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Thank you. Hello there and welcome to a hallucinogenic edition of Kennedy saves the world, and I'm going to save the world from your big fat drug problem.

So there is, there's much to discuss here because recently in Oregon, they voted via ballot measure to decriminalize a host of drugs.

And that is based on the Portugal model.

So for those of you who have been to Portugal and you've been poking around the head shops and whatnot,

I've never been there. So I don't know what the drug culture is like there now, but I know in the 80s and 90s,

it was pretty awful and that a lot of people were doing drugs, particularly

heroin, particularly intravenous heroin, and they were dying from it. So they did in Portugal,

we did in this country, which is they launched a big war on drugs to deadly effect. And it did the same thing there, which it has done here, and here it

is decimated entire neighborhoods, criminalized consensual transactions, and ruined people's lives,

oftentimes shortening them. So what they decided to do in Portugal, they looked around,

and they thought, well, this war on drugs, it really isn't working for us. So what they decided to do in Portugal, they looked around and they thought, well, this war on

drugs, it really isn't working for us. So we need to take a different approach. So what they decided to

do was change their view of drug use. And instead of looking at it as a series of crimes and forcing

people into their criminal justice system, they decided to take it as a

medical issue and take a health approach to drug use. So what they did is they launched a massive

outreach program and they went to, you know, various encampments where people were shooting all sorts of heroin and dying young and contracting HIV and loads of other microbes from each other.

And they started giving out condoms and clean needles and citric acid and personal sanitation kits as a way not of saying, hey, heroin use is great.

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