job for us, but Answlinger shuts it down. When the doctors say to the, there's the biggest crackdown on doctors in American history, over 12,000 doctors are arrested and rounded up. When they come to the one in Portland, Oregon, the doctors say, but what are we meant to do with all these vulnerable, addictive people? And one of the agents said, go and throw them in the lake, they'll make good fish food, right? That was the attitude. So this is resisted intensely at the birth of the drug war. So you had a society really recently that had a much more mature, exactly what you're asking about, a much more mature attitude to drug use than we have now, right? It's not that people thought all drug use is good, we should celebrate every instance of drug use, no one thinks that, right? There were problems and there were, there was some joy associated with drug use, that's actually the norm. There was some pain and terrible things associated with drug use, which are mostly driven by underlying harm, but there are real harms that come from some drugs as well. And most societies, until very recently, had a mature appreciation of this, right? Really? We are the outlier. That most societies have had licensed intoxicants. Now of course, in different societies at different times, it was a czar of Russia who wanted to ban tobacco, right? And did terrible things to anyone who was found with tobacco. Different societies have had different panics at different times. But we are the historical outliers, right? I mean, to give you a sense, just the United States imprisons two million people. There has never been a society that imprisons this many of its citizens, this higher proportion of its citizens, anywhere ever. It's overwhelmingly driven by the drug war, right? I mean, the US imprisons so many people, and the conditions in those prisons are so terrible, that the United States is almost certainly the first society ever where more men have been raped than women. That's how extreme this war is, right? And what we do to people in what the conditions this war creates, it's a total historical outlier. We are in a freak experiment, right? And the one thing you can say in defense of the drug war, and I would give one bit of credit for this, is we gave it a fair shot, right? The United States has done it for 100 years. This country has spent a trillion dollars on it. We've imprisoned millions of our own citizens. We've killed hundreds of thousands of people at a conservative estimate. We've destroyed whole countries like Colombia. Isn't the problem now that there's a gigantic business behind it all? From private prisons to prison guard unions to the pharmaceutical industry that would benefit from keeping most of these drugs illegal so their profits continue to rise to law enforcement. I mean, down the line, you'd be disrupting an evil industry, but an industry. I think that's a real factor, but I don't want to overstate it. Lots of policies have vested interest. What's the factor? What's the main factor? The main factor is most people asked, do you think the drug war has failed? So yes. And most people ask, do you want to legalize any drug other than cannabis? Say no very strongly. So education. I think it's about, I won't use the word education. Can I give you an example of a specific person who I think showed a way to do this? So in the year 2000 in Vancouver, there was a homeless street addict called Bud Osborne. And he lived in a notorious part of Vancouver called the Downtown Eastside. People in Vancouver, people into Vancouver knew it. Know it. It's a place particularly at that time that had really high, like, nightmarish open drug scene, right? Just again, people in like in Switzerland, people injecting in the streets, that kind of thing. And Bud was living homeless and he was watching his friends die all around him. At that time, there was a really big police crackdown. And so people would go and like hide in dumpsters or in alleyways to shoot up. But obviously, if you're hiding and you overdose, no one sees you, you just die. Right. And one day, Bud, he learns that one of his friends, Judith, had died. And he's like, I can't just sit here and wait for my friends to die and for me to die. But as Bud would have put it then, he also thought I'm a homeless junkie. What the fuck am I going to do? Bud had a really simple idea. He gathered together a group of the other homeless street addicts and he said, when we're not using, which is most of the time, even people on the streets, what we should do is just drop a timetable and go and look in the places where we know people, where we shoot up. Right. And if we see someone overdose, we'll ring an ambulance. No officials, nothing like that. Just us. And loads of people had descended on the downtown east side to come up with problems to solve everything. And people were very skeptical, but they liked Bud. Oh, OK, we'll do it. So they start going and searching. And over the next three months, the death toll on the downtown east side had a significant fall. And obviously, that meant people who would have died were living, which is a great thing. But it also meant the addicts thought, oh, maybe we're not the pieces of shit everyone says we are. Right. Maybe we can do something. They were like, what else can we do? Bud went to the library. He learned in Frankfurt in Germany, they had opened safe injection rooms, but like what happened in California until they shut it down, Anseling has shut it down, where people could go and use their drugs and be watched by doctors and nurses and that this had massively reduced deaths in Frankfurt. Nothing like this had happened in the United States since Anseling has shut it all down. But Bud's like, OK, we'll persuade our mayor. They set up a group called Van Do, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. OK, the mayor was a conservative right wing guy called Philip Owen, who, it would be an American comparison. It's not Trump, like Mitt Romney. Rich guy from a privileged family, didn't know anything about addicts. He'd run for office saying all the local drug addicts should be taken and detained in the local military base in Chilliwack and never let out. Gives you a sense of where he's coming from, right? People are not optimistic about persuading him. Van Do, Bud, his friends, they decide everywhere Philip Owen goes, they're going to follow him with a coffin. And the coffin had written on it, who will die next Philip Owen before you open a safe injection site? Every time Philip Owen spoke in public, one of the homeless people with addiction problems would stand up and say, who will die next Philip Owen before you open a safe injection site? One day, Dean Wilson, one of the main people in Van Do, stood up and said, do you remember Julia, who asked you recently who would die next? It turned out to be her because you haven't done it. This goes on for a long time. They do loads of public actions. They filled Oppenheimer Park, which is a big park in Vancouver, with a cross, more than a thousand crosses, each one representing someone who had died of an overdose. And they wrote the names of the people on the crosses. And one day after this had been going on for years, eternally to his credit, Philip Owen just said, who the fuck are these people? What is this? And he went to meet loads of the addicts. He sat with them. It blew his mind. He thought people with addiction problems were just people who partied too hard, indulged themselves. He was completely shocked. He came here to the United States to meet Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, who'd grown up under alcohol prohibition. And Milton Friedman explains drug prohibition to Philip Owen. Philip Owen comes back to Vancouver and he holds a press conference and he had the chief of police, the coroner and a representative of the addicts. And he says something like, I'm not going to speak again without having the addicts here with me about addiction because they understand it better than me. We're going to open the first safe injection site in North America. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. Things are going to change around here. They open safe injection site. Philip Owen's right wing party is so horrified. They deselect him as their candidate and his whole political career ends. But a more liberal guy wins the election and the room stays open. In the 10 years that followed, overdose deaths on the downtown east side fell by 80 percent, eight zero percent. Average life expectancy in that neighborhood rose by 10 years. You just don't get figures like that very often. And I remember the reason I say in relation to change is, you know, a big part of what I argue in Chasing the Scream and in my other book, Lost Connections, is, you know, we you don't write people off, right? But I realised I would have written off Philip Owen. Right wing guy runs for saying we should lock them all up in the military base, right? You don't write off anyone. You don't know who can be persuaded by a message of love and compassion. And the most unlikely, one of the biggest champions of my book is a conservative evangelical Christian in Mississippi called Christina Dent, who's doing incredible work with this right now. And I thought a lot about Philip Owen when I went to go and see Philip Owen on the downtown east side. And he said to me he would sacrifice his entire political career all over again, given the chance for this cause. He said, how often do you get to save thousands of lives of the most vulnerable people? And after I got to know Bud Osborne, the guy who started this movement, and he died, he he and I remember, you know, it's only in his early 60s, but he'd been a homeless addict during a drug war. It takes a toll on you. And they sealed off the streets of the downtown east side where Bud had lived as a homeless person. And they had this incredible memorial ceremony. And there were loads of people at that ceremony who knew that they were alive because of what Bud had started and because so many other people had joined them and so many people who didn't have addiction problems had opened their hearts. Right. And I remember thinking that day. You know, when you get disheartened about this, it's easy to get disheartened, right? This is a hundred year long drug war. We're up against very powerful forces. Everyone watching your show, listening to your show is more powerful than Bud was that day, right? The day he started that, right? Just by virtue of the fact they have a device on which to listen to this. Right. Bud didn't sit there thinking someone else is going to handle this. He didn't sit there thinking, oh, this is we're up against these forces that can't be defeated. He started where he stood. He appealed to the people around him and it started this circle of change that, you know, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled because the right wing government of Stephen Harper tried to shut down this injection site and the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that people with addiction problems have a right to live and that includes a safe place to use their drugs. That will never be taken away now. Right. That started because one, you know, when you have nothing else, you have a voice, you have a human voice that you can use to persuade other people with love and compassion. You can tell them stories. You can build people's love and compassion in the middle of this catastrophe that we're seeing in this country with the addiction crisis. Right. I mean, more people died last year in the opioid crisis than all the soldiers who died in the Vietnam War combined. In the middle of this catastrophe, we can carry on doing what we've been doing. OK, we can carry on doing that. Then we will continue to get the horrific results we are now getting. We can continue to copy the places that have failed. Right. At the end of a hundred year long drug war that has cost a trillion dollars, we can even keep drugs out of our prisons where we have a wall perimeter and we pay people to walk around it the whole time. So good luck keeping them out of a 3000 mile border. Right. That will never happen. That is a ludicrous fantasy. You may as well take all the money that will be spent on trying to keep drugs out that way and burn it in a pile. Right. It is absurd. There's never been such a society. Or we can start to copy the places that have succeeded. Right. Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, Canada. There are plenty of places that have tried the alternatives and people who are quite sceptical. It's one of the things that was most striking to me in all those places is that people who were initially sceptical and initially thought it was crazy very often changed their minds. This is the consistent pattern. Before it happens, people think it's the work of a bunch of fucking wackos. They think, why people who want to, you know, get everyone to use drugs and get children to use drugs and think it's madness. And then they see that that's not at all what motivates people who want reform. And that's not. That's not what happens in practice when you when you adopt these policies. And it's not a magic bullet and they still have problems. But there's been such a significant improvement in all those places.