The War on Drugs Has Failed
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2021
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Scotland's shift not to prosecute people caught with possession of drugs sparks a new debate over the failed 'war on drugs', we're joined by pre-eminent expert Prof. David Nutt and journalist Mattha Musby to talk over how a new approach is desperately needed.
With Julian Assange facing extradition proceedings, the Belmarsh Tribunal has put the War on Terror on trial. We're joined by Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat to explain what exactly is at stake.
As the anti-trans rights LGB Alliance has its first conference, we're joined by activist and YouTuber Katy Montgomerie to talk over the latest episode in Britain's anti-trans mania.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. And many of you may be joining us, maybe having |
| 0:14.0 | in bad circumstances last evening and are feeling slightly delicate today. Well, this is quite an |
| 0:19.0 | appropriate show for you because we are talking about the calamitous failure of the so-called war |
| 0:24.7 | on drugs, which was officially announced by President Richard Nixon half a century ago. And the |
| 0:31.1 | consequences ever since are more people taking drugs than ever before. Drug use globally has exploded, |
| 0:36.1 | so it has problematic, what we could call problematic drug use, drug addiction, drug deaths. |
| 0:42.5 | As well as that, we see mass incarceration, which has disproportionately fallen, will |
| 0:48.1 | disproportionately meant the incarceration of people of color, particularly we can see in the |
| 0:52.6 | United States and elsewhere, which have a big prison population, a massive black population who |
| 0:57.3 | have been incarcerated by a racist policy, which is the war on drugs, which we will be talking about. |
| 1:03.1 | We've seen the destabilization of entire countries from Mexico to the Philippines with violent |
| 1:09.2 | government policies, which again have killed so many people. We've seen people who need |
| 1:15.3 | actual support and health, not getting it, instead of it being treated as a health issue, |
| 1:19.6 | being treated, of course, as a criminal issue. So the reason we're talking about it, and we've |
| 1:24.4 | got lots of areas to talk about, is in Scotland, the government has suggested, or will be, |
| 1:31.6 | has made it clear, they will not be prosecuting some people who are found with class A drugs on them, |
| 1:37.6 | and instead what will happen is they will get a caution, for example, a police warning or police |
| 1:46.4 | warning of some description. So this opens up a conversation because you'd think if we had |
| 1:52.0 | maybe an opposition, which perhaps wanted to suggest an alternative workable policy, and I should |
| 1:59.0 | make it clear, in Scotland, Scottish Labour is supporting the Scottish Nationalist Party in their |
| 2:04.4 | policy shift, but Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is not, and he's making it clear he does support |
| 2:10.4 | the continued repressive drugs policies, which have failed on their own terms. Of course, |
... |
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