CULTURAL BAGGAGE

DECEMBER 12, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: I am Dean Becker, your host. Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud, misdirection, and the liars whose support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies, enriches barbarous cartels, and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent US gangs who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is Cultural Baggage.

Indeed, this is Cultural Baggage, I am Dean Becker, your host, the Reverend Most High. I want to read a little bit from a book we're going to speak to one of the co-authors about here in just a moment.

Quote: "The role of the press in creating national hysteria around pop stars and drugs cannot be overestimated. If the American war on drugs was at least in part manufactured to satisfy racial prejudice, then it's British franchise was at least in part manufactured to sell papers."

And with that, I want to bring on our guest. He's co-author of Drug Wars: The Terrifying Inside Story of Britain's Drug Trade. And with that, I want to welcome JS Rafaeli. Hello, sir.

JS RAFAELI: Hi there, Dean, nice to be on. Thank you for having me.

DEAN BECKER: You co-authored this with Mister Neil Woods. I think he was now the former president of LEAP UK, is that correct?

JS RAFAELI: Neil is the current chairman of LEAP UK.

DEAN BECKER: Chairman, okeh.

JS RAFAELI: So, Neil worked for fifteen odd years as an undercover drugs cop.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: And through -- and bases his experience and his expertise on those -- that front line service on the war on drugs, and based his ethical decision that that was -- that the war on drugs is a vast and hideous policy error, on his experience.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and I think many of us that worked in law enforcement, I don't know if you know, JS, I was a cop as well back in the '60s, and --

JS RAFAELI: Oh, I didn't. Right, okeh.

DEAN BECKER: We all tend to look back on it and see some errors of our ways, in so doing, but, this book, I want to first off just thank you. You educated me. I feel proud this spring, I went to Portugal and to Switzerland to learn from some of their experts, but I learned some things about the drug war for Great Britain, for the UK, that I just had no idea of how this escalated, how -- that's what much of your book talks about, is that there was a problem, but it's nothing like what we have today. Correct?

JS RAFAELI: Well, it's very kind of you to say, thank you, and, yeah, it was -- it's been, funnily enough, it real -- a lot of what I, what comes out in the book was news to me as well.

I didn't -- I had worked in the drugs field, I've written quite a lot about it for several years, but when we undertook the research for the book, it really opened my eyes to, specifically, just how tiny an issue this was in the UK.

DEAN BECKER: Well, as I --

JS RAFAELI: Sorry, can you hear me?

DEAN BECKER: I can. I'm hoping that you'll stay right in that microphone of your phone. We still --

JS RAFAELI: Yeah.

DEAN BECKER: Our levels are low.

JS RAFAELI: -- speaking as loud as I can.

DEAN BECKER: I hear you, man. Yeah, I was looking at something about, quoting from your book again, here, from the preface. "With so much money in the drugs game, how can corruption not happen? It had got to the point that, with drug investigations, police corruption had just become an accepted part of the game."

And that's the hell of it. isn't it, that we have corruption at every juncture of this drug war, that's what makes it run, correct?

JS RAFAELI: Well, that is one of the major threads of investigation in the book, is how, and I don't think people really -- it's not common knowledge, to the -- the extent to which corruption, the corruption of law enforcement, and the corruption of the systems that are meant to protect us, is financially completely based on the drugs trade.

Of course, there were a few corrupt cops, there was police -- there were bent coppers in England, there were corrupt cops in America, prior to the drug war. But, the scale, is so exponentially different as soon as you bring a black market in drugs into the picture. It changes the very nature of the game, it changes the actual nature of the corruption.

It just swells, to an extent never -- we've never before seen.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I think that is the case, and it continues to swell, it continues to grow. I mean, you're, I think, well aware of the situation here in the US, where we have this influx of fentanyl and carfentanyl, which, you know, I end this program with the phrase because of prohibition you don't know what's in that bag, please be careful.

And that's become more pertinent than ever before, am I right?

JS RAFAELI: Well, that's what, I think Richard Cowan, who defined the Iron Law of Prohibition.

DEAN BECKER: Yep.

JS RAFAELI: That in any -- any time you prohibit a substance, it will get stronger. And that was true in the prohibition of alcohol in the '20s and '30s in America, and it's true of the cannabis market, by now, in the UK, which we trace in the book very clearly, how the strains of cannabis got much stronger under prohibition.

And it's true on the streets of, you know, the American rust belt now, with the flood of fentanyl and opiates. And this is a pattern that repeats itself over and over and over again, and it's a very simple policy -- a very simply policy switch could save a lot of lives, and it's really tragic how people don't make that switch.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I think about, you know, the -- the escalation of this drug war. It happened over about the same time frame, the '70s and '80s, it got worse in both the US and the UK, as the politicians tried to ratchet up the punishments et cetera.

It's never been as bad in the UK as it is here, with the ten and twenty and forty year sentences, I don't think, for, you know, lesser amounts of drugs, but, it's always revolved around, I got no other word for it, lies. Lies of horror, portended horror, that sort of thing.

I'm, again, here, I'm on, what, page seventeen of your book. "The rumors of rampant cocaine use had been absurdly exaggerated, if not completely invented. The entire furor took on -- turned out to be based on a single Canadian major stationed in Folkestone, who had arranged one sting operation to buy a packet of black market heroin from a West End prostitute."

And I guess what I'm saying is, the instance of problems is not what it's blown up to be. I guess what I'm saying is, is it exaggerates things as you say in your book. There's less need for these laws than one would normally think.

JS RAFAELI: Well, yeah. I -- that's absolutely true. I mean, and nobody should be -- drugs can be dangerous, obviously, you know, in the same way that alcohol can be dangerous, and alcohol should be numbered among the drugs and we regulate it to alleviate that danger.

I think what the, you know, what the prohibition of drugs, what the war on drugs has done, is to, you know, it's like using a guillotine to cure a toothache.

DEAN BECKER: You know, I don't know how much you've been able to learn from our programs, this is like program 7,110 right here that we've done.

JS RAFAELI: Yeah, I listened to a few, yeah. Yeah.

DEAN BECKER: And, the point I guess I'm getting at, maybe you heard me mention, I have tried to entice, to invite, to question, to make contact with, to develop a friendship, a relationship, a means to have a debate about the policy of drug war, what is the benefit, because we're told that it's somehow, you know, going to pan out in some long run, but it just keeps getting worse.

There's nobody willing to defend it, I guess is what I'm trying to get at. Do you have the same situation in the UK, are there -- is there an ongoing debate about the benefit of drug war?

JS RAFAELI: Well, yeah, there's a few key figures in the media who will, and they're sort of, yeah, four or five who go on the kind of media merry-go-round, and are the kind of, you know, rent-a-pundit who comes on and defends the war on drugs, usually by saying it hasn't worked because we haven't done it enough, we haven't hit the dealers and users hard enough.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: Now, the very funny thing is that the people in positions of authority, politicians, judges, a lot of police, there's this really funny pattern with -- which happens in the UK, that as soon as they retire, I mean, almost like two days after anybody retires, they'll write an op-ed in one of the major newspapers saying we should end the war on drugs.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah.

JS RAFAELI: So as soon as their career won't be affected by it, as soon as they're sort of safe, they'll tell the truth. And they'll say, listen, I was doing this for a long time, it's a terrible mistake, and we should change the law.

And, you know, there was, I think, the attorney general, former attorney general who recently did it. William Hague, who is a real conservative politician here, I mean, I don't -- I doubt your American listeners will know who he is, but, he was a real sort of high profile Conservative politicians, and nobody would ever dream that he would come out for the end of prohibition, but as soon as he retired, bang, there it was.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and that happens a lot over here, too. Not as often as I would want, but, it certainly does.

Again, quoting from your book, "Cannot our legislators understand that our only hope of stamping out the drug addict is through the doctors? That legislation above the doctors' heads is likely to prove our undoing, and that we can no more stamp out addiction by prohibition than we can stamp out insanity."

I look at it liike this --

JS RAFAELI: Now that's --

DEAN BECKER: Go ahead, JS.

JS RAFAELI: Just to say, that's a very interesting quote you just read, right, because that's, I should say to your listeners, that's not my writing, what you just read. That -- what you just read was a letter written in the early 1920s to the Times.

DEAN BECKER: Oh yes, W. E. Dixon, right?

JS RAFAELI: Yeah. Yes, sorry, the reader in pharmacology at Oxford, yeah.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah.

JS RAFAELI: Actually Cambridge University, and the debate in the UK at the time was about how to handle this issue of specifically heroin, but drugs, illicit drugs in general.

And, at the time, Britain had a system which was internationally known as "The British System." And it was a great source of national pride in that era, that heroin, drugs in general but specifically heroin was not handled by law enforcement.

It was an issue for doctors, so drug addicts [sic], if you were addicted to heroin, you could go to your doctor and say I'm an addict, and he would supply you heroin. Not methadone, not a replacement opioid, but actual heroin, which was a hundred percent clean. We knew exactly what was in it, and you got free needles with it.

And this was how Britain handled the growing issue of heroin in the early twentieth century. What they -- what the British doctors like, the Dixon, who you just read, were worried about is, they were looking at the United States and what was going on there, with, you know, that was the year of alcohol prohibition, and immediately following the Harrison Act, which had banned illicit drugs in the United States.

And they could see that addiction was rocketing in America. There was hundreds of thousands of heroin addicts because of the growth of the black market. In Britain, because of the British system, there was no black market in heroin, but zero, because, why would a gangster sell heroin when his client base can go get it free from the doctors? Not free, but very cheap from their doctors.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah.

JS RAFAELI: There's no profit incentive. And everyone in Britain, all the sort of, the doctors, the medical community, the medical establishment, were warning the politicians, look, if you go down the American road of prohibition, you will inherit the American problems, which did not exist in Britain.

What -- I mean, there are these statistics in the book, which are absolutely mad. So, in 1959, there were 62 known heroin addicts in the UK. Sixty-two. By 1964, this had risen to 342. Right? And that was a huge scandal. There were 342 addicts in the whole United Kingdom.

I mean, now, after a few decades of prohibition, we have 350,000.

DEAN BECKER: God.

JS RAFAELI: But, so, but to think, to think that there was a time in living memory when the number of heroin addicts in the UK could, you know, fit into a small pub.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: It's ludicrous. It's like, it's almost unimaginable. And that was part of the really interesting learning process of doing the book, for me, was I didn't know all -- I didn't know any of this stuff. It was complete -- completely blew my mind. And I started reading about it, and I got into it, and I really, I did very indepth research about it, and, yeah.

So, I'm on a kind of a mission now, to educate the people of Britain, because nobody in Britain even knows this stuff. So I want the British people to know that they were actually quite forward thinking. They had a really, the right idea, and they let it go.

DEAN BECKER: This W. E. Dixon --

JS RAFAELI: And we lost it.

DEAN BECKER: W. E. Dixon, he had a good vision there, didn't he? Well, --

JS RAFAELI: W. E. Dixon, and all the people around him, like Humphrey Rolleston, all the people who set up and sustained, you know, the British system.

DEAN BECKER: Well, these ever increasing numbers that you point out here, JS, have to do with the unintended consequences, another iron law, if you will, that if I'm a drug user in an era of prohibition, that stuff costs a heck of a lot, and one of the main ways for me to get my supply without, you know, using rent money, is to sell some drugs to you, and maybe your brother and your cousin, maybe to encourage you to try it, maybe to encourage you just the once to try some heroin or something, and maybe you'll need some more heroin, and you'll be buying it from me and I can get some cost savings, and I can better supply my own needs. Is that a fair assumption much of your book, what you're pointing out?

JS RAFAELI: The -- what you just described is the exact epidemiology of how heroin addiction spreads. That's exactly it. And that's been well researched by very clever people around the world, and rings absolutely true to what we discovered researching the book.

And so as soon as you take out that incentive, if you are a drug user, let's take your example. You're a drug user, and you have a choice, you can either buy from a gangster and sell to me, and get me hooked, that's option A, to supply your habit, or you can just go to your doctor and say, listen, doc, I'm a heroin addict, I need help to regulate my life, to regulate my supply.

If you take option B, the doctor option, the medical option, you will have no profit incentive. You will not need to sell to me in order to finance your own -- your own habit.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: So, that, the British system cut out exactly the spread of that -- that epidemiology, because heroin addiction spreads exactly like an epidemic of illness. And if you take out the vectors of infection, which are -- is your dealer, who just described, you basically take out the spread of the market.

And that's why in the 60s, Britain had a few hundred heroin addicts and America had several hundred thousand.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I tell you what, once again, we're speaking with JS Rafaeli, he's co-author of Drug Wars: The Terrifying Inside Story Of Britain's Drug Trade.

Normally in the middle of the program, sir, we do a little thing called Name That Drug By Its Side Effects. We'll be back in one minute. Please hang with us, there, and we'll be right back with JS.

It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, face chomping, lip eating, heart devouring, brain slurping, ecstasy, suicidality, zombieism. Time's up! The answer, according to law enforcement, from some crazy ass chemist somewhere: Mephedrone, otherwise known as bath salts.

The following message is brought to you by the US Ministry of Homeland Security.

[music] Fear, fear fear fear,
Fear fear fear fear
Fear fear fear
Fear fear fear,
Fear fear fear.

Fear, fear fear fear
Fear fear fear fear
Fear fear fear fear fear,
Fear fear fear fear

Never forget fear.

And hatred. Or lies. Or deception. Big brother says the war of terror will last forever. Merry Christmas.

All right, folks, this is Cultural Baggage. I am Dean Becker, the Reverend Most High. We're speaking with Mister JS Rafaeli, co-author of Drug Wars: The Inside Story Of Britain's Drug Trade.

JS, I don't know, man, the war of terror, I use this phrase, the war of terror is the war on drugs with afterburners. Is that playing out the same in the UK, do you guys have this great fear of, I don't know, advancing hordes of ISIS warriors?

JS RAFAELI: That's -- yeah, that's a complex and multipronged question you just asked. Yeah, I mean, obviously, Britain -- yeah. There are several answers to that question. The quick answer is yes, obviously, Britain is in the throes of a kind of xenophobic spasm right now.

DEAN BECKER: Okeh.

JS RAFAELI: As is the United States, you know, with Brexit and the sort of haphazard madness, political madness that that has inspired. So yes, there is this like fear of outsiders.

Specifically with the war on terror you mentioned, there has always been a crossover in Britain between the illicit trade in drugs and terrorism, starting, I mean, not start, but going back to the 70s and 80s, with the IRA, who were mixed up in drug money and funded their operations through, let's say shady underworld contacts.

And there was always a crossover between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the drug trade, and that continues to this day. And then there are people who are involved in LEAP UK, like ex-SAS [Special Air Service] guys, who were in Afghanistan, walking through, trudging through the poppy fields, knowing that the bullets that the Taliban were shooting at them were financed by heroin addicts on the streets of England.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah, it's a real conundrum, isn't it? Yeah, last I heard, opium juice was being sold for six cents a gram, there in Afghanistan, and, you know, we get the carfentanyl, and you guys I guess are getting the Afghan heroin there, I think that makes it to Canada a lot as well. But, --

JS RAFAELI: Yeah, I mean, ninety percent, I think, of the world's supply of heroin comes out of Afghanistan, I think the United States is actually mainly supplied by South American --

DEAN BECKER: Yeah.

JS RAFAELI: -- heroin, but then, obviously, that whole, the whole heroin and opioid market in America is absolutely skewed by the way the medical system works, but also by this surge in fentanyl, which thus far, I mean, Britain has been largely spared that, the fentanyl horror.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and thank goodness.

JS RAFAELI: So far.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah. We had 72,000 deaths last year, you know, that's all drugs, mostly opiate for sure, and a large part --

JS RAFAELI: Staggering. Just, it's a staggering number, it's just mind boggling. It's more than American casualties in the Vietnam War every year. It's a staggering number, and anybody who isn't just bowled over by that, just isn't paying attention.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and JS, I look at it like this, that over the years of the drug war, and it's hard to estimate, because nobody knows for sure, but, roughly half a trillion dollars, that's a T, trillion dollars, flows into the pockets of these terrorists, into the hands of these barbarous cartels in Mexico and Guatemala, Honduras, and to the street corner vendors and the gangs here in the United States.

Half a trillion dollars. How are people going to walk away from that? How are criminals going to say, oh, never mind, I'll just leave that money for someone else. It is an impossible task to stop the black market as long as it's illegal. I mean, it's just crazy.

JS RAFAELI: Absolutely, and one has to think about what they then -- what do they use that capital that they receive from the drug trade to do? They reinvest it in other criminal enterprises.

DEAN BECKER: Human smuggling.

JS RAFAELI: Yeah, people trafficking, arms, all sorts of smuggling, and, I mean, most significantly to us, for even myself, because Neil comes from a police background.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: Like yourself. So, to us, one of the -- another main thread that we traced in the book is how, because we care about policing. Right?

DEAN BECKER: Yes.

JS RAFAELI: We come from a fundamentally pro-police perspective, like, we take the idea of law, of what law enforcement is meant to be very seriously, which again relates to British history, because it was Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, who set up the first professionalized police force. And he set up these very clear principles --

DEAN BECKER: That's where Bobbies came from, right?

JS RAFAELI: -- were meant to be based. Sorry? Yes, Bobbies, yes.

DEAN BECKER: That's where Bobbies came from.

JS RAFAELI: Exactly. That's why we call them Bobbies in London, yeah. Exactly that. Yeah, exactly. So he set up these principles, on which all modern policing is meant to be based, and what the key principle is that the community are the police, and the police are the community, and that all policing must be done by consent, by the consent of those being policed.

And that's a system that works very well, and one of the things we trace in the book, and it's really heartbreaking for us, is how as soon as you introduced the war on drugs, as soon as you introduce the prohibition of this -- of these substances, it forms a break, a fissure, between the police and the community.

And, the community stops trusting the police, and the police get very corrupt, very quickly. And it's -- it happens quickly and it happens really fast. And it's shocking.

DEAN BECKER: Well, let me throw in this thought, and, to support what you're saying, it's about ten years ago, I was in El Paso, it's the only time I've been at a seminar where there was, you know, working cops, the DEA was there. They had about two dozen of their officers taking part, and learning, and training.

And at the time, I think he was deputy director, Anthony Placido. He said that, you know, at the time, I think he said 370 billion dollars a year is what they think, you know, and that's, you know, it's probably gone up since then, inflation, but, 370 billion dollars, and the best they could determine, about fifty percent of that money was used to -- fifty percent of that money was used to corrupt judges, and, you know, border guards and cops on the beat, prosecutors.

It's such an ugly thing, this drug war. Your response there, JS.

JS RAFAELI: Yeah, I mean, god, again, it makes the UK problems seem a bit small, you know, I mean, America does everything on this huge scale, so, yeah, I mean, if they're using half of 370 billion dollars every year to corrupt law enforcement, that -- what I was getting at before, I think it's, what we have to bear in mind, that doesn't just affect the police who do drugs work. It lessens the police's capability to solve all other crimes.

And it lessens their effectiveness in solving all other crimes, and a classic example of this is the American police, in general, used to have a murder clearance rate of above ninety percent, up until the 1960s. That had been consistent, they would solve 90 percent of murders.

Nixon starts the war on drugs in '71, and within three or four years, the murder clearance rate of American police had dropped to I think 66 percent. And it has never risen above that since, in four decades.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: So, a third of American murderers are getting away with it, and with -- it's hard to say conclusively, but there is an obvious relationship there on the timeline between the introduction of prohibition drugs policing and the police not being able to solve murders.

And to us, that's a tragedy, and it's a betrayal of the police, I think is what we want -- what we want to get at, is that the worst thing that ever happened to law enforcement was they were asked to deal with this situation which it's inappropriate for them to deal with. The police aren't made to solve this problem.

The medical community is, there's other avenues by which policy makers could solve this, and so the metaphor that I use a lot is, you know, when you DIY in your house? You know, you're trying to fix something in your house?

DEAN BECKER: Okeh.

JS RAFAELI: If you have a problem in your house, and you use an inappropriate tool to that problem, you will not only not fix the problem, but you might damage the tool itself.

DEAN BECKER: Right.

JS RAFAELI: And that's what's happened to the police. They were asked to do an inappropriate -- a thing for which their skills were not appropriate, and in so doing, they have been damaged.

And it's a betrayal of law enforcement, it's a betrayal of the police. If you care about the police, you should support an end to the war on drugs.

DEAN BECKER: It's a betrayal to the whole community. I talk about it, JS, that if we were to legalize drugs today, that here in the US, there are probably tens of millions of people who would then be more comfortable to report a separate crime, to speak to law enforcement, to dare to be a part of that community.

Because we have divided, in many ways, you know, dopers versus drinkers and pillheads and whatever, but the point I'm getting at is, through this policy of prohibition, we have put a huge divide between law enforcement and much of the community.

JS RAFAELI: I -- it can't, it really can't be said enough, and in both the United States and the UK, but originating in the United States for sure, it's mixed up with the massive racial issues in law enforcement and policing.

DEAN BECKER: Well, I'll tell you what, JS --

JS RAFAELI: Drug laws and --

DEAN BECKER: I just looked at the clock, we've got to cut it short, I didn't get halfway through this book, we're going to have to hit it again. Folks, we've been speaking with Mister JS Rafaeli, he's with -- he partnered in writing Drug Wars: A Terrifying Inside Story Of Britain's Drug Trade.

JS, I thank you, once again folks I remind you because of prohibition you do not know what's in that bag. I urge you to please be careful.

CULTURAL BAGGAGE

MAY 31, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: I am the Reverend Dean Becker, keeper of the moral high ground in the drug war, for the world, and this is Cultural Baggage.

Hi folks, this is the Reverend Dean Becker. I'm in studio, and man, do we have a show for you today.

We examine what goes on all around the US on a regular basis, but today, we're privileged to hear a bit about what's going on in Great Britain, the progress of some of our friends and allies over there. We're glad to be speaking with the executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership UK, Mister Jason Reed. Hello, Jason, how are you today?

JASON REED: Hi there, Dean, thanks for letting me on your show.

DEAN BECKER: Jason, the fact of the matter is, you know, we have in the past, oh, well really a hundred years, grown to believe, and by that I mean, too many politicians have grown to believe in the drug war, in the quote benefits of this drug war, but the truth be told, there, the fact there are no benefits is being exposed on a daily basis. Am I right?

JASON REED: It's strange. Depends how you look at it. There is some benefits, because it ramps up the rhetoric within these presses that pander to political persuasions, so, if you're of a certain inclination, and you have a pre-bias towards this issue, then the circular nature that you get between what's being published, what comes out in the journals, and what comes out in the political stakes, there's this strange circular logic to it.

So politicians can think they're doing the right thing, because they believe in the moral aspect of it, and I use that in quotation marks, but of course once we know, you start stripping down the policy and you get down to the raw evidence of this matter, there's not anything that can support current policies of prohibition. They just don't work.

But unfortunately, once you get into this circular position where certain aspects of the press pander towards what they think is a popular position, that then reinforces, emboldens our politicians thinking that they're in the right thing on this crusade, and we need to get away from that. This is where we need to neutralize it, and get to a position of pure science and evidence.

DEAN BECKER: And, that is the key, the telling point, is that, you know, the politicians, the, those in positions of authority, that can continue to believe in this drug war, are fondly remembering the tales of their youth, the quote reefer madness that was presented for decades on end, that was designed to frighten children and parents into believing this.

And it's proving to be a fallacy. That it empowers terrorists, it enriches cartels, it gives reasons for these violent gangs to prowl our neighborhoods. Am I right?

JASON REED: I think it's the case of a generational change. I think you're right, it's the -- I'm a child of the '80s, I was brought up in the Just Say No generation, so they just had a logic to it, that all drugs are bad, therefore any kind of bolstering and underpinning that system, for your personal use, was evil, and again, I'm paraphrasing, obviously.

But, once you actually do assess this from a rational position, and you get away from that -- that ingrained perspective that may have come along generationally, you do have to analyze this, and thankfully, we've now got a position where we've got so many different people in the medical field, science and evidence, and just general people that are studying this from an academic point of view, which is so useful because it just completely strips away the wrestling match that comes with the emotional turmoil that inherently comes with the subject.

And once we get into that position, we're finding that that's the information we need, and that's the information that we can start getting across to the general public. Because unfortunately the general public still don't quite necessarily understand what's going on.

And that's where people like you and I come in, to make sure that the science and evidence that is out there supporting our case for reform is actually managing to get to the eyes and ears of people that aren't particularly interested in the subject, but it absolutely one hundred percent effects, through, as you said, terrorism, through street crime, through just the general erosion of social links, as well, because of what these policies can do, inherently racist policies that come with drug policy.

You know, these are all erosions that happen within a social level, so once we actually get to the point where laymen can understand this, that's when we're going to start seeing some progression.

DEAN BECKER: You know, here in the US, we have constant situations where politicians, people in positions of authority, continue to say, especially in regards to medical cannabis, that, oh, there haven't been enough studies done, we dare not go down this path, it's much too early. But the truth be told there are thousands of studies having been done to cannabis and these other drugs which show that it's not as deadly and as dangerous as was portended.

And you guys were actually supported, or recognized, by the British Medical Journal, who is now calling for a reexamination, an end to this eternal drug war. Your thoughts, to their endorsement, please.

JASON REED: It was pretty incredibly to get that degree of recognition, and, the British Medical Journal have always been pretty good on being progressive, opening up the policy and working out, you know, is there alternatives in this, and assessing the evidence, like they should do, you know, it's a peer reviewed journal that is there to have a rigorous conversation on various different things.

And of course drug policy is very prominently on the agenda now. You can't escape it. The media's getting its teeth into it, and also we've got support from the Royal Society for Protection of Health, the Royal College of Physicians, the medical fraternity are absolutely stepping up to the plate now.

So when we got an email from the British Medical Journal saying, would you like to write a piece for us, to detail what you're doing in LEAP UK, and LEAP globally. Of course we jumped at it, it was like, absolutely. This is exactly the publication that we want to be published in. So, myself and Paul Whitehouse, former chief constable here in the UK, we co-wrote a piece that detailed everything that we can highlight within the fails of this drug war, so race disparity, the -- just, the sheer money that goes into the global trade of, you know, three hundred and twenty billion per year globally.

But also, the smallness of the statistics, as well, which resonate well with the voter demographics. So, in the UK alone, each taxpayer pays four hundred pounds a year to keep drug policy afloat. So if this -- if this is a failed policy, which of course we know it is, people are paying four hundred pounds out of their own pockets every year to keep this policy going, when we know it doesn't work.

So then, on the back of that, British Medical Journal a week later came out and wrote an editorial, and it's the furthest they've gone on this subject, and they said that we need to legalize, regulate, and control all drugs, which is the first time they've used that language. They've always been progressive, but they've never signed up to that degree.

But, the key, to us, was the sign-off. Within that editorial, they actually made it very, very clear that they want health professionals now to step up and take this issue on. They're calling for more health professionals, they're saying that more health professionals need to actually take a lead in this, to actually get some health-led policies as opposed to criminal justice system-led policy.

So for us, that was just a clear endorsement of where this conversation is going, and where it has come from, it's just -- that's movement.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Jason, I've got to say, you know, hearty handshake, whatever, for what you've done, but, the truth be told, there is nobody in the United States that's willing to come on my show and defend this policy. They run like rabbits.

You know, I just got back from Portugal, and Switzerland, last month. I got a chance to speak to Doctor Goulão there in Portugal about the very successful harm reduction policy they've had in place for I think 19 years. I got to speak to the gentleman in Switzerland who started their heroin injection program. I got to speak to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction.

And I found that they were perfectly willing, these people in positions of authority, to talk about the drug war, to talk about the problems, and what's your thought there, why are so many politicians afraid to have that debate, to have that discussion?

JASON REED: It is interesting, isn't it? As you said, a lot of times, trying to find the opposing voices is a big key to what we're trying to do now, and they just don't necessarily want to come up and have their say. I think a lot of it is because our position is quite strong, in reform now, there's no getting away from it. The, as we just said, the medical profession has stepped up, the criminal justice system, broad spectrum, has stepped up for LEAP.

But also, we've just got other factions as well, because in this country we've got a brilliant organization called Anyone's Child, which is a movement and an organization of bereaved family members that now want to fully legalize, reform, and control drugs, to prevent the same tragedy in other families that they've gone through.

So once you're faced with these multi, different strings of dialogue that we're putting out there, it does make it quite difficult to argue against. So, to find those voices is near on impossible. So the politicians, a lot of times, are on the wrong side of history. It's just, it's a simple phrase to use, and we use it a lot, but it's pretty much true that they think that they're doing the right thing, when of course we know they're not.

But in this country, we -- there was quite an interesting poll a few years ago where they polled anonymously in the House of Commons, in our Parliament, and they found that 75 percent of MPs when polled anonymously doesn't think that the current drug laws work. So the majority don't think they work, and yet you try and get that on record, it goes a very different way.

And a lot of that is because of internal politics. If a party doesn't particularly support an issue, then it means that individual MPs have to go against their party, which leads to all sorts of different problems internally. Also, there's, as I said at the start of our chat, there's also the position of media and press, and how that interacts with policies and politicians. That always plays a massive effect.

So if politicians can have their say, and be quite free, and have an outside party point of view, chances are you might get some degree of agreement out of them. But if you go through conventional channels, where they have to step up, do press releases, have very quick quotes of him, media stakes, it can quite often put them off because they're not always going to get represented.

So what we've found is, if you neutralize that, and you do get a very relaxed conversation with certain people, it's about creating the right platforms and right conditions for people to have the right level of, say, which I know sounds really convoluted, but basically it means that if you can have a relaxed, open conversation, where you completely have an amnesty, the chances are you do get some quite favorable dialogue.

DEAN BECKER: You know, it's a very incremental thing. It was, what, December 2014, I interviewed our then police chief, Charles McClelland, through a gentle process, you know, if A is true, then B is certainly true, and if B is true, then C is true, and eventually through this gentle, slow progression, about halfway through our conversation he said, you know, Dean, you're absolutely right, the drug war is a miserable failure.

And, from that moment, the local TV and the newspapers carried that interview, and helped to change the equation here in Houston, because, it is totally indefensible, what we're up to, isn't it?

JASON REED: Exactly, and that's -- you've made exactly the right point there, if, just having that conversation, and, as we say in this country, I don't know if this translates, but showing your maths. So if you're doing this ridiculously hard maths equation, then make sure you show how you got to that source, and how you've actually managed to do your working out.

That is key, so if you can show your maths within this discussion, which we are doing, because it's -- the evidence is completely on our side. People tend to have a bit of a change of heart, if they've got this ingrained position.

What we've also got to remember, this is a social program as well. Most of our generation have got a certain way of thinking with drugs. We have been brought up to think of them as the boogeyman. So, if we're all of a sudden then being perceived to release that boogeyman back into society, it straight away puts people's backs up. Well, of course, why wouldn't it?

So, when we're having these dialogues of, you know, well, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, how about this as an alternative? And also putting people at the heart of this debate, as well. This is key.

As much as we do need science and evidence, and the plural of anecdote isn't data, as we say, we also absolutely do need to represent the human faces, and whether that's the literal drug war in the Philippines, in Mexico, or the overdose deaths that are happening because of opioids in your country and in mine, and also, as we said, cannabis and medicinal cannabis and what that represents with human faces as well.

These are all things that do get traction, and absolutely do need representing. And we are, I think, our publicity streams, and I may use that kind of skeptically, that phrase, but our publicity streams are working. We're now better communicators within our general field of reform, and this is getting traction, and this is what's working.

DEAN BECKER: This is Dean Becker, your host. I'm breaking in just for a moment to remind you, you're listening to Cultural Baggage on Pacifica Radio and the Drug Truth Network. We're interviewing Mister Jason Reed, the executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership in the UK. The following, from the TV show Good Morning, Britain.

CHARLOTTE HAWKINS: The way forward to deal with this is to legalize drugs so that people would know what they are taking, is that the position that you feel would be a positive step forward, to help protect people?

RAY LAKEMAN: Well, I'm absolutely convinced that, when, you know, Lee Cohen is, the police, you know, medical experts and things like that, they all talk about what they refer to as a recreational dose.

RICHARD MADELEY: Yes.

RAY LAKEMAN: If, you know, if -- if this drug was regulated, and you had a recreational dose, you'd know exactly what they're taking, whether you like it or not, it would be safer. I've got no doubt my boys would be here, and I strongly suspect that these young people who died at the weekend would be here as well.

We don't have to like it just to see that it's -- it would have prevented these deaths.

DEAN BECKER: It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! [coughing] Rather harsh. Yes indeed. You've got to sneak up on this stuff. Time's up! The answer: K2. Spice. Or JWH018, the non-urine testable synthetic version of marijuana. Surely after its prohibition, no one will want to sell it at fifty dollars per gram.

Now, back to our interview with Jason Reed of LEAP UK.

And I think the, I don't know, what must be realized, recognized, is that, heretofore, in the US in particular, we had ten, twenty, thirty years of ratcheting up the drug war, from, you know, Nixon's time up through about the mid-'80s [sic: into the mid-'90s], and, the politicians just leaped into that, who joined in that attitude, who voted for mandatory minimums and search and seizure, and, you know, just extending prison terms, et cetera et cetera, as if it was god's will. That isn't happening anymore.

There are fewer, hell, I imagine there's fewer people every day, now recognizing the need for this drug war, that stand forth and call for more draconian measures. It's, it's just not happening any -- these days, is it.

JASON REED: I think we've got two strands, as well. We've got the human costs and the literal fiscal costs. And both of them aren't weighing up now, so I think people are having to be more critical thinking, especially on the human costs, because, in this country alone, we've never had a higher rate of drug deaths. This is it. We're topping the charts.

And, globally, we're seeing that as a trend as well, so when you're seeing that it's not the other person over there in the street that's got this problem, this is happening on every single one of our doorsteps. Chances are we all know someone that's had an addiction or suffered some sort of fallout through drug policy. These are stories that are now connecting up the dots, to make people realize that this isn't a concept. This is actually literal, this is happening to me, in my own world.

And that's the key to it as well, is to make sure that people realize that you're not exempt. There is no -- there is no barrier around you to safeguard, if we're having more and more drug deaths, then chances are through six degrees of separation or fewer, you are going to be effected.

And we're seeing a massive rise in drug deaths here, especially at festivals as well, some music festivals and nightclubs. And there's a great initiative over here called The Loop, which is a drug testing facility. So people that go to clubs and festivals, that may want to use drugs throughout that event, they take this, their stash, to different provisions around the site where they'll then get drug tested, find out what's in those drugs, so if you've got MDMA, have you got pure MDMA or have you got something else that's mixed with it?

And they're finding that things like rat poison are obviously present. Concrete. All of these different impurities are there. And just this weekend, there was drug deaths at festivals, and, it's tragic, obviously, absolutely horrendous that it happens to any family.

And I'm hesitant to kind of slide into this point of view, but, if there is a benefit from that, which of course there very much isn't, but the conversation has now been opened up in this country because of those drug deaths. All over the media this week has been about drug testing facilities and how they can save lives.

So if we can actually save lives through the tragedies that have happened, and befallen us before, then maybe there is some tiny silver lining to that.

DEAN BECKER: I just this morning caught a, I think it was BBC [sic: ITV], but I'm not sure, it was Good Morning Britain, and this gentleman was talking about how his children died because of prohibition, because they didn't know what they were taking, they had no idea of the contents of the drug they imbibed.

And that is representative, here in the US, last year we had over 60,000 deaths because people were taking drugs, again, where they did not know what was in the bag or the pill, that, the US, we call this the control, of the controlled substances, that's the biggest fallacy that's ever been created, and I guess what I'm leading to here Jason is that, you know, we don't know if that's, if it's heroin, or if it's horse tranquilizers, fentanyl, or if it's elephant tranquilizer carfentany. It's an absurd situation, isn't it?

JASON REED: We have -- we've reached that free for all point now. We use -- wild west gets used a lot, and I'm reticent to use it, but, it's a fairly good motif to emblemize just how much of a complete catastrophe it's now become, where everything is just up in the air and we don't know what we're getting.

In this country alone, we've had a thing called legal highs, which I'm sure you know about as well, which is, cannabis substitutes like Spice, which are just essentially just synthetic cannabinoids sprayed onto a substance. This is now wreaking havoc across our homeless population, and we're seeing different social demographics have fallout because of this.

You know, this is historically true as well, you often associate certain drugs with certain demographics. And of course, being a student of Carl Hart, you realize that we don't always pander to that, you know, it doesn't always make sense, you know, we don't have the meth addict, as we conceive them, we don't -- we certainly don't have the heroin addict, how we perceive them.

This happens to everybody, across the social spectrum. But what we are seeing is that there are certain vulnerable groups, as I said, the homeless population in this country, that are now suffering because they just do not know what they're getting with their substances.

And this is where heroin assisted therapy and safe consumption rooms are crucial. And we're getting that conversation here, we're, in Scotland, we're managing to potentially get some movement with those safe facilities, and in Wales we might as well. But in England, and London central, politics, there's still a lot of movement. We've still got that position, that very conservative politicians don't want to move on this because of what they think the moral position is.

And of course, that's where we need to twist the discussion around, to make people realize that actually the moral situation, and the immoral situation, is to do nothing, which is what current drug policy does.

DEAN BECKER: When I was in Portugal, talking to their drug czar, Doctor Goulão, I brought up the synthetic, and I hesitate to use the word cannabis, but that crap they put the poison on. And he says, we don't have that here, because there is no need for it there, there is no penalty for possession of regular marijuana, it is the fear of arrest and being thrown in a cage that sends many probationers and parolees here in the US to smoke that synthetic crap, rather than, you know, risk using actual marijuana. It's just totally turned on its head, if you ask me.

JASON REED: And that's the iron law of prohibition. The iron law of prohibition means that things are always going to get worse, and that's what we certainly found with synthetics, is that just when you think we've got on top of everything, which of course we haven't, this new string of the drug war comes along to go, actually, look, we've just changed the whole game again.

And this is what LEAP are doing at doing, across the world, is to make people realize that the trade is always going to be one step ahead of those that are chasing it. There's no way you can ever get on top of it, because once you do clamp down on one thing, the balloon effect says it's going to bulge out into somewhere else.

And people like Neil Woods, our chairman here, who's a former undercover officer, he's in this up close and personal, and what we're finding in LEAP UK is that, the undercover officers primarily, and we've got about five or six, they're the ones that have suffered the most within this, both what they've seen with their own eyes, but also what the job has done to them, through PTSD, and just general fallout of being faced with the most vulnerable people in our communities, and yet still making their lives worse.

These are real moral hangings, and dilemmas, that they've had to go through to have this Damascus moment of, am I doing the right thing in this? And that's why LEAP's message is just so internationally powerful, I feel.

DEAN BECKER: No, it, it certainly is. It's resonating anywhere it's recognized or allowed to be brought forward. Jason, we're running out of time here, but I want to bring up the fact that GW Pharmaceuticals is perhaps the world's largest producer of marijuana. They're based in Great Britain, and they are, if not already, will soon become the world's largest exporter of cannabis to the world. Your response there, please.

JASON REED: How strange is that, the country that has probably got some of the harshest laws on cannabis still is now officially recognized by the UN as the largest grower and exporter of legal cannabis.

And it's just perverse, especially when we're not even allowing medicinal use. We've got no access to medicinal cannabis in this country. And there's a couple of high profile cases at the moment, with children who've got epilepsy, and that kind of condition, that are now doing everything they can to appeal for a Home Office license just to get some, an import and export license, so that they can get the medication that they feel best suits their child, because they've seen it with their own eyes. The seizures stop with medicinal cannabis oils, and the routes they've taken.

But, we're still not allowing it. And to the point where it was even, one of the cases, denied very, very recently, within the last couple of days. So we've got this position of being the biggest exporters and growers, and yet no access whatsoever, and on top of that, criminalizing. We still are criminalizing people that have got serious conditions that use cannabis.

So we are seeing quite a big push now of our politicians. The, we've got different boards within Westminster. There's one called the All-Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, they're starting to do a lot more with medicinal cannabis as well, saying, right, this has gone far enough, we need to address this.

And this goes back to the point I was making as well, is, you need a dovetailing of politicians, the general public, and publicity. You need that triangle to form, to get out there the messages that we're trying to get across, and that's where we are now getting quite a lot of traction.

There's a lot more movement in this country now, of getting patient narratives out there, there's a great organization called United Patients Alliance, which do put out those patient narratives, just superbly.

And we are, we're getting movement now. But, it shouldn't have taken this long. It really shouldn't have.

DEAN BECKER: No. And again, we're closing it out here, again we've been speaking with Mister Jason Reed, the executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership in the UK. You were talking about promotions and publicity. You guys won a national award over many of the networks for the work you have done, am I right?

JASON REED: Yeah, that was completely bizarre, we wasn't expecting that degree of success. So, what it was, we've got a podcast called Stop & Search, which you can find on iTunes and Cast. And we get some big people on there, we get politicians, we get nationally recognized celebrities in this country, we've had Ruth Dreyfuss, the former president of Switzerland, now the chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

And we just have conversations on drug policy, addiction, all these different overlapping factors, and last week, we were up for two awards, the best current affairs and smartest podcast. And we got the silver award in both categories, and we beat people like BBC Blue Planet, which is like their giant flagship program about ocean life. We beat national radio shows, we beat headline politicians, so to get that degree of endorsement was just -- it just shows how far we've come.

We certainly used it as a, well, this just goes to show how big the issue has now got, where we're, a humble podcast with absolutely no budget whatsoever, is now essentially beating these massive great media players. And that's testament to how far we've come. You have a drug policy conversation that's growing, it's only going to get bigger from this point on. We're doing something right, I think.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Jason, one last thing, please share your website, point folks to where they can learn more about the work you do.

JASON REED: On our website, go to UKLEAP.org. Facebook is UKLEAP.org. Instagram is @UKLEAP, and our twitter is @UKLEAP. And as I said, our podcast is Stop & Search. If you just google stop and search podcast, you should be able to find us.

DEAN BECKER: Once again, I want to thank Jason Reed of LEAP UK for that great interview. That's all we can crowd in this week, join us next week when our guest will be Jodi James of the Florida Cannabis Action Network, and again,I remind you, because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag, please be careful.

Drug Truth Network transcripts are stored at the James A. Baker III Institute, more than seven thousand radio programs are at DrugTruth.net, and we are all still tap dancing on the edge of an abyss.