Benjamin Y. Fong is the associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and the author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st-Century Binge. From cigarettes to crack to opioids, Fong’s book looks at how the United States became a country with a major drug habit. He talks about the role of private industry in monetizing addictive chemicals and the hideous consequences of the war on drugs. 

For a leftist, drugs pose a certain conundrum: On the one hand, we believe in full legalization and an end to the horror of the drug war. However, we also don’t take a fully libertarian “drug use as an expression of individual preference” approach and recognize that drug use can be (1) a response to desperate conditions and (2) pushed by private actors who profit off misery. Legalization alone will surely produce more destructive industries like the cigarette industry, which profits from slowly killing its customers (and constantly addicting new ones). What, then, is the progressive approach to drug use? Quick Fixes offers a nuanced and fascinating look at the intersection of capitalism and chemical dependency. 

Nathan J. Robinson 

Let’s start with getting a lay of the land of drugs in America today. We use an awful lot of them, and an awful lot of different kinds. You open your book with a shocking statistic about the percentage of the world’s opioids that are consumed in this country. So, in this country specifically, what are we hooked on and how much?

Benjamin Fong 

We’re in the midst of a world historic drug binge. Americans comprise 4 percent of the world’s population, and we consume about 80 percent of its opioids, 99 percent of its hydrocodone, and a bit more than 83 percent of its ADHD medications: amphetamines and amphetamine-like drugs. We are a uniquely drugged populace. Just from personal experience, I feel like more people are using psychoactive drugs than ever, at any other time that I’ve been alive, and that is confirmed by the evidence. The trends of drug consumption over time in the 21st century are all going up. I think the most familiar part of this is the opioid crisis and associated deaths of despair, but really, it’s across the board. It’s benzodiazepines, amphetamines, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and marijuana, of course. With the notable exception of cocaine, all drug use is at a historic high and rising. And so, in the book, I wanted to make sense of why that was. At the same time, we still have this zombified war on drugs going with the largest prison system in the world and one-fifth of that population behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses. It’s a huge paradox at the core of American society.

Robinson 

I noticed you used the word “zombified” there to describe the war on drugs. What do you mean by that?

Fong 

The first thing to say is it’s still going on. I think that it has lost its ideological justification on both sides of the political spectrum. People see the war on drugs as increasingly pernicious and are increasingly open to decriminalization and legalization movements around marijuana and other drugs. People recognize that the war on drugs was not only a failure in itself—it did not stem drug distribution or consumption in the way that it promised—but it also bore all these perverse outcomes as a result. It still goes on. The prison population is still ballooning in some cases. But I think there are fewer and fewer backers of the war on drugs.

Robinson 

Yes, it’s true. It has disappeared a lot from the political rhetoric. I feel like even on the law-and-order right, they’re all focused on BLM protesters and anarchists and Antifa. In 2020, I was reading about Joe Biden, and if you go back to the 1980s and 1990s, some of his old rhetoric around drug use is shocking.

Fong 

Absolutely. It’s forgotten or at least minimized by Democrats today, but Biden was a staunch anti-drug warrior. He joined together with Strom Thurmond in creating crime legislation. He’s always kind of been that way. I think a few years ago, there was some shock that a few White House staffers were let go because they had admitted to using marijuana, but that’s in line with Biden’s entire career. He’s never been on that side of the Democratic Party.

Robinson 

That’s good, though. We’re in a good place. We’ve made some progress if no one believes in the war on drugs anymore.

Fong 

We’re certainly in a better place. The kind of anti-drug hysteria that really made possible legislation like the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, or the 1988 version and other key pieces of legislation in the acute phase of the war on drugs, is no longer there. I think the population is less susceptible to that kind of thing, though things change very quickly. Given what’s going on with methamphetamine in this country, I could foresee certain scare tactics around that particular drug being employed for political purposes. But on the whole, I think that everything’s trending towards decriminalization and legalization.

There are generally two things to be concerned about here. The first is that it’s not just backyard marijuana growers that are benefiting from the new trends. It’s large corporations, and the leading edge of this right now is in psychedelics. There are a lot of big corporate investors in the new psychedelics market, including Peter Thiel, whose COMPASS Pathways is very aggressively pursuing synthetic psilocybin patents. This new legalization movement is being heavily corporatized, and most likely, it’s going to involve a reinforcement of existing trends in psychiatry rather than a questioning of them. This could be a moment where we’re rethinking psychopharmaceuticals, where we’re rethinking drugs in general and how we use drugs recreationally as well. But it feels like the way in which this is going, it’s just going to, like I said, reinforce existing trends.

The other bit is that I think that with the enthusiasm for drug legalization—there was just this big psychedelics conference in Denver in June—there’s little discussion of why it is that Americans are so interested in drugs today. I think that points to the unique stressors of American society. It’s really difficult to look at drug consumption today and all the trends going up and not see some reflection of the present crises that we’re going through.

Robinson 

Yes. I want to get to that because as leftists, we are obviously staunchly opposed to the war on drugs. But there’s also the kind of libertarian opposition to the war on drugs, which says that whatever people do under capitalism, that’s on them. We don’t judge, we don’t think about it, we don’t try and change it. Once we’ve rolled back the state, if everyone’s addicted to drugs, that’s personal responsibility.

Fong 

Just quickly, one thing: one of the foremost proponents of legalization is Milton Friedman. He has long made this argument to say that if you just leave it all to the markets, all of these perverse things that go on in the drug war will go away. It’s important for legalizers to keep that in mind.

Robinson 

Right. I went back to my hometown for the first time in a while, and I was walking down Main Street, and I noticed a new store that looked an awful lot like an Apple Store, but it was weird because I couldn’t tell what they sold. It turned out it was a pot dispensary. It was really strange. It seems a lot of these places look like Apple Stores. It was really well-designed, so corporate, and so obviously backed by a lot of money. To have it legal is better than things were in my youth, but then it also felt like I’m a little bit in Aldous Huxley land. This is also a little bit dystopian. 

Fong 

There’s a dispensary—I think it’s based in Southern California—called Dosist, and when you walk in, it looks exactly like an Apple Store. They’ve copied Apple’s aesthetic so much that I’m surprised they haven’t been sued. You don’t even know that it’s marijuana that’s being sold. They sell things like “sleep” or “restoration”—things with words attached to them, but you’re unsure what’s exactly in any of these things. There’s undoubtedly something good about the present moment in decriminalization in particular, and legalization secondarily. I think we have to look at what these things mean in the present historical moment, when there is a dearth of private investment in certain needed goods. A lot of the trends today are in privatizing public services, and so you can see the expanding legal drug market almost as the expansion of public-private hybrids in that it’s bringing into the realm of profit extraction things that were previously outside of it, or at least outside of it in a legal sense.

Robinson 

One of the reasons I like your book is that I don’t think there has been yet, or at least I haven’t seen, a solid left analysis of drugs. As we’ve mentioned, we’ve been fighting for so long on the “stop the war on drugs” as the left platform on drugs, that now we need to start having some more complex thoughts about, what does it mean when you can go to parts of this country where it seems like the only public spaces are churches and liquor stores? Is that something we don’t have an analysis of? Do we just say, like Milton Friedman, that’s the market at work and we’ve done our job by rolling back the state? Or do we analyze these things a bit and ask, why are particular trends occurring? What you do in this book is to take a few different kinds of drugs—and they range from coffee to alcohol, opiates, cocaine, and psychoactive drugs—and the different histories and meanings, who uses them and why they use them, and try to understand the phenomena that we see before us.

Fong 

I think we can do both things at once. We can continue criticizing the war on drugs. There are plenty of key staples of liberal drug reformism that are perfectly good: revising rules around mandatory minimums, different sorts of measures around policing, and legalizing marijuana. I think that all of these things are majoritarian demands, things that people really want and would do a lot to undo the war on drugs. But like you say, we’re in a different moment, where Elon Musk is touting his ketamine use, where Peter Thiel is the leader in psilocybin distribution. At this moment, I think the left needs to consider: the war on drugs was obviously bad, but what about this current moment that we’re living through? How do we make sense of it? For my money, obviously going back to some kind of more conservative or prohibitionist mindset is not the answer, but I do think that those trends can be criticized, and they can be criticized by relating them back to the contemporary state of American society. And again, those are the particular stressors, inequalities, and anxieties that we face on an everyday basis. 

Robinson 

Let’s go into a little more detail about that. Perhaps we could go through what you call your orienting claims. You make a series of general statements that frame the stories of the various drugs that you tell from chapter to chapter. Your first claim is: work structures “normal” drug use into a dosing regimen. Let’s unpack that.

Fong 

Historically, drug use has had a much wider array of uses than it has in contemporary American society. Drugs are useful for communal fellowship. This was, I think, the primary way in which alcohol was used in pre-industrial societies: to cement social bonds. Drugs have had religious and spiritual purposes; they have helped expand human consciousness in various ways. There are a potentially infinite number of ways in which drugs can be used. But given the imperatives of capitalist society, they tend to be used for one of two reasons: either to get up for the day, or briefly relax in your few leisure hours so that you can be refreshed for the next day. And if you think about the ways in which drugs are categorized—uppers and downers—that’s pretty much how Americans use them.

Robinson 

Get up for work and down when you come back. 

Fong 

Yes, exactly. And even for the psychedelics, these are drugs that really defy classification. Psychonauts have always held that they get you to the outer reaches of human consciousness and understanding, and yet today, how are they being used? They’re being microdosed by Silicon Valley tech executives in order to better sparkle at work. It’s a very instrumentalized purpose for psychedelics. I think that that sort of speaks to how drugs are used in general in a capitalist society. They’re used to conform to the demands of work.

Robinson 

It’s funny, as I was reading your book, I thought, well, is that true? And then I went for my giant can of Sugar-Free Red Bull here that I use—

Fong 

That is a giant can.

Robinson 

I think this is the biggest they sell at the grocery store. This is 20 ounces.

Fong 

I think that that’s sort of what I point to as the defining feature of drug use, given the imperatives of work. One misunderstanding there is that people want to say, does that mean that we’re especially susceptible to the charms of drugs given the imperatives of capitalism? And I would say not necessarily. You look at alcohol consumption in pre-industrialized societies, like in the 1820s in America: we drank roughly three or four times the amount that we do, per capita, today. There’s a book about that time and the nascent temperance movements called the Alcoholic Republic. It’s just hard to imagine how pervasive alcohol usage, both in terms of quantity and quality, was at that time. 

Robinson 

I think I have to admit that I have become a drug addict to work harder. If I don’t have my caffeine, I get a horrible headache.

Fong 

Yes. There’s a wide range of forms of caffeine and other stimulants. Amphetamines are a really quintessentially American drug because they’re just really good at what they do. They were not sure what to use it for, but the initial uses for amphetamine when it was first put on the market in the 1930s were: improved mental performance, weight loss, and pep (mood adjustment). And if you just think about those three uses, in all ways, they’re great drugs to have on hand in the United States. They help us do the things that we need to do to get up for the day. Despite the fact that they have very well documented negative consequences, I think amphetamines are always going to be useful to Americans, provided we maintain the imperatives we have.

Robinson 

It’s no coincidence, of course, that Silicon Valley and Wall Street are notoriously drugged places. I think Sam Bankman-Fried was on piles of drugs.

Fong 

I don’t know the specifics there, but I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s certainly at the top—this is another thing that the left needs to adjust to—in elite circles, drug use is rampant. No one apologizes for it. It’s sort of a fact of life. And in fact, these executives think about drug use as sort of maximizing their best potentials. So in that kind of situation, like you said before, the left needs to rethink its critique of drugs more generally. 

Robinson 

I was just looking this up, and indeed, the head of FTX, the collapsed crypto empire, tweeted: “Stimulants when you wake up, sleeping pills if you need them to sleep.” They were known for popping the Adderall all day.

Fong 

Yes, just in the quote that you just read, there’s something very akin to almost like military discipline, as ridiculous as it is. And with amphetamines in particular, we really started taking them because of the military. It was the military that first saw their utility on a mass scale. It was soldiers in World War II who got accustomed to taking “energy tablets” regularly. And when they returned, that’s really when amphetamine use became normalized in America. You could almost think about it as an extension of military discipline.

Robinson 

Let’s go to your second framing claim. “Psychopharmacology is the science of treating atomization.” What do you mean by that?

Fong 

Since the late 19th century, Americans have taken drugs quite self-consciously to deal with social imperatives. And in the late 19th century, a discourse around what was called neurasthenia took off, popularized by George Miller Beard. William James simply called it “Americanitis.” The way in which it was conceptualized was, because we live in this urbanized, industrialized society, people become anxious and have different sorts of constitutional difficulties. And so, there were various spa retreats for wealthier neurasthenics out there, but the primary way in which people dealt with this was through the patent medicine industry. In the late 19th century, there was an enormous patent medicine industry in the United States. These were proprietary nostrums containing things like alcohol, opium, cocaine—all medically pure stuff. There was a lot of honesty just about why people were using these things: to deal with the stresses of modern life. There was a broad understanding of the advances of Western civilization or whatever as being well worth it, but something that nonetheless took some accommodation. And it’s very similar throughout the post-war period. If you look at drug and cigarette advertising at the time, there’s very much a reflection of society in the drugs. So, why do you need benzodiazepines, amphetamines, barbiturates, etc.? Well, you need them because you’re working hard, you’re anxious as a result of having to conform to all of these demands, and you deserve something to take the edge off. Once again, there’s some recognition that there are social imperatives that work in drug use. It’s really only since the biological revolution in psychiatry that we’ve come to accept these justifications around drugs getting at certain neurotransmitters—serotonin, norepinephrine, etc.—that somehow altering the chemicals of our brains allow us to resume our normal activities. It’s only when those justifications became popular that the social reference dropped out. And so, if you have someone who takes psychoactive drugs medically, they would say, it does this one thing to some neurotransmitter reuptake, or something like that, and that helps me function normally. That’s a historically novel situation where we’re not actually thinking about the social stresses involved in mental health. 

Robinson 

Why aren’t you able to function normally in the first place? What are the causes of that? I’ll quote you here: “Against the present psychiatric consensus, the mental illnesses that drive both medication and self-medication with psychoactive substances are not simply disorders of the brain. They are also illnesses of society mercilessly preyed upon by large pharmaceutical companies.” I take it that an implication of this is that if we lived in a more functional society that met human needs better, we might not necessarily see less drug use over all. People might use drugs for pleasure or for, as you’ve mentioned, religious and communal purposes, but we would certainly use drugs differently.

Fong 

Yes, I think that’s right. And one of the reasons I would say that this claim might be controversial, or it might strike people in the wrong way, is that mental illness is something that’s felt very personally—it’s bodily. Many people want to say that if you say it’s some reflection of contemporary society, you are diminishing the biological factors involved or somehow dismissing its reality. And especially in the realm of mental health, I think it’s good to be nominalist in all matters. If someone says something is real, there’s no reason to dismiss it. The questions that are interesting to me are, in what sense is it real? How did it come to be real? To take the case of ADHD. I don’t doubt that ADHD is real, though every once in a while, in some big magazine a psychiatrist will come out and say that this is not a real category or something, and that it’s constructed by pharmaceutical companies. I think the interesting questions there, though, are not whether it’s real or not, but how did people come to see ADHD as a category that made sense of their experience? How did amphetamine usage come to be primarily associated with ADHD? Because historically, neither of those things were true. So, it’s a difficult claim, I think, but biology—our physical processes—is part of our social condition and is affected by our social conditions. I don’t think saying that mental health is determined by contemporary social conditions need totally marginalize the biological explanation.

Robinson 

Nor does it counsel dropping the drugs before you change society. For example, just because your atomization and isolation might be what’s making your depression truly terrible and unbearable doesn’t mean that your antidepressants aren’t working, or should be dropped.

Fong 

Absolutely. Both medically and recreationally, psychoactive drugs are terrific, and that’s one common misconception around the book. Some readers have told me that I take a kind of negative view of drug use more generally, and that I might be in league with the prohibitionist in certain senses. But it’s not that at all. Drugs are a kind of miracle for human beings. It’s the contemporary ways in which drugs are used according to capitalist imperatives that is the focus of the book, really.

Robinson 

Let’s go to your third claim here, which is something you’ve touched on already, which is that drug producers are typical capitalist organizations.

Fong 

Yes. In both the illicit and licit drug markets, I think that there’s a common conception that drug producers and distributors are particularly insidious organizations or individuals. Big Pharma obviously comes in for criticism in left circles a lot. And then on the illicit side, through shows like Narcos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire or whatnot, you get this understanding of the drug trade as particularly seedy and insidious. But how I view them in the book is just as very typical capitalist organizations.

So, we could start with Big Pharma. Big Pharma is often taken to be especially corrupt in some way, but what does their corruption consist of? Well, they lobby and they sometimes bribe politicians. They artificially stimulate demand through often ridiculous advertising. They suppress negative press and maintain exclusive patents. This is all stuff that any corporation would do. The key difference is that they’re selling psychoactive drugs, which are heavily protected by the FDA. On the illicit side—and this is where you get sort of wild flights and fancy into just how violent the drug trade is—most drug cartels operate according to principles you could almost learn in business school. It’s not very glamorous stuff. Pablo Escobar, who I think is the person most associated with violence in the drug trade, rose to power by inventing this insurance scheme that would protect cocaine shipments out of Colombia. It wasn’t very glamorous stuff. It’s not like he shot his way to the top. That being said, there is a lot of violence in the drug trade. Much of it operates almost by market principles, not some inherent ruthlessness. And here, I’m following anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who says that the violence that you see on the street, you could almost see it as a kind of human capital development. It’s very market oriented. It’s not coming from some desire to be violent for the sake of violence.

That being said, just to close off that thought, I think there is a good reason why the drug trade is seen as particularly insidious, and that’s because it’s a convenient scapegoat onto which we can project all of our anxieties about our society. It’s not us who’s involved in something that is unbelievably exploitive, it’s someone over there. It’s those drug-addled corporations and these violent drug producers, they’re the problem. So, vilifying the drug trade is a really convenient way of thinking that we’re not involved in this insidious thing.

Robinson 

That calls to mind a lot of the 1980s rhetoric about how the worst people are crack dealers because they are destroying the inner cities themselves, and our responsibility is to lock them up.

Fong 

One could take all of those kinds of statements, all the absurd things said about drug cartels and drug dealers, and apply them to CEOs, and almost none of the meaning would be lost.

Robinson 

You wrote this great article about cigarettes for us that has been adapted for this book. Cigarette companies are just large legal versions of street level drug dealers.

Fong 

I would say worse. Certainly they’re more detrimental to Americans health. I try to be comprehensive in terms of psychoactive drugs. I don’t discuss non-psychoactive drugs, even though they’re some of the most interesting drugs, like the arthritis medication market in the United States. It’s very interesting. But I only cover psychoactive drugs, and I tried to be comprehensive there. And of all the different things that I talked about in the book, cigarettes are far and away the deadliest and most harmful. It’s another thing that was surprising to me: cigarette consumption in my lifetime certainly dropped off a cliff—it’s not normalized in the way that it used to be up until the 1970s and 1980s—but still, it continues apace, and the way in which tobacco companies have adapted to the moment, whether it’s through e-cigarettes or just dumping their reserves on foreign markets, is pretty remarkable. The cigarette tragedy continues today.

Robinson 

Your fourth claim is that the difference between licit and illicit drugs is a class distinction.

Fong 

Yes. I think in the official mythology, people want to say that licit drugs are safe and illicit drugs are harmful in some way. I don’t think I know anyone who actually believes that. But trying to figure out what these markers actually get to is a bit more difficult. What I want to say is that—this is sort of getting ahead to the fifth claim as well—when we talk about drugs, and when we want to control drugs, we’re typically thinking about other people and controlling other things. And so, in this particular case, drugs are considered licit when they are associated with some respectable class of people and considered illicit or bad when they are associated with some disreputable people.

There are plenty of cases of this going back to the 19th century. Then, morphine usage was quite common in the supposed doctor visiting classes, while at the same time, there was a lot of anger at and demonization of Chinese opium subcultures. Opium and morphine are pretty much the same drug—morphine is a derivative of opium—and yet have completely different social connotations around them. It’s similar throughout history in the post-war period. Benzodiazepine usage was fully normalized, while heroin was demonized. You could argue that the effects of those drugs are not so different. Maybe the example that is most ready at hand for modern observers is the difference between cocaine and crack cocaine. It’s really remarkable just how normalized cocaine was in the 1970s. Pretty much everyone thought that cocaine was on the path to legalization.

Robinson 

Yes, you’ve got those incredible ads that you reprint from High Times Magazine, where they’re just advertising cocaine paraphernalia pretty openly.

Fong 

There’s even the kit that was sold to turn powdered cocaine into rock cocaine. That was the most remarkable one. The cocaine paraphernalia in general was all over the place, but to see something that was actually touting rock cocaine as an acceptable practice—this is before the crack scare—was pretty remarkable. But again, with cocaine and crack, you have one drug that is taken by elite white professionals. There’s that famous scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen sneezes into the cocaine while surrounded by nice professionals who are talking about their trip out to California. That was really the association of cocaine at the time. And then once you get crack, which people at the time didn’t totally understand was a chemical cousin of cocaine, you get completely opposed social judgments of it and it became an absolute menace. It became something around which the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the 1988 version were both designed—another case where you get absolutely opposed social judgments. And I think in all these cases, it really had to do with the people involved. If you look at the emergence of domestic and global drug prohibition at the beginning of the 20th century, who are the targets? It’s the Chinese and opium subcultures, Black stevedores and cocaine, Mexicans and marijuana. The targets are always pretty clear, and it continues to today. There are ways in which legal regimes lag behind cultural acceptances around different drugs. And so, psychedelics are still technically Schedule 1 drugs, but they’re increasingly respectable.

Robinson 

Different people are using them. It’s not just hippies.

Fong 

Right, exactly.

Robinson 

Let’s close out with this fifth claim of yours, which is that drug policy really isn’t about drugs. You begin with the just extraordinary admission from John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s aide, where he says, “The Nixon campaign had two enemies, the anti-war left and Black people. We couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Blacks. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Good God.

Fong 

It’s a remarkable admission. There’s no two ways about it. But I think in a way, it crystallizes what we all know about drugs, which is that when people talk about drugs, or even when people use drugs, they’re dealing with different things than the actual substances. When people use drugs, they’re dealing with various stresses and anxieties in their lives. When people demonize drugs, they’re wanting to demonize other aspects of the society. And so, I think that it’s always a mistake to linger too long on the substances themselves. The drugs themselves are really interesting, and what they say about contemporary social conditions and the kinds of things we’re facing on an everyday basis is where drug discourse becomes interesting.

Robinson 

Let me just conclude here by asking you where we as leftists start in thinking about a rational approach to drugs. Again, we’ve established the baseline, which is that criminalization is obviously cruel, but how do you think we should think about drugs after doing all the research and writing that went into this book?

Fong 

There are two polls between which Americans have swung wildly when it comes to drugs. One is moralistic drug prohibitionism, and this is really what inaugurated the temperance movement and alcohol prohibition. Americans also inaugurated the global war on drugs beginning in the early 20th century, and it’s also obviously evident in the acute phase of the war on drugs with Nixon. The other pole of that is an unreserved drug enthusiasm, and there are all sorts of sources in American society that are pushing drugs as the answer to all of our woes and problems. We’ve swung between these polls pretty wildly. I don’t think Americans need any more drug prohibitionism, nor do they need any more drug peddling. I think what they need is freedom from the kinds of stresses and anxieties that lead to both drug peddling and drug prohibitionism. And in the conclusion, I say, to my mind, the two best policies that could address the many different facets of what people consider the drug problem, in the abstract, are a federal jobs guarantee and Medicare For All. Because when you look at different drug pathologies and abuses, where do you see it? It’s usually in the rich and the poor, on either side, and that’s because they’re missing the regularization of work. There’s something insidious about that, but there’s also something regularizing about a regular work rhythm, and especially where work is as meaningful as it could be with public jobs provisions. A lot of the imperatives to avoid the drudgery of work go away. And then on the other side, a lot of drug taking today, both medical and recreational, I want to say is a result of not having adequate healthcare structures in the United States. If we could improve the different structures of care in America, a lot of the imperatives to use drugs as a way to cover over other problems would go away. They’re not intuitive responses to the drug war, nor to new drug legalization movements, but I think that they’re at root in all the different problems we conceptualize around drug usage.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth. Listen to this episode on our podcast.