EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,033 words- 0:00 – 2:52
British-in-America culture shock: accents, Arizona heat, and everyday disorientation
- JRJoe Rogan
Here we go.
- JHJohann Hari
Bring it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Five, four, three, two-
- JHJohann Hari
(clears throat)
- JRJoe Rogan
... one. Hello, Johann.
- JHJohann Hari
Hey, Joe. It's great to be back with you.
- JRJoe Rogan
Good to see you, man. What's happening?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, good. I was just, we were just saying before we went on camera that I, uh, I made a note to myself that says, "Talk slow, talk American." Because, although I spent about half the year here, we British people, there's a reorientation where you suddenly realize. I was once in a, uh, an IHOP in Cactus, Arizona, and I was saying to the woman, right, like, "I'll have some pancakes," or whatever it was. And she kept looking at me going, (mimics accent) "What?"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
(mimics accent) "What?" And after about literally three minutes, she goes, (mimics accent) "Do you speak English?" I was like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ooh.
- JHJohann Hari
... "My people fucking invented it," right? But no one was there to laugh at my sad joke-
- JRJoe Rogan
But-
- JHJohann Hari
... because they didn't understand what the fuck I was saying.
- JRJoe Rogan
Arizona's a strange place. I really love Arizona. There's great parts, like Phoenix is amazing, Tucson's a great place too, but it's a Wild West sort of a state. It's one of those weird holdover states that have a lot of weird old school laws, like, like, uh, I think you can just walk around with a gun.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, you can. My main experience in Phoenix was, uh, in Arizona in fact, was going out with a group of women who were made to go out on a chain gang, wearing T-shirts saying, "I was a drug addict," while members of the public mock them and jeer at them, right? Because I was writing this book about, I wrote this book about the war on drugs, and I wanted to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that Joe Ar- Arpaio?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah. Sheriff Arpaio, no longer sheriff now thankfully. But, uh, yeah, and it was, yeah, Arizona's a deeply weird place.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's weird. Lot of really nice people, but it's 150,000 degrees.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah. Well, literally-
- JRJoe Rogan
You know?
- JHJohann Hari
... almost nobody lived there until air conditioning was invented, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
And you see, I once made a horrendous mistake in fact in Phoenix where I had to walk somewhere and I could see on the map it was like a mile away, so I was like, "Oh, I can just walk. It's fine."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
And I get like halfway there and people are literally stopping their cars going, "Are you okay?" Because the only reason anyone would ever walk in Phoenix was basically if your car had broken down.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
It didn't even occur to them I might have actually just chosen to walk, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, pro- plus you're so white.
- JHJohann Hari
I am literally the whitest person.
- 2:52 – 10:13
Why Americans ask “What’s your story?”: storytelling culture, self-narratives, and reality-TV politics
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's funny that we, how much we appreciate the English accent though. The English accent is like one of the best tools for selling things to very gullible Americans, whether it's like-
- JHJohann Hari
British people benefit from constant positive discrimination in the United States, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
It's like having a 10-inch dick just having a British accent.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
People will go, they'll be like, "Oh my God, you got an accent."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
And it's like, all humans have accents, I've just got, uh, you know, a slightly different one.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's a, a cherished one. We like, we really en-
- JHJohann Hari
It is.
- JRJoe Rogan
It, it makes you feel like you're more sophisticated, you're, you're more, uh, well-read, you're more aware of the world.
- JHJohann Hari
I mean, I just am sophisticated and well-read anyway.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, well, you're lucky.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs) But no, but you get this constant, um, yeah, constantly people ascribing to you much better qualities than you actually have.
- JRJoe Rogan
But why does it work in reverse, like in, in England? What is the reaction to American accents? Is it, it's mostly disgust, right? (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs) I don't know. There's a mixture. Americans, we grow... I always think like the relationship between Britain and America is like, um, one of those police mirrors, because we grow up constantly looking at the United States, right? We're constantly staring through. We are immersed in American culture.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
But when Americans look back at us, they're just seeing like a reflection of themselves. I mean, Americans watch Downton Abbey and know about like the Queen or whatever, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
... but there isn't that two-way dialogue that there is, that, that, you, that, you know, that... Yeah, so it's a slightly weird... So I think we feel very American, right? And I, I spent half the year here and I, you know, every now and then you come up against these deep cultural differences that you're just like, "Oh fuck, okay, right, this is really not my culture," right? And it's a, those moments of disorientation are, are really strange.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like give me one for an example.
- JHJohann Hari
Well, there's a question that Americans ask all the time that I have literally never heard a European ask, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
It's the question, "What's your story?" Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, interesting.
- JHJohann Hari
Every American, you can go to the most crusty right-wing person coming out of Mar-a-Lago or a kid in West Baltimore and you can say, "What's your story?" And they'll have an answer. The only context I can imagine a British person saying, "What's your story?" would be in a police interrogation.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- JHJohann Hari
It would be an extremely hostile question. "What's your story?" Right? It would be... You just wouldn't ever say it, right? We don't... Americans narrativize their lives in a way I absolutely love, and as a journalist who writes books about like depression and addiction and you want people to talk about their lives, it's an unbelievable gift to you, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
That people will tell you so... I remember once being on a bus in Mississippi and sitting next to a woman, and within five minutes of chatting to her, she told me about like her two miscarriages, how her mother hated her.
- 10:13 – 12:45
Hari’s return topic: updating 'Chasing the Scream' and reframing what we think we know about drugs
- JHJohann Hari
So we were gonna talk about, yeah, the, the, uh, I was very interested to talk to you because we talked last time about my book about depression, Lost Connections.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
And one of the things that was interesting to me is we talk about the book I wrote about addiction and, and the war on drugs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
And I really-
- JRJoe Rogan
Was that out last time you came?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was?
- JHJohann Hari
So that was a b- a book that came out a few years before.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
It's just come out in a new edition where there's loads of extra material, particularly about the opioid crisis. And it's interesting 'cause-
- JRJoe Rogan
So you added to it?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, loads of new stuff 'cause th- that book's about five years old now. And, um, although with loads of new stuff now, but, you know, it was something I cared about for this really like personal reason in that one of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not, not being able to. I didn't, I didn't understand why then, because I was a little boy, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family. And it got to the point where I was writing, uh, Chasing The Scream, my book about the drug war, about, well I guess I started it eight years ago. And some of the people I love were in a really shitty condition, terrible state. And I was trying to figure out what to do. Nothing I was doing was working. Nothing I was doing was helping. And I, I decided, right, okay, well there are lots of people all over the world who are trying to deal with this problem. I wanna go and meet with them, talk with them. So I ended up going on this big journey. It took three years. I traveled over 30,000 miles. I wanted to sit with, um, you know, people who'd been through addiction. It actually led to a lot of other aspects of the war on drugs, which I think are as important as the, what we do about addiction. Um, and I wanted to sit with like the places that had the harshest possible policies, like we mentioned Arizona where I went out with a, this, these women who were made to go out on chain gangs and are humiliated and, and, and tormented. Um, Vietnam where they make people with addiction problems go into literally forced labor camps. And the places that had the most compassionate possible policies like Portugal, where they decriminalized all drugs with incredible results. Switzerland, where they legalized heroin, incredible results. Um, and I guess I ended up just spending so much time with such a crazy mixture of people from a, you know, transgendered crack dealer in Brooklyn who ended up actually being one of the smartest people I know, to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, um, who's definitely not one of the smartest people I know.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
And, and, and I learned loads of things. But I guess the heart of what I learned is...... just so much of what we've been told about this for so long, it's now a hundred years since we started fighting the war on drugs in this country, and it was then imposed on the rest of the world. So much of what we're told is wrong. Drugs aren't what we think they are. Addiction isn't what we think it is. The war on drugs isn't what we think it is. And the alternatives to the war on drugs aren't what we think they are. So in some ways it's kind of dawning to r- go all over the world and realize, so much of what we take for granted isn't right, but that opens up this whole exciting other set of possibilities.
- 12:45 – 13:29
Most drug use isn’t addiction: the 90/10 split and what ‘problematic use’ really means
- JRJoe Rogan
The, the main reason why people assume that people do drugs is to escape reality. Um, what do you think is the, the primary thing that they're running from?
- JHJohann Hari
So you've got to separate out two things. And this surprised me, because my family's experience was pretty bad and catastrophic addiction. But most drug use, even the main drug war body in the world, the UN Office of Drug Control, admits that 90% of all currently banned drug use is what they call non-problematic. So the person isn't addicted and it doesn't damage their health. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
So 90%. So let's set that aside. We'll come back to that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- JHJohann Hari
There's that 90% that's recreational use, where people use because it makes their lives better.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
Then you've got the 10-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like coffee, sip of wine at work, or, uh, uh, with dinner, or-
- JHJohann Hari
Or, or, ecstasy, or a whole range of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 13:29 – 20:24
Rat Park and Vietnam: addiction as adaptation to environment (connection vs. isolation)
- JHJohann Hari
... a whole range of currently cannabis, a whole range of currently legal drugs. Um, in most cases, there are some people who have addictions to cannabis. Um, but you could... So that you've then got, got to ask, well, what's happening with this 10% who have got a problem, right? What's going on? And one of the things that really blew my mind in the research for Chasing the Scream was realizing I had deeply misunderstood what addiction is. I had misunderstood the thing I had thought I had been seeing in front of me since I was a kid, right? So most people, let's think about heroin addiction, because that was close to me. Most people, if we stop the next 20 people to walk past your, you know, your, your studio, and we said to them, "What causes heroin addiction?" I think they'd look at us like we were stupid and they'd say, "Well, the clue's in the name, dipshit," right? Heroin causes heroin addiction. We've been told this story for 100 years, it's become totally part of our, our common sense, right? We think if we took the, we took the next 20 people after that who walked past this studio and we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, at the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts for a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need, um, and we think that... A lot of people think that's what addiction is, right? It's this physical hunger for the chemical hook inside the drug, right? Um, there is some reality to chemical hooks. They exist, they're real, but that's actually m- m- a very small part of what's going on. The first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something wrong with that story we've been told, is when it was explained to me by loads of doctors in Britain, where I'm from. If you step out into the street and you get hit by a truck and you break your hip, you'll be taken to hospital and you'll be given l- loads of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin, right? It's the medical name for heroin. It's the stuff you'll be given in hospital is much better than the shit you buy on the street because it's medically pure, it's, you know, not contaminated. Um, if what we think about addiction is right, that it's just caused by exposure to the drug, what should be happening to all these people in British hospitals who have been given loads of heroin, right? Anyone watching this podcast who's got a British grandmother who's had a hip replacement operation, your grandmother's taking a shit ton of heroin, right? Um, if what we think is right, that addiction is caused primarily by exposure to the chemical hooks, loads of these people should be leaving hospital and trying to score on the streets, right? This has been studied very carefully. It virtually never happens, right? And when I learned that, it just seemed so weird to me. I thought it couldn't possibly be true, right? How could it be you've got someone in a hospital bed who's taking loads of really potent heroin, they don't become addicted, and in the alleyway outside, you've got someone who's using a, actually a weaker form of the drug who becomes addicted. How can, how can that be? What's happening here? And I only began to understand it when I, when I went to Vancouver and met this amazing man called Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment that's really transformed how we think about addiction all over the world. It's led to a new way of thinking and loads of new evidence. So Professor Alexander explained to me, this story that we've been told, right? That addiction is caused by the chemical hooks, primarily, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your viewers can try them at home if they're feeling a little bit shitty today, right? You take a rat. You put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. You might remember in the 1980s, there's a famous Partnership for Drug Free America ad that's- that shows this experiment, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And the rat i- in this cage starts to drink the... It pre- always prefers the heroin water and almost always kills itself within a week or two, right? So there you go. That's, that's our story. The... You're exposed to the drug, it takes you over, uh, and then you just die, right? But in the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and says he was working with people with addiction problems, and he's like, "Well, hang on a minute. We put these rats alone in an empty cage. They've got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats, right? What would happen if we did this differently?" So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends, they've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls. They can have loads of sex. Anything a rat finds meaningful in life is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and of course they try both. They don't know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the water very much. None of them ever use it compulsively.
- JRJoe Rogan
The heroin water.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, the heroin water. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. So you go from almost 100% compulsive use and death by overdose when their lives are shitty, to none when they have the things that make life meaningful. Now, there's loads of human examples I'm sure we'll, we'll, we'll talk about. But the, the main thing I took from this is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
We have to ask ourselves, what are the contexts in which people become addicted? Because there are some contexts where people find these drugs extremely addictive, and there are some contexts where they don't become addicted at-... at all. There's something... Th- the drug plays a role, chemical hooks are real. I can talk about how we know that. They play some role, but they're actually a surprisingly small role of what's going... a small amount of what's going on. We know this from... I mean, there's so many examples, but I'll give you, give you another one. In... At the same time as Rat Park, there was an experiment going on that everyone listening to this would have heard of, the Vietnam War, right? In Vietnam, shit loads of American troops were using heroin, right? It was very easy to get it out there. They'd actually... Insanely, they had cracked down on cannabis, and so people had moved to heroin because sniffer dogs can't detect, um, heroin as easily as cannabis. So, cannabis was everywhere. Oh, sorry, uh, heroin was everywhere. Loads of American troops were using it. And if you look at what people said at the time, the authorities, the Nixon White House, they were shitting themselves. Because they're like... They believe this chemical hooks theory of addiction. So they're like, "Fuck, when this war ends, we're gonna have, you know, half a million heroin addicts on the streets of the United States." There's a really good study that followed these, these men home, and it found that the vast majority of them just stopped, right? They didn't go into... They didn't go to rehab, most of them. They didn't go into horrific withdrawal. Some of them had an uncomfortable flu-like symptoms, but, um, most of them just stopped. Now, if you believe this old theory that chemical hooks take you over, that makes no sense. But if you understand what Professor Alexander is saying and that... all the new evidence about addiction that I go through in Chasing The Scream, it makes, it makes perfect sense, right? Y- you, me, everyone in this area, if I took any of us and put us in a horrific, pestilential jungle where we don't wanna be, and I made you kill a load of people and potentially die at any moment, you would find heroin much more appealing-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... than you do now, right? If we wanna understand why people turn to painkillers, we've gotta understand why they're in pain, right? Um, and- and- and the core of addiction, it's made me... I learned from these amazing experts all over the world, the- the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 20:24 – 23:54
From punishment to recovery: why shame-based drug policy worsens addiction
- JHJohann Hari
... to be. And once you understand that, you can see why what we've been doing is such a disaster, right? Because the theory we have with the war on drugs, think about Arizona, we can talk about that more. But I, you know, like I say, I went to this nightmare prison, Estrella Prison in- in Phoenix, Arizona, where people are humiliated. And the theory behind that, part of the theory behind the war on drugs is, if you've got people who are addicted, you've got to inflict pain on them to, you know, give them an incentive to stop, right? But once you understand that pain is in fact the fuel of addiction, it's in fact the primary cause of addiction, you can see why- Sometimes people say that doesn't work. Truth is, it's much worse, right? That makes addiction worse. Those women I went out with and spent all that time with who were, you know, humili- I remember in that prison, we'd come back from, uh, being on the chain gang where they have to... sometimes they have to dig graves. They weren't doing that the day I was there. They had to collect garbage the day I was... one of the days I was there, but... We come back, and normally with prisons, t- as a journalist, they don't wanna show you anything, right? You're- you're like... you have to kind of really finagle to get them to show you anything. In this prison, um, it- it's like a pantomime of cruelty. They wanna show it to you. The whole point is to humiliate these people, right? So the women I'd been talking to and the men were really terrified of what they called the hole, right? It's the solitary block. And so I said to the guards, "Will you show me the hole?" I was sure they'd say no. They're like, "Yeah, sure. Come on. We'll show you." So we go around to the- the hole, and these women who pa- for the most, like, trivial infractions, like having a cigarette, it's literally a hole, right? It's like a concrete block. You're on your own. There's nothing in it. There's a tiny window where you can see sunlight. No TV, nothing. Um, and I remember speaking to a woman who was in this and suddenly thinking, "This is the closest you could get to an exact human recreation of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats, right?" And this is what we're doing thinking it will stop these women being addicted. It's... Th- the system we've built up... Dr. Gabor Mate, um, an amazing guy, said to me, "You know, if negative consequences stopped addiction, there wouldn't be a single addict in the world," right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
What have people with addiction problems not suffered? What humiliation have they not endured? So we've got this... I think we've got to really shift our perspective on what addiction is. And there are places that have done this that have led to incredible results.
- JRJoe Rogan
The, uh... I love that rat experiment one, because that had always been parroted as, "This is the proof positive that the- these drugs are so terrible for you." But once they figured out that if you take those rats and put them in a wonderful place, and they don't have addiction, it really does make you step back and go, "Okay, what is exactly going on here?" Obviously, there's chemical hooks. They are real. Like people that are on sustained prolonged use of opiates, especially, uh, people with back injuries, have an incredibly difficult time kicking them. Even really positive people who don't necessarily have awful lives. But, um, uh, it's- it's one of those things that gets in your head, and then you sort of parrot it. You- you've- you've heard it, you repeat it. But, uh, it's the reason why I asked you the question. It's like, what- what is- what is the cause? For most people, you believe it's o- an unfulfilled life or, um, uh, a painful life, or a painful self-image, or, uh, r- remorse for your past? Or, like, what is it that... D- do we have, like, primary g- reasons or primary attributes that we attach to- to these people that are drug addicted?
- 23:54 – 28:28
Opioid crisis as 'deaths of despair': linking addiction, suicide, loneliness, and economic insecurity
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah. So this was what my more recent book, which is called Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and The Unexpected Solutions is- is about. Because I think the core of addiction is- is about trying to deal with pain.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
But the causes of human pain are obviously huge. But what I learned is, there's scientific evidence for nine causes of kind of deep despair, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, now if you think about depression and, uh, uh, very similar factors play out with addiction. They're actually densely interconnected, um, uh, phenomena. But, um...There are real biological factors, right? Your genes can make you more vulnerable to that. Just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others.
- NANarrator
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, and there are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed or addicted that can make it harder to get out, right? But, uh, most of the factors that are causing this despair are not factors in our biology. They're factors in the way we live. I think it's a kind of- this doesn't cover all of the causes that I- I learned about for Lost Connections, but it covers a lot of them. Everyone watching your show knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter,-
- NANarrator
Sleep.
- JHJohann Hari
... you need clean air. Exactly. If I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked really quickly, right? But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we've built is good at lots of things, and I'm really glad to be alive today for all sorts of reasons. I had to go to the dentist the other day. I'm glad to be alive now, not like 100 years ago. But there's a lot of evidence that we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. Just think about, you refer to the opioid crisis, for example. S- the- because I think even r- a lot of really good people are profoundly misunderstanding what's happening with the- the opioid crisis. Where is the opioid crisis happening, right? I've been to a lot of the epicenters of it, places like Monadnock in- in New Hampshire. Why is- why are things so disastrous there? Why is there much higher, uh, opioid, um, addiction in West Virginia than on the faculty of Harvard, right? People on the faculty of Harvard have much better access to opioids, right? Everyone there has good health insurance. They have much better access. What's going on? The- the- some amazing economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, did a massive study of this. And they said that we need to understand the opioid deaths mainly as what they call deaths of despair, right? It's not a coincidence that the places where opioid addiction is highest are also the places where suicide, not with opioids, is highest, where antidepressant prescriptions are highest. There's a whole- these things are clustering together for a reason, right? And you don't have to spend much time in those places to see people, through no fault of their own, have- are like the rats in that first cage, right? They have been deprived of the things that make life meaningful. This doesn't mean chemical hooks don't play some role. They do play a role. But I've been to the places that have solved this, and it wasn't by thinking primarily about that. So I'll just talk about the reality of chemical hooks, if that's all right, 'cause I think it's very important to understand in relation to opioids. So there's a very strong agreement among scientists that the most powerful chemical hook we know is nicotine, right? You smoke cigarettes, like my mother smoked 70 cigarettes a day, you smoke cigarettes. The thing you feel a physical craving for when you stop, which my mother would never do, is, um, is nicotine, right? That's the chemical hook. Um, and so in the late '80s, when nicotine patches were invented, there's this huge wave of optimism among scientists because they're like, "Oh, right. Cigarette smoking is an addiction to the chemical hook, nicotine. Now we can give people all the chemical hook they're addicted to without any of this shitty cancer-causing smoke. People are gonna stop smoking, right?" Um, so nicotine patches are introduced, and the US Surgeon General's report a couple of years later finds highly motivated people, um, using nicotine patches, um, 17% of them will stop smoking, right? Now it's important to say that is not nothing, right? That means if you meet the chemical hook for people who are addicted to cigarettes, 17% of them will stop entirely. That's a big deal, right? That saved a huge number of people's lives. But obviously, 17% is not 100%. That leaves 83% that got to be explained by the other things. And that's really the factors that I talk about in- in Lost Connections. So, I mean, there's a whole range of them. But, you know, if you are acutely lonely, we are the loneliest society there's ever been, right? You are much more likely to be vulnerable to despair, depression, addiction. If you are controlled and humiliated at work, which most people now are to some degree, you're much more vulnerable to these things. There's a whole range. I go through nine of these- these factors in the book, but to me the most important thing in thinking about the opioid crisis, and I'm- I find it really frustrating that this is never
- 28:28 – 40:33
Swiss heroin-assisted treatment: legalization as order, not chaos
- JHJohann Hari
discussed in the American debate, is I've been to the place that solved an opioid crisis, that had a disastrous opioid crisis and ended it, right? And they did something that's very different to what Americans are being urged to do. So I'm a Swiss citizen 'cause my dad's from there, so I know Switzerland well. And by the time you get to the year 2000, Switzerland is having like an opioid nightmare, right? Um, people can look up videos from the time, but, you know, people, like, Swiss people are obsessed with order. It's not a coincidence they invented clocks and all that shit, right? Like, in their public parks, people are like injecting in the neck, like-
- NANarrator
Whoa.
- JHJohann Hari
... nightmare scenes, right? That'd be bad anywhere. But to Swiss people, this is like their worst nightmare, right? And they try all sorts of things. They try the American way, arresting people, punishing people, shaming people, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. And then one day they get this- this incredible woman called Ruth Dreifuss, who I got to know later, who becomes the Minister of Health and then the president, the first ever female president of Switzerland. Um, and she explains to people, "I think the solution is to legalize heroin." And she said, "I know that sounds really shocking, because when you hear the word legalization, what you picture is anarchy and chaos." She said, "What we have now is anarchy and chaos, right? We have unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown drug users, all in the dark, all filled with violence, disease, and chaos." Legalization, she explained, is the way we restore order to this madness, right? So the way it works is, uh, I spent a lot of time in these places. Um, obviously, no, or maybe there's some really hardcore libertarians, but almost no one believes we should legalize heroin the way alcohol or cannabis are legal, right? No one thinks there should be a heroin aisle in CVS. That's not the plan, right? What they did in Switzerland is if you had a heroin problem, you were assigned to a clinic. I went and spent a lot of time in the one in Geneva. The former president, Ruth Dreifuss, lives opposite this clinic. I think that tells you something-Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, across the street?
- JHJohann Hari
... across the street. What, uh, what it, what it... Uh, so the way it works is-
- JRJoe Rogan
She should move.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs) Well, but if you see the clinic-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... I'll tell you why, right? So, the way it works is you have to go to the clinic at seven o'clock in the morning, 'cause Swiss people believe in doing things really fucking early. It's a constant disagreement between me and my dad. You turn up, you go in. They give you your heroin there. They give you medically pure heroin. You can't take it out with you. You gotta use it there, partly 'cause they don't want you to sell it on, but mainly 'cause they wanna monitor you to make sure, you know, you don't d- overdose. Um, you use it there, and then you leave to go to your job because you're given loads of support to get housing, work, and therapy to figure out why you can't bear to be present in your life, right? So, it's really important they give two things. So, bear in mind these two things, 'cause it's the opposite of what we're doing at the moment here. Give them the safest possible version of the drug, and give them massive amounts of help to deal with the reasons why they need that drug. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, when they're giving them the drug, are they injecting it in them?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, they... No, they... The individual injects himself or herself.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- JHJohann Hari
So, if you, if you were the patient, I'm the nurse. I give you the heroin and I give you a clean syringe. And one of the things that really surprised me, uh, at first I found really weird, is they will give you any dose of heroin that you want, apart from one that would kill you, and there is never any pressure to cut back. And yet, I went there when it was 13 years after this had first started, and there was almost nobody on the program, um, from the start. There were, like, three people who'd been there the whole time. Almost everyone does cut back and stop over time. And I remember saying to, uh, Rita Mangi, who's the chief psychiatrist there, "Well, well, how can that be? 'Cause we're told the chemical hooks take you over, you need more and more. If you had an unlimited supply, you would just carry on forever. What... How c- how c- how do you explain this?" And she looked at me like I was dumb, and she said, "Well, we help them and their lives get better. And as your life gets better, you don't wanna be anesthetized so much." Which, once that's explained to you, is so obvious, right? But... And it's worth just explaining the results of the Swiss program. In the fif- it's 15 years now. In the 15 years since this began, according to the best scientific evidence, people like Professor Ambrose Uchtenhagen have shown there have been zero deaths, overdose deaths, on legal heroin. Not one person. There's been a massive fall in overdose deaths outside the legal program 'cause people transfer in. 'Cause why would you carry on using expensive, shitty street drugs when you could be getting, you know, help and given the drug for free? Um, and what is fascinating about this is Swiss people are really conservative, right? My Swiss relatives make Donald Trump look like Oprah. And yet, Swiss people, after this had been in practice for, uh, five years, had a referendum on whether to get rid of it, and 70% of Swiss people voted to keep heroin legal. Not 'cause they're so compassionate, to be honest. That's not... They're not. (laughs) They're really not. Uh, it was 'cause crime fell so much, right? It's much cheaper to give some-
- JRJoe Rogan
How much did the crime fall?
- JHJohann Hari
I've got the statistics in the book. It's a few years since I wrote it. But there was, I think, something like a 50% fall in street, street crime. Street prostitution literally ended, right? There was no street prostitution after that. Turns out women, you know, don't wanna be on the street being fucked by random strangers (laughs) for, for money-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... if they've got, like, an alternative. Who knew? But the, um... So, there was an enormous fall in crime across the board, and the police confirm that. Everyone agrees with that in Switzerland. And all the kind of anarchy in the streets just, just stopped, right? But, but what... The reason I think this is really relevant to the opioid crisis is what we're doing is the exact opposite, right? So, they give them the safe version of the drug, give them help to figure out why, practical support to change their environment, to get out of that isolated cage and more, into a life that's more like Rat Park. What do we do? If your doctor in this country finds out that you are using, say, Percocet or Oxy, not because you've got back pain, but because you've got an addiction, your doctor, by law, has to cut you off, right? If they don't, they can be busted as a dealer. It's happened to lots of doctors. Um, so they have to cut you off. So, instead of giving you the drug, we stop you getting the drug. Most people then, or not most, a very large number then transfer to much more dangerous street drugs, like heroin. Secondly, far from giving you help to turn your life around, we give you a criminal record. We shame you. We stigmatize you. We put barriers between you and reconnecting. The opposite of addiction is connection, but what do we do? We put barriers between people and reconnecting. This is why... That's one part of it, right? So, there's the drug policy part of it, uh, where we're doing exactly the opposite of the country that succeeded in ending its opioid epidemic. But there's something I think that's even deeper than that, which you really see in places like West Virginia, Monadnock, the kinda hearts of the, the opioid crisis, which is we're also creating a society that is becoming harder and harder for people to be present in, especially in those, in those places. Th- there's an analogy I keep thinking of. In the, in the 18th century in Britain, loads of people were driven out of the countryside into these disgusting urban slums in, like, London and Manchester. And, and something happened that, that, that has been well-documented. There was something called the gin craze, right? Where basically shitloads of people just became alcoholics, drank gin until they died, right? There's a famous painting from the time called Gin Lane of a mother downing, like, a bottle of vodka while a baby, like, falls out the window, right? And things like that really were happening. If you look at what people said at the time, very similar to what they're saying now. They said, "Look at this evil drug, gin. Look what it's fucking done to us. If only we could get rid of this evil drug, gin, this problem would go away," right? We know now when we look back at the gin craze, it can't have been gin that caused it because anyone in Britain who's over the age of 18 can go and buy gin, right? And while we still have some alcoholics, to be sure, we don't have mass epidemics of alcoholism. We don't have babies falling out of windows. What changed wasn't the amount of availabi- it wasn't the availability of the drug. The drug is more available now than it was then. What changed was the amount of pain and distress in the society, right? We don't have a society where people are as profoundly disorientated. I mean, it's going up because we're creating more disorientation. So, we... If you create a society where people's basic psychological needs are not met, right? Where they have a shrinking number of friends and social connections, where they're taught that life is about money and buying shit and displaying it on Instagram-... excuse me, where they spend most of their time at jobs they find unfulfilling, controlling, and humiliating. You're gonna create growing pools of people who can't... And you... By the way, make them feel constantly insecure, financially insecure. Half of all Americans haven't... Through no fault of their own, haven't been able to set aside $500 for if an emergency comes along. So you create this pervasive insecurity in the society. You're gonna create very large numbers of people wh- who are gonna wanna, and, and feel a need to anesthetize themselves. Now, that's not a good solution, obviously. (laughs) I don't think heroin, opioids, these are not good solutions to these problems. But, but it's not a crazy solution either. There's a line I think of all the time, I, I s- I som- I don't quote it very often 'cause people can really react against this insight, but I think it's actually important. You know Marianne Faithfull, the great, like, '60s British singer? She went out with Mick Jagger, annoyingly, that's why people remember. She's much better than Mick Jagger. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
Sh- in her memoir, she, she had a heroin addiction in the '60s. She was homeless for a while. She has this very challenging line that I think about a lot. I'm gonna phrase it slightly wrong, but she said, um, "Heroin saved my life 'cause if it wasn't for heroin, I would've killed myself at that point." Right? Now, Marianne Faithfull is not saying heroin was a good solution to her homelessness, but we've got to understand, this drug use is happening because it performs a function, right? One of the most important things I learned for both my books, for Chasing The Scream and Lost Connection, is that these forms of despair, depression, anxiety, addiction, they are meaningful signals, right? They are telling us something. The fact that they have been rising year after year after year, the fact we're now at the point where average white male life expectancy has fallen in this country for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States, that is a signal that is telling us something.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that's because of drug addiction and, and overdose?
- JHJohann Hari
Overwhelmingly 'cause of drug addiction and suicide. It's re- it's risen to that point. Uh, there are other factors going on, like obesity, but that... The main drivers are, um, o- uh, overdose and suicide. Um, that is telling us something. And what we've been doing up to now is we've been insulting that signal. We've either been saying depressed people, addicted people are just weak, or we've been saying, "Oh, it's just a problem in their brain." Th- there are real things going on in their brains, of course. Um, or we've been saying, you know, "It's just craziness." Um, but in fact, it is largely a response to the way we're living. Of course, there are other things going on as well, and we can talk about them. And once you understand that, you realize there's got to be a deeper response. And I went to places that had done that, not just Switzerland.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, Switzerland, uh, what is the overall population?
- JHJohann Hari
Five and a half million.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it's a-
- JHJohann Hari
It's a small country.
- JRJoe Rogan
... fairly small country.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, how much money do they have to spend to, uh, keep this program going? And what are the... What is the time constraints in terms of, like, how long is, uh, a person who's got an addiction problem allowed to stay there and, and receive treatment?
- JHJohann Hari
There's no t- time constraint. You can stay on for your entire life if you want to. In practice, that doesn't happen very often.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do they stay in the facility?
- 40:33 – 53:13
Portugal’s decriminalization + reintegration: redirecting money from punishment to rebuilding lives
- JHJohann Hari
Which is why Swiss people are very pragmatic. They're not, you know, the most compassionate people, but they are very pragmatic people. That's why it was so popular in Switzerland. But let's think about another place that adopted really different drug policies, right? Um, 'cause I think there's something we can learn from there as well. So Portugal, around the time Switzerland is having its horrific heroin crisis, Portugal is having a fucking nightmare, right? By the year 2000, 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, which is incredible, right? And every year, they were... Like Switzerland, they were trying the American way, shame, punishment, stigma, and things just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And then one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they're like, "We can't go on like this. What are we gonna... What are we gonna do?" And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the drug war began in this country 70 years before. They said, "Should we, like, ask some scientists what the best thing to do would be?" So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know in Portugal called Dr. Joao Gulao, a totally extraordinary person. Um, a- and he'd run the first ever drug treatment center in, in Portugal, founded after the dictatorship. And they said to them, "You guys just go away. Look at all the evidence and figure out what the hell we can do." So they go away for two years. They, they learn about Rat Park, they learn loads of things, and they come back and they say, "Okay. Solution is we wanna decriminalize all drugs, from cannabis to crack. But..." And this is the crucial next step. "Take all the money we currently spend on fucking people up, arresting them, shaming them, imprisoning them, and spend all that money instead on turning their lives around." And interestingly, it's not really what we think of as drug treatment here in the United States, right? So they do some residential rehab. That has some value. Main thing they did was a big program of job creation for people with addiction problems. Say you used to be a mechanic. They go to a garage and they say, "If you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages." Again, much cheaper than sending him to prison, right? Uh, they set up a big program of small loans so people with addiction problems could set up and run businesses, the things that they thought were important. At the time, people are like, "This is crazy. They're just gonna spend it all on drugs, lunacy," right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, by the time I went to Portugal, it was, again, uh, 13 years since this had begun and the results were in. Addiction was down by 50%.... o- and this is by, figures from the British Journal of Criminology, the best scientific study of this. Um, overdose deaths were massively down. HIV was massively down. Every single indicator on problems related to drug use had fallen like a cliff, right? It wasn't perfect. They've still got problems, of course, but there was a massive improvement. And one of the reasons, you know, it worked so well is that virtually no one in Portugal wants to go back. I went and interviewed a- a great guy called Joao Figueredo, who at the time of the decriminalization, was the top drug cop in the whole country. And he said what I'm sure loads of your listeners are thinking, right, at the time, which was like, "If we decriminalize all drugs, we're gonna have an explosion in drug use. We're gonna have loads of kids using drugs. It's gonna be a nightmare. We can't do this." And when I went to see him, uh, the audio is on the Chasing the Scream website, he said, uh, something like, "Everything I said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other side said would happen did." And he talks about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalization screwing people's lives up when he could have been helping them turn their lives around.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And, and this is something that I saw all over the world, right? The places that have drug policies based on shame and stigma and the fantasy that you can get rid of drug use, which you can never do, um, they have mass- really terrible and rising problems. The places that have policies based on, "Okay, let's restore order to the market and let's give lo- liberty to drug users and love and compassion and practical help for people with addiction problems," have declining drug problems, right? Again, not perfect, but it was such a significant improvement that support in Portugal... I mean, they've got five main political parties. None of them want to go back, right? That tells you something.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Yeah. Now, when they did this in Switzerland, what was the primary cause for this drug addiction and how did they deal with that? So if they dealt with it in Portugal with these loans and, and, and, and helping out businesses by paying for half the salary and all those things, like, that seemed like wonderful ideas. What did they do in Switzerland to sort of mitigate what are the issues, whatever the issues were that were causing people to be drug addicts in the first place?
- JHJohann Hari
So it's a combination. They gave people lots of therapy. So I remember one of the people I spent some time with in that clinic had been, um, terribly sexually abused. And there's a lot of evidence that giving survivors of sexual abuse safe places in which they can release their shame about that leads to a big fall in depression, addiction, and other problems. There's a lot of evidence that, that kind of abuse is, is, is a big driver of a lot of addiction for a lot of people, though clearly not everyone. Um, some of it was just there were people who had never been given a chance in life or had never had stable lives. Uh, it was kind of a mixture of things. And, and one of the things that's really good about the Swiss system is it wasn't saying, in this kind of cookie cutter way that often h- happens in drug treatment in the United States, although there's plenty of good examples as well... You know, you don't arrive and they say, "This is your problem. We're here to tell you your problem and how to solve your problem." It's very much guided by actually the person themselves, right? People who are in deep pain, the, the, the core of it is you have to listen to them, right? If we think about this addiction, depression in the way that I'm arguing, that we should see them as signals that are telling us something, most important thing is to listen to the signal, right? I remember, it was something I thought about a lot, I had this weird experience that I kept thinking about all the time I was writing my book, Lost Connections, about depression. And it's only quite light in, late in the day that I realized why I kept thinking about it so much. I was in Vietnam about, uh, five years ago now, maybe a little bit less, um, and I did this really stupid thing. I was, uh, I was in Hanoi, and I was really tired. I was doing research for a different book that I haven't finished yet. And, uh, by the side of the road, I saw this big red apple, woman selling it. And I'm shit at haggling, so I paid like $5 for this apple or something like that, and I took it back to my hotel. I was so tired, I lay on the bed, and I start eating it and it was just gross, right? It was something really... It's chemical taste. It was like how I imagined, uh, food would taste after a nuclear war when I used to watch those films in the '80s, right? Um, but I was so tired. Even though I knew it was wrong, I ate like half of it and threw it in the garbage. And next, like, four days, I was just, like, violently sick, right? Like, just in a... Like something from The Exorcist. (laughs) And so I'm lying there in front of CNN and occasionally projectile vomiting. And it gets to, like, 4:00... But I'd had food poisoning before. I basically lived on fried chicken in my 20s, so I was not new to this rodeo. And a- after about four days, I, I said to Hoang, my, uh, fixer and translator, who was arranging... I was there to interview survivors of the war, the Vietnam War, for something. Uh, I'm like, "Look, I'm only here for another three days," or whatever it was. "I've got to go meet these people. Otherwise, this whole trip would have been a waste of time." So he drives me, like, six or seven hours into the countryside. And we get there, and he's lined up these people for me to interview, and I'm like, "Oh, thank God. Oh, I don't feel so bad, actually." I was sitting in his hut with this, this woman, who's an 86-year-old woman who was the only person from her village that survived the Vietnam War. So I'm talking to her, and as she's speaking, the, the room starts to... I've never had this feeling before. I've had a feeling when you're drunk when you feel the room's moving, but it literally felt like the room was moving around me, like, like I didn't feel like I was disorientated. And then while she's talking, I just, like, explode all over her hut-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no!
- JHJohann Hari
... this poor woman, right? From both ends, like fucking horror show, right? And so I say to Hoang, "Just, just take me back, put me in the car, take me back to Hanoi," right? And he's, this old woman's, like, saying something to him, and I'm just, like, lying there. And he says, um, "She says you've got to go to the hospital, you're really sick." And I'm like, "No, no, I just need to go back to the hotel." And he said, "Johan, this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War in this village. I'm gonna listen to her health advice over yours. We're going to the hospital." So we go to this hospital where I'm pretty sure I was the only European who'd ever been treated. They take me in and Hoang's like completely lying, going like, "This is an important Westerner. It will disgrace Vietnam if he dies here," right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no.
- JHJohann Hari
And so I'm lying there, and they're like j- jabbing me with everything. And I'm like, "What's going on?" And they're asking me lots of questions, and I, I felt the most nauseous I've ever felt, right? And I kept saying to them, "Give me something for the nausea," through Hoang 'cause they didn't speak any English. And the doctor said to me-... you need your nausea. It will tell us what's wrong with you, right? And I was even lying there and thinking, "Oh, that's kind of interesting." I also remember lying there and thinking ... but they figured out it was the apple. And I remember having... (laughs) I remember having such a ridiculous thought where I thought, "Okay, I'm about to die, right? I've been killed by an apple. I'm like Eve or like Snow White or like Alan Turing." And then I was like, "You're about to die and your last thought is that you're basically a pretentious cunt," right? Like, (laughs) I was, like, horrified by myself. Anyway, the- they gave me all this treatment and a few days later when I leave, I'm talking to the doctor and I- I- uh, I was discussing various things with him. And I said to him, "What would have happened if I'd, um, if I had gone back to Hanoi, if you'd driven me back to Hanoi?" And he said, "Oh. Well, what happened is my kidneys had stopped working 'cause I hadn't kept any water in for four days, so it was like I had been in the desert for four days." And the doctor said, "Oh, you would have died on the journey. You wouldn't have made it." And it ... So I kept thinking about this experience, which weirdly didn't actually affect my, like, world view or anything. It's the closest I've ever had to a near-death experience. But all through researching my book about depression, Lost Connections, I kept thinking about this thing, right? You need your nausea. It will tell us what's wrong with you. And I realized, all the time I had been depressed, if I think about my relatives and people I love who'd had addiction problems, I had seen their... my depression, their addiction as a bit like that nausea, right? As, like, a kind of malfunction, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Something that you should get rid of. And actually, what we need to do is hear it, right? 'Cause it will tell us what's wrong with us, right? It doesn't mean it's a good feeling. It's awful, right? Depression is the worst thing I've ever felt. Uh, addiction is a terrible state to be in. It's not saying, just in some kind of, you know, way, "Oh, we need you to put up with it." It's that if we hear the signal, we can begin to find solutions. And all the places I went, the places that have solved depression crises that I went to for Lost Connections, places that have solved addiction crises that I went- that I went to for Chasing the Scream are places that have said, "Actually, this means something," right? "Your pain makes sense. You feel these ways for reasons, and we need to get down into these- these deeper reasons," which is really not what we've done in the United States since the drug war began, you know, uh, a century ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
So did they figure out in Switzerland what was causing this rash of addiction? And i- just by treating, it seems like if there is some underlying condition that's causing this depression, that's leading people to drug addiction, that just giving them free heroin is not gonna fix the root cause. So how-
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... h- how did they find out what the root cause was?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah, th-
- JRJoe Rogan
And why it was such an epidemic.
- JHJohann Hari
You're totally right, that ... So the her- the heroin is- does two things. So partly, as you become addicted, you spiral in- uh, uh, for people who don't have huge private resources. Some people do, right? As you become addicted, what happens to a lot of people is you spiral into chaotic street use, right? So for a lot of women, that means sex work. For a lot of men, that means property crime, right? Well, some men sex work as well, but mostly not. Um, and so what happens is actually you- you become, you know, you develop an addiction t- 'cause you're dealing with this pain, but then you actually move into a much more chaotic way of living, right? Which- which causes deeper pain and deeper pain. Obviously, if you're being fucked by strangers every day and you d- or treating you badly, you're gonna wanna be even more anesthetized after that, right? Or if you're frightened of the police all the time. So what happens is, uh, partly what happened in Switzerland was giving people the legal heroin ended the chaos of street use, which in itself was making addiction worse. Now, that's clearly not the cause 'cause you don't start out as a street user. So it was partly that, and I think it was partly attending to people's deeper distress. And it's not like there's one cookie cutter thing that was- that was the answer. It was listening to different people at different stages and- and- and looking at they'd had some problems with unemployment, but you don't want to overstate that. They'd had some problems with child abuse. You don't want to overstate that. It was more like a kind of menu of things, a more sophisticated menu of things that ... But- but- but the thing that they definitely showed in the Swiss model and in Portugal and in lots of other places I went to is compassionate treatment reduces addiction, right? And treatment understood in the broadest sense because it reduces the pain the individual is in. Anything that reduces the shame, stigma, and humiliation will, over time, reduce addiction for most people. Not everyone. Some people are in such internal agony, they will always need anesthetics. And this, I think, is a really important point, and one that can be quite challenging to some people, including people like me who have people they love with addiction problems. So where I open
- 53:13 – 1:09:10
The drug war’s origins and enforcement logic: Harry Anslinger, racism, and the Billie Holiday persecution
- JHJohann Hari
Chasing the Scream is with this story that I think a lot of people, um, think, "Why the fuck is a book about the war on drugs starting like this?" And I think it tells you so much. Um, so in 1939, in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, walked on stage and she sang for the first time a song that I'm sure all your listeners and viewers have heard. It's a song called Strange Fruit, right? It's a song against lynching. It's the idea that, uh, in the South, the bodies of African American men hang from the trees and they're like a kind of strange fruit in the South, right? This is unbelievably challenging at that time. There are very few popular songs like that, um, and-and to have an African American woman doing it was quite shocking, right? She wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door of that hotel. They made her go through the service elevator 'cause she was African American. And that night, Billie Holiday gets a warning from a man called Harry Anslinger, from the agents of a man called Harry Anslinger, that basically says, "Stop singing this song," right? And you think, "Well, wait, what's this got to do with the war on drugs?" So Harry Anslinger is a man, uh, he was a government bureaucrat. I think the most influential person no one's ever heard of. He's affected the lives of loads of people listening to your show. So Harry Anslinger is a government bureaucrat who takes over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. So you've had this big war on alcohol. It's been a shit show, it's been a disaster, and he takes it over, and he wants to keep his government department going. And he invents the modern war on drugs. He's the first person to ever use the phrase "war on drugs." And- and he really builds this war on drugs around two intense hatreds he has, and Billie Holiday is the personification of both.One was a- a- a really intense hatred of African Americans. I mean, he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s, which gives you a sense of how racist he was. He used the N-word so often in official memos, his own senator said he should have to resign. That's how hardcore he was, right? And he also had an intense hatred of people with addiction problems. And Billie Holiday, you know, she'd grown up on the streets of Baltimore, a part of Baltimore called Pigtown. She- sh- when she was 10, she was horrific, she was raped. Uh, the man who raped her was sent to prison for a year and a half. She was sent to, uh, reformatory for longer than he got, right? She- she was tormented by the nuns there. They- they said she was disobedient, she brought it on herself. They used to lock her in with dead bodies overnight to teach her a lesson. She eventually ran away. She tried to find her mother. Her mother had gone to what's now called, uh, well, Roosevelt Island now, it wasn't called that then, where she was working as a- a- a prostitute. And Billie Holiday starts kind of "working," in inverted commas, next to her mother in this brothel from when she's like 14. So she's being raped by men for money night after night after night. She's, you know... And when they... the police res- rescue, break into the brothel, they arrest her, right, and send her to prison. Um, so Billie Holiday is trying to numb the grief and pain that comes from that, right? So she starts out using loads of alcohol, and then she's using loads of other stuff as well, mostly heroin. And when she gets this warning from Harry Anslinger saying, "Stop singing this song," Billie Holiday's attitude is, "Fuck you, I'm an American citizen. I'll sing what I fucking please," right? And at that point, Harry Anslinger resolves to destroy her. Th- the first man he sent to- to track her is a man called... follow her around, is a guy called Jimmy Fletcher. Harry Anslinger hated employing, uh, white people, uh, sorry, hated employing African Americans, but you couldn't really send a white person into Harlem to follow Billie Holiday everywhere, be kind of obvious. So he employed this African American guy called Jimmy Fletcher, who's ca-... his job title was a bag man. So he was given the job to follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes, befriend her, document her drug use, right? He dances with her in nightclubs. He gets to know her really well. And Billie Holiday was so amazing that Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her. And his whole life, he felt really ashamed of what he did. He busts her. Uh, they... when they come in to search her, she- she- she, uh, makes him... she pisses in front of him and says, "You can look in my pussy. You can see I don't have anything here." Um, she's put on trial. Uh, the trial was called The United States versus Billie Holiday, and she said, "That's how it fucking felt." She's sent to prison for 18 months. She doesn't sing a word in prison. But what happened to her next, I think, is the- the cruelest thing. She gets out of prison, um, and at that time, to sing anywhere where they served alcohol, you needed what was called a cabaret performer's license. Um, Anslinger makes sure she doesn't get it. So one of her friends, Yolanda Bovan, who's also a great jazz singer, said to me, "What's the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing they love," right? They take away singing from Billie Holiday. It's what we do to people with addiction problems all over the United States, right? We- we give them criminal records that make it much harder to do the things that are meaningful to them, find work, for example. Um, so in that situation, obviously, Billie Holiday relapses, right? She starts using a shit ton of heroin again. Uh, one day in the early '50s, she- she collapses, uh, not far from where she'd first sung Strange Fruit. Um, the first hospital won't even take her 'cause they're... 'cause she's got an addiction problem. They said, "We're not having her." Second hospital takes her, but she says to her friend, Maylie Dufty, on the way in that Anslinger's men weren't done with her, they were gonna come for her. She said, "They're gonna kill me in there. Don't let them, they're gonna kill me." She wasn't wrong. So in the hospital, she's diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, um, probably related to her severe alcoholism. Um, and in the hospital, she, um, she goes into heroin withdrawal. So Maylie, her friend, manages to insist that she's given methadone and she starts to recover a bit 'cause heroin withdrawal is quite dangerous when you're weak, right? Like, when you're old or you've... Um, Anslinger's men come, they arrest her on her hospital bed. They handcuff her to the hospital bed. I interviewed the last person who was still alive who'd been in that room, a- a man called U- Reverend Eugene Calendar, who'd been a religious minister. Um, they handcuff her to a hospital bed. They don't let her friends in to see her. They don't let her even have candies. Outside, Reverend Calendar led protests with signs saying, "Let Lady Day live." They were big protests. They knew they were killing her, right? Um, then after 10 days, they cut off the methadone and she died the next day. Her friend... one of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life, right? There's loads of things about this story, which is being made into a movie, um, Lee Daniels is directing it, um, uh... There's so many things about this story that tell us what this war on drugs is about, right? Firstly, it's about, um, i- in... it- its effect, it's about shaming addicts and its effect is it makes addicts worse, right? We see that with Billie Holiday, see that everywhere. Secondly, it's been insanely racist from the start, right? At the same time that Harry Anslinger found out Billie Holiday had a heroin addiction, he found out Judy Garland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, had a heroin addiction. It ma- changes how you watch The Wizard of Oz when you know that. Um, and he went to the studio and he advised, uh, he- he said to Judy Garland and to the studio, she should take longer vacations, right? Spot the difference. With a white woman, Judy Garland, longer vacations. With Billie Holiday, fucking destroy her, right? Uh, in fact, one of the agents he sent to destroy her, a man called George White, who... this guy tracked her in the last days of her life. We now know, I mean, he's a, literally a psychopath. He was a- a- a hugely obese guy. He was a strange guy. He infiltrated a Chinese drug gang when he wasn't Chinese, the only person to ever do that. But he, um, he boasted in his diary about murdering people, about spiking women and raping them. I mean, these were really deranged people that were... that founded the- the- the drug war. But the reason I say it in relation to what we were just talking about is because in this culture, we tell only one heroic story about people with addiction problems, and that's that they sometimes recover from their addiction. That is indeed a heroic story.Everyone watching this who's been- who's d- managed to do that is a hero and I massively love and congratulate them. But that is not the only heroic story we should tell about people with addiction problems. Billie Holiday never stopped using drugs. She was still a fucking hero. She- any- she never let these people stop her singing that song. She would go to the places where you didn't have a license, she'd go to the worst parts of the Deep South. She sang Strange Fruit, she- they- people threw bottles at her, they stubbed out cigarettes on her. She never stopped singing that song, right? And I think about Billie Holiday a lot and I think about, you know, all over the world, every day, people listen to Billie Holiday and they feel stronger. And all over the world, every day, we are still following the policies of Harry Anslinger and it makes us weaker. And th- this conflict that begins right at the start of the drug ... And I think, if I'm honest, I think ... this isn't an easy thing to say but I think one of the reasons why the debate about the drug war is so charged is 'cause it runs through the hearts of all of us, right? Anyone who's got someone they love who's got an addiction problem, as I do, there's a Harry Anslinger in your head. Right? There's a bit of you that looks at them and thinks, "Someone should just fucking stop you. Why are you doing this? Someone should stop you doing this." And then, for most people, there's another part that's like, "Okay, that anger isn't useful in most cases. Um, actually, what- you're doing this for a reason, we need to understand those reasons, we need to help you to change your life," right? But that conflict is- is- is very deep in us and Harry Anslinger, the war he invented, and we can talk about what he did with cannabis and loads of other things, but 'cause he invented the ban on cannabis, that- that war is- is still playing out. Does that make sense?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
I know that was a long answer but-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
... sorry! (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
No, it does make sense and it's a horrific story about Billie Holiday and I had no idea that, um, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was also addicted.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, did you-
- JHJohann Hari
And the Munchkins, a lot of them as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, eh, now, Harry wha- eh, wha- wh- why was Harry Anslinger's hate towards her so extreme?
- JHJohann Hari
So when he was a kid, the book is called Chasing the Scream, 'cause when he was a kid, he grew up in a place called Altoona in Pennsylvania and he- he lives in a farmhouse, his dad was actually a refugee from Sw- well, refugee in inverted commas, immigrant from Switzerland, um, and they grew up in this farmhouse and in the next farmhouse down there was a- a, um, a farmer's wife who had an, uh, heroin addiction. Or meth- sorry, morphine addiction, would have been heroin then. And Harry Anslinger had this really haunting memory of going to that house and hearing this woman scream and scream and him being sent to take the horse and cart, I think he was 11 or something<|a|><|agent|><|en|>He had this very keen sense-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
That civilization was incredibly fragile, it could collapse at any moment, that you only need a little bit of contamination and it would all go to shit, um, and- and- and so he ... Yeah, I call it Chasing the Scream 'cause I think in a way what Harry Anslinger's doing is like chasing this scream all over the world and I felt like what I was doing going to all these different places from the killing fields in Mexico to Portugal and Switzerland was like following this scream as it kind of ricocheted around and actually how he made- he thinks he's stopping these screams, he's actually creating far more screams in their- in their- in their place.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but I still don't understand why he had this intense-
- JHJohann Hari
With Billie Holiday?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
So, well, she's an African American woman standing up to white supremacy who has an addiction problem but the truth is what he did to Billie Holiday is not part- it- it's not ... This is what he did to African Americans and to people with addiction problems. Billie Holiday just happens to be famous so I'm telling her story but this is what he did to huge numbers of people, right? He wanted to destroy the whole jazz scene. The- one of the amazing things spending time in his, um, archives in Penn State was seeing all these memos from, uh, his agents. So he said to them, "Go to your local jazz club, document the evil things that are happening there." And the things they wrote back are kind of hilarious, right? There's one (laughs) agent who I forget where it was but he- he wrote back and was like, um, there was a popular jazz song at the time called, uh, That Ocean Man and had a lyric that said, "When he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean," and he's like, "There is going to be an epidemic of drowning across the United States-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
"... as people use cannabis because they're gonna believe they can walk on water." So he would- yeah, he was like, I mean literally they're hilarious he said, uh, you know, he believed that when you smoke cannabis time slows down so a minute seems to last a thousand years. Like these extraordinarily heightened crazy things that he would- he would say and he actually latched ... So at that time when he first takes over what becomes the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, you know, cocaine and heroin just aren't very popular, right? There's just not much of a war to fight. I mean they exist but they're not that popular, they're quite r- they're confined to small urban scenes. Cannabis was more popular, not as popular as it is now but ... And- and he had previously said cannabis isn't harmful, not bothered about it. Suddenly when he cottons on that this is the way to big- build up his department, he announces that cannabis is l- uh, the phrase he used was, "The most evil drug in the world." He said, "When Frankenstein's monster bumps into a spliff on the staircase, Frankenstein's monster dies of fright." Like all these extraordinarily heightened claims, um, and- and- and he- and he- so he starts trying to get support for a ban on cannabis and he latches onto one case in particular. It's important 'cause I think we're hearing these aga- these things again now. Um, so a kid in Tampa, Florida called Victor Licata, he was, well not so much a kid, 21, killed his entire family with an ax, butchered them all. And with the help of the Fox News of its time, Hearst- Hearst Newspapers, uh, h- e- Anslinger announces, "This is what will happen if you use cannabis. Literally you will kill your family with an ax," right? A- and this becomes a hu- very famous story across the United States and cannabis is banned in its wake. Years later someone goes and checks the psychiatric files for Victor Licata-... wasn't even any evidence he'd ever used cannabis, right? His, he'd had terrible problems with psychosis. His family had been advised more than a year before that he should be institutionalized, and they refused. They kept him at home, and this tragedy ensued. We're hearing these, these scare stories again about, about cannabis. There's something that Anslinger said that I think could be like the motto for the entire drug war. In the wake of the se- so Anslinger introduces this ban in the US. He promises drugs will disappear, right? You will have noticed drugs did not disappear. He starts to say, "Well, that's just 'cause evil foreign countries like Mexico are flooding our country with drugs." You'll notice that's come back as well. Um, "So what we need to do is force all these other countries to ban them as well, and then they'll disappear." So the US, in the wake of the second World War, really has the power to do that. World is in ruins. Um, and there's one pa- when he goes to the new United Nations and he's insisting this happens and they're basically threatening people, they're saying, "We'll cut off your foreign aid, or you won't be allowed to sell goods to the US market if you don't do this." The, the, the ambassador from Thailand is like, "Well, you know, it doesn't seem to have worked very well in your country. We've actually got a long pattern of established drug use in, in Thailand. We don't really have many problems. We don't wanna do this." And Anslinger said to her, said to him, "I've made up my mind. Don't try to confuse me with the facts." And I always feel like that's the drug war, right?
Episode duration: 2:59:18
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