Inequality and the Future of Drugs

I'll never forget the privilege of having my face on a van that was driven around Gorton and Denton, the constituency where the Green Party won with Hannah Spencer. One of the things that was on that van, one of the Labor Party's repeated attack lines during that election, was that myself or Hannah were going to want to sell crack to children in playgrounds I'm a politician, so I get attacked and criticized a lot and that's part of a role But I thought it was pretty disgusting to see a party of government trivializing and demonizing such an important issue The UK have one of the highest drug deaths in the whole of Europe. and in fact, every year, for the last thirteen years, more people are dying from our so called war on drugs But I can say all of this, but what we really need to hear is an expert in drug policy. So I'm delighted today to be joined by Kojo Karam. This episode is sponsored by Crowdfunder Bring your bold idea to life at crowdfundnder. co.k forward slash bold. K Jo, thank you very much for being in the studio. Thank you so much for having me. The place I want to start and it just makes sense to pick your brain on this is that green party policy is to legalize and regulate drugs and the media kind of lost their mind over this. Y. They often talk about This has never been tried anywhere and it's some kind of big experiment, but you're probably the man to ask about the history of drug legalization and regulation. Yeah. So with the new book what I actually did was go through a lot of different jurisdictions that have implemented some form of drug legalization and regulation over the past decade and actually looked at what were the consequences, who were the winners, who were the losers, and how it actually related to some of the fear and paranoia that preceded the actual legal reform. in terms of what actually then ends up happening And so over the past decade, we've seen a real transition in how drugs are governed in a number of different jurisdictions around the world. The warar on drugs, which itself is an experiment. It's an experiment around one hundred years old. know A lot of these drugs that we try and police through the war on drugs have been used by human society since the time of Memorial Go back five thousand years and you'll find Ammer Indians in the Andes using Ayasa or Coca, but over the past century, particularly since the nineteen oh nine Shanaopum Commission, the very first attempt to prohibit drugs, we've had this emergence into this architecture of what we now call the war on drugs. And so that was seen as kind of the norm, and I think all of us grew up in a world where that was seen as almost common sense know certain drugs are bad, and so we prohibit and we criminalize those drugs in order to hopefully create what the UN at least described as a drug free world. So first of all, we can see that that clearly hasn't manifested. We've seen the use of drugs go up. We've seen drug death rates go up, particularly in the United Kingdom, which has one of the highest drug death rates in all of Europe And we've seen an entire system of criminalization and mass incarceration being proropped up by this war on drugs. You, the UN estimates that twenty percent of all prisoners in the world are in there because of drug offenses and that translates two and a half million people around the world So that was the norm that we all grew up with. Over the past decade, we've started to see that norm really fragment. Starting in twenty twelve with Washington and Colorado State, we've seen the legalization and commercialization different from regulation of cannabis. And now half of the US states have legal commercial cannabis markets. We've seen Australia reschedule psychedelics, psilocybin and MDMA. So legal psychedelic therapy is now legal in Australia. Even in Colombia, legislative bills being pulled through the parliament there to legalize and regulate the trade of cocaine. And so we've had the past decade, a huge transition in how drugs are governed, so much so that we now have a Republican conservative president in Donald Trump sitting in the oval offffice, you know, the same oval offffice where Ronald Reagan, week after week warned the country about dangers of drugs and it being number one public menace in the United States, we now have Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office flanked by Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy, signing executive orders to fast track psychedelic treatment. This is the transition that's happened all around the world. And I think that the UK has really been behind this conversation. And I think that is part of what we're seeing in terms of the impact that drugs still have within our society. We still have you know a massive drug death rate numbers. We still have huge amounts of people being inrisoned for drugs with a prison population that overcrowded prison population according to the Ministry of Justice. and I think it's time for the UK to really try and engage with this conversation that's happening globally. There's so much to unpick there. If I start with just the technicality, we talked about the difference between regulation and then commercialisation. You okay to spell out what the differences are? Yeah absolutely. I think so much with the backlash that happens when labor try to force a spotlight on the Green party's legalization and regulation policy around the Gordon and Denton by election was relying on this kind of slippage or confusion about the relationship between regulation and commercialization. So they were like you know party you want, you know came to be sold in Tesco next to your crunching a cornfakes with this idea that the options that you have apart from Criminalization is mass commercialization and commodification, turning things that used to be contraband into commodities that can be bought on a retail consumer basis. When in reality, when you look at the way legal regulation has been rolled out all around the world, there is a huge variety in the different forms of regulatory vehicles that could be put forward. And so one example we might think about with drugs that have a higher risk factor, you know, your opiates and the derivatives would be things like a heroin prescription model. So Switzerland hardly a kind of radical hippy state, they've had legal heroin prescription. years now where if you have ac acute dependency issues, you're able to receive the drug from a state based provider, a doctor, whilst also being supported with some of the issues that might be in your life, there might be feeding that dependency, whether that might be housing, whether there might be mental health, whether there might be employment issues. We look the bills that were put forward in Colombia for the legalization of cocoa and cocoa related products, they had what was a three tiered structure for how this might roll out. So they would have the cooa tea, you know, more caffeine based stuff as being something that might be commercially available that people might be able to buy in stores. but for more dangerous drugs like cocaine, they would have a more prescription pharmacist based model. and then for the acutely dangerous drugs, you know things like crack cocaine, they would have something very similar to that kind of overdose prevention and prescription treatment that you see with things like heroin in countries like Switzerland. And so there is a vast array of different forms that legalization can take. Even things like legalization of cannabis has taken vastly different forms Across the different US states, some states have been hyper commercial, advertising, putting all the efforts into kind of growing the consumer market. There's other states that have taken what's known as a social equity pathway forward, where the priority has been on trying to repair some of the damages of the war on drugs. And so guaranteeing in the law places like New York State or Chicago that a high percentage of the tax revenue that the state collects is spent on over policed communities, on communities that have been left behind and punished during the war on drugs. And even in other countries, you might think about Germany, which also legalized cannabis over the past few years, when it announced it initially, the Traffic Light Commission announced legalization of cannabis, people thought this was going to be a new commercial model But by the time it was passed through in twenty twenty four, whilst they legalized cannabis, they didn't allow for the kind of dispensary storefont model that we see in North America. Instead, what they legalized was the right for people to grow their own cannabis at home and for people to form what's known as cannabis social clubs, where you know people might get together learn how to cultivate and use a substance, but not be able to kind of buy it in the way you might buy something in a shop. And so it's kind of the difference between a kind of community vegetable garden and going into Tesco and buying your food from there And so I think that Having the conversation about what legalization look like is a conversation that's going to take a lot of time. and there will be some things that are tried and might not work. and That might be the one advantage of the UK being so far behind in this debate is that we can learn from what did Canada do? what did Uruguay do? What did Germany do? what worked, what didn't and put something together. But I think the first argument that needs to be had before is to make people aware that so many of the harms that they fear might happen with legalization already happening with criminalization and prohibition. We're already seeing drug death rates spike. We're already seeing people with dependency issues spiking. we're already seeing associated crime going through the roof. And so thinking about what has prohibition done over the last hundred years, I think is where we need to start in the UK and then we can look at the different forms of regulation different substances. And I want to dive into prohibition at the moment and the history of that and particularly how racialized it's been. We'll go there in a moment Still sticking with legalisation and regulation at the moment. You mentioned cannabis a few times. and I know that whenever I've spoken about this on the media, people inevitably talk about mental health issues people might have and the difference between correlation and causation with cannabis justust to ask what sort of evidence is out there, and then how would you respond to someone who's worried about that? I understand people's fear around the relationships between cannabis and mental health, and I think that First of all, I'm I' a professor of law and political economy, so I'm not a scientist. You know I don't research things like schizophrenia, so I wouldn't claim to have a kind of definitive analysis of that. But I have read you know the research of people like you know doctor Matthew Hill, who's in Calgary in Canada, who has looked at this in much greater depth. and again it understanding of well, is there a relationship between causation and correlation? Is there an idea that people who have a propensity towards mental health issues also find cannabis as something that might calm potential? And that's why there might be a relationship between those who use cannabis and mental health issues, or is it that cannabis causes those mental health issues? I think that those things that are still to be really determined and anyone who says they have understanding of all the intricacies of the human endoc Canander boid system and how it reflects on different plan strains, I think is definitely misleading the population. But I think what we can say is we can look at legal regulation that has happened and actually see what has been the impact because so much of the fears that people express in the UK that there's going to be a huge spike in youths. There's going to be a huge spike in mental health issues. This just hasn't been worn out in the United States, which, you know, twenty twelve, Colorado legalized business so we've had over a decade now of this expertimimentation. And you know, places like Oregon where they had a study on this, they found that with legalization, there was a slight increase in use, around four percent increase and a very slight increase in kind of cannabis use disorders, around two percent. But there wasn't this explosion that people would talk about and in terms of actual youth use that went down. that went down also in Canada and in Uruguay because notot surprisingly, a legal dispensary is going to check an ID in a way that you know a street provider is not. And so if you are below the age, it's going to be much harder to access these substances in a legally regulated framework. And so Somewhere like Colorado, which has had legalization for over a decade. att the decade point it had a poll with its residents to see who thought that it was a positive development and it was a negative development. seventy one percent of residents voted that it was a positive development in terms of the impacts on society and obviously in terms of some of the tax revenue that is also probably being spent across the state as well. And so I think a lot of the fears and paranoas are understandable, but I think that we do need to actually look at the evidence and we need to start having the conversation in the UK about legal reform in a way that recognizes this is happening across the world. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to learn what works and what doesn't and try and better than what we're doing right now, which I don't think is working for anybody. What I want to look at, you've used this phrase a few times over war on drrugs, which I think people are very familiar with Hopefully' not too broad a question but why did the war on drugs stop? Well I think this is such a really interesting question It's something that almost feels counterintuitive because we've been so bombarded with this propaganda around particular drugs that it seems like it's almost natural and that you know idea of prohibiting and stigmatizing these particular substances is something that's just a natural human response to, particularly what drug policy scholars would call the big three cannabis, cocoa produced products and opio produced products. When in reality, we go back just hundred and fifty years, even in this country, the United Kingdom, these substances were seen as part of legitimate commercial trade. Britain famously fought an entire war against the Qing Dynasty of China for the right to sell opium likeike the idea of prohibiting the trade of opium at that time, peopleople can read the work of people like John Sum Mill on this was seen as a sign of a kind of backward and uncivilized society to think that you can interrupt the free exchange of commodities by prohibiting the trade of opium And you know, many of the institutions that still dominate global economy now SBC, PNO ferries, a lot of these got their start in the trade of opium across the British East Indies. And so whether we might think about the production of coca in Dutch controlled Indonesia, whether we might think about the commodification of cannabis in places like the Caribbean, you know, alongside the commodification of other psychoactive substances, which are now really integrated in the European diet, you know coffee, tobacco, sugar And so up until the early twentieth century, we don't see this distinction between drugs in the same way that we do today. But what really changes is the emergence of the United States of America as the hegemonic power within the international arena. And drug prohibition becomes really their flagship policy, which they get the European empires, which are having a great time commercializing and trading these drugs to actually start to agree with what is a kind of internal US issue, something that's really tied to a particular moral panic in the turn of the twentieth century. Alcohol was also prohibited. We forget that in the USA. and it's not that alcohol was this failed experiment prohibition is this logical rational public health approach. they were seen as the same thing at that moment. The same organizations, the same temperance movements that were championing alcohol prohibition were also pushing the very first laws prohibiting drugs. And I think that some of the differences between the way the Europeans look to drugs and the way that the US looked to drugs is due to maybe evolving ideas about what it meant to be a healthy human, evolving ideas about what it meant to be a kind of coherent society, but also we have to recognize the very real and naked references towards racial hierarchy and demonization of particular communities that drove the prohibition of drugs in the early days of early twentieth century. Viewers can go on their Google or on their iPhone and look up some of the articles that surrounded the prohibition of drugs, cannabis, cocaine in the early twentieth century in the US. People like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle are very helpful digitizing all of their archives. And so you can see some of the headlines like Negro Ccaine, Fiends or the New Southern Menace, which is a story the New York Times published the same year Harris Act was passed, which was the first federal prohibition of drugs. And this story is and it might sound ridiculous to viewers, but it's a story about how cocaine was making black people in the American South impervious to bullets. And so they were taking cocaine, they were being shot by police and they were just running through them like Neo in the Matrix associations between marijuana and Mexican communities and this idea that the point of prohibiting drugs is to try and protect a potentially delicate purified idea of white America from this invasion of these substances and associated peoples And so you get that in the kind of first half of the twentieth century, and then you get it really kind of crystallized when America takes the reins of the institutions of international law with the emergence of the United Nations, the very first UN treaties that prohibit drugs, the UN Convention on Single narcotic Dugs eenty one and these are the treaties that still determine drug prohibition even deep into the twenty first century. So the UK's Misuse of Drugs Act in nineteen seventy one is the domestic implementation of the UN. and Conventional narcarotic drugs. and all around the world you see these countries, you know, it wasn't by happenestance that countries from Jamaica to Colombia, to Afghanistan, to Ghana, to you, South Africa all suddenly decide in the mid twentieth century, o, we want to prohibit drugs. This is something that was really enforced by the United States through soft and hard power. through funding counter narcotics enforcement programs like Colombia in Colombia, the Meridia Initiative, in Mexico, and by ensuring that if countries wanted to be part of this new system, of international law, they needed to sign up to the US' war on drugs. It was a requirement of becoming a member of the League of Nations to actually sign up to the Hgopum Convention of nineteen twelve. And so What's really interesting about thinking about this topic now in twenty twenty six is if so much of the war on drugs was really maintained by the US's hard and soft power What is the world that we're moving into where the United States is also is still trying to criminalize drugs. You know, Nicholas Madura will say that they definitely are still criminalizing drugs, but they're also simultaneously trying to commercialize drugs. They're also simultaneously having Donald Trump sign executive orders rescheduling cannabis so that it can open up you know tax breaks to a lot of these you know very lucrative cannabis companies that are dominating this new emerging market. And so what's going to happen over the next few decades, I think is something that's really interesting to think about Yeah, that's amazing history that. And then going to the future We've heard the history of the League of Nations and everything that was going on, but now we're at the point where Donald Trump is fast tracking drug bills What's the danger of what happens next partarticularly in the UK if we don't kind of win the argument on the evidence grounds The real danger is thinking about simimply moving from a world of mass criminalization to a world of mass commercialization And we're al, I think seeing that in certain stamps with the UK. So the UK legalized medicinineal cannabis in twenty eighteen. And that was legalized through a campaign led by mothers of desperately sick children who had complex epileptic issues and who had found going to other countries that medical cannabis was one of the few treatments that helped them manage and treat those issues. And so they campaigned and eventually created enough pressure for the government to change the laws in order for them to be able to access the treatment that they needed. But this hasn't been made widely available on the NHS. And so what we've had instead is the explosion of a quite expensive private cannabis industry, which anyone taking the tube or looking at billboards across London will see some of these adverts of these companies starting to pop up, framed as very kind of relaxed wellness treatments. But these are going to be the big winners of legalization in the UK unless we think about how might we use these regulations to shape the industry in a slightly different way. And I think you're also seeing that in the US. Again, you're seeing the very first companies ome billion dollar companies through the legalization of cannabis in the same world in which we still have the death penalty for drug trafficking you know in countries like Indonesia and Singapore and Iran And so we're now in this strange world where you can become a billionaire doing exactly the same thing that you can get literally shot by firing squad four in another part of the world. When we talk about who's going to own this new sector, we talk about who is going to be the big beneficiaries of this new sector That is where we need to try and intervene in this conversation right now rather than wait for a couple of generations when A lot of these laws and a lot of these companies are crystallized in terms of dominating this particular sector. because I think often we look at the way and say tech has led to a massive oigarchic class and huge drivers of inequality. We might look at the way that fossil fuels have led to you an oigarchet class and drivers of inequality And we try to think about what kind of regulatory reforms might we pass in order to make these industries operate on a different medium But there's an industry emerging right now that often we because of the stigma, because of the association of it as a kind of a cultural issue rather than ultimately an economic issue, we avoid the conversation and we might find ourselves too late when we find that that conversation has already been claimed by the Donald Trumps, the Peter Thes, the Elon Musk of the world And now a quick break with our friends from Crowdfunder. 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And there's a crowd of people out there waiting to turn your bold idea into reality. Hey, we'll even give you fifty quid towards your first project if you raise two hundred fifty pounds from at least five donors What could you do for your community? Turn your bold idea into a reality at crowdfunder. co d Uk for slash Bld You've talked about the history of a war on drugs and particularly how racialized that's been. But we also know in terms of enforcement that if you're a young black person, for instance, I think you're sometimes eight to eighteen times more likely to be stopped and searched depending on where you live in the country compared to a white peer who is no more likely or less likely to be carrying drugs. How are governments going to I mean, are they going to carry on it's impossible for you to have a crystal ball, but how they could carry on this racialized policing or enforcement of it at the same time as commercializing drugs? The narrative is going to be completely incoherent. I mean, the narrative is incoherent, but I don't think that's ever stopped to Donald Trump before. And that is literally what we have been seeing, you know, over the course of the second Trump administration. We've seen a real embrace of commercial potential, of particularly psychedelics and cannabis, and also not just partnering up with Silicon Valley investors who have commodified a lot of these areas, buying the patterents that mean they have exclusive ownership over the drugs that are then placed on market for a certain period but also simultaneously using drugs as an architecture for expansive enforcement of a Draconian state, you IS is still smnatching up anybody with a Hispanic name and sending them to a blacks side in El Salvador and saying, well, they're a narco trafficker. And so you can have criminalization and commodification at the same time. And for me, that's the most dystopian of all worlds. But I think now is the opportunity to try and intervene in that discussion and talk about, well, what we want to prioritize what we want to put forward is public health, harm reduction commommunity ownership all of these different mechanisms that might create a very different future, particularly around drugs than present. And if we are able to do something In this particular sector if we're able to normalize things like cooperative production, normalize things like the protection of global south producers within this new market, then what example might that give to these other industries? whether it's fashion, whether it's production of coffee? You know I was kind of ended the book by going to Ghana which is, you know where my family's from, which was the last place. I would ever imagine, you know Ghan is often cited as one of the most Christian societies in the whole world and it would be the last place I would imagine to engage in drup policy reform because of the potential tax revenue that's available in twenty twenty three, they legalize the cultivation of cannabis Is this going to be simply the same as you know, Ghana's big export is cocoa? you know, any chocolate people might have, look at the back of it, It'll probably be from Ghana or C d'vois, but that doesn't actually help the Farmers on the ground who actually cutting the cocoa pods, is cannabis going to be simply a replication of that? Or can we do things differently where they get a greater share of the actual value of the supply chain? And if we are able to do it with cannabis, then I think that that creates an example for these other industries. And is there any work that's been done that you know of to protect farmers, particularly in global health communities that's working Is there any country that is kind of taking a global supply chain and doing it ethically? So I don't think there's anywhere that's got it perfect at the moment. but I think there's really interesting initiatives that are being implemented across different jurisdictions. and so There is, you know, Morocco law also legalized cannabis cultivation and that You started with the mass forgiveness of criminal charges that were placed on thousands of farmers who'd been living in the informal economy and fearful of the punishment of criminalization. You know, the king there managed to pardon thousands of people and I think that that's transformative for local communities. There's initiatives in the Caribbean to again try prot the kind of cultural rights of these plants that are associated with particular communities. There is also initiatives even happening in places like the USA. and so because it's a state by state model I think what's really interesting is different states have taken different approaches with how cannabis legalization is rolled out. And so there have been states that have been It's been all about commercialization, you know, in Alaska or Nevada where there's people still serving out cannabis trafficking sentences at the same time as you have a legal Silicon Valley backed cannabis dispensary down the road doing the same thing. and that's very different than states like Illinois or New York that have really emphasized what is known as a social equity model of legalization. And so that is trying to think about how can you use legalization, still a commercial market, but how can you use the commercial market in order to try andace are some of the devastation that the war on drugs did especially to particular communities. And so they have commitments that are baked in the law for the access of you know licenses to people who've either been arrested incarcerated for the war on drugs or had family members incarcerated for the war on drugs. They have the communion and expungeemment of sentences. You know offtten when we talk about criminalization, we just talk about prison numbers and people might say, Oh we've only got this many people in prison. It's still huge in the UK, but we've only got this many people. But that's not the end of criminalisation You get a criminal record, that is going to impact your ability to be able to access work, to be able to get a visa to travel abroad. All of these issues that people were dealing with sometimes decades after criminalization were expunged in a lot of these states that pursued a social equity model and a commitment as well to spending some of the tax revenue. so in New York bill is commitment to spending eighty percent of the tax revenue by the New York state on specific communities that were over policed and over criminalized during the war on drugs. And so these are very different models depending on what decisions you make at the point of regulation. It definitely isn't perfect in New York and there's been a lot of Us and downs in the process of how that's rolled out over the last few years. But I think that this is one of the few benefits that we have here in the UK is again, looking at all these different jurisdictions around the world and almost being like, you know, do we want to have the kind of club model of places like Barcelona or Germany? Do we want to look at the kind of state based dispensary model in somewhere like Uruguay Do we want to have a social equity model like in New York? know do we want to have a hyper commercialized model places like Nevada? So there's so many different decisions to be made. In many ways, I felt like the book was almost like, you just a super boring the most boring investigation into drugs ever because it's all about like what's the licensing structures here? You know what's the different ways in which tax revenue is distributed these are the questions that are going to decide. drugs look like in the future, because I think if we hand this whole sphere of the economy to the private market What we're going to do is not only create a new vehicle for inequality, but it's also going to expedite some of the harms that are associated with these you know, admittedly risky products Regulation is the point that I think really needs to be emphasized Drugs are not regulated when you have a prohibited market, a criminalized market and everything is more dangerous when it's unregulated. You know glass of water I wouldn't drink if you told me, o, it's actually gone through no regulatory checks. there's been no safety, there's been no regulatory oversight over who the producers are. I wouldn't even drink that. So when we talk about risky products, we need to think about what type of regulation we're going to bring in and I think that we can learn from all these drug policy reform initiatives that are happening all across the world right now. And just to push back on your own book, I think the nuts and bolts sounds incredibly fascinating and actually what we need. People frequently say they enjoy this podcast because we kind of we do the bigger picture stuff, but we very quickly get into actually how would you physically do this and what might be the barriers on them. So I think there's been a long timee space for a book that deals with exactly that. So I think be nicer and kind to do something This might be a very specific question. It's about the behaviors that people might display when they use drugs, so it's slightly different to the drug. And one of the ones I think is trickier to deal with in terms of media landscape is GHB, particularly around drugs that are used for spiking people's drinks and things like that. Do you have a sense or has any research been done into like the consequences of legalizing drugs where people might behave in pretty abhorrent ways, utilizing the drug not because of the drug, but actually that drug gives them a space in which to do it? So I think this is one of like you say, the more thaorniest and more difficult issues when we talk about. entally having different regulatory controls over particular substances. I think first of all, like I mentioned, I think the point to be made when you think about something like the legalization of a drug like GHB is legalization doesn't mean greater availability. And so Again, so many people make the presumption that by prohibiting something, you're going to reduce the availability of it in terms of the availability of it for anybody to pick up. That is not what the evidence has shown us. You know, we've had decade after decade of drug prohibition and just say no campaigns and sniffer dogs at airports and all of these efforts and we've seen drugs and drug use go up And the availability of drugs also go up. And so prohibition doesn't mean a reduction in availability and a reduction in use. And also what it doesn't allow for is a recognition of greater drug education. And so I don't know the drug education, you might have gotone to school, but I think I got the same that everybody got, which is if you look at a drug Y heart will explode and die, don't have look at a drug. and you know that is all you can have. There's no education about recognizing its impacts on the particular people. There's no education about recognizing when somebody you're with might have been spiked or might have been damaged or what should you do? Prohibition also creates the context where people are afraid to roach authorities with potential issues they might have with the use of drugs because they're afraid about the potential consequences as well. And so when we think about what moving beyond the war on drugs might allow for, I think greater regulatory control about the production and the availability of something only becomes possible once you start using those regulatory tools And also greater education about the impacts of drugs, about the way drugs might impact society, about they might impact a person, then also becomes possible. And in terms of the aborrent relationships between things like GHB and things like sexual assault, I think that so often in society, we tend to blame like the drug because the drug is a useful explanation for for all these social problems when we have a much deeper problem around misogyny around sexual consent, which we need to have a much broader education on. But it's so much easier to blame the drug than it is to actually look at society. And I think that is really what the use of drugs has been. You know I had an example of it just just the other day where A few days ago, I've got a little seven year old girl and you know, we were walking through the underground and somebody who was you know street homeless, she asked me, why would someone be homeless? And I'm trying to give her this like complicated explanation about you know the housing shortage, right ab by, you know, her low eyes are going everywhere. this poor seven year old She had no idea what I was talking about. And then a few days later, I remember I was walking on my own and I was behind a mother and a young son had almost the same conversation as my daughter and was saying you know, why are people homeless? And the mother just went, Oh, they're all on drugs just moved on. simimple explanation like, and I think that that is what drugs have allowed people to do Rather than deal with complex issues, things like sexual assault, things like street homelessness, things like mental health, it's given us an easy scapegoat to blame. And I think part of what the point of drug policy reform should be is to actually open up those conversations on a much broader level. Part of the problem here, right is that we have a reactionary media who look for quick answers to things. And the answer you gave was woven and textured and evidence based. and it's trying to find ways to communicate that against kind of other narratives that are very intuitive, even if they aren't true. Yeah. And the thing about it's a hypocritical medor as well, like we have media that is aware that the drug policy doesn't work and also is aware that in terms of the kind of backlash that I think has been given the Green Party's actual evidence based policy on legal regulation, I think it's so striking that A lot of that has come from serervative political class that has been in terms of their own personal life far more associated with these substances than Tetolers like like yourself. you know, there was a recent Conservative partarty leadership election, I remember, where every single contender from Michael Gove for his admission about cocaine to Rory Stewart talking about taking opium in the Afghan mountains, it all had themselves admitted use of drugs. But yeah, we're talking about the draconian down tough on drugs policy and what's really interesting about what we've seen in the US is that we've seen how quickly politicians will move from criminalization and war on drugs rhetoric, to profiting from the actual commodification. People like former Speaker of the House, John Bayer plays a leading role in cannabis companies despite having, know, been banging the drum for the war on drugs, you for years on years. And so I think that that is something that we need to really call out this hypocrisy around policy, you know at the very top of British society and they know that criminalization of drugs isn't going to impact them. It's not going to impact Westminster. There's not going to be stop in searches of people for you know, drug use or randomized drug tests in Westminster. And so they know it's only going to impact particular communities and I think that It's those communities that we need to say, this isn't working for us and we want to learn from what's going on around the world try and to do something different and that's what I tried to do really with this book. Yeah, and also in Parliament, the traces of drugs were in bathrooms. I don't know the exact stat but it was massive in terms of the amount of drug use that was potentially going on n was going on. The traces were there. Yeah absolutely. And in terms of concluding, what do you want to see happen next? Why do we need to go from here? So I think that the first thing we want to do is to try and recognize that the war on drugs has failed and really make that point unreservedly By its own metrics, the warar on Drugs promised, and you can see this, you know in all the rhetoric that surrounds the first international laws, the speeches on the warar on drrugs by Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon If we implement this and it was an experiment this hadn't been done in human history, this experiment of criminalizing, you know, incarcerating, stigmatizing people who use drugs and people who fall into the supply of drugs, this will lead to drug down, drug use going down, the harms of drugs going down That has been the opposite as we've seen around the world. And that's not just in places like the UK and the U.S. I mean, the devastation that the war on drugs has done in places like Colombia where I went for this book The war on drugs is a metaphor here that people use to try and Sound tough. places like Mexico in places like Colbia it's no metaphor the death rate is larger than some UN resolution recognized wars. The environmental impact has completely devastated agricultural land through aerial fumigation policies, crop eradication policies have made huge amounts of land that have been used by agrarian communities unusable for generations you know corruption of political system devastating impact in huge amounts of places around the world. We've seen the use of drugs. deaths from drugs continue to go up. And so I think emphasizing that this has failed should be the first point of call and trying to dismantle this system of criminalization around trying to manage be admittedly risky and potentially negatively impactful use of particular substances And so once that has been dismantled. I think then we get into a much longer and much slower conversation about what is the type of regulatory framework we want to build that might really emphasize public health really emphasize things like community repair and minimize things like mass commercialization and mass profiteering that we've seen with other drugs because the drugs that are prohibited are not the only drugs that have been globalized over the past century. We've seen huge profiteering around a vast range of different pharmaceutical drugs, and we don't simply want to transition things like cannabis and psychedelics into that same old model And so what I think that initiatives around Do we want to allow for new forms of cooperative production? Do we want to pass policies which include things like the cultivation of these substances have to be held in lands that are registered as a commons? Do we want to have things like seed banks that are available for farmers in the global South to be able to access the seeds that they require Do we want to have things like open access around patterns so that we can't have big silicon Vallalue backed pharmaceutical companies establish a legal monopoly over these substances and be able to extract rentier profits from them. the next generation. These are all options that are open to us and I'm sure that it will take a bit of trial and error, a bit of things working here and a little bit of changing there. But I think we need to really emphasize the what we're doing now hasn't worked and we need to learn from what's going on all around A lot of the fears that surrounded legalization in places like the USA just haven't materialized. Even the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Nora Volkl said in Congress I thought the legalization would lead to a massive growth in use use of cannabis and that hasn't happened. It simply hasn't happened. And so we can understand that a lot of the fears and stigma I think come from a genuine place in people, but we need to look at what's going on around the world understand works, what doesn't and try to move our entire drug policy away from this myths of the twentieth century and onto things that are actually evidence based and what actually works. I've learned so much during this conversation. one thing that's really stood out to me is I think when this is used as a political attack, the issue of drugs more widely, it's often to take away from the kind of central message of inequality and cost of living to try and get us on a kind of quote unquote culture war isue. Aolutely. But what I think you've done brilliantly is point out that the drugs issue is an issue of inequality, is an issue of cost of living. Absolutely, abbsolutely. And we can see that the way in which spikes in terms of substance abuse disorders are correlated with places that have suffered with de industrialization, with economic abandonment We think about Scotland and its drug death rates, where we might think about the rust belt in the United States and the impact of the opioid crisis over there. If you leave communities devastated and abandoned and you leave people isolated and without any hope of any kind of economic stability, you create the idealized conditions for the types of increasing drug use and increasing substance abuse issues that we've seen over the past few decades. And so trying to use this moment of transition, not to simply create a new hyper commercialized peter Theo backed commodities industry, I think is a really rare opportunity and we might actually try and shape a different form of economy recognizes the risks of these substances, recognes their potential harm, and maybe uses that to justify different forms of production, distribution and consumption kind of Yeah, the hyper commercialized ulsive consumption that so much of capitalism tries to accelerate. If people want to find out more about you and your work, how can they find you? I'm a professor at Loughborough University. So I have a new book out called The Next Fix, The Winers and Losers in the Future of Drugs. And so check out that book going to start substack ' everyone's doing that now. And yeah, just the look of Kojo Kram on or I don't have any inventive like handles. It's just Kojo Kram. I mean, that worked at one point it sounds like you wanted people to rock up to L B I'm presuming that's not the envir. KJ, thank you so much. really appreciate it This episode was brought to you by Crowdfounder wasas you a bold idea Start it at crowdfonder. co Uk F its slash bolt