 you have critics like Michael Schellenberger, who I think makes a very powerful case that we're not doing what Portugal did, and instead we have a disaster unfolding that is likely to blow back on those of us who wanna see the drug laws liberalized. Zach, can we run that clip? I think you could get rid of drug dealing or drug use without a severe curtailment of our civil liberties, which nobody, not even the most fascist really in our society would support, but you can disallow open drug scenes, which is the homeless encampments. You can disallow open air drug dealing. It's hard, but it is, we do know how to do it, which is that you basically suppress any, if you see one dealer and one addict making a sale on the street, it's not a priority for police. But once it becomes known, and part of the problem is that like addicts, if you live in Cleveland, like you know that San Francisco is a place that you can go to and use heroin openly and freely on a low cost. And so when you shut that open air drug scene down and open drug dealing down, it massively improves the security of the neighborhoods. So this speaks to a fear that I've seen a lot even when we were mentioning we're gonna have this conversation. It's been expressed in the comments that if you decriminalize all drugs in America, every city is gonna turn into San Francisco or Portland and there's gonna be tense cities everywhere. So does that need to be part of the conversation with drug decriminalization? And how do you address that? Well, I mean, yeah, it was something that Michael Schellenberg was saying, when it comes to the issue about the open air drug markets, that's one conversation. And then it comes to what do you do about all the people who are using drugs and others? And that's where Michael is ultimately incredibly disingenuous, full of shit recommending policies that are internally incoherent and all this sort of stuff and playing on people's ears around and stuff. So I think that when it comes to, like Michael's coming out against, Michael Schellenberger became a leading opponent to safe injection sites, right? The supervised consumption rooms. That just seems the opposite of what he's talking about about public drug use. What we know, based upon decades of evidence from 60 cities around the world throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, et cetera, is that when you open up a safe injection site, it was now called an overdose prevention center, supervised consumption room, right? That basically, which are essentially needle exchange programs with a back room and a nurse where people can't get their drugs there, but they can bring in drugs they've obtained elsewhere and then use them there. What you find in the evidence is first of all, it eliminates overdose fatalities, right? There has not been, there have been, I think tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have now around the world had suffered an overdose in one of these facilities, not one of whom has died. Never mind the people who would have died out on the streets, right? Secondly, what it does is it enables people to begin to improve their health, right? There's a kind of quiet place where they can be, right? Where they're not on the streets, right? Where they're behind and they can get a cup of coffee, maybe wash their clothes, maybe talk to a counselor, you know, and have a safe place to use their drug and then chill out somewhere, right? Thirdly, the evidence shows that they significantly reduced the public nuisance, the open-air drug problem. You find fewer used syringes on the streets when you have a safer injection site, you see less of that kind of drug dealing because the consumption sites have an incentive to try to keep the people who come to their facilities from being involved in drug stuff on the streets, right? So though his opposition to supervise consumption sites just as antithetical to everything we're talking about, including what he and I and everybody else agrees with, which is that you can't allow open-air drug markets. Now the question about open-air drug markets, that's a different one. You know, and that's something where I look, for example, at what happened, another European model, they called it the Frankfurt model beginning 30 years ago where they had a major problems in open-air drug dealing and drug using in some of the parks in Frankfurt and other words. And what the mayor did was basically set up a Monday morning group where she had to head a police, the head of prosecution, the head of health services, the head of social services, the head of housing services and a few of the top people. And at that meeting, it was like, okay, what's the focus here? And the police would say, well, we're thinking of having a little crackdown on this neighborhood there. You know, and then the quite mayor would say, well, so what are we gonna do with the people that you're picking up? And then it would be, well, can housing take them? Can this take them? It was a coordinated policy of the sort that for example, Mayor London Breed in San Francisco has totally abdicated, has totally failed, right? It's a nobody, I mean, I was just in San Francisco last week, you look at the open air scenes going on there and it's unsightly, it's problematic, nobody wants to accept that. You look what happened in Europe and I think somewhat this happened in New York as well. A lot of that, remember New York used to have big open air drug markets, right? Part of what happened was a policing strategy which pushed people off the streets. I mean, a de facto policy that said that if drug use or even selling is happening behind closed doors and we're not getting complaints, it's not open air, it's not messing with a sense of community security, we're not getting complaints from neighbors, then that becomes a low priority for us. The key to dealing with open air drug markets is not getting rid of drug use, because you can't do that or you can only try to reduce it through other programs. The key is pushing that stuff indoors in ways that don't harm the rest of the community, right? That's the, in Rotterdam they called it the Rotterdam like dealer program or something where the police knew that's what you had to do, right? And then the other thing is distinguishing in policing among the problematic people involved in dealing and the less problematic or what I would call the distinction between the asshole dealers and the non-asshole dealers. If somebody, if you got a guy running a local bodega and under the table, they're selling a little heroin or cocaine or whatever to their local, the same people who shop in their stores. It's a kind of under the table, it's quiet. They know their customers are not selling to kids. Basically from a policing perspective, you wanna basically turn a blind eye to that stuff. Conversely, if somebody's out there on the streets and they're hawking this stuff or they're harassing people walking by or they're making people feel unsafe or they're selling to kids or things like that, that should be a number one priority of the cops. The cops should be stopping those people. They should be arresting those people. And if those people don't wanna take some, accept some kind of helping service, then those people need to be put off the streets in a serious way. Schellenberger's approach is idiotic because he takes a real problem about public drug use where we need real solutions and then he does something like opposing safe injection sites which is the opposite of what you'd wanna be doing in order to deal with open air drug use. When you look at say the way Portugal who pioneered this policy 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, they didn't say let's set up the treatment first and then do that. They do the two things simultaneously. You end the criminalization of possession and you're changing the system's approach as well. So you do both of those sorts of things. There's no place in America, whether it's Oregon and California or even wealthy cities that have fully enough access to treatment. These things can be expensive. One thing about harm reduction is that, people talk about we need quote unquote treatment beds. Most people with a drug problem don't need a treatment bed and treatment quote unquote beds are expensive, very, very expensive. You wanna reach people and hopefully be able to help them. Thanks for watching that excerpt of a live stream that Zach Weismiller and I did with Ethan Natelman, late of the Drug Policy Alliance about legalizing all drugs. If you wanna watch another excerpt, go here. If you wanna watch the full conversation, go here and come back next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time because every week we've got a live stream with another great guest that you're gonna be into. Thanks for watching.