 Welcome to the Addiction Recovery Channel. I'm Ed Baker and I'm very pleased to be here with you. Today's a special day. We're back in the studio. Thank you, Town Meeting TV for opening up for us. It's also a special day because of our guests. I'm honored to have as our guest today, Johann Hari. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Yes. Johann is a remarkable person. He doesn't hardly even need an introduction. In a very short period of time, he's authored three books, Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, and Stolen Focus. These three books have changed the way millions of people think about people with addiction, people with anxiety and or depression, people who have seemed to lost their way, unable to pay attention, unable to feel themselves or connect with themselves and others. Johann's body of work has focused on what's really wrong, the absence of connection. We as creatures need each other, we need to connect. Johann is shedding, throwing light on this idea of connection and how badly we need it. Thank you so much, Johann, for your work. Thanks for having me here. You know, I know today we're going to go into a lot of solutions and this is the way it should be, to talk about solutions, to talk about hope. But first, I want to begin focusing on an unthinkable, unspeakable reality in my beloved country in America. Up until October 2021, October 2021, the 12-month period, up until that point, we lost 105,672 loving ones, loved ones, to drug overdose in America. I'd like you to begin, I'd like you to tell us, what is your understanding of that? How do you explain that, Johann? How has this happened in my country? Yeah, this is very personal to me. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I didn't understand why then, but as I got older, I realized we had addiction in my family, several members of my family. And I think there's lots of things going on, but there's a concept that I think is at the heart of the answer to your question, which is everyone watching knows they have natural physical needs, right? Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. 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 built is good at lots of things. I'm glad to be alive today, but we've been getting less and less good for a long time at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. And then of course, during the pandemic, our ability to meet our needs just went off a cliff, right? Which is why there was an explosion in overdose deaths, suicide and so on during the pandemic. And there was, I started to really understand this. You know, obviously I was researching this for a long time before I really began to make sense to me. And it particularly began to make sense to me because I'm an incredible scientist, I got to know. So if you had asked me when I started doing the research, almost exactly 10 years ago, for chasing the Screamer book about addiction, if you'd said to me, let's say heroin addiction because that was close to me. If you'd said to me, what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you're an idiot and I would have said, well, the clue's in the name, right, obviously, heroin causes heroin addiction. We've been told this story for a hundred years that's become totally part of our common sense. It was certainly how I saw the world, right? We think if we kidnap the next 20 people to walk past this studio in Burlington and like a villain in a horror movie, we injected them all with heroin every day, three times a 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 become used to and then start to desperately physically crave. And that's what addiction is, right? That's why we call it in English, being hooked, right? You've got a tremendous hunger for the chemical hooks. It turns out that story isn't wrong, but it's a very small part of a much bigger picture. And I only began to understand that when I went to Vancouver, interviewed a man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment in the 1970s that's really transformed how we think about addiction across the world. And Professor Alexander explained to me, this story we've got in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. Your viewers can try this experiment at home if you're feeling a little bit sadistic. 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. If you do that, the rat will try both. It will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself by overdosing within a couple of weeks, right? So that's our story, right? The rat tries the drug, it needs more and more of it, it craves the chemical hooks, and then it dies, overdoses. But Professor Alexander was working with a lot of people with addiction problems in the 70s, and he looked at these experiments and he said, well, hang on a minute. They put these rats alone in an empty cage where they've got nothing that makes life meaningful for them. All they've got is the drug. What would happen, he said, 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 wants 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 drug water very much. None of them use it compulsively, none of them overdose. So you have almost 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living for them. To no compulsive use and overdose when they do have the things that make life worth living. Now there's lots of human examples of this that we'll get to. But what I learned from this is the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, hugely valuable though that is to many people. The opposite of addiction is connection. And if you think about what's happened to us all throughout my lifetime, I'm 43, all throughout my lifetime, we're becoming more and more disconnected, more lonely, more cut off from meaningful work, more cut off from financial security, all sorts of things. And then of course during the pandemic we've been profoundly disconnected from those things. How moving this is the first face-to-face interview you've done in two years. Think about how different that feels compared to if we were staring each other through a screen. So the heart of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be. And when you are disconnected from the things that make life worth living, of course life becomes more painful. Of course you're much more likely to want to seek out anesthetics, whether it's oxycontin or heroin or gambling or pornography or whatever it might be. Does that ring true to you Ed? Yes, yes of course. And I've seen it many times in my life, I've experienced it in my life. The analogy with Rat Park I think is incredibly interesting because we have a large population of people today in America who are addicted. And the withdrawal and physical pain of ending involvement with the drug is real and these people are addicted. So the idea of constructing like a human rat park that would give them the types of opportunities that they need to recover is something that fascinates us all. We're taking steps toward doing that in Vermont, we're taking steps to understand what the real needs of people are. In the past what they used to do, I'm sure you were aware of it, the narcotic farm in Lexington, Kentucky. When I was a kid, a bunch of my friends became developed addiction to heroin in the 60s and they would get shipped down to the narcotic farm in Lexington, Kentucky and they would detox and they would come back to the neighborhood and they would relapse because there was no equivalent of Rat Park in the neighborhood. There weren't things for them to get interested in, there weren't people to reach out to them and help them. Today in Vermont we're beginning to see that, we're beginning to develop systems that reach out to people, systems that connect and touch people, systems that pull people in and let them know we care about them. But it's a long, such a, and I'm sure you're aware of it, it's such a long row to hoe. And you know, when I think about it in my observations, Johan and I know you see it too, it's okay to have an image of Rat Park, but the reality, when you look at stigma, the fog of war and the way it lingers in many, many of us, what I see is the major block to connection is what we've been taught, I think in your book, you trace it back a hundred years to Harry Enzlinger. You know, we deal with this all the time. How do we overcome that? How do we build a Rat Park? So, yeah, it's a really important question. I went to places that had actually done this, right? So I can give you plenty of examples, but I'll give you an example of one. So in the year 2000, and I think this is a vision of where Vermont could be 10 years from now, this is absolutely achievable, and if we do achieve that, there will be a dramatic fall in overdose deaths and a huge number of people who get to have good lives again. So in the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the world. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of staggering, right? And every year they tried the American way more, they arrested more people, they shamed more people and stigmatized more people, they imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse. Until finally the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and they said, look, we can't go on like this with ever more people becoming addicted to heroin, what are we gonna do? And they decided to do something really radical, something nobody had done in more than a hundred years. They said, should we like ask some scientists what the best thing to do is? So they set up a panel of scientists and doctors led by an amazing man I got to know called Dr. João Gulau. And they said to them, you guys go away, look at all the science on this, figure out what would genuinely solve this problem, and we've agreed in advance, we'll do whatever you recommend. So all the main political parties agreed they would abide by it, was to take it out of politics. So the panel went away, they looked at all the evidence, including Rat Park, and they came back and they said, okay guys, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack the whole lot, but, and this is the crucial next step, we're gonna take all the money we currently spend on stigmatizing, shaming and punishing people with addiction problems, and we're gonna spend all that money instead on turning their lives around. And interestingly, it wasn't really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States, right? So they do some residential rehab, which has real value, but the main thing they spent that money on was a big program of reconnection. Say you used to be a mechanic, they'll go to a garage and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. They spent a lot of money on getting people housing. The goal was to say to every person with an addiction problem in Portugal, we love you, we value you, we're on your side, we want you back. They realized there's no point in talking about de-stigmatizing things if people are literally criminals. If the law is saying you are a criminal for having an addiction, well, you can say, well, we're gonna de-stigmatize, but all the messages from the society are going the other way. By the time I went to Portugal, it was 13 years since this had begun, and the results were in. There was a major study by the British Journal of Criminology found that addiction was down by more than 50%. Overdose deaths were down by 80%. HIV transmission among drug users was down by 90%. And one of the ways you know it works so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. I went and interviewed a guy called João Figuera, who was the top drug cop in Portugal at the time of the decriminalization. And he said to me, when the decriminalization was initially proposed, he'd said what lots of people very understandably say when they hear the idea of decriminalizing all drugs, he said, this is madness. We'll have an explosion in drug use. We can't do this. And he said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen. And everything the other side said would happen did. And he told me he felt really ashamed that he'd spent so many years prior to the decriminalization. He now knew making people's addictions worse when he could have been helping them turn their lives around. And this is something I saw all over the world from Uruguay to Portugal to Vancouver. At first, when you propose moving beyond the drug war towards policies based on connection and compassion, it's really controversial, right? And people think it's crazy. And then they see the results. And it's not perfect. They've still got problems in all those places, to be sure. But there's such a significant improvement that the support hugely increases and becomes very, very substantial once people see it. And I think that's partly because it's something you do a huge amount of work on and care about a lot there as well. If we think about stigma or if we think about the war on drugs. So, like I was realizing, if the core of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life, because your life is too painful a place to be, you begin to realize why what we do, the predominant thing that we do when it comes to drug policy is the war on drugs, right? You begin to see why that's such a disaster. Because the theory behind the war on drugs is if someone has an addiction problem, you need to inflict more pain and suffering on them to give them an incentive to stop. But once you realize that pain is the fuel, pain is the cause, you realize that's not solving the problem. It's actually making it worse, right? You know, this is so true, Johan. Thank you for that beautiful explanation. You know, it makes me think of a hundred things at once. But basically leading up to the show, I took a little break and I read Paul Tillich, a theologian, philosopher. And something he said stuck in my head and you just said it. You said that they would stop spending all the money that they spent on the war on drugs and they would put it into loving people with addiction. And Paul Tillich says, it's a beautiful quote, love has to precede help. Without love, there can be no help. In fact, without love, help becomes a problem. And that's what I hear you saying. That it's that love has to come first. We have to love these people. Love them enough to change around our systems, to change around the way we think, to self-reflect and see what we're doing wrong and to meet them and love them and provide for them because they're worth it. And I just see like in Vermont, I think we're moving in that direction. But like you said, there's this reaction. Oh, it's going to backfire. You know, there's going to be people taking drugs all over the place. You know, if we don't punish it. And this is the mentality that still exists. We're making inroads. But it's really a long, a very long row to hoe. And I just wonder, I meditate about it. I think about it all the time. What can we do to move the ball forward? People like you, authors like you, shows like this. People like Daniel Franklin. Like you seem to say there's these little eruptions with rippling effects. And you never know, you know, where they're going to go or who they're going to influence. But I do believe that. But it just seems to me, and I'd like you to speak about this. In Switzerland, Ruth Dreyfuss, when she did the great social experiment there and began prescribing diacetylmorphine for people with addiction, what she said was, this is an emergency. And in an emergency, you take drastic action. I see this as an emergency in America today. But I don't see enough drastic action being taken. What do you make of that? That's a really good point. I mean, what happened in Switzerland is really interesting as well. So at the same time that Portugal had this huge heroin crisis, Switzerland not so far away is also having a huge heroin crisis. And they reacted slightly differently. So Ruth was the first ever female president of Switzerland. She's completely, by the way, you guys might want to try that one day. Amazing. We'd love to try that one day. We almost did. Yeah, you tried. You got close. Next time. And she's going to be black. Watch. Ruth is an amazing person. When she took over, she inherits this enormous, by Swiss standards, an enormous heroin crisis. They were having, people might remember the news footage from the time, people shooting up in their parks and streets. HIV also. Yeah, it was the height of the AIDS crisis. It's a really terrible situation. And again, they had tried, Switzerland is a really conservative country. My dad's from there. If it was a state in the United States, it would be Utah, right? It's a conservative state, right? And so their initial instinct was just punishment, shame. And they tried it, and it just was a disaster. The problem kept getting bigger and bigger. And Swiss people are pretty conservative, but they're also quite pragmatic. They could see it wasn't working. And Ruth, as First Minister of Health, and then as President, proposed what sounds at the start like a very drastic solution. She said, I think the solution is that we should legalize heroin for people with addiction problems, right? And I remember, so I went to, it's important to understand what legalization doesn't mean. There isn't like a heroin aisle in CVS. So the way it works is, I went to see this in Geneva. I think it tells you something, by the way. It's kind of like decriminalizing it, basically. Well, no. So it's legalizing in a specific way. And I think it tells you something. So I went to one of the clinics where they provide the legal heroin. It tells you something that Ruth, the former president, lives almost directly opposite this clinic. So I went to the one in Geneva. And the way it works is, if you've got a heroin problem, you're assigned to this clinic. You go. You have to go at 7 o'clock in the morning because Swiss people believe in doing things insanely early. So it was a disagreement between me and my dad. You turn up, you go in, and a nurse gives you medically pure heroin, right? And you have to use it there. They won't let you leave with it, partly because they don't want you to sell it on the streets, but mainly because they want to monitor you to make sure you're okay. You use it, and then you leave, and you go to your job because you're given a load of support and help to get work, to get housing. And it was fascinating going to these clinics because, so when I went there, it was explained to me by Rita Manghi, who was the chief psychiatrist, and by other people there, including the users, the patients. So you can stay on that program as long as you want. There's never any pressure to cut back, and they will give you any dose of heroin you want except for one that would kill you. But when I went there, it had been in place for 12 years, and there was... So you hear that, and you think, well, surely everyone would just stay on it forever, right? If you're given free heroin, given what we're told about drugs, they take you over, you need more and more of them. Why would anyone ever stop? But interestingly, I went there 12 years after it had begun, and there was only, I think it was two people who'd been on it in this program at the start who were still in the program. And I was saying to Dr. Manghi, well, that doesn't make sense to me, right? We're told, you know, you become addicted, you need more and more of it. And she looked at me like I was dumb, and she said, well, we help them. And as their lives get better, they don't want to be anesthetized so much, right? Which once you hear it is so obvious. There's that love before help. Exactly, exactly. It's telekinetic in practice. And what's fascinating is if you look at the outcomes of the Swiss program, which has been studied very extensively in Switzerland and internationally, do you want to guess how many people have died of heroin overdoses on legal heroin since this program began almost 20 years ago now? None. Zero. More people have died of heroin overdoses in this country by far since you and I started talking that have died in those 20 years in Switzerland. Every five minutes right now. Exactly. So this, again, it shows this approach, which is love, compassion, practical help, deal with the initial, it's what to say, not everyone in Switzerland wants to go into the heroin prescription program. Some people want to go to abstinence programs. It's about having a broad menu of options, right? But this is, and Ruth, after this program had been in place for a few years, Ruth, President Dreyfus, went to visit the clinic. And when she was there, one of the patients came up to her, handed her a note and just ran off. So she put it in her pocket and she, and later that day she was in her office, the president's office, and she opened this note. She was like, oh, she remembered she had it. And this guy said, you know, he'd wrote a letter, said, Dear Madam President, when this program began, I was homeless, I was in a really bad state. I was gonna die, I had no hope. And he said that I came to this program and my life has really changed. And he said I probably shouldn't tell you this, but if you walk out of your office and you go two doors down and look through the door, you'll see I work in your office now. I work for you. How beautiful that is, yeah. And you think about, and this is something I saw, it's something that so infuriates me when I'm, as you know, I live after you in the United States. And I've been doing a lot of work with people with addiction problems in Las Vegas lately, people who live in the drainage tunnels beneath the city. And one of the things that's so emotionally difficult about that is I know lots of people in this country who have died, if they were Portuguese or Swiss, would have good lives now, right? And the most important thing to say about this is that the current situation we have, this catastrophic situation that you described at the start, this is not a force of nature. This is not like the weather. This is a choice, right? We are choosing policies that predictably have these outcomes. We don't have to carry on doing that. We can choose the policies that we know that the evidence overwhelmingly shows saves people and helps them turn their lives around. We can choose that, right? So how do we get there? And when I think about how we get there, I think a lot about, this might sound strange, but I think about a friend of mine called Andrew Sullivan, who's a British-American writer. Andrew, in 1994, was diagnosed at the height of the AIDS crisis with HIV, as HIV positive. And at that time, as far as anyone knew, there was no hope in sight, right? They didn't know what was about to happen. Andrew's best friend, Patrick, had just died of AIDS. And Andrew thought, well, that's it, I've got a few years to live. So he quit his job and he went to a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod, and he decided he was going to do one last thing before he died. He was going to write a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book advocating before. And he thought, well, I'm never going to live to see this idea put into practice. No one alive today is ever going to live to see this put into practice, but maybe somewhere down the line, someone will pick up this... Oh, excuse me. Maybe somewhere down the line, someone will pick up this idea and try to put it into practice. The idea Andrew wrote the first book to ever advocate for was gay marriage, right? And when I get depressed, I think, God, we're up against such powerful forces here. I tried to imagine going back in time to 1994 to Provincetown and saying to Andrew, okay, Andrew, you're not going to believe me, but 26 years from now, A, you'll be alive. That would have blown his mind. B, you'll be married to a man because that would be legal. And C, I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States quotes from this book you're writing when it makes it mandatory for every state in the Union to introduce gay marriage rights. And the next day, you'll be invited to a White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to have dinner with the president to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved. And by the way, that president, he's going to be black, right? And this sounded like the most ludicrous science fiction. Have you all heard what he's saying to you? So, Ed, 26 years from now, a trans president is going to invite us to smoke crack in the Oval Office with her, right? Not that we want that. I mean, the trans president, yes, not the crack. Incredible. How did that happen? How did we get from there to here? We got there because, you know, ordinary people banded together and appealed to other ordinary people in a spirit of love and compassion, right? And they expanded that circle of love and compassion until it completely transformed society to the point where now more than 80% of people under the age of 30 support gay marriage rights, including a majority of young Republicans, right? So we've transformed that. That will never be taken away now, right? The same thing is already happening with addiction. Even if you think about something as trivial, I've had really bad insomnia lately and I've been watching Cagney and Lacey and Miami Vice. And even if you watch those shows, right? I recommend younger viewers watch them because they're really good, but me, because there's a stock character in Cagney and Lacey or Miami Vice that you'll often see who's the kind of evil addict, right? The kind of a character appears who's addicted and you know that they're a bad person, they're evil, right? They would never do that on Law and Order now, right? It would be bizarre if you turned to an episode of Law and Order. That's true. Because there's been a change in the culture, right? We've become much more compassionate. So what we've got to now do is transfer that massively expanded compassion. We don't talk about people with addiction problems the way we did even 10 years ago, right? Never mind, 20 years ago. Now that we've got that change in the culture, we need to now, as we are doing and as your work is such an important part of, transform that cultural change into policy change which is happening and needs to happen much quicker and every person who joins the fight, the sooner we do it, the more lives we save. I mean that is so refreshing and invigorating and inspiring to me. And I just hear shades of Vendu, the Vancouver... Area network of drug users, yeah. Area network of drug users who are like a radical revolutionary group who changed drug policy in Canada forever. Yeah, for anyone who wants to... Anyone who's watching thinking, okay, that sounds very good, but how am I ever going to do that? I would tell them the story of my friend Bud Osborne. So in the year 2000, Bud was a homeless guy with a very bad addiction problem living on the downtown-y side of Vancouver. The downtown-y side is a kind of notorious part of Vancouver. It's an area with a lot of homelessness, a lot of addiction problems. It's where the original Skid Row is, right? So Bud was living there and this was a time of very intense police crackdown on people with addiction problems and Bud was watching his friends just die all around him. And as he would have put it then, this is not obviously the language I would use, he would have been like, look, one day he heard that his friend Margaret had died and he thought, I can't just watch my friends die, but he also thought, well, I'm a homeless junkie is how he would have put it. What am I going to do? And then one day Bud had an idea. So at that time, because of the police crackdown, people, when they wanted to shoot up, would go and hide somewhere like in dumpsters or like crevices around the downtown-y side. But of course, that means if you're hiding and you shoot up and you overdose, no one sees you, they just find your body. So Bud had an idea. He gathered together a group of people with addiction problems and he said to them, let's just drop a timetable for them not using, which even for quite hardcore users is most of the time, right? We'll drop a timetable and we'll just go and look in the places where we know we hide. Just us, no like officials or anything. And if anyone's overdosing, we'll call an ambulance, right? They're like, wellness checks. Exactly. So the people, so they started to do it. And over the next couple of months, the death toll on the downtown-y side significantly fell, which was amazing because people who would have died were living, but it also meant that people who had addiction problems started to go, and maybe we're not the pieces of crap everyone says we are. Maybe we can do some things like, well, what else could we do? So Bud went to the library and he started to read about drug policy and he learned that in Frankfurt, in Germany, they had opened what were called then supervised injection sites. We would now call them overdose prevention sites, which is where you could go if you had an addiction problem. You could use your drugs. You'd be monitored by nurses and doctors. They'd give you clean needles and so on. So if anything went wrong, they would help you, right? And he discovered that in Frankfurt, this had almost ended overdose deaths in the areas where they had them. So he was like, well, let's do that here, right? But there had been nothing like that in the whole of North America in 70 years. So Bud was like, okay, we'll persuade our mayor to do it. And the mayor of Vancouver at that time was the most unlikely person to try to persuade. So his name was Philipp Owen. And Philipp Owen had run for office and all the local drug users should be taken and detained at the local military base in Chilliwack and never let out, right? And Philipp Owen was, how would you describe Philipp Owen? He was a kind of rich, from a very wealthy family. He was kind of right-wing. He'd never known anyone with any addiction problems. He's not quite like Donald Trump. He would have been like Mitt Romney, right? A kind of very patrician rich guy who just, this was just like, he was like, just lock him up, right? So they formed this group, they founded the Vancouver area network of drug users and they decided anywhere Philipp Owen went they were going to follow him with a coffin. So they built a coffin and they wrote on the coffin, who will die next, Philipp Owen, before you open a safe injection site? And they follow him around and every time Philipp Owen speaks in public and he takes questions from the public, the first question is always someone standing up going, who will die next, Philipp Owen, before you open a safe injection site? One day Dean Wilson, it was one of the members of Vandu, stood up and said, do you remember Julie, who asked you last time, who will die next before you open a safe injection site? Turned out it was her because you haven't done it. And this went on and on and people in Vandu started to get a bit discouraged. They were like, we don't seem to be changing his mind. And then one day, eternally to his credit, Philipp Owen said, who the hell are these people? What is this, right? He just didn't know anything about it. And he went to the downtown Eastside and had loads of time with people with addiction problems. And he started to learn about drug policy. He went to Chicago to meet Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who was very good on this issue. And he came back to Vancouver and he held a press conference. And he had the chief of police, he had the coroner, and he had a representative of Vandu and they were all in the audience. And he said, I'm never going to talk about addiction again without having these guys here with me because they know much better than I do. We're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America. Things are going to change around here just you wait and see. And Philipp Owen's right wing party was so horrified they deselected him as their candidate for mayor. And his political career ended but the next mayor, a more liberal guy won and they opened the safe injection site. And in the 10 years that followed, average life expectancy rose by more than 10 years. That's staggering. You don't get figures like that except when a war ends, which of course is what this was. And I remember when I went to interview Philipp Owen, many years after his political career had ended, on the downtown East side he said to me, I would sacrifice my entire political career all over again to do this. How many times do you get to save the lives of thousands of the most vulnerable people in your society? And this was then challenged, the safe injection site was then challenged by the, Canada had a right wing government led by a guy called Stephen Harper. They went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court and the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that people with addiction problems have a right to life and that includes a safe space like the supervised injection site and that could never be taken away. And I remember after I got to know all these people, Bud Osborne, who'd started this whole thing, he died, he was only 62 but he'd been a homeless guy during a drug war, it takes a toll on you. And when Bud died, they shut down the whole of the downtown East side where he had lived and they had this incredible memorial service for him and there were all these people there who knew that they were alive because of what he had started and they had joined. The downtown East side now there's this huge thing that says if you don't care, no one will care, which is a quote from Bud. And I remember thinking that day and subsequently, you know, it's hard to imagine a more powerless person in our culture than a homeless guy with an addiction problem. Bud didn't sit there going, well, someone else is going to have to solve this one, right? We'll wait for someone else to handle it. He started where he stood and he used, when you've got nothing else, you've got a voice, a human voice that you can use to persuade other people, that's what he did, and he persuaded the people around him, again, in a spirit of love and compassion and they persuaded more people and they persuaded more people. And, you know, we all have this power within us to appeal to people in a spirit of love and compassion. Why did the way gay people are treated, transformed so extraordinarily? It was just because huge numbers of ordinary gay people were incredibly brave and came out and then loads of straight people opened their hearts, listened to them and responded in a spirit of love, right? That's what we have to do here. We have to change this culture. It is already happening. We have to change it more. Once we have that change of culture, we can then change the environment to reduce the underlying causes of addiction. We can change the environment to help people with addiction problems, not screw them over. This is all achievable. I've been to places that did it. We have to start taking the first steps, what's happening here in Vermont and we have to follow the spirit of people like Bud Osborne. Oh, thank you so much. It is happening here in Vermont and I can feel the spirit of Bud Osborne and other people can too. Thank you. Thank you for that beautiful, beautiful story. And I think it rings true in your book. You talk about the Stone Wall in Greenwich Village. You talk about people coming together, uprisings. You know, people come together and throw light on an injustice and therefore begin the process that leads to justice. And it makes me feel extremely hopeful. So thank you. Thank you for that. And the one thing you can say in defense of the war on drugs is, my God, this country has given it a fair shot. The U.S. has fought the war on drugs for 100 years. You guys have spent a trillion dollars, right? You've imprisoned millions of your fellow citizens. You've destroyed whole countries like Colombia and El Salvador. And at the end of that, you can't even keep drugs out of your prisons where you pay someone to walk around the wall perimeter the whole time, right? That approach is never going to work. And big majorities of Americans now see that. More than 85% of Americans agree with the statement, the war on drugs has failed. What we need to do now, the job now, so this is a hollow policy, right? It has failed completely and people can see it's failure. I mean, I would like to meet the person who looked out over the United States today and say, well, that one's working well, right? What we need to do now, the job is, people don't like what's happening now, but they are understandably afraid of the alternatives, right? So what we need to do is explain to people what the alternatives look like in practice, that it's not the things they're afraid of, you know, that decriminalization and legalization don't mean, you know, your kids can go into a store and buy drugs. In fact, quite the opposite. It would be harder for your children to get drugs in an environment where they're controlled by licensed legal businesses. Do not care about... Drug dealers are not checking ID, right? It's about, explains to people what the alternatives look like in practice and how approaches based on love and compassion work so much better than ones that don't. You know, for 100 years, we've been singing war songs about people with addiction problems. We should have been singing love songs to them all along. I couldn't agree more. Johann, thank you so much. Thank you so much. You know, I wanted to... We could go on for a number of hours. This is wonderful to talk to you and wonderful to have you wisdom, you know, for my audience. Thank you so much. I'd like to bring on a close friend of mine for a moment, Daniel Franklin. Thank you, Daniel, for joining us. Thank you, Ed. Daniel, in my estimation, is what I would call a dream maker. William Butler Yeats, a great poet and author, wrote in the early 1900s that dreams and dreams begin responsibilities. And dreams begin responsibilities. And the essence of that is that when we dream, if we look to our dreams, we can find what we are responsible for in our lives. And I think Daniel, to me, personifies that. Daniel dreams of a better world and ferrets out of the dream his responsibility to make it so. And he does that. So thank you, Daniel, for being on our show. And thank you for helping to make the world a better place. Thank you so much, Ed. It's an honor to be back on ARC with you and to be joined by Johann, who has really influenced my beliefs and approaches to working to helping people overcome their challenges. As you noted, I'm a dreamer. I dream of a time when people with substance use disorders, people who use substances and have co-occurring conditions, people with medical conditions and their family members aren't treated with stigma that prevents them from having the basic things that they need in life to be healthy and happy and prosperous like medical care, employment and housing. I dream of a time when people are treated with dignity and respect and when we leave room in our hearts and minds for what they've been through that contributed to them having the struggles that they do. And that we leave room in our hearts and minds to not treat them punitively and with prejudice. Ultimately, it's not just individual people that we need to change, but the environments, the lived environments, the communities that people live in. And finally, I dream of a time when people have access to all of the supports and services that they need without judgment about what they choose to use or don't. While we have a long way to go, that's what we're trying to build in the Lamoille Valley to inspire elsewhere. Jenna's Promise and Recovery Vermont and many other partners are central to this effort and vision to reduce stigma, to reduce barriers to care, and to reshape communities to care for people more holistically. With that said, I want to ask you, Johan, what have you seen or learned in your travels and your research that gives you hope that we can turn the tide in the opioid epidemic and the addiction epidemic? What would you say to someone looking for a reason to be optimistic and believe that we can make a difference? Yeah, I really admire the work you're doing, Dan, and you should be really proud of it. I would say to them, I've been to places that had crises as bad as this, and they totally turned it round. And we know how to do it. This isn't rocket science. This isn't science fiction. We know how to do it. At the moment, the United States is copying the places that have disastrously failed when it comes to drug policy. What we could do is copy the places that have succeeded, right? And the places that have succeeded have done exactly what you are building here on the ground, Dan, which is approaches based on love, compassion, restoring order. You know, that's the key. We know this, right? There's some problems in life where you have to figure out what the solution is and then fight for it. We've done the first bit. We know what the solution is, right? It's not magic bullet. We still have problems in those places, but there's been such an enormous fall in those problems. So we've got to copy the places that have succeeded, which is exactly what you're doing, and we've got to fight. Copy of the places that have succeeded. Yeah. You know, such a difficult thing, it seems, for us to do to admit that what we're doing is not working and someone has figured out what to do and to begin to do it. It seemed incredibly invested in the war on drugs. It was 2013, the Obama administration officially ended the war on drugs and began a public information campaign to teach people that addiction is a disease and people need a treatment and people do recover. 2013, it's nine years ago, but it seems like the troops haven't gotten the message that the war on drugs is over. So I would argue it's good that they stopped using the language of the war on drugs, but they didn't really change the substance of it very much. If you still criminalise people for having addiction problems, in what sense have you really ended the war on drugs, right? Or if they still have to go to armed criminal gangsters to get their drugs as well, I would say you still haven't ended it. So it's good that they use more compassionate language. They did make some real changes that were very small steps in the right direction. I don't want to say there was no difference. That would be wrong. But these changes are happening very... Look at the vote in Oregon, to move towards a much more Portuguese model. That would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Unthinkable, right? So there's already these big changes that are happening, but we've got a hell of a lot further to go. And it's also about healing the... Partly it's about dealing with drug policy and partly it's about a much bigger project of actually healing society. Bruce Alexander, who did the Rat Park experiment, says, you know, we talk all the time in... I know this is very close to your heart as well. We talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery and that's hugely valuable. But we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just as individuals, but as a group. If you look at... Think about... And it's not the only fact, to by any means, but think about loneliness. Going into the pandemic, 42% of Americans agreed with the statement, no one knows me well, right? I'm sure at the end of the pandemic that's even higher, right? Now, what does it mean to have a society where almost half the population feels that no one knows them well, right? That's an extraordinary level of loneliness and isolation. So it's partly about dealing with drug policy, which is hugely important. And partly it's about dealing with these deep underlying factors in the society that are, you know, signs of a kind of spiritual and social sickness that we need to deal with. So it's about both those parts of it. You know, when you're speaking about ending the war on drugs, and I believe fervently that that's what has to happen, we have made progress in Vermont, especially right here in Chittenden County. There was our mayor, our state's attorney, and our attorney general and our police chief conspired to not press charges against people who possessed Buprenorphine that was not prescribed to them. So it was illegal for them to possess it, but they were not going to be prosecuted for possessing it because we recognized that they were possessing it to treat themselves. And that conspiracy spread to the state legislature which passed law that enacted that into law. And that set is a beautiful move forward that we've made right here in Vermont, right here in Chittenden County. We have an attorney general, T.J. Donovan, who's come out publicly in favor of supporting overdose prevention sites. Our Chittenden County state's attorney, Sarah George, in favor, our mayor, Weinberger, in favor. So there's the beginning, there's this like, it's like almost a sprout. You know, it's gaining strength and growing. But the environment itself is not welcoming it. And I wonder if you have, I think that you tend toward like radical action. I don't hear you, you know, hesitating to really support that, like Van Du, the Stonewall riots. You've got to fight at every level, right? So if you think about something like the war on drugs which is so pervasive and so harmful, you've got to have, you know, people got to fight at individual communities in their workplaces. You've got to have some people who work inside the system, you know, lobby. At every level you've got to have those people. So it's not a, you know, different people have different temperaments and prefer different kinds of action. But I think we've got to fight at every single level in this, if we're going to get where we want to go. Yeah. And you see that also. I mean, you're in the legislature. There's little pockets of interest. There's pockets of support. There's pockets of forward thinking people. How do you, how do you maximize that? What do you, what do you do in your relationships with these people? It's a lot of it is education. And, you know, as Johan was talking about earlier, is helping people to realize that their worst fears are not going to come true. But I also, earlier you were talking about in Vancouver, there was a person who eventually sacrificed his own career, probably knowingly, for the greater good, chose a controversial stance that saved countless lives, but lost his career. And time and time again in Vermont and elsewhere, we've seen situations, even with passing civil unions in Vermont in recent decades, where it not only costs legislators their seats, it costs the majority for the party that brought that around. So I think education is critical. It's also helping people to realize how serious of an issue this is, how much it affects us all. And ultimately, we have to take bold measures that may cost us something and believing that it's worth it. Exactly, that's the, you know, that great line Lyndon Johnson said when he was president and he was passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and they said, oh, you'll lose the South. And he said, what's the goddamn point of being president? You don't do something, right? So I think it's partly encouraging people at the top to be braver. And also partly, you know, sometimes you'll get brave politicians and that's really valuable. And the writer Rebecca Solnit says, you know, politicians mostly are going to be a weather vane and it's our job to be the weather, right? You think about gay rights. Actually, that didn't happen because some politicians were brave at the top. It happened just because ordinary people pressured them, the culture changed and over time, you know, we got to where we are. So I think you've got to have both. We want to encourage politicians to be brave and we want to pressure them to be brave. Elizabeth Warren always says, you know, in politics you don't get what you don't fight for, right? And there are people who agree and disagree with her specific policies. But I think she's right on that. You don't get what you don't fight for. We've got to fight for it. And if we fight for it enough, we'll get it. But you're absolutely right. We need more politicians like you. I know that's not what you were saying. Like, specifically you need me, but it's not like you were bigging yourself up. You don't get what you don't fight for. That's my takeaway. We're getting ready to wind the show down. And what a pleasure to have you on, Johann. What a pleasure to have you on, my favorite person. I picked this quote from Lost Connections. I'll read it and then maybe you can elaborate on it a little bit. Quote, this is you talking to, I think, your 16-year-old self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you and find a way to connect with them and build a home with these people. A place where you are bonded with one another and find meaning in your lives together. We've been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home. Yeah, I think that, you know, the Persian poet Rumi said, you know, the wound is where the light enters you. I'm sure Leonard Cohen, who loved Rumi, was thinking about years later when he said, you know, he was cracking everything as how the light gets in. And I think, you know, it's hard to see anything good in the scale of the tragedy that's happening that you were describing at the start, Ed, and that you're working on every day, Dan. The one good thing about it, and this is not, as you both know much better than I do, it's not just the overdose crisis, the suicide crisis, the enormous depression crisis. One in three middle-aged women in this country is taking a chemical anti-depressant at any given time. Even more depressed than not taking them. The one thing you can, the one good thing about that is it's basically impossible to deny that all the alarms are going off. It's impossible to deny that something big is happening and something is really wrong and we need to really change something, right? I've yet to meet the person who says things are going well and nothing to see here, let's move along, right? That'd be a very odd person who said that. So the good thing about the scale of the suffering is it gives us lots of points of connection with each other, lots of points where the, lots of wounds where the light can enter us. And so I feel like the opportunity for us to connect over our shared pain is really profound right now. And that is a well of discontent that we can activate to build change. But we have, one of the things that blocks that, as you were saying before, is stigma. At the moment, lots of people feel this pain, I think, well, there's something wrong with me. I screwed up, right? It's my fault. And it's about saying, well, what a funny coincidence that so many people screwed up at exactly the same time. It responds to exactly the same forces, right? So it says, well, this isn't your fault. This isn't some flaw in you. This is a flaw in the environment that we've built and together we can change that environment, right? So it's about explaining to people that they can release their shame. They can put that somewhere else. In fact, there are people who should be ashamed that they built the system that did this to us, right? That mostly the war on drugs and other factors as well. You know, we can connect through this pain and use that as a point of strength. And as Hemingway said, war breaks everyone, but afterwards you're strong in all the broken places. And I think that's true of the war on drugs as much as any other war. We can be strong in all the broken places if we build the solutions together. Yeah. That's beautiful, Johann. And it makes me think of... When we hear people with addiction are described as weak, immoral, and sometimes I think the only weak and immoral thing about people with addiction is the way we respond to them. We're weak as a culture. We're immoral, immoral as a culture. And I think a lot of our suffering emanates from us on some level knowing that. We're not really living the way we should. So when you say that our pain is something that can unite us, it's that pain that can unite us and kind of move us as a culture to connecting with each other, like you're advocating, connecting with each other around doing something better, becoming better as individuals and as a culture. It's almost like people with addiction or the people considered the least of us are offering us the opportunity to respond to them in a way that elevates us. And we're just hesitating to do that. So I couldn't agree with you more. I remember this quote that Trey Anastasia was sharing with me. It was one of the transformative moments in his treatment and his recovery, Trey Anastasia from the band Fish. And he said that the nurse told him, we're not bad people trying to become good. We're sick people trying to become well. And how that really inspired him to let some of that shame and guilt and so forth go and to focus on getting well. I think all of us are sick people trying to get well. Yeah, you know, there's this line, the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti said, it's no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society. And actually, in a way, it's building what you're saying. You could almost see people with addiction problems as like canaries in the coal mine, right? They're experiencing more sensitively the factors that are actually weighing on almost everyone in this culture, right? The lack of their needs being met, particularly my god, the last two years, right? So yeah, I think that we can see this in a richer way. And the things that are making some people addicted and making some people depressed and making some people anxious and making some people just less happy and fulfilled than they could be. And so dealing with the things that are driving addiction can also deal with the things that are making so many of us feel so lousy. Yeah. Well, I can't be any more happy than to have you on the show, to have had you on the show. It's been a real pleasure to me. Oh, totally my pleasure. Thank you. Yes, and Daniel, and I'm sure for the viewing audience, this has been a real treat. So I'm hoping, you know, one day that maybe you'll come back and be on the show again and spread your wisdom to the audience and it's been really great to have you here with us. It's been a joy to be with you. Thank you for all the work you're doing. It's been amazing. Right.