 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Johan Hari, former columnist for the Independent of London and author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Scream, the first and last days of the War on Drugs. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Johan. I'm really excited to be with you guys. Thank you. Now, we have a War on Drugs that's throughout the world to a different extent, to a greater or less extent, which is sort of a secondary product of prohibition. And a lot of people don't even know about the history of prohibition, how these drugs even came to be illegal in the first place. So as a sort of general question, and you can choose any specific drug or as a general concept, how did drug prohibition begin in the first place? You know, there were so many things when I started researching my book that I had no idea about. You know, I had this quite personal motivation to look into it. We had drug addiction in my family, one of my earliest memories as I'm trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And that's really why I started doing the research that led me to kind of go to 12 different countries and travel 30,000 miles and just sit with loads of different people whose lives have been changed, either by the War on Drugs or the alternatives to the War on Drugs. So I met a kind of mad mixture of people from a crack dealer in Brooklyn to a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel to the people who led their country to become the first one to decriminalize all drugs. And I discovered that just so many of the things that we take for granted are just wrong, so many things. So if you'd said to me at the start, why were drugs banned 100 years ago? I would have guessed. They're the reasons that if you stopped a random American in the street today and you said why are drugs banned, they'd probably say, well, we don't want people to become addicted. We don't want kids to use drugs. What's fascinating if you go back and look at why all happens is that stuff barely came up. That's not why drugs were banned. It's not even mentioned in most of the debates. The reasons why drugs were banned is because as the people would have put it at the time, they believed that blacks and Chinese people were forgetting their place using drugs and attacking white people. Actually open the book with a place that might seem a bit weird to open a history book about the war on drugs. But I open with this, this I think a really significant moment in the war on drugs in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in midtown Manhattan and she sang the song Strange Fruit, which I'm guessing most people listening to this know it's the song against the very subversive, very subversive song. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what her goddaughter Lorraine Feather said to me. She's got to understand how subversive that was to have an African American woman standing in front of a white audience in a hotel where she wasn't even allowed to walk through the front door. She had to go through the service elevator and sing a song, indictment of American white supremacy is kind of, you know, incredibly brave. And that night, Billie Holiday gets a warning from the man who launched the man who the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and basically the man who invented the modern war on drugs, a man called Harry Anslinger. And it basically said, look, stop singing this song. And Billie Holiday said, effectively screw you and our American citizen. I'll do what I want. And at that point, he decides to begin really destroying her. And I tell the story of the book of how he stalked and played a role in her in her death. I can tell you about it if you like. But I think that tells you so much about what the war on drugs was about right from the start. Well, how explicit was this? Because a lot of the time we're talking about this crushing racism that motivated a lot of American law making in the early parts of 20th century, it's kind of under the table or hidden. It's, you know, the real goal is to prevent Chinese laundries from operating. But what we're going to instead do is say it's to ban certain ways that laundries might operate that are dangerous, that really just happened to align with the Chinese, is where they explicitly saying like as discussing these laws or as writing these laws or writing about them, we need to do this because blacks and other minorities are forgetting their place. Or was that the subtext? The subtext and they had a more perhaps lofty sounding reason that they expressed. The thing that absolutely amazed me is that it's not subtext at all. Typical official statement was the cocaine N word sure is hard to kill. You know, Harry Enslinger used the N word so often in his own official memos that his own senator in the 1920s said he should have to resign. I mean, this is not subtext. This is text to a really startling degree when you actually go into the archives and look at it. And it's worth explaining, I think, a bit about the role that Brace played in terms of Enslinger himself. So I think Harry Enslinger is the most influential person who no one's ever heard of. He's he takes over the Department of Prohibition in the late 1920s, just as alcohol prohibition is ending. So he inherits this big government bureaucracy with nothing to do that's actually just been discredited. It's incredibly corrupt. Obviously, he lost the war on alcohol massively. And he realizes that alcohol prohibition is going to end fairly soon. And he effectively builds the modern war on drugs. I'm sure he did genuinely believe in these things, but he wanted to keep his government department going. And he really builds. He's the first person to use the phrase warfare against drugs long before Nixon. And he really builds it around these two obsessive hatreds that he has. One is a hatred of addicts based on some stuff happened to him as a kid. And one was a really intense hatred of African Americans. As I say, he is regarded as a mad racist in the 1920s. And this is regarded as a racist enterprise at the time, which is quite surprising, actually. Now, you can kind of go through the different drugs and say heroin Chinese people. I mean, that's for example, because I think you have a line in the book, if I'm remembering correctly, that the common user of heroin and say 1905 was a housewife drinking a tincture. Well, not heroin was a brand name for bear, but a tincture of opium of some sort that make you feel better with a little bit of opium in it. But then when the Chinese get associated with it, the entire narrative changes. When it can be racialized, the move to ban it is a project of racializing it. So again, you're totally right. The opiates are regarded as this thing that's been brought by the Chinese. Cocaine is regarded as African American cannabis or marijuana is regarded as something that's been brought up by Hispanics from Latinos from Mexico. Cannabis is an interesting example because Anselinger had actually said on the record officially that he did not regard because, bear in mind, when he takes over the Department of Prohibition, cannabis is still legal in the United States. And he was on the record saying it's not a harmful drug, not bothered by it. And when he then begins to build his war against drugs, cocaine and heroin were really minority tastes in the US at that time. You can't really build much of a government bureaucracy around cocaine and heroin because it's a tiny trade. And that's when he suddenly announces that cannabis is, in fact, worse than heroin, worse than any drug that it invariably causes psychosis. And he picks up on this particular case. It's very interesting. There's a boy in Florida called Victor Licata, who was 21, hacked his family to death with an axe. And along with the Hearst newspapers, who were the kind of Fox News of the day, he creates this huge hysteria, which this is what will happen if you smoke weed. And and in light of this panic, cannabis is back. Years later, someone went back and looked at the files for the psychiatric files for Victor Licata. There's not even any evidence he used cannabis. He his parents had actually been told to institutionalise them several years before, but they wanted to keep him at home. There was insanity in his family. The whole thing was a kind of bogus hysteria. But of course, it worked in the sense that Ansler then has this huge department because, of course, cannabis is it was even then much more widespread than than heroin and cocaine. But you're right. It's not a coincidence that Victor Licata is Latino. Well, there's an interesting parallel, which I did not see in your book. And I was one like absinthe in Europe was actually prohibited for a another axe murder in the 1905. I think that's called a Lafay murders a guy in Switzerland murdered a bunch of his family in a similar thing. And the story became that he was on absinthe and therefore lost his mind. And so then the prohibition of absinthe is a uniquely dangerous alcohol with warm water, whatever swept across Europe. And this seems to another be a constant theme is that we say that some drug is just really going to take over your autonomy and turn you into a raving psychopath. We had this with bath salts in the United States recently. And that that's why we need to prohibit it. But there's always this racial overtone to it also. Yeah, this belief skips from drug to drug. As it becomes discredited with one drug, it skips to the next. So enough people know enough people have used cannabis that, you know, you can't credibly say that about cannabis anymore. So the idea skips to cocaine. Now enough people know enough people have used cocaine that, you know, well, it doesn't really suck. So it skips from drug to drug. It's a misunderstanding of both drugs and mental illness to think that, you know, one drug invariably makes people insane and so on. It's a misunderstanding of how those things work. You're right. It skips around. Does this mean, though, that they aren't dangerous? I mean, so when I was a kid, I remember the one that was super scary was PCP. Super rare. Like it was the one that made you insane and they had to shoot you in the kneecaps to get you to stop. So is it was something like PCP? Is that just totally made up? Or is there is there any truth to this stuff is actually can make you not so dangerous? The two things that this is the most surprised me in my research, as I mentioned. The one of the reasons why I cared about the subjects and why I spent so much time learning about it is because we had addiction in my family and my family's experience with drugs was catastrophic. And it's very tempting to generalize from your own experience. And I kind of assumed a very, very large portion of people who use drugs like heroin develop really serious problems or drugs like meth. And I think the two things that most surprised me in the research are firstly, what a small proportion of drug users are harmed by the drug. It's definitely not zero. And it's really important to say that. And secondly, what really causes addiction? And that really kind of blew my mind, actually. So to start with the first point. And so we all know this with alcohol, right? You go into a bar in DC tonight and you're going to know that there are people there you look around you and you know that most of the people in that bar, the vast majority, 90 percent, if it's a typical bar, will be, you know, drinking alcohol because it makes their life better. They're having a good night. They're relaxing and so on. And there will there may be some small minority who have an alcohol problem in which case they need our love and support. We all know that. What was really striking to me and actually learn this from data that was given to me by Professor Karl Hart, which frankly, I didn't believe. When he first gave it to me and I really had to look at it in a lot of detail. Actually, that ratio seems to be true for virtually all drugs. Ninety percent of people who use meth don't become addicted to meth. Ninety percent of people who use crack don't become addicted to crack. Now it can cause other health problems and other things. I'm not saying those drugs are a good thing. What people should use them. But the thing that obvious question that begs is, well, hang on, what's going on with the 10 percent where something does go wrong? And to me, that was the most fascinating bit. So if you had said to me, you know, five years ago, when I started this research, what causes, say, heroin addiction to choose the one that, you know, happened to be closest to me, I would have looked at you like you were in here. And I would have said, well, the clue's in the name, right? Use heroin. Yes. So it's a stupid question, right? And, you know, we've been told this story for 100 years has become part of our common sense. It was definitely part of my common sense, which is, you know, we think if you kidnap the next 20 people who walk past, you know, the Kato Institute offices, right? And you made them all use heroin together for a month. At the end, they've described our intern program. Don't don't let that out there. Well, your poor interns forced to use smack at the end of, say, a month of how long the relationship lasts. They would all be heroin addicts, right? And we think we know that for a simple reason that we think we know why that would be that there are chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to physically need. And so at the end of that month, they'd had this ravenous, craving for heroin. The first thing that alerted me to the fact there's something not right about that story is when it was explained to me in Canada or most of Europe. So say I'm in London at the moment about to come back to the US. If I step out of the end of this interview and I get hit by a truck and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of a drug called diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's just the medical name for heroin. Actually, they give me much better heroin than I could ever get from a drug dealer because it'd be medically pure. It'd be a hundred percent heroin whereas what a dealer sells you is very little bit is actually heroin. All over Europe and all over Canada, the whole time people are being given heroin in hospital. If you have a European grandmother and she's ever had a hip replacement operation, she's taken a lot of heroin. So they're supposed to all the same chemical hooks as any addict you're going to see on the street, right? If what we think about addiction is right, that it's caused by the chemical hooks, what should happen to all these people in hospital? Some of them should become heroinites. This has been studied very carefully. It virtually never happens. And when I learned that, it seemed so weird and so contrary to everything I've been told, again, I didn't really believe it. And I only really began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and met this incredible man called Professor Bruce Alexander who's done this experiment that has opened up a whole world of science and experiments on humans, the experiments looking at humans that I think really should change how we think about addiction. So Professor Alexander explained to me this theory of addiction that we all have in our heads about chemical hooks comes partly from a series of experiments that that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments that Cato and Tchik could stage them and put them on YouTube. Anyone listening to this can try at home tonight if they feel a bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself. Do you guys remember the famous? We had a thing called DARE in school. I think Aaron had that, right? Drug abuse resistance education, which pretty much has told us all these sort of, these are the worst things ever. You'll be addicted immediately, which I believed until recently. So the rat's experiment, I remember watching that in a film strip in sixth grade, I believe. Yeah, and you can see it on YouTube and it kind of shows you that experiment. But in the 70s, so actually by the time you were shown that this had already been proven, but in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, hang on a minute. You put this rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing to do except use the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called RAT Park, which had loads of cheese, loads of colored balls, loads of tunnels, the rat had loads of friends, they could have loads of sex. Anything a rat wants in life is there in RAT Park, right? And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water, and they of course try both because they don't know what's in them. But this is the fascinating thing. In RAT Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. So you go from almost 100% overdose when the environment is shitty and they're isolated to no overdose when they have a good and valuable life. There's loads of human examples I can talk about about that. But to me, what that tells you is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. So this is fascinating because I think that the big takeaway that I got from your book, and we've gone into it in different ways here, is that the primary driver of the drug war has been people's perceptions of what a drug user is like, either of race or class, and then their perceptions of what a drug does. And in pretty much every instance of this, when you're asking the question of why is something prohibited when something else is allowed? Why is alcohol allowed but marijuana prohibited? And if you have a government that doesn't have libertarian principles, meaning it thinks that it can in principle ban anything, then what actually decides whether or not something is prohibited or whether it's allowed is sort of whether the people in power take that drug, use it or know people who use it or have some sort of accurate depiction of what heroin use is like or what alcohol use is like or what marijuana use is like. And the single biggest thing that happened with marijuana is that people, as you mentioned, started knowing people who took marijuana and they started knowing people who did cocaine. And so that changed the perception of the drug user, but the big drivers is the perception of the drug user and the perception of the drug. That's interesting. I think there's some truth in that. I don't think it's the main reason or rather, I think it may be, it's a crucial factor in how the war is sold. But I don't think, because actually it's very interesting if you look at, it's the best way to explain this. I don't think you need to challenge how people think about drug users to change how they think about the drug war necessarily. And I think Switzerland is an interesting, there's a few places that interesting examples of this because I actually think the worst harms caused by the drug war are totally different to what we've been talking about. I think obviously I care massively about what we've been talking about. I actually think the biggest harm is a whole other thing. And it's by far the most devastating effect of the war on drugs, even more than the massive and unnecessary death of addicts and the terrible addiction crisis and even more than the mass imprisonment, it's the violence caused by prohibition itself, which is destroying whole countries. So, and causing catastrophic violence in the city that you're in at the moment in Anacostia and the east of the river and across the United States. And I think it's worth explaining this to people. I mean, I learned about it mainly from a, as I said, a transgender crack dealer in Brooklyn and a hit man from the Mexican drug cartel. And actually from a guy who does amazing research for Cato, Professor Jeffrey Myron at Harvard who's an associate fellow of yours who's done absolutely amazing work on this. And I think everyone at Cato should be incredibly proud of him. Best way to explain it is, again, do a little experiment, right? Your listeners can do this. While you're listening to this podcast, go and try to steal a bottle of vodka. And if the liquor store catches you, they'll call the police and the police will come and take you away. So that liquor store doesn't need to be violent. It doesn't need to be intimidating because they've got the power of the law to uphold their property rights. Now do a different experiment. Go and try to steal a bag of weed or a bag of Coke, assuming you're not in Colorado or Washington or Oregon. If that guy who sells that catches you, obviously he can't bring the police, right? The police would come and arrest him. He has to fight you. In fact, he has to establish a reputation for being such a badass that no one would be so stupid that's to try to steal from him. And he has to establish his place in that neighborhood through violence and intimidation. There's a writer who said that the war on drugs creates a war for drugs. Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calculated there are 10,000 additional murders every year in the United States as a result of that dynamic. I reported, for chasing the screamer, report on from Northern Mexico, and as I said, just came back from Colombia, from Ciudad Juarez, where it's worth remembering, more people had died in the drug war violence in Mexico and Colombia than have died in the civil war in Syria. And there may not be that much we can do about the war in Syria. We should talk about it. But we could end this violence. And if you want to know how we could end it, just ask yourself, where are the violent alcohol dealers today? Does the head of Heineken go and shoot the head of cause in the face? You know, does your local liquor store send the teenagers who work there to go and kill the people at another liquor store? Of course not. That's exactly what happened under alcohol prohibition. Everyone listening to this knows who Al Capone is. Everyone listening to it knows who Pablo Escobar is. I bet none of you know the name of the head of Heineken or Smirnoff. And I bet you don't care, because it's a legal regulated business that doesn't create violence. Okay, but so that's one narrative. And it's a very, it's a common one. And it's one that we at Cato talk about a lot. But when it gets made, there's a counter narrative that gets made by especially more conservative people that says, look, the world has violent people in it. It has people who will shoot each other in the face over nothing. And sometimes that's cultural. Sometimes that's just part of who they are that it can get certain communities seem to have more of it than others. And that's the drive of the violence. And the drugs is just what they're latching onto. So they latched onto alcohol prohibition and there was a lot of violence around that. And if you get rid of that, then they're gonna latch on to drugs because that's something they can be violent around. But if you get rid of drugs, it's just gonna be something else. And so the violence is not being caused by the prohibition. It's just that the prohibition is where the violence moves to because that's the most convenient spot. Yeah, and we can measure this. So there's a simple way of answering that, which is to look at a graph that Jeffrey Myron, your associate Harvard professor shows. It's a graph of the murder rate in the United States in the 20th century. It massively spikes up when alcohol is banned and it collapses when alcohol prohibition ends. And it massively spikes up again in the 70s when drug prohibition is intensified under Nixon. And I wanna say that it's important to stress that's not the only reason why it spikes up in the 70s, but it's a contributory factor. There's basically two ways to think about this, isn't there? There's the quantity theory of crime, I think of it this way, which is that certain inherent proportion of people are just criminals. And then there's the incentive theory of crime, which is, well, there's plenty of people who wouldn't normally commit a crime, but if you offered them a fair incentive to do it, they'd consider it. And I think everyone listening to this knows that the incentive theory of crime is obviously true, right? I would not go and, I don't know, push over in our woman. If you offered me a billion dollars to do it, I would think about it. I'd like to think I'd still say no. You know, I hope I'd still say no, but there are lots of people listening to this will know that there are crimes they would not just commit of their own volition, but if you offered them loads of money to do it, they would probably do it. If we had someone like Bill Bennett come in, a former drug, very big hearty drug warrior, and say, so he wouldn't disagree with you that the drug war causes violence because people do violent things for things that are legal, but that doesn't actually answer the question of whether or not drugs should be legal because that question is about whether drugs are the kind of things that people should be doing or that the government should all be okay with people doing in the sense that the kind of thing that you end up being if you're a drug taker is an unacceptable thing that the government has a responsibility of standing in between you and those substances. And if there is illegality that results or violence that results from around this, that's just a product of the government of people having base motives to try and get things that they shouldn't be getting and the government needs to sort of stand in the way and make sure that that doesn't happen if it's the best we can able to do. Yeah, I think you're right and that does bolster your case that you have to change how people think about drug users and I do think there's a case for doing that but I guess there's a few things you could say in response to that. Firstly, there's a question of scale. Let's grant, I don't agree with it, but let's grant the idea that it would be a desirable thing to prevent people from choosing to use drugs if they want to, right? Would it be worth losing 10,000 Americans every year to do that? Would it be worth losing more than 100,000 Mexicans to do that? Once you factor in the violence and it's worth remembering, there's a quote that I think every American tax payer should know, I think it's a scandal. Michelle Leonhardt, who was the head of the DEA until relatively recently, was asked by Senate subcommittee what she thought about the fact that 60,000 innocent Mexicans had died in the drug war violence. Actually, it was a much higher, that figure they put her was wrong, it's been more destined that but that's what they put her in. And she said, these were her exact words, it's a sign of success in the war on drugs. I mean, that ordinary Americans are so much better than that. That's really, if I think about the people that I got to know in Northern Mexico, who had lost people in the most unbelievably terrible ways, beheading and butchery. And, as I said, I got to know a hit man who had in fact between the ages of 13 and 17, butchered or beheaded about 70 people. He had, she was an American kid, had grown up in Laredo. Obviously on the border with Mexico. So I think once you factor in these, now I do agree that I think, so even if you grant this demonized view about drug use, I still think the violence would, ending that violence would outweigh this demonized drug use. But I agree also the demonized drug use is the demonized idea of drug use is wrong. And I think the other way to challenge that is to talk about what legalization has meant in the places that have tried it. Because it's interesting because it's not, the first thing to say is that legalization means different things for different drugs. In the same way that I'm pretty sure that in DC, you could own a dog, a monkey and a lion if you really wanted to. But I'm also sure the rules would be different, right? You've got to, I'm sure you can just go and buy a dog for a monkey, I guess you might need a license. And it's definitely a lion. You couldn't just, A zoos can own lions, I guess. But yes, the different people probably can own those in different ways. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a fairly sensible, even pretty hardcore libertarians would agree having a lion in your yard is not a good, not a good idea, right? And that there should be a system that's fairly regulated, right? The, you can do the same thing with different drugs. So I've been to places where different drugs have been legalized, that means different things. So obviously Colorado, three US states have now legalized marijuana like alcohol. So you've got to be over 21, you know, there's a certain amount you can buy every day. It's taxed, it's a regulated product. Switzerland has legalized heroin for addicts. And it works very differently. Obviously, you don't go into the Swiss equivalent of CVS and just buy heroin, right? The way it works is if you're a heroin addict, you're assigned to a clinic, you go to that clinic, you're given your heroin there, you have to use it there in front of a doctor or a nurse and then you leave. And what's fascinating is you leave to go to your job because they give you help to get a job and so on. What's fascinating about that is, do you know how many people have died of overdoses on legal heroin in Switzerland? Probably zero. Zero, nobody, not a single person. Now there's lots of reasons I know that will be jarring to some people listening to this, the fact that that's an indisputable fact. It's one of the reasons why Switzerland, which is a super conservative country, voted by 70% to keep heroin legal after they'd seen it in practice because you saw such a big falling crime and you saw addicts just being turned around. But yeah, so it's important to explain to people that legalization doesn't mean what they think it does. And you know, so I think it is much, it's about, I take your point about changing the attitude towards drug users. There's an interesting debate about this. If you look at Washington and Colorado, the campaigns to legalize marijuana, both successful. And I'm from Colorado actually, and Erin has lived there for a long time too, so. Did you guys vote in the referendum? No, I was living there at the time. I was in Colorado in actually Pueblo, which was one of the towns that legalized it for sale at the beginning. I was there the day that it went legal and drove by and have pictures of remarkably long lines lined up outside of the dispensaries. It was an event. Well, that's had a real ripple effect across the world, amazing ripple effect. You know, everywhere I went, people would talk about what happened there. And now it's a non-issue. That's the interesting thing too, is I mean, a lot of people in Colorado were already smoking marijuana if they wanted to because of medical and other sources, but it's become mundane. It's just like, all my friends, yeah, I mean, you just go to the store and buy it. It's not this crazy thing anymore because they've made it kind of boring. I think that's a really important fact. This is one of the things I saw everywhere when they moved beyond drugs from Portugal where they decriminalized all drugs to Switzerland where they'd legalized heroin. It's massively controversial when you first do it. And then the effect quite rapidly is, oh, is that it? You know, and people see significant improvements over time, there's nowhere that's done this that hasn't seen a significant increase in support after they've seen it in practice, which I think tells you something, but there was a really interesting debate between the Colorado and Washington campaigns, not debate between them, but a difference of approach. So I got to know and interview the people who led both sides, the Colorado and Washington campaigns. What's interesting is in Colorado, guys like Mason Tavert who led the campaign, who I really admire, he led a campaign that was very much about trying to change how people thought about the drug itself, which was saying cannabis isn't what you think it is. It's less harmful than alcohol. Actually, if people transferred from alcohol to cannabis, that's a good thing. In Washington, people like Tonya Winchester, who I hugely admire as well, who led the campaign there took a totally different approach. When she talked to people, so the way Tonya would explain it is, only 15% of people in Washington smoke cannabis. If what you're trying to do is run a pro cannabis campaign, you're not gonna win. What she did is she said to people, when she was out canvassing, I'm not asking if you like cannabis, I don't like cannabis, I don't wanna smoke it. The question is not, do you like cannabis? The question is, do you think people's lives should be ruined for smoking cannabis? Do you think we should empower criminal gangs? Do you think we should continue with a situation where drugs are controlled by people who don't check ID and sell as happily to a 13 year old as a 30 year old? So she needs a different approach. One of the interesting things is they both won. So in a way, I guess both arguments are effective. My personal instinct is more to be towards Tonya's approach, but I could be wrong. I think they're both true. Well, one of my favorite stories you tell in the book, which is related to the conversation we're having right now is going back to the history of the drug war and two brothers named Harry Smith Williams and Edward Williams who were involved in the beginning days of the drug war and were involved with Harry Anslinger. One of the books written by Harry Smith Williams was this book called Drug Addicts Are Human Beings, which is a striking title and one thing that we might forget quite often and he seemed to realize in 1938, I think when the book was written. Yeah, I thought that was such a kind of crazy heartbreaking story. One of the reasons why, exactly speaking to that point, one of the reasons why my book is written largely is the stories of people I got to know or people I learned about. It's because I think this sounds a bit wanky and I don't put it as pretentiously as this in the book, but I basically think the drug war is a war that only continues because we've dehumanized all the people involved. We've dehumanized drug users, we've dehumanized drug addicts, we've dehumanized drug dealers, we've dehumanized the people who live on the supply route countries, we've dehumanized the cops who fight this war. And actually, I think if you really want to end it, one of the reasons I wrote it is stories of the people I got to know because I kind of thought the average American or British person or pretty much anyone, if they met Chino Hardin, the transgender crack dealer that I got to know who's one of the most wise and amazing people I've ever met, if they got to know Bud Osborne, the homeless street addict who started an uprising in Vancouver, if they got to know Lee Maddox, the cop in Baltimore who turned against the drug war, they wouldn't say, fuck these people, I don't care, let them die. They would not say that they met, they got to know Maricela Escobedo, the woman who was looking for her missing daughter in Ciudad Juarez in the middle of the drug war, whose story I'll tell. They would not say, let them die, I don't care. The job here is to rehumanize those people. And the story you mentioned of Henry Smith Williams, I think is kind of heartbreaking. So he was a doctor, back when drugs were legal before there's this crackdown. And he treated some opiate addicts and they were a bit like kind of low level alcoholics today. So they had jobs, they had a problem. They would go to the local pharmacy and they would get there. It was called Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup. It was kind of mild opiate. And they were addicted to it and it debilitated their lives. And then drugs are banned. And suddenly he sees this huge transformation where these patients who previously had controlled but debilitating addictions, suddenly, the first thing that happens is the price massively goes up by like, I think it's a thousand percent for opiates. The second thing that happens is milder forms of the drug are no longer available. I can explain why I think that's really important in a minute. And lots of these addicts who've been able to hold down jobs and everything, they just lives fall apart. A lot of the women become prostitutes. A lot of the men tend to property crime. You see a huge increase in property crime and you see a huge increase in deaths from drugs. Partly because the drugs are contaminated because they're much harder drugs than they were before. And he's like having previously not been very sympathetic to addicts. I mean, he was really, he didn't like them at all. He kind of used almost eugenical language about addicts. Yeah, exactly. We'd be better off if they'd never been born, that kind of thing he said. Suddenly, he's confronted with seeing all these people die and almost the logic of what he'd said before drugs were banned. And he just couldn't stomach it. And so he begins to speak out. He's part of a wave of doctors who insist on prescribing heroin to their patients, giving heroin legally to patients because there was deliberately a loophole written into the law when drugs are banned by the senators, which basically said, this is meant to apply to recreational drug use, but doctors can basically do what they want. So Henry Smith Williams was one of thousands of doctors across the United States who said, well, look, we're just going to carry on prescribing. And because they didn't want their patients to die going to criminals. And what happened to him next, I think, is almost unbelievable that his brother is arrested, his brother was a prescribing doctor. It's the biggest roundup of doctors in American history. 17,000 doctors are busted that basically accused of being drug dealers. Is this Harry Antlinger again? Yeah, Antlinger leads that. Antlinger, just before he starts stalking Billie Holiday and then plays a role in her death, he obsessively destroys these doctors. You know, it's a mass breaking of doctors. There's a big rebellion in the U.S. The mayor of Los Angeles goes and stands in front of a heroin prescribing clinic and basically says, you will not shut down this clinic. This does a good job for the people of the United States. There's actually a crazy story about why. And it's closed down. That loophole is shut down state by state. And California, where Henry Smith Williams was, is the state that holds out longest. And it's really interesting why, I found this extraordinary, why California does shut it down. It turns out the local Chinese drug gangs were really pissed off because in Nevada, the heroin prescription had been shut down. So if you were a drug addict, you had to go to the drug gangs. But in California, of course, they could go to Henry Smith Williams and other doctors. The drug gangs weren't getting much business. So the local Chinese drug gangs bribed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to introduce the drug war in California, to stop doctors prescribing and fully criminalize heroin. Wait, wait, wait. They bribed the federal, this is insane. Wait, they bribed the agents themselves or the top level people? It's called Chris Hansen. He was the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In California, there's a big court case. I got the documents from it. And they bribed him to ban heroin, to fully ban heroin because they got the trade, right? And it was then revealed a few years later and there was a court case and Chris Hansen was sent to prison. But by then, the ban was in place, right? Now, that's not the main reason why heroin was banned across the US. I wanna stress that. But it does tell you something about who won from the drug war. Who had been the only winners from this war all along? Organized crime, armed criminal gangs. So the solution to this, at least in part, is this humanizing of the people involved and the telling their stories. So we can do that in part through your book and books like yours that present those stories to us. But we're aware the best way to humanize people is to actually experience them face to face and get to know them and have repeat interactions with them. And so you're a journalist and so it's, I mean, not only do you have the skills to track these kinds of people down and know how one goes about sitting down with a drug cartel hitman and a Mexican drug runner and dealers and vice cops and so on. But it's your job to do it. The rest of us don't have either the time or the skill set to do it. So how do you, and we're so separated from these people. It's not like getting to know a, Muslims in your community when you're a Christian where you can just go over to the mosque or whatever. It's harder than that. So how do we go about humanizing these people who are either part of the criminal element or actively excluded or in profoundly different socioeconomic strata than we are? Yeah. The solution is not for everyone to reach out and meet their local Zeta hitman. I had a slightly weird experience when I went to Rosalia Areta who's the hitman for the Zetas that I interviewed. When I went to interview him he's in prison in Tyler County in Texas. And there's a slightly weird experience of the way in when the guards, I can't do a text and accent. I apologize, the guard on the way in says, you know, like, well, obviously we can't leave you on your own with him. He's butchered or beheaded about 70 people. And I was like, oh, thank you. And so they might go to the room with him. And then I turned around a few minutes later and they were just gone. I was just like, oh, thanks very much. Anyway, fortunately I was not beheaded. But he's actually kind of quite weak and feeble when you meet him. But no, that's not the solution. It's worth remembering, you know, almost the vast majority of people who were part of the anti-slavery movement in Britain and the North of the United States have never met a slave. So I don't think you have to personally meet people in order to, I think it helps if you know, you know, you can debunk, certainly with addiction. Everyone listening to this podcast knows someone who's got an addiction problem. And you have seen a really significant change in how we think about addicts in a really short period of time. If you think about, this is the most low-brow reference I'll ever give, but if you watch something like Cagney and Lacey or those 80s cop shows, quite often in those shows, there are characters who are addicts, who are the evil addict, right? Who come in and they're like, you know, a monster, a ravening monster and they're the villain of the show and the fact that they're an addict makes them the villain. That would not happen now. You would not get an episode of CSI where the addict was evil, right? People just, the culture has shifted in such a way that people would really bulk at that. And that's been a humanizing process, I think a bit like the gay rights revolution where people talk about their addictions and people come out if you like. And there has been this slow humanizing process which has already begun. So now, even now, you don't have, the drug war does massively persecute addicts, but no one defends it in those terms anymore. Very, very few people. There's actually this move to kind of, and I'm a bit worried about it actually. Cato, you guys might wanna do some research on this. I think there's a kind of defensive rebranding of the drug war. So look at Chris Christie, for example. Chris Christie got a lot of praise for giving a speech in which he says, you know, we need to stop punishing addicts. He talks about his mother having been a smoker and she was never able to give up. And he talks about New Jersey as a model. If you look at what's happening in New Jersey, if you give you an example, they've got a prison that obviously contained a lot of people who were there because they had drug problems, that they converted into a so-called treatment center. Now, I haven't looked into that, but I strongly suspect it's punitive and shame-based treatment, which is the norm in the United States and is an absolute scandal. But also, you know, yeah, it's slightly better if you're an addict to go into something called a rehab center, which is an actual form of prison, which is gonna tell you that it's because of your moral flaws and shame you. That is a little bit better, but it's still nothing like what they did in Portugal where they actually halved the heroin problem. For example, I can talk about it if you want. I'm worried that because they know they can't hold the line for defending prohibition, they're gonna kind of rebrand prohibition and call it treatment when it's actually not very different to prohibition. And it's still gonna be the court mandates you to go to the treatment, so-called treatment. The treatment is still gonna be judgment and shame-based. It's gonna be in an actual fucking prison, right? It's not, you know, it's not that different. So I think it's worth us being really vigilant to that. People announcing they've ended the drug war when actually they're just continuing it by different means. There's one fact, there's so many facts in your book that are jaw-dropping in a variety of different ways. And there's one that I wanted to kind of go back a little bit about, because we've been talking about some of the exporting of the U.S. war on drugs, but to bring Harry Anselinger back into this, who is the Lex Luthor of the drug war? I mean, I rarely, after reading this, I've rarely encountered anyone who's as much of a supervillain as this guy. But the how he got, and this is the story I would like you to tell, we'll highlight this, how he got Mexico to fight our drug war. Before I tell you that, can I tell you my favorite quote from Harry Anselinger? Oh, please. At one point he was being challenged by a representative in another country at the, well, it was the League of Nations then. And actually, no, it would have been the United Nations by then. And a representative in another country is talking about how they don't want to do what he's saying. And he said, this is exact words, I've made up my mind, don't try to confuse me with the facts. And to me, that's, that's like the perfect motto for the entire war on drugs, isn't it? But no, Anselinger, so when they banned drugs in the United States, unsurprisingly, drugs do not disappear. But Anselinger had told people that drugs would disappear, so you needed like a person to blame. And he picks on the, see resonances with politics today, obviously. He announces it's the Mexicans that they're flooding the country with drugs. And so therefore you have to export the drug war. It's a bit like Trotsky's idea about revolution. You can't just have a revolution in one place, it has to happen everywhere, and you have to export it. And so Anselinger starts demanding that other countries fall in line. Obviously Mexico is the neighboring country. And Mexico does this really brave thing. They say no. They actually appointed to run their drug policy an extraordinary man called Leopoldo Salazar-Viniegra, who was a doctor who ran a rehab center. And if you look at what he said in 1930, I mean, it would be prescient today. He said, we shouldn't ban cannabis because it's not that harmful. Other drugs, we need to give people love and support. And we mustn't ban drugs because the whole country will be taken over by cartels if we do. I don't think any human being has ever been so vindicated. That's pretty good, yeah. Leopoldo Salazar-Viniegra. And Anselinger effectively says, fire this man, get rid of him. And Mexico again, really bravely says, no, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna keep our man. And so the diplomatic pressure has stepped up and stepped up and stepped up over the next few years until in the end, what they did is, so opiates for hospital, opiates to use in hospital for medical relief were manufactured, all the ones that were used in the rest of the Americas were manufactured in the United States. And they cut off the supply of legal opiates to Mexico. So people started to just die in agony in Mexican hospitals. And in the end, Mexico gave in. They got rid of Leopoldo Salazar-Viniegra. They bring in a much more prohibitionist person and the whole course of Latin America in the 20th century, branches at that point. And you end up where, when I went to Juarez with an absolute horror show. And this happens all the way through the history of Mexico and repeatedly throughout the 20th century, Mexico tries to break from the US line. So you have this moment with that maniac G. Gordon Liddy when in 1970, when Mexico tries to move towards a more sane drug policy. And Liddy, what's it called? Operation Intercept, I think it's called. They just search everything that comes across the border from Mexico for like six weeks and it bought the Mexican economy to a standstill and then of course Mexico gives in and begins this catastrophic program of fumigation and all of that. This happens again and again and again. And to me, obviously I talk about lots of different things in the book, I talk about the mass incarceration in the United States and the catastrophe there about the criminalization of ordinary drug users, about the destruction of drug addicts. But to me it's what we've done to the supply route countries is so devastating, it's even more devastating than all of them. And we've basically extorted, I mean we extorted Mexico by basically putting their citizens into pain. And we also have made sure that certain studies, I mean America and this is just horrible because you write about how the 1995 World Health Organization report about cocaine that said most use is quote, experimental and occasional are by far the most common types of use and compulsive dysfunctional use is far less common but the US threatened to cut funding to the World Health Organization unless that report was buried. I mean this seems to happen a lot. We have a huge track record of using our weight to make other people fight our puritanical pathologies about the drug war. Yeah, I think you put it really well and there's been a real war on science through the drug war as well. A real suppression of scientific research. You know like you mentioned that study you just mentioned is the most detailed scientific study of cocaine use ever. I can't remember the stats but it's hundreds of scientists looking at enormous numbers of people and really detailed science. And yeah, there was just a massive suppression of it. And again you said that. So it was leaked, you got it because it was leaked, correct? Yeah, it was leaked to the public. Yeah, it wasn't leaked to me personally. It wasn't published, it was leaked, which is crazy. Yeah, it's never been officially published. For precisely that reason, and you saw this right at the start actually there's this fascinating thing I discovered in Anslinger's archives where when they're making the initial proposal to ban cannabis, he wrote to, I think it was 30 doctors saying what do you think? And 29 of them wrote back and said, no, this is not a good idea, don't do that. And one of them wrote back and said, no, maybe, and he published the one and ignored the other 29. There's another scientist who wrote to him, Dr. Ball, his name was, he said something like, you know, well, maybe you're right, but I think we should fund some scientific studies to figure this out, this can be tested. And Anslinger wrote back and said, I think these were his exact words, the time for temporizing is over. It's crazy to, the thing that was to me was so fascinating about working on chasing the screen for so long is it's crazy to realize so many of the things we've been told are just not true, you know. And then to go to places where they've done the exact opposite and just see the results I tell you about, if you like about Portugal, you know, so Portugal in the year 2000 had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. 1% of the population was addicted to heroin and which is kind of incredible. And every year, yeah, it's an extraordinary, it's, you know, one in a hundred people, that's extraordinary. And every year they tried the drug war way more, they're arrested and imprisoned more people and every year the problem got worse. And one day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and basically said that we can't go on like this, what are we gonna do? And they decided to do something really radical, something no one had done since the start of the drug war. They basically said, should we get someone to actually look at the scientific evidence? So they set up this panel of scientists and doctors led by this amazing man called Dr. Chua Guilao where I got to know. And they basically said, look, you guys go away, figure out what would solve this problem. And we've agreed in advance, we'll do whatever you recommend. So it just took it out of politics. And I don't think they thought the panel would recommend what it did to be fair, but they did stick to their word. So the panel went away, looked at all the evidence, things like Ratt Park, what we were talking about before. And they came back and said, decriminalize all of it, decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack. But, and this is the crucial next step, take all the money we currently spend on ruining addicts, on stigmatizing them, shaming them, arresting them and imprisoning them and spend it instead on turning their lives around. It's interesting, it's not what the kind of stuff Chris Christie is talking about. They do a bit of residential rehab, they do a bit of psychological support, there's some value in that. But the biggest thing they did was the opposite of what we do, we give addicts criminal records, make it harder for them to reconnect to the society. What they did was set up a program of job subsidy for addicts. So saying used to be a mechanic, but go to a garage and they'll say, employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to say to every addict in Portugal, we love you, we value you, we're on your side, we want you back. And the results went up by the time I went, it was 13 years since this experiment began, it's 15 years now, the results are really clear. Injecting drug use fell in Portugal by 50%, five zero percent, overdose massively fell, deaths among addicts from all causes massively fell. One of the ways you know it worked so well is I went and interviewed a guy called Juan Figuera who led the opposition to the decriminalization at the time, he was the top drug cop in Portugal. And he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other side said would happen did. And it talks about how he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so long arresting and imprisoning drug addicts. It's worth just saying as a code is that difference between decriminalization and legalization. So what they did in Portugal is they stopped punishing users, but you still have to go to criminals to get your drugs. Legalization is where you open up some legal route. So it's like decriminalization shuts down oranges to need black and legalization shuts down breaking bad. I don't want to present Portugal as just the solution because it doesn't deal with what I think is the most devastating aspect of it. But it does deal with a really significant aspect. And it does show you can end all criminal penalties for drug use. And if what you do next is smart, you will see less addiction, not more. Now there were almost out of time. So there's a couple of things I want to make sure we hit that I think are crucial ideas in your book. One you kind of broached on a few minutes ago, but I think it's very important that what the iron law of prohibition and what that is and how that means that the nature of the drug market under prohibition is not what it looks like when the government gets out of either complete prohibition or does something partial legalization or decriminalization. I'm so glad you asked about that because it can sound a bit wonky, but I think it's one of the worst harms of the drug war. And I've been trying to find a way to explain it in a way that doesn't sound really wonky. But the best way to explain it is imagine, so the best way to explain it is the day before alcohol is banned in the United States, most popular drinks by far were beer and wine. A week after alcohol prohibition ends, most popular drinks are beer and wine. In between, you could not get beer or wine. The only alcoholic drinks available are things like whiskey, vodka, and moonshine. And you think, well, why would that be? Why would banning alcohol change the way people drank alcohol? It didn't change what people wanted, it changed what they could get. And the way to understand that is to imagine, if you or me, let's imagine you or me wanted to get the nearest bar to the Kato Institute website and Kato Institute offices, imagine we wanted to get enough alcohol for everyone in that bar tonight to be happy. And we had to smuggle it in a wagon from the Canadian border or the Mexican border. If we fill our wagon with beer, we're only gonna get enough alcohol for what, 100 people? If we fill it with vodka, we're gonna get enough alcohol for thousands of people. When you ban a substance and it has to be smuggled, you suddenly get a premium on getting the biggest possible kick into the smallest possible space. And the reason why that's really damaging is because we don't want people to be using the most extreme form of a drug, right? The, if you think about, so for example, you'll often get, Kylie Fiorina said it in one of the Republican debates, you know, I'm saying this from memory, so I may be getting it slightly wrong, but something like, well, cannabis today, yeah, she said it to Jeb Bush, didn't she? Cannabis today is not like the cannabis that Jeb Bush was smoking in the 60s. It's much stronger. The implication being that's why we can't legalize it. Well, she's right. It is much stronger, but that's because of the prohibition, not despite it. The, most people who smoke cannabis don't wanna smoke super skunk. Just like most people who drink alcohol go into your bar in DC, very few people will be drinking vodka and no one's gonna be drinking absamth, right? Most people- Whatever clear for that matter, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Most people want mild forms of their drug. This is really devastating when you look at opiates and cocoa products. Like we were saying before, the most popular way of consuming opiates was a syrup, very mild amount of opiates in it. When you banned heroin, that just vanished. When you ban opiates, that just vanishes in the only form of heroin you can get is, the only form of opiates you can get is heroin. Think about cocoa products. The only, the most popular way of consuming them was in tea prior to them being banned, very mild. You know, it's more like caffeine than it is like cocaine. That just disappears. Has anyone even heard of cocoa tea now? Outside, you know, Peru and Bolivia, no one. Most popular way of consuming it becomes powder cocaine. And the, cause it's the only way of doing it. And then when you have that huge crackdown, led by Reagan in the 80s, and the huge crackdown on cocaine smuggling, what do you get? Crack, crack. And even more intense. Exactly, and even more intense, even more compacted form of cocaine crack. That is an invention of the iron lord prohibition. Fascinating. That's very, it's incredibly important. So I think that for the closing out here, I think we can tie a couple of these together in a great thematic way. One is I'd like to hear the sort of end of the full element of the Billie Holiday story and then how that ties into Harry Anslinger and the end of his life and what happened at the end of his life with his involvement with drug dealing and drug use. Yeah, so when Billie Holiday says, I'm going to sing my song, whatever you want, Anslinger results to destroy her. First person he sends to stop, he hated employing African-Americans, but you couldn't really send a white guy into Harlem to stalk Billie Holiday because- He also importantly, he did jazz music too. That's what he thought. I'm obsessed with the things that Harry Anslinger said about. He said there was like the primitive jungles of Africa. Well, it's done, right? I mean- In regard to it, it's like, it's so funny the memos that his agent said him about jazz, but it was so amazing. There are a few things like, he said it was like the kind of deranged gibberish of a dying man. What he did is he quoted the lyrics and he'd say, this is how marijuana makes you feel. So there's one song where he says, when he gets the notion, he thinks he can walk across the ocean. And Anslinger writes, they do believe that on marijuana. So he obsessively hated the jazz world and he wanted to destroy all of it. And so he sends this guy, Jimmy Fletcher, to stalk Billie Holiday. He spends years following her around Harlem. Billie Holiday was so amazing. Jimmy Fletcher fell in love with her. And his whole life, he was ashamed of what he did. He buss her. She's sent to prison. She spends 18 months in prison. She doesn't sing a word in prison. But what happens next is the cruelest thing. She gets out and you need a license to perform anywhere where alcohol was served. And Anslinger makes sure she doesn't get that license. Her friend Yolanda Bavan said to me, what is the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing they love. You know, they take away singing from Billie Holiday. She relapses. She collapses one day. She relapses on both very heavy alcohol use and heroin use. And she's taken to hospital in New York and they diagnose, actually the first hospital won't even take her because she's a heroin addict. Second hospital on the way and she says to one of her friends, they're gonna kill me in there. Don't let them, they're gonna kill me because she was convinced that Anslinger's men were gonna come for her. She was diagnosed with liver cancer, quite advanced liver cancer and she starts to go into withdrawal because she hasn't got any heroin in the hospital. And one of her friends, Maly Dufty, managed to insist that she was given methadone and she started to recover a little bit. And then Anslinger's men cut off the heroin after 10 days. That was the limit that Anslinger had put in place. And she died a couple of days later. When she died, she was handcuffed to her hospital bed. They didn't let in her friends to see her. They took away her record player, they took away her candies. One of her friends told the BBC that she looked like she had been violently wrenched from life. And I think that tells you so much about what the drug war is about, about how it destroys addicts, how it's about race. At the same time that Harry Anslinger found out that Billie Holiday was a heroin addict, he found out that Judy Garland, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz was a heroin addict, he recommended that she take slightly longer vacations and he reassured the studio she was gonna be fine. Spot the difference, right? Which is sort of what he did at the end of his life too with a certain cylinder. So this is what we know from what Anslinger himself wrote and what he told his co-author. So he found out that Joe McCarthy was using opiates, not heroin, but opiates, which were then still available. And Harry Anslinger not surprisingly loved Joe McCarthy. And he went to Joe McCarthy and said, you know Senator, you need to stop this. And McCarthy said no. And so Anslinger arranged that he could get his opiates legally from a pharmacist in DC. You know, bear in mind he had destroyed the doctors who had wanted to do that. So when it came to someone that Harry Anslinger cared about, he turns into a legalizer like everyone else. Later in his life when he, he became quite ill with angina, he himself started using opiates that were prescribed by his doctor. And I sometimes try to imagine, you know, what did Harry Anslinger think the first time he used opiates? And he felt them kind of washing through his system. Did he think about Billie Holiday? Did he think about the doctors he had destroyed for giving people this drug? You know, did he think about all the lives he'd ruined to stop people doing this thing that he was now doing? Now, for those who are familiar with your past transgressions, where they can go to look up all this stuff? Because you've said a lot of things that might be shocking to many people because they've never heard it before. But you have all this documented. So where can they go to learn more about this? Yeah, well, if they go to www.chasingthescream.com and it's scream as in, ah, not scream as in the screen you look at to watch television, they can hear interviews with all the people that I've talked about in this interview, all the people I interviewed. So they can hear the audio of all of that, all the quotes from the book that was said to me, you can hear the audio. There's massive and extensive footnotes that I'd recommend people kind of follow up to look at the trail for the history of this stuff because it's shocking and a lot of this stuff should be better known. And I think it's important that we know this because it doesn't have to continue, right? We have a choice about this. A big majority of Americans agree with the statement the war on drugs has failed. And the one thing you can say in defense of the war on drugs is we have given it a fair shot, right? The United States has spent a hundred years and a trillion dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. And at the end of all that, you can't even keep drugs out of your prisons where you have a walled perimeter that you pay people to walk around the whole time. That gives you some sense of how much this war is gonna work. That our alternatives have seen them in practice. We can, you know, you can look at them for yourself. We can see the results. There is a better way waiting for women ready to choose it. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.