 Here we go, folks, happy Thursday. I am Nick Gillespie. I'm an editor-at-large. I am an editor-at-large at Reason Magazine. I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Zach Weismuler, and this is our weekly Reason livestream. We are talking today with Ethan Natelman. He is the founder and former head of the Drug Policy Alliance. He was a political science professor at Princeton University in a distant life and a very different America. Ethan, thank you for talking to Reason today. Now, it's my pleasure, Nick, and good to meet you, Zach. Good to meet you, too. We're gonna be talking about our subject for the next hour, hour and a half, is legalize all drugs. Nobody is better positioned to talk about that better qualified than Ethan Natelman. We live in a world that is where we've been waging war on drugs, on illegal drugs, illicit drugs the government calls them. Going back, at least, to the very early 70s with Richard Nixon when he talked about a war on drugs, but the war on drugs in America actually goes back to the colonial founding if we wanna get kind of really historical about it with all kinds of laws about imbibing tobacco and alcohol and all of that. We're gonna be talking, in the 20th century, laws starting getting passed in the early part of the century in order to curb use of certain kinds of narcotics and various patent medicines and things like that. In the 30s, we saw a banning of marijuana typically in all of these things. And I think most of these people know. Most people watching know that drugs would be associated with some kind of subgroup that was not liked. It could be Negroes, cocaine Negroes. The New York Times used to write a lot about in the teens and 20s. Marijuana was identified with Mexicans, LSD in the 60s with young people. But you identify bad drugs with bad people and then seek to control them. Ethan, can you talk about what's been happening over, let's say, since the mid 90s, since 1996 when California first legalized medical marijuana. A few years later, it has legalized recreational marijuana as have more than a dozen states. Where are we in the drug war? And I apologize, I'm speaking in Lower Manhattan. So the occasional, you know, large truck. We'll probably hear police sirens and a couple of screams of people. But Ethan, give us the measure of where we are in terms of the drug war, circa 2023. Who's winning, who are the combatants and are we winning or losing the drug war? Sure, sure, Nick. Well, let me just start off by saying I should probably move the upper west side. It's much quieter up here. We rarely hear those sirens and all sorts of things. That's because it's dead. That's, I mean, it's a graveyard. It's a cemetery. Yeah, yeah, but Central Park, Riverside Park, you're stuck down in the middle of all that concrete. I didn't move to New York in order to hang out in fake nature, but please continue, sir. It's all a matter of balance, right? So anyway, the answer is, Nick, I mean, I think there's definitely been significant progress since the 90s, but obviously a long way to go. And I'm talking both U.S. internationally. I mean, obviously the most dramatic transition has been with cannabis, right? I mean, when I got going this in the late 80s, you know, there were, marijuana was not legal anywhere for anything, not medical, not anything. And maybe 28% of the country thought we should legalize it and barely 50% thought we should legalize it for medical. And beginning in 1996, with the ballot initiative in California and going up to the present, you know, we're now at a point now where over 65% of Americans say make marijuana legal, you know, something like 90% say make it legal for medical purposes. You're even getting a majority of Republicans in many states and certainly among young Republicans. There's a sense of inevitability, right? I mean, you have went over, well, we're half the country now has legal access to marijuana. I mean, you know. And about half of all Americans have tried marijuana at least once in their lifetime. Yeah, half of all adult Americans are over the age of 16 or whatever. But the thing that's remarkable about that, of course, is that we did it in the United States. I mean, because you think about it, we were the evil empire of the global war on drugs for the last 100 years. And yet nonetheless, the same country which had the most oppressive drug policy of any democratic society and criminal justice policy in the history of democratic societies, in which has been the global champion and proselytizer of the war on drugs, we nonetheless became the world leader when it came to legally regulating cannabis first for medical purposes and then more broadly. And I think that was because we pursued, you know, a very sort of disciplined and thoughtful strategy about putting medical marijuana first. I think we're aided by the fact that our opponents, the drug czar's office, the federal government, the DA were so extreme in sort of mocking the medical value of marijuana that they essentially lost any sort of credibility they had even with people in the center. So the marijuana reform has been absolutely dramatic. There's obviously too many arrests still going on. You know, it's bizarre that even, I remember in New Jersey, which is legal as a year or two ago, even as you had a substantial majority of New Jersey and saying, let's do it already, let's legalize. And they just couldn't quite get it through legislature. Nonetheless, the police were arresting more and more people from marijuana possession every year. So you still have a problem, especially in the South and some other states of significant marijuana arrests. There is that racial bias that sort of just woven into the DNA of marijuana policy all around the country. So that's there, but monumental success, something that people could not have been predicted, I don't think 15 years ago or so. The second area, in terms of reducing the role of the drug war mass incarceration, we've had a lot of progress there as well. I mean, the war on drugs was the cutting edge of the movement towards mass incarceration in 1980s and 90s. It was the same driving things. Places like New York, D.C. and New Jersey, 40 to 50% of all new commitments to prison back in those days were for drug law violations. You know, but you get to the end of the century, early 20, you know, early 2000s and basically, you're talking about a half a million people out of a total incarcerated population of 2.2, 2.3 million, are there on drug law violations where that's the first charge. And then if you add in all the things where it's a secondary charge or you add all the things where people are being violated for all in probation but not being counted as a drug offender when they're reincarnated, all the people getting caught up in violent struggles between drug dealers and getting involved, you know, getting put in for homicide or assault, you know, all the people stealing to support their habits, which are more expensive because they're illegal. So we've now taken that number down. I don't know the exact numbers, but the numbers locked up on for drug law violations has really dropped very substantially from that half a million. And it's not been seen as the driving element in mass incarceration now for at least a few decades. So- Can you talk a little bit the other place where there's a lot of movement in the past decade or so and certainly just in the 2020 elections, which 20, excuse me, midterm 2020, well, 2020 and 2022, but the decriminalization or the loosening up of laws related to mostly plant-based psychedelics, so things like mushrooms. And there's also, you know, legal movement to make MDMA and psilocybin, the psychoactive agent in mushrooms available in certain kinds of medical clinical trials and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about kind of what's happening on the psychedelic? Sure, sure. I mean, and truth is, Nick, the other area I was gonna mention was the third area of harm reduction, but we can get back to that later. That's how legal exchange problems are reduced. AIDS, overdose prevention, that's the other place where we've seen significant change, but not nearly as significant as marijuana or even with reducing the role of the drug or mass incarceration. The psychedelics don't play in very much, of course, to the whole issue of mass incarceration. Relatively few people are getting arrested much less going to jail or prison. I mean, I don't know if the numbers amount to the hundreds or perhaps the low thousands nationally. Obviously, there are some major, you know, dealers and producers who have spent long amounts of time, there's the whole kind of grateful dead and I don't know, does fish have a whole psychedelic element to it, I'm not sure. But, you know, it's, you know, I mean, there's the people who are, you know, who are still getting busted, but it's a minor, minor element when it comes to the criminal justice system. What's significant there is really that there's these two tracks that you've mentioned. One is this extraordinary explosion, this psychedelic renaissance of research. You know, a lot of it funded, unfortunately, not by the government, but by private industry, which is gonna distort the way this whole thing emerges in various respects. But nonetheless, I mean, you look at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, University of California, you know, Texas, Alabama, Florida, University College, London, I mean, you name it. I mean, major research institutes looking into the potential medical, psychological benefits of psychedelics, and that was inconceivable just 10 years ago. In fact, even when I stopped running Drug Policy Alliance six years ago, we could not have imagined this sort of transition. The work that MAPS is doing, where they're probably gonna get MDMA, you know, AKA Ecstasy or Mali, which is not technically a psychedelic. It's more of a cold and impathogen, but that's likely to be approved by the FDA in the next year, year and a half or so. And then separately, it looks like psilocybin. The key ingredient in magic mushrooms may well be approved because of other efforts going forward. And I think we're gonna see that this is not gonna stop. I mean, the evidence about the benefits of these substances and dealing certainly with emotional psychological issues, but also potentially even physical issues, I mean, it really is extraordinary. And it's one reason why you have hard scientists sounding like enthusiasts when they talk about this stuff. The parallel angle is the decriminalization model, right? Basically it's the more grassroots psychedelics movement picking up on what we did with marijuana reform beginning in the 90s, which are local referendum. First at the city level, then at the state level, now in Oregon and Colorado, basically saying people should be allowed to grow their own. People should be able to use this thing in a religious or other types of things. This should not be regulated by the state. Let's just pull the state back from this. And we're not gonna open up retail sale of psychedelics, but we are gonna allow almost everything short of that. And there's a kind of radical element of that. Part of it, which I love, another part, which is kind of being politically blind to the broader political context, because we don't wanna see this stuff kind of rolling backwards. But that's been significant. In terms of people's broader consciousness, I think the major element is just that there's a reduced fear around this stuff. I mean, you and I and many other people are far more open talking about our psychedelic use. Even people who don't have some public profile on this issue, I mean, you know, the Michael Pollan's book, I mean, that's just excited, massive interest. The media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable so far. There's been relatively few kind of, you know, stories of people jumping off buildings because they were flipping out on psychedelics and thoughts they could fly. So I mean, that still lies in the future. It'll swing around again, it never really does. But I think we're a lot further along now compared to the previous psychedelic renaissance in the late 50s and early 60s, where there was also overwhelmingly positive media, a lot of excitement about scientific research, but it was not as broad-based. It didn't rest on the basis of the major marijuana reforms which provided a model. So I think we're in an area where any rollback in this area is gonna be modest. And I think there's a lot of room to still keep running forward. I wanna just very quickly point out that, you know, Michael Pollan, one of the ways that I've thought about it is Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind kind of made psychedelics, as well as, you know, weed was already okay, but it made psychedelics okay for the NPR crowd. And one of the things that's very, makes NPR much better is to listen to it while you are on psychedelics. It's not where you want it. Can we return to what you were saying at the very beginning there for a second, Ethan, about marijuana legalization and the changing attitudes towards that over time? I'm pulling up a graph here, the Gallup poll that has tracked that since 1970, you see starting at 12% around 1996, which is when the medicalization went into effect in California. You see that upward trajectory from 25% all the way to about 68%, according to the latest polling data, people who agree with legalizing marijuana. And you mentioned it's even higher when you talk about for medical purposes. I wonder, you know, since marijuana is the most, you know, popular recreational drug, aside from alcohol, are there limits to the lessons that we can infer from that when we talk about pushing decriminalization or legalization to drugs that are less popular or, you know, might have a greater risk profile? So, like, what are the lessons that you would draw from the success of marijuana legalization and what are the limits to those lessons? Okay, exactly. If to be fair, that's an excellent question, but just pull up that chart again and I want to watch just two comments about it. One is the people watching this may notice or listening, I'll describe that there was a period in the late 70s when the numbers went up to what is it, at 28% or something before the drop into 23%. And that was appearing in the late 70s where 11 states decriminalized marijuana possession where President Jimmy Carter basically called for the federal decriminalization of marijuana. There were medical marijuana kind of quasi-research statutes passing around the country. And it was the point where a lot of people thought, that was the, you know, late 70s was when I was in college, it was the period where a lot of people thought that marijuana legalization was inevitable. But I bring that up because, you know, in fact, it shows you that things can roll backwards. It also shows you that the early generation of advocates, I'm thinking especially, you know, normal played a very important role there. They kind of got ahead of themselves. They thought that getting at 28% And normal just to say normal is the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws. Yes, and it was a key in the 1970s, a very significant force in sort of popularizing the liberalization of marijuana laws. It almost kind of went under in the 80s. And then it's been out there since that time as a kind of the leading organization in terms of representing the voice of the marijuana consumer, right? Not as politically active in many places as drug policy alliance and marijuana policy project, but really a bigger reach on the social media front. But so it shows you that, you know, we have to be careful of imagining, just cause quote, unquote, every, you know, we used to say, oh, everybody, everyone in college was smoking pot. But in fact, it wasn't. It was half or 40% back in the day, you know? So we have to be careful about that. The other thing, Zach, about that on Gallup poll, if you were to take out the Gallup poll on support for legalizing gay marriage, right? You would see that the line almost is the exact same as it is for legalizing marijuana. I mean, these two are the major issues that emerged primarily out of the progressive left end of the political spectrum, but managed to cross over enough to become basically national, you know, national policy in different one way or another, right? And if you break it down a little further, you would see that the one significant difference between the two is that the marijuana legalization thing would get something like 70% of Democrats and maybe 30% of Republicans. Gay marriage would get 80% of Democrats, but maybe only 20% of legalizing gay marriage, right? Of legalized marijuana. So you'd see a little basis where we, the marijuana move was better able to cross over to the Republican conservative side than was the gay marriage thing. But this- I wanna point out because this is reason and it's a libertarian outfit, it was actually libertarians were always pushing for marijuana legalization as well as gay marriage and reason which started publishing in 1968 within the first couple of issues was espousing both of those positions. So the progressive left caught up to us, the Republicans are starting to catch up to us. Talk a little bit about in the 70s, so normal as a group is hugely important and kind of really setting the conversation for marijuana legalization. There's also cultural changes going on and what is the interplay between culture and politics when it comes to drug laws? And I guess we'll use marijuana as an example. In the 70s, you also had the rise of High Times magazine, which was not just a small magazine. It became a mass, it was selling hundreds of thousands of copies per issue. You had the rise of performers like Cheech and Chong. I mean, if you go back and listen to comedy records from the 50s or 60s, you'll hear people kind of making very coded references to getting high or smoking weed. But then suddenly Cheech and Chong was able to have top 10 albums or singles that had to do with smoking weed. What's the interplay between culture and politics when it comes to drug legalization? I mean, Nick, it's a great question. I think, first of all, I think probably limited and maybe sometimes two steps forward and three steps back. I mean, all of that popular role of marijuana and popular culture in the 70s did nothing to prevent what happened post-1979. I mean, the turning of marijuana began in the last years of Carter. There was a kind of adolescent marijuana use that had actually gone up to something like 10 to 12% of all seniors in high school were said they were smoking daily, which is a legitimate problem issue that any parent would be concerned about. Folks back then didn't have to handle that issue. These were lessons learned for the sort of next wave that I was the kind of leader of beginning in the 90s. I would say that the medical marijuana thing, that's where culture made a difference. When we look at, when we started doing the medical marijuana initiatives, and I didn't draft the medical marijuana in California, but I put together the funding and headed up the campaign because the grassroots activists who drafted it did not have the will to do that. But I'll say, then support was maybe 55%, maybe 55 to 60 nationally, maybe a little under that. And when you go into a ballot initiative, you don't want 55% approval. 55 is your baseline. You need to be 55 to think about moving forward. Right, I mean, but you would prefer to have something like 65 or 75% because you know what's going on. So that would be unrealistic on most of our issues. And the truth be told, sometimes we would get 65, 70% on another ballot initiative area, like treatment instead of incarceration, those numbers would just melt. Whereas the interesting thing about medical marijuana, we do polling and get 55%. And then you come to election day, we get the same thing, or sometimes even better. So medical marijuana tended to stay up. But I'd say that one of the most important things that I think happened in the late 90s, early 2000s, that is not really measurable is that it wasn't just our political successes. First in California, and then next few years, and Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Nevada, and Maine, and legalizing marijuana in those states, and then Hawaii, it was that the entertainment media picked up on this issue. There was a period where you could barely turn on a single TV show, whether it was a drama or comedy without having a medical marijuana episode from Merckless and a Murphy Brown to all these other sorts of things. Major movies, I mean, Susan Sarin did not do a movie unless she was smoking a joint in one way or another. So I think that entertainment culture of legitimizing of marijuana and it being used typically not by young people, not by Cheech and Chong fans, but by older people using it for medical purposes, by religion, for cancer. AIDS patients, right? I mean, because the role of medical marijuana in the way it was talked about in helping AIDS wasting syndrome seems to be- That was important. It helped broaden it out also in terms of the gay community and a range of others. But older women using marijuana to deal with chemotherapy for breast cancer, something like that. And glaucoma, you would hear a lot about. You'd hear glaucoma, but Nick, I'm really stressing that visual image of a woman who'd been, I mean, like when we had to do the ads, the TV ads for Prop 215, the Mental Coral Initiative of 96, it was a woman who had come through breast cancer or it might be her kids. It was that sort of thing. The glaucoma thing played, the AIDS wasting syndrome played. So that wasn't a place where broader culture really played the significant role. If I couldn't, just two of them, your point about the libertarians, you're right, libertarians were pivotal. Reason also, Cato, when I first started stepping on it, 87, 88, William Buckley and Milton Friedman were two of my most prominent allies. I remember speaking at Cato conferences in 1988. I remember the wonderful writer, Jacob Sulla, meeting him back in the late 80s, and he's been one of the best journalists for over 30 years on the drug issue. So libertarian, Gary Johnson, the first governor, former governor of Mexico, then is the libertarian party candidate. So libertarians and the institutes, Reason, Cato, and even the, was it Pacific Research Institute and Independence and Independent Institutes? They were putting out some of the best stuff, really smart, solid stuff, and also to their credit. This was not so prominent in the early years, but many of the libertarians in this issue, and especially the journalists like yourself, who initially was, give me legalization, or I'm not interested in all the stuff in the middle, the harm reduction, the incremental reforms. But in point of fact, many of the people from Jacob Sulla to Alan Bach, the Orange County editorialists, they really began to get into the nitty gritty of reforms and appreciate the importance of incremental reforms in advancing towards an ultimately more libertarian objective, right? Now, the other question I'll respond with Zach's earlier question was, so with marijuana legalization, what does that say for all the other drugs? And by and large, I think there was more, there was spillover in two respects. The first thing I have to say though, is even as support for marijuana legalization was going up as you showed in that Gallup poll, if you looked at the Gallup polls on support for legalizing all drugs, you saw relatively little movement in the 10 to 15% level. You could kick it up if you rephrase the question, but you didn't see a spillover in that sense. Which you did see, especially in recent years, is a spillover in probably three respects. The first one's the one that Nick mentioned before on Psychedelics. It kind of helped people ease up. It was like almost like we're asking, well, if we can legalize marijuana in the skies and fall, what's next? And Psychedelics was one of, was the next one. The second one was that when we started to, this really began actually when we almost, I say we here, not me, but the broader drug policy reform movement almost legalized marijuana in California in 2010. It lost by a few points, did much better than people expected. Two years later, Colorado and Washington become the first ones. The media covers that, not just as marijuana breaking out from the other drugs. They carry it as a kind of reaction against the war on drugs that support. So the media coverage expands the kind of broader significance of the thing. And the third one, ending, for drug policy lines for me, I'd always kind of hedge when it came to, do we want to legalize all drugs in the sense of making them legally available or over the counter the way we do with alcohol or cigarettes are now increasingly with marijuana. And I had hedge on that issue because of my own personal uncertainty because I thought it was better politics to hedge than not, but I also, I'm not a libertarian libertarian in that same way. I don't have the same confidence that that's going to lead to the optimal policy. But when it came to decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs, which was very much the European model, I mean, Portugal, but also other places, it was been part of DPA's, you know, mission since the very beginning, but nothing we could really move forward with politically. But when my successors at DPA in 2020, work with local advocates to decriminalize marijuana in Oregon and win that by a substantial margin, actually that initiative and the psychedelics legalization initiative are both on the ballot in Oregon in 2020. They're both first timers. They both win by about 55% of the vote. I mean, that is a major, major breakthrough. And by decriminalization here, well, there's a lot of details, but it basically boils down to, we don't want to put anybody behind bars for simple possession of small amounts of drugs for their own use if they're not hurting anybody else. That's the essence of decriminalization. And that one is wildly popular. No, it depends how you frame it, how you sell it. It just made it through in Oregon. When you look at the polling in other states, you're getting in the low fifties, maybe mid fifties. You're getting what we do with medical marijuana, but whereas medical marijuana had that thing that people could relate to and as I said, the older women and the shift imagery, the decrim thing, don't arrest people. Most Americans, going back even to the late 90s then, would say, we don't want to put people in behind bars if they get picked up for possession of a little bit of heroin cocaine or methamphetamine for themselves. The first couple of times, but we want to make sure we're shoving them into treatment. And if they don't quit, we're going to lock them up. And the sad thing is, is that even up to today, most Americans, it hasn't shifted that much. It's still like, well, yes, we don't want to lock them up the first time, we don't want to give them chances to give them treatment, but the notion of letting it be, like it's not anybody's business, not the government's business. And that's why Oregon was a breakthrough and one has to move very carefully in that area because the devil is in the details and you get all sorts of unfortunate opponents. Yeah, let me just very quickly, I'm sorry, Zach, let's show that slide of how different types of drug use breaks down, kind of lifetime, annual and monthly. In the past 30 days, is a kind of shorthand for a casual user. Certain drugs don't really work the same way, but if we're looking at this, this is a drug usership among Americans age 12 and older. Yeah, for the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics. Yeah, so this is government data and it's widely accepted, but 46% of Americans ages 12 and older have said they've used weed at least once in their lifetime, 18% in the past year, about 12% in the past month. But then when you start looking at things like cocaine, 14% in the lifetime, 2% in the past year, 7 tenths of 1% in the past month. LSD, only 10% of Americans say they've used it, 1% in the past year, 2 tenths of 1% in the past year. When we look at things like heroin and these numbers are remarkably stable every year. 2.3% have used it ever, 3 tenths of 1% in the past year, 2 tenths of 1% in the past month. And even the reason I bring these numbers up is that just kind of, if we can talk a little bit as we move from discussions of marijuana legalization to these other drugs, part of it is that these drugs are very uncommon. Most people have not ever used them and certainly don't, maybe they did it once and that's it. How does that factor into the way that when you're talking about decriminalizing, it's one thing to say, oh, we want to decriminalize weed, nobody should go to jail because they have a couple of joints on them. But then when you say somebody's got some heroin on them or methamphetamine, and we're not talking about Adderall or Ritalin, then it changes, right? I mean, because these are substantially, there's just like the, and now when I say culture, I don't mean like whether or not it showed up in that 70s show, but just the people's familiarity, these are very foreign substances to people. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Nick, that's basically right. So rather than just simply agreeing with you, let me just pick out a few points on some nuances here. One is that there's sometimes slight biases in those government surveys. I remember Gary Johnson, the former governor of Mexico used to make a joke. He said, if somebody calls you up in the 70s and asks you to smoke marijuana, yeah, man, of course I do, even if you didn't. Somebody calls you up in the late 80s or 90s and asks you if you smoke marijuana. You didn't say, who's calling? Who wants to know? I'm not telling you anything, right? So you have kind of an, and we're back in an era of people almost being a little ashamed to say they never smoked marijuana at times. So you get a little upward about, conversely, on the heroin cocaine stuff, we're in eras where people don't really want to reveal that. Secondly, when you're looking at drugs like heroin and such, don't forget that those surveys don't typically count people who are incarcerated. And some significant percentage of people behind bars, in fact, have used those drugs but are not there. And some significant number of people who have died of overdoses and AIDS use those drugs and they're now dead. So they kind of, you know, dead prematurely. So there may be a kind of, the numbers may actually be a little higher than you would think as a result. I think, but your point, you know, cocaine had a period, right, in the late 70s. I mean, even you mentioned high times as part of the very popular magazine, there was a point where high times was thinking of shifting towards, I think they already were focusing more on marijuana and cocaine, including it. And I think even normal was beginning to have some internal discussions back then about including cocaine in their advocacy. It was seen with some good reason as a relatively innocuous drug. The potency back in those days was more like 12% pure as opposed to that. Six years, 70, you get in subsequent decades, mostly among middle, upper middle class people who had jobs and lots of incentives to keep their drug use. Was always talked about as non-addictive. In the 70s for a long time and there were people, magazine and time life as a series of publications that doesn't really matter anymore. But going back to the 40s, I mean, was it was a, you know, the establishment of American life and they were generally pro-psychedelic, pro a lot of drug use, including people in Time Magazine, you know, they've talked to share. It would be like, oh yeah, yeah, cocaine is great, it's a pick me up, it's a fun party drug. And what's great about it is it's non-addictive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, and most people, probably 90% of people using it were not having a problem and many of those who did have a problem were able to get out of it because they had the resources they had incentives and motives. Once you move in towards, you know, people shifting not just to free-basin cocaine, but to smoking crack cocaine. When that emerges in the mid-80s and when the population of users in the media's eyes shifts very dramatically to poor black people in the cities and of the criminality involved with that and, you know, people have much fewer abilities, incentives and resources to keep their drug users under control, that's when you see a major shift. And powder cocaine, which is becoming more potent, really gets swept up in that, gets more and more demonized. And the other thing, of course, I mean, look, I'm no fan of cocaine. I've never particularly enjoyed it. You know, I probably did it a few dozen times when I was younger. Always seemed to me like drinking too much coffee and having post-nasal drip. I mean, you know, I had friends who become poets when they do cocaine and people who love it. But it doesn't bring out the best in people. It's not quite the opposite. And so that drug, I think, had a well-deserved reputation for not being a great people drug, human drug, you know. There was a reason- Maybe it's good for pets, but not for cocaine. Yeah, yeah, for pets. And, you know, one can make an argument, you know, right before sex, but for socializing and things like that, or as a work drug, you know, no, no, no, no. And in a way, if you think about it, you know, Ritalin, Adderall, you know, which are being prescribed, hadn't been prescribed for decades now in very large numbers to young, you know, to boys basically and some girls, but, you know, younger people, you know, and it's helped a lot and it's been over-prescribed as well in a lot of cases. But as I understand it, if you were to take that Ritalin Adderall pills or those other things that they're given high school kids or younger, and if you were to ground it down and smoke it or inject it, the effect would be pretty damn similar to injecting or smoking methamphetamine, you know, with all the, you know, problems of keeping your drug user in control and addiction and health and all that sort of stuff. And conversely, if you were to take that methamphetamine and make it available in five milligram pills in the way that Ritalin or Adderall is at a comparable dose, it would be pretty damn similar to the Adderall and Ritalin. So a lot of this is about the labeling of drugs. My understanding is MEF has certain properties that are a bit different, but that by and large, it has far more to do the amphetamines and other drugs, but especially amphetamines, has far more to do with the potency and the form of administration than it does with whether it's this stimulant or that stimulant. And certainly the media plays a very big role in shaping our attitudes towards particular drugs as well as drugs in general. Well, Nick, the way I like to frame it to people is, you know, imagine, you know, an editor at a local newspaper says to one of his top reporters, well, I'm gonna give you a few weeks. I want you to write for me. We're gonna do a multi-part piece about alcohol in our community. And the reporter goes out and he basically goes and he visits the 12-step programs and the rowdiest bars and the jails and all this stuff. And he comes back and he has this devastating portrait of alcohol in the local community. And the editor looks at it and goes, no, wait a second. And, you know, he goes, did you go to the vineyards that are in our community? Did you go to the high-end bars? What about the 90% of people who don't have a problem with alcohol? And then he opens up his own side draw and pulls out his own flask, right? And then he says to the guy, okay, I wanna do the same thing on methamphetamine. And the journalist goes out and he visits, you know, once again, the treatment programs, the jails, you know, what have you. And he comes back, writes his devastating portrait of methamphetamine. And the editor goes, yes, perfect, great, love it. He doesn't stop to say, well, wait a second. What about all the people using methamphetamine who aren't in the treatment programs or in jails? Who's recruiting new methamphetamine users? Cause it's obviously not gonna be people whose teeth are falling out or all this sort of stuff, right? I mean, who's doing the kind of snowball research? What academics call snowball research where you find one person in the community doing something like using meth and then you ask to meet his friends and then ask the friends to meet their friends. So you find all sorts of people who may have no contact with the treatment system or with the JL criminal justice system. So that's a fundamental bias and distortion in the way that we think about this issue and perceive this issue. It's not to give these drugs a pass. It's just to say that we see in full glory all the horrific sides of these drugs but we know almost nothing about the mass of people who are using these drugs in more modest or moderate ways or not getting in trouble or getting in trouble and out of trouble without ever coming into contact with treatment or criminal justice systems. And Ethan, you mentioned earlier that when we're talking about these drugs that have the potential to have much worse outcomes that harm reduction is really the approach that has come to the fore decriminalization and that the details of how it's done are really important. And so I'd like to dig into some of those details first at the federal level and then down at the state level and then looking at some international examples. But since this graph shows that there's been a shift at the federal level in drug policy that began during the Obama years. And the red line here shows the amount of federal drug control spending going towards supply reduction. So that is typically cracking down on drug dealers, arresting people, interdiction is what they call it. Demand reduction is the green line which just in 2016 there surpasses supply reduction and that has more to do with treatment, getting people not dependent on these drugs anymore. This is another way to look at it from the national drug control website. So that blue slice there, this is the latest federal drug control budget from 2022 which is $39.3 billion and about half of that is treatment, that big blue wedge and then the orange wedge there is prevention. So more than half now is going to treatment and prevention. The yellow wedge is domestic law enforcement and the green is interdiction. So it's still not a small number going towards kind of the traditional drug war activities. But my question, laying all that data out is has this shift at the federal level had any effect? And if so, what? Well, Zach, I mean, first of all, some of these numbers are a bit suspect, right? Because there are political reasons where even Republican governments in the past have wanted to claim that they're spending more on treatment or less on interdiction. So what gets counted has varied from year to year. You saw even in the Bush administration, you saw a drop in spending. If you pull that chart up again, you'll see a drop in spending on the enforcement side. Yeah, you see that one between 2002 to five and that I think was just a change in the way they were calculating things for political reasons, right? Now, the other question I don't know in that thing is probably the single greatest change in terms of actual dollars was that Obamacare significantly increased access to drug treatment for people, right? And because it began to provide higher levels of coverage for people who are struggling and it requires certain things. I don't know, I am assuming that that big jump in treatment money is a reflection of the Obamacare what opens up as opposed to dedicated drug treatment money, but it also could reflect the fact that, not just in Obama, but even if you think about it, under Trump, very little in the way of bipartisan legislation went through Congress and got signed by President Trump, but there were two major bills, I think in 2018 that did just that. One was one to reduce mandatory minimums on drug sentences. And the other was one to really up the level of resources for dealing with the opioid addiction issue and the overdose crisis where even Republicans were saying, let's spend some more money on this. They weren't ready to spend as much money as Democrats, but it did increase substantially. So those were the key factors, but keep in mind when you're talking about harm reduction, the federal government's been a fucking disaster. I mean, quite frankly, it wasn't until you begin to see support for harm reduction really during the Obama administration, but even he does not use the word. And the Trump administration definitely doesn't wanna use it. It's only Biden who believes in harm reduction personally, less than Obama did, who finally uses it. You know, who hires a former West Virginia drug czar who's been pro-harm reduction to some extent. They put harm reduction- Could you very quickly just define harm reduction? Yeah, harm reduction- And why is it a different and better approach to drug policy concerns? It's basically, Nick, I mean, it's typically contrasted with an abstinence only approach, right? And it's great advantage, it's two major advantages. One is it's basically just common sense, human nature, pragmatism. The other thing is that there's oodles of evidence showing that it tends to be highly effective and more effective than abstinence only approaches, right? So harm reduction really emerges around needle exchange programs and access to sterile syringes and pharmacies in order to reduce the spread of HIV-AIDS back in the 80s and 90s. And the Europeans pioneer this stuff and the US is very slow. Bit by bit, tragically slow, we basically allow a quarter million people to get infected and die, whereas if we had rapidly embraced access to sterile syringes through pharmacies and needle exchange programs when the Europeans and Australians and others did, probably well over 100,000 fewer people would have died in this country. But that's the essence of harm reduction. But it's obviously more broadly, it's a broader notion. It's the notion of, if you're gonna, people are gonna get drunk, make sure you have a designated driver. It's the notion if you're gonna play football or ride a motorcycle or a bicycle, wear a helmet. It's put the goddamn seatbelt on. It's just anything that reduces the risks and harms associated with people engaging in a potentially risky or harmful behavior. Just damn common sense. It applies in so many areas of life. If you're gonna do psychedelics, you know, don't do it at a big concert. Don't do it with strangers. Don't do it in the middle of the city. Do it with people you're comfortable with. If you're gonna do MDMA, make sure you hydrate. Make sure, you know, all the just common sense. Make sure you test your supply, all of these concepts. And as opposed to saying, you shouldn't be doing any of this. So we're not going to give you any guidance on how to do it more responsibly. The mainstream view is don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. The best way to get out of a problem is to stop, which is true on some level, but doesn't really mean very much to people who call it up in it. And the other thing is that if you do have a problem, the abstinence only approach is basically in America, it's a 12-step approach, which is if you have a problem with one drug, you have to stop using all drugs forever. And in America, we combine the 12-step approach with the coercion of the criminal justice system. So we take an ideological model of alcoholics anonymous, which has helped a lot of people, but doesn't work for the vast majority. And we attach criminal sanctions to people who can't cut it, who fall off the wagon. The harm reduction approach is, look, any, as if I'm a treatment provider, if I'm somebody trying to help, you know, I mean, the best way to say it is, with a 12-step approach, somebody knocks on your door at a 12-step treatment program. And that person says there, are you ready to stop using drugs now? Because I can't help you unless you're ready to stop using drugs. And if that person says, no, I'm not ready, or no, I don't think I can, then that staff person says, well, go away and come back when you're ready, right? And the result, of course, is that many people went away and subsequently died of an overdose or AIDS. The harm reduction approach says, listen, I'm not putting any conditions here, except if I'm gonna let you in my program, you can't be an asshole to the people here. My basic thing I know is, what do you wanna accomplish in your life? What are you trying to do? I mean, are you trying to stabilize your life? You're trying to regain custody of your kids? You're trying to get a real job? You're trying, I mean, what are you trying to do? Let's focus on what it is you wanna accomplish in your life. And then let's figure out the ways in which your drug use is getting in the way of that. And maybe stopping entirely, if you can do that, is great. But if you can't, maybe you just gotta use less. Maybe you gotta not use when your kids are around. Maybe you gotta only get high on the weekends. Maybe you gotta only do in the evenings. Maybe you gotta, you know, all the kind of, maybe you gotta ship from injecting to smoking or from smoking to an oral form, all the different ways, you know, in tobacco. I don't know if we're gonna get into this, but obviously shifting from smoking cigarettes to taking on, you know, them e-cigarettes or these heated tobacco products, vaping, you're still addicted to the underlying nicotine, but you've now reduced the risk to us by 90, 95%. And if you can move to using those pouches, you know, the nicotine pouches, the zinc and on and all these other sorts of things, snus, you know, you reduce the risk even more. It's all, that's the essence of harm reduction. The federal government has been incredibly backward and it's only now under Biden that we see them publicly embracing it. Under Obama, you saw them at the United Nations level beginning to quietly support some of this stuff. But even the drugs are was a bit reluctant. Now you see a bigger embrace, but once again, I mean, sure we'll get into this later when fentanyl comes around, it kind of changes the story and we still need harm reduction. And also the old knee-jerk impulse is, you know, let's interdict, let's lock up, let's increase penalties, let's do mandatory minimums, not just Republicans, but even the Bidens of the world, you know, even the Democratic governors of the world who just say politically, even if I know it's the wrong thing to do, I still feel compelled to say I'm gonna do it. And one of the most robust empirical findings from harm reduction seems to be what you mentioned earlier with reducing disease transmission through injectable drugs. This is an example of a very early study around Yale where they tracked all the needles in the local community and found a reduction by a third of HIV infections. And I mean, that's been replicated over the years. That's also one of the strongest findings out of Portugal, which we'll get to a little bit later. There is a critique of harm reduction that I'm sure you've heard that often comes from people who are involved with the treatment system and the rehab system. I went to Oregon after they passed measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs in the state. And this was, I think you probably agree, the most kind of the biggest step forward in that regard in any single state within America. And I talked to some of the people who were involved with that. I also talked with a treatment provider who is critical. And I just wanted to play a clip from that documentary to kick off a little bit of discussion about some of the pushback we've been seeing to decriminalization and harm reduction lately. Once again at the vanguard of reform. In February, it enacted a law ending prison sentences for all types of drug use and possession, whether it be cocaine, meth, heroin, or psychedelics. In 2019, before this new law was passed in a statewide referendum, more than 4,000 people were convicted of drug possession in Oregon. And many more cut deals with prosecutors, allowing them to avoid a conviction in exchange for supervised probation and some rehab. With the new law, not only does possession bring nothing more than $100 ticket, defendants can get them dismissed if they place just one phone call to a drug abuse assessment hotline. So far, only 29 people ticketed for possession have placed that call, according to the nonprofit that runs the hotline. The lack of accountability built into the measure, that would be my concern is that we see a bunch of money in the system that isn't having an effect. Mike Marshall, who has a personal history with alcoholism and meth use, is executive director of Oregon Recovers, which lobbies for more funding for addiction treatment and opposed measure 110. I'm worried about the person living on the street in the tent right outside this window who's smoking meth all day long and they're destroying their system. We need to have a system of care to take care of them. So there's really two issues that Mike Marshall's raising there. I'll make them separately. One is that he believes that this decriminalization was implemented without setting up a more robust treatment system first. And there's some evidence to bear out in the years that have passed since that, that passed in 2020 went into effect in 2021. And there's reports that people who want to access treatment are unable to. And so Mike Marshall says they should have flipped this. They should have funded the treatment first, set up a really robust treatment system and then decriminalized. And then his second one has to do with incentives that there's no longer a way to sort of push people into treatment by issuing them citations or whatnot. Take one or both. I mean, Zach, I mean, I'll say a number of things about this. I mean, the first one is, the notion, I mean, the people who come from an ideological perspective and believe in abstinence-only treatment, they're just gonna resist anything on an ideological basis regardless. I mean, we have dealt with resistance from the abstinence-only treatment community forever and ever and ever. And it's just something, sometimes they finally come along and there's a younger generation of people where harm reduction is just more part of the discourse and common understanding. So I think that's a matter of change. It's just gonna happen. Secondly, when you pass a breakthrough initiative like this, it's been true with every initiative we've done. It's probably true in all the other areas as well. These things don't easily get implemented. They're doing something brand new. So rolling these things out, getting it right, whether it was a medical marijuana, marijuana legalization, criminal justice reforms, treatment instead of incarceration, or take a whole range of other areas that I don't know about. But when you're doing something for the first time in a major way and you're changing a system in a key way, the rollouts are gonna be immensely challenging. I mean, to say, oh, it worked perfectly. It rolled out perfectly. It's everything we expected. That's just fantasy. It doesn't happen that way. Thirdly, when you look at, say, the way Portugal who pioneered this policy 20 years ago, nearly 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. Fourthly, 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. When that fellow you had there, Mike Marshall says, I'm worried about the people on the streets and we need to help them. That's exactly what the people who supported the initiative were saying, right? There's nothing special about that. So I think you get this old guard resistance, but the information I've seen in terms of lives being saved in terms of the money eventually getting out there and the ways intended, remember a lot of the money is coming from marijuana tax revenue. So it's not even as if taxpayers are paying, generic taxpayers are paying more. They dedicated some of the marijuana tax revenue over the objections of some of my allied marijuana performers to providing harm reduction and treatment services. So you're having a substantial increase in the state of Oregon of funding for services to help people struggling with drugs. And that's the bottom line there. Fewer people go into jail, crime not going up as a result of the initiative and more people getting help. Is it gonna be perfect? No. Is it a major transformation that sets a model for other states in the country in the same way that the European countries provided a model for what Oregon did? Yes. Zach, can we talk a little bit about the outcomes in Oregon and Portugal? Well, okay, so I mean, one of the concerns with Oregon specifically is that there has been a spike in overdoses since it was decriminalized. Hold on, I'm trying to find the slide here, number 15. Right, but Zach, the key point there, of course, is that there's been a spike in overdoses virtually throughout the entire country, regardless of whether they were pursuing more liberal policies or more crackdown policies. I mean, that's a major game changer has been fentanyl. And if fentanyl's beginning to show up or showing up in a major way in an area, fentanyl did not show up across the country all at one time, but when it shows up, remember fentanyl's special, right? Until before fentanyl emerged when people or the media would write about a heroin overdose, very few people died just from taking too much heroin. Most of what was called a heroin overdose, right? Or another opioid. You've typically involved using heroin in combination with alcohol or in combination with tranquilizer, benzodiazepine type drugs. They would have more accurately been called fatal drug combinations, right? Or accidental drug, you know, resulting from that. Fentanyl changes the game because fentanyl is 50 to 100 times the potency of heroin. And the result means that you don't need to combine fentanyl with other drugs, you just need to get that by itself and you can die of an overdose. You know, you're stopped breathing. And so when that happens, that can really change the figures substantially. The slide that I just pulled up here shows the national drug-involved overdose deaths, 1999 through 2021. And you see there's a light gray line that's way above all the other ones. That's synthetic opioids, i.e. primarily fentanyl, it says in parentheses. So that gives everyone an idea of the scope of how much fentanyl is driving the overdose crisis that we... That everybody agrees is real and substantial. But can we go back to Oregon though, because you had pulled up a slide as well that in Oregon itself, overdoses are up 20%, right? Yes. You're over a year. So, you know, Ethan, is that, you know, is that because fentanyl has shown up in Oregon now? Is it because people who drugs have moved to Oregon or is it that, you know, we have to look at decriminalization and wonder, you know, is this part of the, you know, early application of a policy that I think all of three of us certainly are in favor of? Well, I mean, one thing, one broader context I think for this is you look at a lot of the Western European countries where harm reduction has been part of overall policy in a more substantial and radical in the United States for now 30 years, and they don't have the overdose issue we have. I mean, it just doesn't exist there. And it's part of this, because it's part of our broader system. And fentanyl, of course, is also not really showing up there except in a few kind of, you know, few cities. So that's first. Secondly, the initiative passed in November 20. Rolling this thing out, we're barely two years, unless it's years, it's the implementation of this stuff. It's far, far too early to evaluate something or hold a change initiative, which you can see are immediate things. We're also, you see fewer arrests happening, for example. That's obviously going to be a direct reaction to law. If you see more people going to get help because there are more resources available, that's obviously going to be a result of the law, right? If you see shifts in tax revenue or how tax, those are obviously direct results. But when you want to look and try to evaluate this in terms of the broader health of the drug-using population, isolating that out, the early rollout stage of an initiative from the consequence of fentanyl being out and about all over the place, nevermind the impact of the pandemic and the effect that that had on higher overdose rates and drug use rates and all this sort of stuff, there's too many variables. So I think the people who want to try to attack it, I've seen DPA, Drug Policy Alliance and others, put out some pretty good reports basically showing the ways in which this has generally worked and been quite effective. And my understanding is that, the public is remaining generally supportive in Oregon of the initiative. I remember in Colorado, in Oregon, when they started, in Colorado, Washington, when they started rolling out, people were going, ah, this doesn't work, it doesn't work, we can't do it. It was all about the rollout issues. But when actually you checked with the public, the public was saying, no, we felt we did the right thing. The public support remains strong. So I mean, another line of criticism that I've heard from Mike Marshall, but also others is that Oregon should have learned more from Portugal because Portugal did a better job at first setting up like a more robust treatment system. Here's some numbers out of Portugal, by the way. So 2000 is when decriminalization went into effect. The red line at the bottom is Portugal. This is death, drug deaths per 100,000. The blue line is EU. You see Portugal plunging in drug deaths after decriminalization. And then in recent years, probably due to fentanyl, there's been an uptick. I think actually probably not fentanyl. It may be more stimulating drugs coming in and things like that. And that also happens when Portugal goes through that economic crisis. So there are other issues going on there. But it is true that Portugal still has less than half the number of drug overdose deaths than other countries in the EU. So it is, by any measure, it would be considered if you want to be, if you're gonna have a drug overdose, you're gonna have less than half as many in Portugal than in any of the other EU countries. Yeah, and just to run through some of the, so this is the prisoner sentence for drug offenses, plunges in Portugal over time. HIV diagnoses attributed to injecting drugs, which we talked about earlier, plunges dramatically. You know, the critics who are pro decriminalization, but skeptical of what Oregon is doing, points to reports like this. This is a report from the Swedish government, basically, that studied Portugal and said that it's not just the abolition of penalties for using and possessing small quantities of drugs. There was also efforts regarding rapid and effective treatment and also coordination between various healthcare interventions. You know, both use and possession for personal use are still prohibited, but the penalties been moved from the legal system to an administrative one. And so they use that to, if you get caught in possession of drugs, they can send you before this commission of a social worker, a psychologist, and a lawyer. And then they decide, you know, does this person have a substance abuse problem? If so, we're gonna recommend them treatment. And then if they don't accept that recommendation, they can actually issue a sanction. So it's more of a heavy-handed approach. And, you know, as a libertarian, it's not the most pleasing thing to hear, but it's something to grapple with the fact that that is kind of the highest profile example of all drug decriminalization has a little bit more of a heavy-handed system. What that will say- And if I may, before you start, I mean, again, going back to the libertarian side of things, and when I think of people like Thomas Saas, the great critic of medicalization of society and whatnot who resisted medical marijuana on the grounds that it was, all it was doing was increasing the ability of the state to police people's personal lives, things like that, we need to recognize those of us who are pure legalizers, that Portugal and most of Europe and most of the success stories, they actually, they haven't legalized drugs in any way, shape, or form that we tend to have a discussion in the United States. And so a black market also persists in Portugal because they have not legalized it. So yeah, so guys, a bunch of points on that. I mean, firstly, essentially the first report about the Portugal model 15 or more years ago in the United States was published by Cato. And interestingly- And written by Glenn Greenwald. And written by Glenn Greenwald, of Intercept fame in Brazil and all this sort of stuff. And in it, he basically emphasized the decriminalization and gave short shrift to the kind of increased access to helping services, right? And then there were some corrective reports came out and one of the leading academic reports were by a British academic Alex Hughes and an Australian Kate, Alex Stevens and a Australian researcher, Caitlin Hughes, published in British General Criminology where they did a much more in-depth analysis and they pointed out, it was really both pieces of this, right? The second thing of course is that, it's remember, Zach, it's not about these commissions. They're not about sending people to treatment. I mean, what they're basically doing is figuring out, how do we need, how can we help this person? Does this person need to go to an employment counselor? Does this person, you know, they would say a lot of people who are committed drug users, if you say go to treatment, they don't want to go to treatment. But if the person on the commission goes, hey, listen, I see those marks on your arms. It looks like you're getting some abscesses, some infections there. Why don't you go and see a doctor to have that, your abscesses checked out? And then a drug user will go to a doctor rather than a treatment person. And then the commission person calls the doctor and says, by the way, here's what's going on. When you look at the guy, you know, it's a more subtle approach. It's focused not on achieving abstinence and more on helping people get their lives together, be less of a burden and troublesome to the community and get their stuff together, right? They might reach out to their families. They might do things like that. So understand it's not about, we almost in America almost reflexively say, treatment, treatment, treatment. But a lot of what it is is about, you know, I mean, look, the vast majority of people who quit smoking in America didn't go through treatment programs and, you know, cigarettes are more addictive than heroin, right? So, I mean, you know, it's understanding this sort of thing. And then thirdly, you know, to Nick's point about, you know, Thomas Soss and he and I became quite friendly in the 90s and, but we would debate one another. And I remember when we won the Medical Marijuana Initiative, Tom was my leading critic. This is going to be the medicalization of marijuana. You're empowering the doctors. They're worse than the prison guards and all this sort of stuff. And I was like, Tom, you're crazy, man. I mean, first of all, the whole system, the federal government is not going to allow people, doctors write prescriptions for these things. It's a much more informal thing. Secondly, the medical system is so much less pernicious than the criminal justice wanted. And thirdly, the medical system is required and ultimately to, you know, they have to accept certain scientific, science-based arguments in a way the criminal justice system doesn't. That can just all be about public sentiment. So it's more vulnerable to crumbling. And in the end, you know, I was right. He was wrong. And I think in this case- You're alive, he's dead. So you won, it's across the board. No, no, Nick, I wouldn't give Tom that much credit here. Even if he was still alive, I'm still right, he'd still be wrong because ultimately the fact was, look at the marijuana thing. The whole medicalization thing opened it up towards border legalization without resulting in anything that Tom would have feared. And I think the Portugal model, it's very much the same thing. Doctors play only a modest role in this stuff. It's not medicalization. It's not only even that heavy-handed, right? I mean, if you don't want a ration to get help. I have more sympathy for Saz's concerns about the medicalization or, you know what, Michelle Foucault, it was also friendly with Tom Saz in the 70s when Foucault was at the University of Buffalo and Saz was at the New York State Medical Center in Syracuse, you know, worrying about different forms of kind of large controls over individual lives. But I agree with you, Ethan. Zach, could we show, you know, in a more like American context, one of the problems here, and this has a lot to do with drug policy, is the rollout in reforms? And what we have seen in places like San Francisco is where there has been decriminalization or whether it's, you know, de jure or de facto, decriminalization of drugs, you get open-air drug markets and things like that. And then 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 want to 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, you know, 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 were 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, you know, 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 Michael Schellenberg saying, you know when it comes to the issue about the open-air drug markets, right? 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 sears around this stuff. So I think that when it comes to, you know like Michael's coming out against, say 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 public drug use. What we know based upon decades of evidence from 60 cities around the world throughout Europe now Australia, Canada, et cetera is that when you open up a safe injection site or was now called an overdose prevention center or 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 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 and have a safe place to use their drug and then chill out somewhere, right? Thirdly, the evidence shows that they significantly reduce 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 dealings 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 is 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 with 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 of 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 taught 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 cracked down 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? And 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 shopping 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. If I may just from a recent live stream we had Bill Bratton on who was police commissioner in New York in the mid 90s widely credited with reducing crime here and again under Bill de Blasio from 2012, 2014 or 2014, 2016. And he was complaining in terms Ethan that you are kind of replicating here of where he was saying the problem in New York is that people are making marijuana deals all over the place there's food carts everywhere selling marijuana there's people on the streets. And I was like, well, it's legal here but they haven't rolled out the retail. So it has to happen on the street because they haven't opened up storefronts like if, you know, when's the last time you saw somebody buying liquor on the street? It's like, you don't have to do that. You go into a live store, you go into a liquor store, yeah. You know, Nick, it's very tough for me and I really kind of avoid commenting publicly because the fellow Chris Alexander who's running the New York state office of cannabis management is very good guy. He used to work for me at Drug Policy Alliance. You know, my organization Drug Policy Alliance you know, really led, played a major role in New York adopting probably the most, you know, thoughtful, progressive, well thought out system. Best law in the country, but the implementation. Well, the implementation is, and so, you know, now just last week I saw that a bunch of cannabis companies are suing the New York state for, you know that going beyond what the law requires in ways that actually, you know, bordering being illegal so I have to see where that happens. And it's been hobbled because somebody sued, you know that was unrelated to the whole issue here and that's prevented the rollout of Brooklyn and a whole bunch of upstate counties. So it's a complicated thing. Every state has had problems with rollout. And remember also, when we legalized alcohol in 1933 eliminated alcohol prohibition and most states banned it. I mean, most states allowed it then. It's not as if you switched your fingers everybody was going illegal liquor outlets. You still had well-established criminal networks that did not want to give up their markets. You had the organized crime trying to shift into the distribution side of things when they're no longer involved in production. You know, you had the legal market now trying to compete with the illegal market by for example, offering corn whiskey which had not been a thing before prohibition but now people have developed a taste for it, right? I mean, these things, I once started researching an article when I was still teaching in Princeton whatever happened to the black market in booze and it didn't just poof go away, it takes time. And I think if you go 10 years forward the black market in campus is gonna be substantially smaller than it is now. And remember, it's part of the black market if some of that black market is just people growing their own which is legal in most states and sharing with friends or maybe even selling a little that's not a problem, that's not an issue. What we're talking about in New York is not even what they call the legacy people involved in the market for 10, 15, 20 years and are like, are they gonna make the transition or can they do the regulatory requirements which is tough for them. The bigger problem is a lot of outlets which were not involved in the marijuana business for 10 or 15 years that in this kind of gray area window we have between full legalization and implementation they're taking advantage of a lot of factors including the slowness of the state and giving licenses to entities that are ready to up and go. And I mean, that stuff's gonna work itself out. It's the same thing when Zach was showing Oregon these are all rollout issues, you know Pete, the world doesn't change that quickly. I do wanna point to a great book that's about 10 years old now maybe a dozen years old by Garrett Peck called Prohibition Hangover which is one of the few books that came out from Rutgers University Press it's still available on Amazon and whatnot that actually looked at what happened after Prohibition ended it's a phenomenal history as is also an Ethan I know you spoke to her on your podcast psychoactive I've interviewed her for reason Lisa McGears the war on alcohol because we do have this sense that, you know Roosevelt gets elected and in 1933 Prohibition is repealed and then suddenly we're living in a world of micro breweries and, you know at gastropubs and it literally took half a century or more before we kind of got to an equilibrium in terms of alcohol. You know, there's another standout book there on back in the late 80s I read a book by David Kivick a professor of KYVIG called Repealing National Prohibition and that was really a template for me in thinking about how to build a drug policy reform model and I remember introducing the book to the heads of the Drug Policy Foundation the founders then Kevin Zeiss and Arnold Treback and they then using that model on their stuff it's a beautiful book because one of the things it shows was that the movement to repeal alcohol prohibition brought together people who had remarkably different varying views about what was most wrong with prohibition why they cared about it most and remarkably varying views about what should come in its place but they all came together to end prohibition and inevitably there were gonna be conflicts and differences once it came to you know figuring out the details thereafter but that you know and that really was for me a model like I'm gonna bring you know when I was building a policy life movement bring together people from the left, the right and the center people who only care about this drug or that drug people coming from racial justice from HIV prevention from a libertarian perspective bring it all together and then once we kind of really went it then we can take out the knives and fight over the details about how we're gonna roll it out and implement it but the bigger issue was getting rid of prohibition. And you know that's a great moment to plug your legacy in all of this you built a massively broad coalition and I think some of the earlier marijuana groups were also involved in that kind of stuff and it's libertarians always talk about Baptist bootlegger coalitions where it's people who come together to fuck over the legalization of something because you know they're benefiting in one way either ideologically or economically from something you're talking about the flip side of that do you worry that in the current drug legalization movement particularly related to marijuana but also to other drugs that other issues the legacy institutions including drug policy alliance are they you know they're sensing that they've they've got the window you know the arc of history is bending towards them are they more are they less open to these wide-ranging trans-ideological coalitions to get stuff done in the short term? Well you have to distinguish between a marijuana policy project which was you know focused really on marijuana legalization and the same with normal where they're essentially victims of their own success they're at a point now where there's remarkably little philanthropic money left out there you know once this stuff becomes legal a lot of the philanthropists start saying hey listen I don't want to pay for this when people are making money for it so you know I'm gonna focus to other things and you deal with the industry and so marijuana policy project I don't know what normal is doing in that regard but it means that it becomes very hard to raise the philanthropic money and that ultimately it ends up shaping the nature of the laws that get passed the ballot initiatives that get drafted it also means that where you still have an ongoing problem of marijuana prohibition persisting with high levels of arrest and high levels of racial bias as in the South and a range of other places it means the philanthropic money you know unfortunately you know is not stepping out I'll also say philanthropic money from the foundations were always dreadful when it came to supporting marijuana reform I mean I raised almost all my money for marijuana reform from wealthy individuals George Soros, Peter Lewis, John Spurling, Bob Wilson you know Bernard Sells you know I mean a whole range of from across the political spectrum right the foundations, the Fords and the whole range of they were terrible they were on the marijuana issue they were useless and even as they began to fund criminal justice the staffers I mean they had their own hangups on that issue now when it comes to the broader issue of coalition building and whether or not say DPA and others will maintain that broad base I think in psychedelics I mean you know part of this is generational I think that if you look say at Rick Doblin the founder and leader of you know MAPS you know which is now the biggest drug policy reform organization in the world I mean he's very committed to doing this across the board he and I speak the same language it's all about that a younger generation and especially a generation which came up under Trump which you know made the whole bipartisan thing a lot more difficult than it was in my day but even before Trump there was already a growing resistance I saw it on the left and I think the same things were happening on the right to doing that kind of you know cross the spectrum you know broad tent bipartisanship stuff it's just not part of the same ways of thinking in a way and so I think you've heard me talk about this we've been in a few public settings but you know one thing I'm trying to talk to younger activists about is one of the things that I think made us successful with drug policy reform was our communication our realization that we don't win unless we persuade the ordinary American middle of the road parent that what we're saying about marijuana or other drugs is more persuasive than what the other side is that means speaking a language it means not using progressive speak and not using not just academic language but lefty type language you know it means not putting your identity first you put the message first right these are all sorts of things that seem to have been lost or dismissed among a younger generation of activists which take great pride in some of the remarkable transformations they can cause in states that are places cities and states that are already progressive but which may effectively in my mind be handing over the country to the neo fascists who are speaking a language that sometimes you know appeals even more than the lefty language does so you know I think it's it is a real risk but I think it's not about the changing of the issue I think it's a generational shift and it's also because of reflection of the broader both both a cause and a reflection of the broader polarization or society which is unfortunately shape the communication side of things. In terms of how libertarians talk about drug legalization and I wonder if it might make sense to talk more just kind of as a closing topic here about full on commercial legalization because we've talked you know a lot of the kind of politics and you know what is possible it's like we talked a lot about treatment and decriminalization but there's kind of a case that I think was being made there about if you think about the effects of prohibition the fact that it's prohibition itself that is both making these drugs more dangerous and also creating some of the disorder on the streets that maybe it would make sense for America to actually leapfrog places like Europe and Canada and go for all out legalization and Nick was sharing this piece with me earlier by the late Dan Baum in Harper's Magazine called Legalize It All and I thought this could be a way to kick off this conversation. He writes that just about everybody who thinks seriously about the end of drug prohibition agrees that we'll want to discourage consumption. I mean that we can put that aside for a second but the goal could be accomplished at least in part under a system of regulated for-profit stores by setting limits on advertising and promotion for banning them or banning them altogether by preventing marketing to children by establishing minimum distances from schools for retail outlets by nailing down the rules about dosage and purity and by limiting both the number of stores and their hours of operation. And so Baum here is basically proposing treat these hypothetical all you can buy drug stores the same way you might treat highly regulated liquor store. Does that strike you as a plausible and good model? Well, I mean, first of all politically I think it's neither here nor there. I just don't see the support. I mean, as we point out before Zach even as the numbers rose from marijuana legalization and now in psychedelics we're not seeing the same type of change. I think the one the country that comes closest to be open to that sort of model maybe Switzerland actually where the numbers have been a 35, 40% in the past but even there they're accustomed to having a fairly hyper regulatory system. And so they might and they've had a lot of success in varying ways with that sort of system. There's a greater cultural tolerance for it. The United States we don't have the kind of tolerance for those sorts of models. I mean, periodically we had post prohibition with states having liquor monopolies and things like that but it's not the kind of thing that one can see really working in America where we tend to veer between moralistic prohibitions extremes on the one hand or like let it all roll. Like you look at European they want to legalize gambling. They still, the casinos are regulated that the state lotto's and all this are saying in the United States when we go from prohibition legalization we start having casinos open 24 seven with all sorts of incentives to keep gambling and stuff and we do start doing lotto and we're hiring ad companies design ads that specifically appeal to addicted personalities. I mean, so we don't do that middle ground thing. Secondly, I'll tell you one of my principle ways of thinking about legalization it gives me pause is I think about what some people would oftentimes describe as the three most powerful addictive and omnipresent drugs in human society. And what are those sugar fat salt, sugar fat salt, sugar fat salt, right? Now you look at what sort of multinational food producing companies have been able to do on that front, right? Where they're doing stuff with brain chemistry and they're figuring out the exact combinations of the sensual taste in the mouth and the texture and the sugar fat salt combinations where junk food not just because of what they're producing but has become enormously popular in all sorts of ways and appealing and it's especially an issue with poorer people but this is becoming more and more of a universal phenomenon not just the United States, right? And you see that obesity, the consequences of obesity the estimate now is possible that obesity now results in a greater loss of life and of dollars lost than does either smoking or all illicit drugs put together, right? So and that's happened quite dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years. So if I begin to imagine a legal system where pharmaceutical companies can, you know do what the food companies have doing and sort of be coming up with all sorts of neat drug combinations that specifically generate some level of dependence but don't do that much harm at least in the short-term and da-da-da that's my great fear about what could happen there. When I look at a model for legalization the one that I think comes closest is one that actually- before you go on there, let me just ask if that is your fear would that actually be a worse situation than we are in right now given the level of death that is happening from fentanyl which is the fact that fentanyl is on the streets is purely a byproduct of the black market. Well, that's the right questions, Zach. How do we compare these relative risks, right? And in fact, 30 years ago I put through the working group at Princeton the Princeton Working Group on the future drug use and alternatives to drug prohibition. And I published a piece called Thinking Seriously About Alternatives to Drug Prohibition in the journal, the academic journal, Daedalus, 30 years ago which really hashed out all of these so you can find it online but it really hashed out all these issues how do we balance the competing values at stake including the question that you just posed, right? Now the question is, is would that in fact solve the fentanyl issue? It might, it might do that. You know, if you had asked me the same question four or five years ago or maybe four or five years from now if the fentanyl issue diminishes a lot would that change the calculation? But Zach, the thing I would point out is there is actually a model that emerged and was actually enacted into law but never implemented. And about 10, 15 years ago New Zealand had a major problem with synthetic cannabinoids, right? And people were getting in trouble with it stores were popping up unregulated and what eventually happened was the two biggest manufacturers of the synthetic cannabinoids which was kind of not legally regulated but not illegal they approached the government and the health ministry and they said, we have a mutual interest here. We know our products are relatively safe we've done the testing but we don't like all these fly by night companies and all these pop up retail outlets and so, and we have a mutual interest in getting rid of these. So what they proposed and what New Zealand Parliament enacted with like 110 to one vote was the system setting up basically an FDA like entity that were pharmaceutical companies or anybody could submit a drug that they had created to this new FDA like entity. And if they could establish a substantial margin of safety the government would approve it for over the counter retail sale to adults even though it had no accepted medical use. So it was like the FDA thing without requiring medical use just showing substantial margin of safety and the people behind that including in the government understood that what they were proposing to do for synthetic cannabis might well be a model that could apply more broadly to all other drugs as well. Now, unfortunately, the law was never implemented for ridiculous reasons when people caring about animal rights protested they didn't want to have drugs being tested on animals and all things shut down. But the fact is the drug that law is still on the books the United Nations Control Board and our Congress Control Board which normally freaks out about any reform didn't really quite know what to do about it. So I think that's a potential regulatory model which might make a lot of sense. And remember also, it's also about like if you're gonna legalize cocaine are you gonna legalize it only in a kind of cocaine coca-tea version which has cocaine in it or like chewing gums and sodas like liquid forms are you gonna legalize the sale of 10% pure potency powder for snorting are you gonna allow it to be sold in injectable or smokable forms? If you only allow it to be sold in the less potent forms would you then crack down on people who are selling it in turn cocaine that they bought at a pharmacy or a store into crack? Would you then crack down on them for selling it in the pre-made crack forms? So I mean, the organization in the UK transform you put up one of their slides before and their public policy specialist Steve Rolls R-O-L-L-E-S he was the last of my 80 interviews in my podcast, Psychoactive. He's really done some of the most advanced thinking on this stuff. He's an ITism about being sort of a hyper regulator which is true, it's, you know but he's actually thinking hard about what regulatory models might make sense for what sorts of drugs and they have a new volume that came out in the last year about how to legalize stimulants which is the hardest, you know we can figure it out for cannabis, psychedelics maybe even for opioids but the stimulant drugs are the ones that cocaine and methamphetamine are the really, really tricky, challenging ones. You would agree though that movements towards, with almost no exceptions movements towards decriminalization and legalization are to be preferred over the status quo or a rollback of that. Yeah, I mean, almost totally. I mean, the thing is, like, one of the great advantages of legalization to the extent that legalization is synonymous with legal regulation and that's something that some old fashioned libertarians recoil at but when you define legalization as legal regulation, right? You know, one of the arguments I typically made is that people think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact prohibition represents the abdication of regulation. Anything that's not being effectively prohibited is basically lies outside and is totally unregulated controlled by gangsters, criminals, you know, blah, blah, blah. So when it means, when legalization is synonymous with legal regulation and when that legal regulation is pragmatic, not overly heavy-handed, not dumb, which inevitably regulations become dumb and backward in some areas but where the essence of it is constructive and conforms to local culture, well, I think that is almost always a step forward, right? Yeah, I know. We don't want, you know, underground synthetic drugs being sold. We don't want, you know, the latest, you know. Well, you don't want them to be underground but maybe you want them to be sold but then the people who sell them, you know, if they're acting in open daylight, they can be, you know, they can be found, they can be sued, they can be held responsible. Right, you want civil liability, exactly. That's one of the great benefits of a legal regulatory system is you have civil liability for the harms that are caused and, you know, some synthetic cannabinoids may be perfectly fine, other things but, you know, the stuff where people are using now with a xylazine, this other tranquilizer drug out of Columbia that's being mixed with fentanyl and beginning, you know, it's immersed in Philadelphia. You don't want that, well, that crap there. But I know what you're saying and this goes back to, you know, the kind of Thomas Saw's worldview which is beautiful and powerful in its simplicity but, you know, when I say, you know, I would like to live in a world where all drugs are treated like beer, wine and alcohol often from my fellow libertarians, I'll be told that I'm awful because I'm asking for new taxes, you know, and new regulations to be written and it's kind of like, yeah, I guess so but, you know, in the big picture are you fucking kidding? My perception is this is a substantial evolution in the libertarian, both libertarian and political libertarian, you know, where they no longer say prohibition and taxation are the same thing. There's an understanding and part of that's political pragmatism, you know, that marijuana has been such a great success and you realize that has to come and part of this matter that the way you tax, how you tax, the levels you tax make a huge difference, you know, California got the taxation system all messed up, there are better and worse ways to do this stuff and then ultimately prohibition represents its own form of tax and it's a far more onerous one. Yeah, and I worry, you know, also talking about the kind of identitarian left, you know, where people are, you know, will say that the drug war is absolutely the most racist, you know, fraud that's ever been perpetuated on America since slavery or Jim Crow but we will live under it for a number of years until we get our specific demands met in terms of who gets licenses, who gets this, who gets that. You know, there's a lot of sussing out to be done, I think within the drug reform movement, if what we're trying to do is to make the world better. Well, and you know, Nick, that's just following, I mean, I remember the good old days, Charlie Rangel, the Harlem congressman who chaired the House Select Committee on Narcotics back in the 80s and early 90s. Yeah, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus. Right, major drug warrior, right? And when I was out there arguing for legalization, you know, not the same type that Tom Sass or Friedman or Buckley were arguing for it, but still, you know, that was the label for the major reform. And you know, like when Zach was rolling the Oregon stuff, you know, Rangel would be like, well, first let's get all the treatment in place, which he knew was never gonna happen. These were not legitimate objections to trying to reduce the harms of prohibition. They were just ways of trying to defend the status quo. And that's what has to change. And I think that- And it did with Rangel to his great credit, said I was wrong. I was wrong to support major sentencing disparities. Well, I don't know how, I will tell you that I remember him being one of my principal opponents when I first stepped out in the late 80s, like, you know, on Nightline and other TV shows. And then we get to the year 2000 and I team up with Ariana Huffington and we're doing these shadow conventions on attacking certain issues with the Democrats and Republicans are pretty calm. And there is Jesse Jackson, another major part of mine and Charlie Rangel. And they're speaking on my day to oppose the drug war. You know, and Charlie Rangel standing up there and saying, when I go to Cuba, what am I gonna say to Fidel Castro when he asked me about our political prisoners, our prisoners in the war on drugs. So he followed in the footsteps of a younger generation of black leadership that was beginning to play a vanguard role in the political, in the evolution among elected officials. Yeah. Can I ask one last question before we bring the stream to a close. You know, do you have any hope that there will be non-ultra progressive cities that start implementing some of these reforms in a serious way in the near future? If we're talking about broadening the political coalitions, you know, it's great to the degree that San Francisco or Portland or Seattle start implementing this stuff and showing what works and what doesn't work. Well, Zach, I think the answer is, I mean, there's two ways to look. One is that what you saw eventually on needle exchange programs was that they got embraced. I mean, the great example of that is in Indiana, when all of a sudden a city had a huge outbreak of HIV among the subject drug users. And first the health people said, we gotta do that. Finally, they got the conservative police chief to say it. And the governor then was Mike Pence before he was vice president. And he was opposed, opposed, he's always been opposed. And, you know, he's got the police chief and everybody's saying, do it, do it, do it, do it. You gotta save lives, a priority. And finally, Mike Pence says he had a conversation with God and God told him it was the right thing to do. So he gave it a kind of qualified green light. So you do have those examples. And then on the overdose issue, that's one, you know, where it has over the last decade been basically hitting poor, lower middle class, white, the kind of, you know, death of despair type thing in a significant way. And that's forced some rethinking there. There's a wonderful group in a harm reduction Ohio, might even be its name. And started by a guy, I'm gonna space on his name right now, who was the, he was actually a journalist. He was a journalist covering the drug issue and other issues for USA Today, back in the day. And, you know, so you see, even in Ohio, people are trying to figure out how to do the right thing. You know, people don't wanna have, you know, the people they know dying and dead like that. So that's opened up, you know, ears on harm reduction, naloxone, drug testing, things that kind of right-wing prosecutors and others were always opposed to. So I do have some optimism. It's a shame it moves so slowly on that front. But I think there is evidence of movement there. All right, we are going to leave it there. We have been talking with Ethan Nadelman, formerly of the Drug Policy Alliance, and also of Psychoactive Podcast, which is still available to consume pretty much everywhere. It's still out there, Nick. Yep, it's coming. You have tax or regulation. This is, it's fully legal. You have what, how many episodes did you do? And it's not even taxed or regulated. It's free, you know? How many episodes? I did 80 episodes in 80 weeks from the summer of 21 until about a month and a half ago. I'm taking a break now and hoping I'll be back later this year, next year. That's fantastic. It's an incredible archive of voices. I highly recommend it. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and knowledge of this season, as well as your aspirations. And Zach Weismiller, thank you for doing what you do at Reason. This has been the Reason livestream. So come back next Thursday. We're gonna be here. My pleasure, Nick. We're gonna be talking. Thank you. Always great to talk with you. Bye-bye.