Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, digging up South Africa's grim past.

I don't think there's any parent who would say,

oh well, I'm over the disappearance of my child,

let me just move on.

It remains a devastation, decades on.

Plus Joan Littlewood, a towering figure of 20th century British theatre.

The problem is the same everywhere you know.

Whether it's in Moscow or New York, the theatre is pretty dead. The theatre is not the great vivid reflection of today that it should be.

Also the African American women who did the maths for NASA and an American vaccination program that went horribly wrong.

The next thing I remember was being in the hospital.

I could not move my fingers, my toes, my arms, my legs.

That was scary.

But I could breathe. It didn't get into my lungs and I was very fortunate about that.

That's all coming up later in the podcast. But we begin this week with drugs, mostly illegal recreational drugs, which have oiled the wheels of violent international

criminal gangs and have laid low the lives of millions of addicts.

I say mostly illegal because there are a few places where a different path has been followed,

where governments or local authorities have tried to regularize the sale and use of narcotics.

Among the most notable is Portugal, which became the first country in the world to decriminalise all drugs in 2001.

Rebecca Kespi has been speaking to the family doctor who became a key architect of the strategy

and looking at what prompted the radical policy.

This has been combat a drug not been

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