So we've seen some places across the country decriminalize drugs and the optics haven't been so great. You kind of alluded to this earlier and talking about, you know, in your perfect picture, you would set some social norms. In preparing for this, I was reading a New York Times op-ed by the conservative columnist Brett Stevens, who was kind of outlining his objections to Oregon's drug decriminalization, which I think recently just recriminalized drugs. And he wrote about a woman who, quote, performed oral sex on a man at 1130 in the morning on a block between Target and Nordstrom, and a police officer handing out toothless citations to addicts shooting up in public, sometimes on playgrounds. So I don't know you well, obviously, but I know enough about you to know that you're probably not down with, you know, public sex and shooting up on playgrounds. So can you talk about in your kind of perfect vision for the world, what did these places just not really get and what could they have done better?

Yeah. So I think there were some things that happened in Oregon that could have been done differently and some things that were outside of their control and just happened to all happen at the same time. So one of those was the emergence of fentanyl. Fentanyl hit the West Coast right about the same time that Oregon was decriminalizing drugs. So their overdose rate did shoot up after 2020. But if you look at the states around it, there was no difference in the rate that it went up versus other states that had not decriminalized possession of drugs. So in Oregon, they did not legalize drugs. So they were not legal markets, but it just was that people were not going to be arrested for drug possession anymore. So there was some backlash against that on the overdose side. Look what's happened. All these people are now dying of overdose because we decriminalize drugs. That is not true. There's no evidence that that's the case. It just happened to be that fentanyl arrived at the same time that drugs were decriminalized for possession. There also in Oregon was not a law or policy statute against public drug use. So police had used drug possession to police public drug use. That was just, you know, if someone was using publicly, they could be arrested for possession instead of public use. And when they took away that ability to arrest people for possession, now there was nothing to arrest them for. Using in public was not something that they could stop legally. And so you had a situation where even for most people who don't believe people should be arrested for possessing drugs, like me, we're not okay with people shooting up in front of the McDonald's or anything else like that. That's a separate thing than somebody just

being in possession think that distinction gets missed a lot in this conversation.

Yes. Or we conflate drug possession with a host of other crimes, shoplifting, car jacking, whatever it might be. Those are separate. And it's not that they can't be related, but that's a separate crime. If you are arrested for shoplifting, that's a shoplifting charge. That's not a drug charge. And whether you're drunk or high or sober or whatever. Yes, yes, exactly. And we have to be really careful not to swing that pendulum so far to say, hey, we're not going to it's not just that we're going to not arrest people for possession. We're not going to arrest them for anything that they do related to their substance use. That is not in the best interest of that person or public safety or public policy, any of that. It's a different thing for someone to be in possession of a drug and for them to be engaging in harmful behavior against other people where there are other victims, where maybe it's public property, maybe it's private property that they're on. There are so many other issues that are wrapped up in that, that people often just wrap up all together. And it's understandable why they do that, because drugs have been an issue where we have not been encouraged to think in any kind of nuanced way about. We've just been encouraged to flatten everything out, lump it all together and be afraid. And so we're using the tools we've been given when we respond in a way that just is a sort of blanket backlash. There are very real problems with what was happening in Oregon. I don't want to raise my kids in a place where there's just rampant public drug use everywhere. That's completely understandable. There are other ways to fix that other than criminalizing possession. Possession wasn't the problem that the public was upset about. It was all of the things that you were mentioning. And there are other ways to enforce those rules or to create rules that would give the police away to police public drug use that would not get back to dispossession.

100%. I think that a lot of people now conflate drug decriminalization with basically public spaces turning into shanty towns. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Yeah. Yeah.

So let's say we legalize drugs. Recreational consumption will almost certainly tick up for at least a time. I mean, I hear what you're saying about public education and you're totally correct that cigarette smoking is not nearly as popular as it was in, say, the 70s where people wanted to look like, you know, greas, and they thought smoking cigarettes looked cool. A lot of people, millennials, Gen Z, they don't think it looks cool anymore, which I agree is a success. But for at least a time, I think we would probably expect recreational consumption to go up, and I think you're seeing that with weed. Is that difficult for a lot of people in your more conservative circles, your more religious circles to get over? And what is your response to it?

Yeah, I think so. It, for me, is the biggest kind of fear that I have related to that. It is, you're right. Absolutely. I 100 believe that recreational use will increase. I'm not convinced that that is going to turn into an automatic increase in addiction rates, because addiction is driven by other things, not just exposure to a substance. And so if we want to deal with the other things that drive addiction, that's what's going to help us lower rates of addiction. And I think by moving drugs into legal markets, we're going to reduce the amount of trauma and suffering in people's lives. So that takes a few steps to get there. So think about people who live in communities where, like the community I grew up in, in West Jackson, gunshots every night while I'm laying in bed, police sirens every night.

Which is interesting because in the media you see like, like Jackson's not New York City. So I feel like it kind of flies under the radar that way. But you do, you grew up in a very high crime area, correct? Yeah.

At least that was my experience because why would you be hearing gunshots and police parents all the time?

I don't mean to, I mean,

you have something going on. Right, right, right. Yeah. And so, so we, we experienced that. Now I look back on that and say, I wonder how much of that was actually driven by this underground market that was playing out on the streets of West Jackson all the time. People getting shot in drug busts that were going bad or whatever the case may be. So there's that level of trauma of unsafe communities that is exacerbated or created by this underground drug market. There are all of the families, think about all of the families impacted by 100,000 people every year dying of a preventable overdose. The vast majority of those people are dying from contaminated drugs. This is not prescriptions that they're dying from. So all of those people, those people have children, they have brothers and sisters, they have parents who are now dealing with, there's a whole bombshell of trauma that has exploded into this family, increasing everyone else's risk of developing problematic behaviors to deal with their trauma. So when I think of shifting markets legal, I think of it as a massive trauma reduction plan because of how much crime it's going to prevent, how many deaths it's going to prevent, how many people whose lives are torn apart and permanently sort of held back by criminal records, by family destabilization. All of this is trickling into every generation because every person, every adult we put in jail, most of them have children that are now impacted. Now their own risk of addiction is going up. Their own risk of experimenting with drugs is going up. We know this is the case. So if we want to break these cycles where we see so much harm and so much continued drug use through generations, we have to figure out how to reduce the amount of trauma and toxic stress that children are living in. And this is one way to do that. So will more people use? Yes. But I think we can address the reasons why they might become addicted and that that recreational use will not become addiction. And think about it like a bar graph with a bunch of different, you know, points of data on it. For most of us in America, when we think about drugs, we have one data point in our mind, and that's just drug use, rates of drug use, what you're talking about right now. So if that's all you have in your mind is the only thing that's at play, then if I tell you that rates of drug use are probably going to go up, then you immediately say, well, that's a bad policy. No policy works that way. Every policy impacts all sorts of areas of our lives.

What is the saying? There are only tradeoffs.

Yes, yes. There's no perfect solution. One of the things we're looking at is rates of drug use. And there's a whole host of other ones that are also part of that weighing of the pros and cons. And that includes how safe do we want our communities to be? How much risk are we willing to take that our kids are going to die from an overdose just because they, you know, use some pills at a party when they're in college? How much risk are we going to take that what's happening south of the border with countries that are particularly bearing the weight of this underground drug market? The impact that that has on immigration here. There's all kinds of other tradeoffs that we're making. And I think most of us have not realized that our lives are touched in almost every way by drug prohibition. It impacts, we have woven the laws of drug prohibition into impacting just about everything. And once we begin to see that full graph built out, not just of rates of drug use, but all the other things, all the other costs and collateral damage that we have to live with because of this policy, to me, the weight became like 10 to 1 that these policies would overall decrease harm, even if we have a few more people that are using.

Right. So you make the argument in your book that prohibition historically is somewhat of a drug prohibition, is somewhat of a new or somewhat of a recent response, well-intentioned, but in some sense a progressive response, and that legalization is actually the conservative response. And I was hoping you could talk through that. You talked a little bit about it earlier, but can you kind of walk us through the history of what this looked like before drug prohibition existed? Because I think a lot of people just kind of assume it was always this way. Yeah,

that included me. I thought it was always this way too. And as I started to learn, realized, wait a second, this is, it wasn't that heroin is sort of naturally, its default is to be criminalized. The default was, hey, this is a substance that people use and most people use it non-problematically and some people use it problematically. And if they do, they need to be under the care of a doctor. That's how we handled it. So there's not a whole lot of things that I would say, let's go back 150 years and approach it the way we did 150 years ago. And in most things, we've made forward progress. This is one of the areas where we have made backwards progress. That has been a regression of using something that we had actually a very effective approach to 100 years ago, where people who, let's take heroin, for instance, people who, people could use heroin. It was available to people in the most popular forms were very low dose. You could buy it over the counter. It was in soothing syrups that moms like me used because life was hard and the kids were stressful. And they would go to their local pharmacy and get some soothing syrup to help them through the day. And people used it. Very few people became addicted to it, but some did because we know that that is a risk of using something that even if it's a lower dose. If they became addicted to it, they could go to their doctor and their doctor could, even if it was a higher dose, could prescribe them a regulated amount. They could take that under the care of their doctor. And at that time, people who struggled with addiction, very few of them were poor. Almost all of them were employed. They were still participating and able to be with their family in an engaged way because so much of the harm that we experience now related to addiction is because at the point that someone begins struggling, for one, they're paying higher prices. So they begin to have a cash problem if they're struggling with an addiction. But we tend to cut them off from everything that helps them stabilize their life as soon as they start struggling. So they might lose their job if they fail a drug test. They might lose their family relationships. Now, maybe that's because of chaotic behavior. Maybe it's because of just family stigma that we so misunderstand addiction that we suddenly think that, you know, oh, my gosh, I'm living with somebody who I don't even know and they're not even trustworthy and they're a bad person. That certainly plays into it. And so when we look at what has what has happened, we had this way of approaching it that was very health centered. It was working. And then we made some shifts largely related to, you know, Dr. Bruce Alexander, the guy that ran the Rat Park experiment, he said, you know, every now and then it's convenient to have a drug scare. And often what happens is we are afraid of something else and drugs become a very easy thing to link it to. And so at the turn of the century, there was lots of fear over immigration, Chinese immigrants, African-Americans having more rights. And drugs was an easy thing to link those to. began to develop this fear of the drugs and this way of thinking about drugs that was so successful by the people who began the process of prohibition that now you and me today, we don't even remember that this is the way the world handles. This is new. This is a very, I would say, got a big government. This is a very not conservative way of approaching substance use at all. It is very intrusive and invasive into the lives of people. And we have been okay with that because we have been led to believe that this is the only way. This is just the price we have to pay for a world where we're fighting drugs. And I think we're fighting them in the wrong way. We're not fighting them. We're funding them. We are making them far more deadly, far more harmful. And we can go back to a world where we focus on reducing harm from substance use and making sure that the markets have as little harm in them as possible. Alcohol causes more societal harm than any other drug. It's devastating. We're just kind of used to those harms. Well, yeah,

we've just kind of accepted that that's just part of life, you know. Yes.

Yep. And we know that it can be harmful. We also know that most people use it non-problematically. But we have mechanisms already. I think when people think about changing the way that we approach other drugs, they think, well, that would be crazy. That would be like a whole brand new thing. It's not a new thing. We have alcohol is a legal drug that causes a lot of harm. we have figured out ways to reduce the harms of alcohol while still allowing consumers to participate in it. We do not have the owner of one liquor store going and taking out the owner of the liquor store across the street. That just is a world that we can't even fathom. This sounds so crazy to us. That's exactly what we have under prohibition with other drugs. It's a choice that we've made. This is not a world we have to continue to live with. It's a world we've chosen to have where we have this level of chaos surrounding substances. So we can go back. We can learn some lessons from the past, take some of that wisdom and bring it into the present and let go of a really terrible experiment that has gone on, cost millions and millions of lives and has been going now for so long that we've forgotten that there is a better way. Right.

We obviously live in a very politically binary world these days. Do you still consider yourself a Republican?

I think of myself as conservative because when I look at kind of policy approaches, I think I still believe in all of those policy approaches. So there are some things about kind of the Republican platform that they just feel kind of foreign to me. And that's true of kind of all the both major platforms. I'm deeply committed to respectful dialogue. And it feels like most of the people out in the public today are not committed to that. It's hard for me. It's hard for me to identify there because it just is so counter to the way that I think it's helpful to engage in the world and to engage with people. But very much so. And I, you know, Billy, it's interesting because as I was on this learning journey, I had this thought, particularly with my faith, but also with kind of the way that I view politics and the role of government of, you know, if I change my mind about this, does this mean I can't be a Christian anymore? If I change my mind about this, does this mean like I'm not conservative anymore? And the more that I learned, the more I became convinced, and I'm still convinced, that no, my values have not changed. I have learned new information that has led me to believe that a different set of solutions is more in line with the values that I hold than the solutions I had been supporting. So I see it as just a learning journey of realizing, I think we've lost our way on this. And that would not be a surprising thing. Look at the history of the world. We've lost our way over and over and over again. And then we found it. And then, you know, give us 25 years and we look back and go, oh my gosh, I can't believe people used to think X, Y, or Z. And yet the people at the time could not see that that was not right. It was just the world, the air they breathed. So is it possible that suddenly we've entered into the utopia where there's nothing else that we're blind to? I think that would be incredibly foolish to think that's the world we live in. There are things we're blind to. I think this is one of them and one that we're going to look back on in 25 years and say, wow, we got that so wrong. And I'm glad we moved past it.

Right. So when your organization End It For Good does a lot of discussion on this issue, as you said, you're deeply committed to kind of having a civil conversation about this. Do a lot of people who kind of come from the same conservative roots, I mean, you're in Mississippi, a very conservative state, do they look at you like you're insane?

That's what I was worried about when I started talking about it. I thought, oh, no, people are going to just be waiting for me to renounce my faith or say that they think I've gone off the deep end. And what I found is that people are actually really interested. And part of it is, I think because of my background, that it feels less threatening. They're not hearing this from someone who wants everyone to be out there smoking and using it up or whatever. Right, right, right. Yes. Like that is, that's not the angle at all. And so I think it gives them a sense of, of, of safety that the kind of world that they want to see is the kind of world that I want to see, which is a world with less harm and also not a world where everyone's using drugs. So that, you know, I was really worried about how people would respond and have just been blown away at how much people actually long for solutions, at how much they are willing to be curious about those solutions, if they can learn about them in a way that doesn't feel shaming and blaming and are open to new Probably the most common thing I hear is, I've never thought about this before. So to be able to be part of someone's learning journey and provide them with what was given to me, a place to learn, to ask questions, not to be shamed and blamed. Right, because you said

at the beginning, that's something you can really empathize with, right? Like you grew up just drugs bad, jail good.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think a lot of people come from that perspective, to be frank.

Yeah. And I think the way that I thought about it was very much the way other people do, which is I'm not sitting here scheming, you know, how can I destroy people's lives or how can I oppress people or how can I, you someone else from getting ahead? Maybe there's a few people out there who are thinking that. The vast majority genuinely, honestly believe that the way we're approaching drugs is just the best we've got. work and we continue to get worse and worse outcomes is baffling. But the only thing they hear is we just got to do it harder. So it's great to be able to give people a different way to think and whether or not they end up agreeing with where we have landed, that's okay with us. We're willing to work with people. I went and led a book discussion on my book that came out last year at a local sheriff's department in North Mississippi. So the sheriff had come to one of our events and he reached out and said, I'd really like for all of my people to read your book and will you come and lead a book discussion on it? So I went up and there was about 30, all of his deputies, all of his office staff, 30 people. They had lunch we all had lunch together and and I gave kind of a presentation on the ideas of the book and we went around everybody shared their thoughts and perspectives and they ranged from this is crazy and could never work to you know one officer who's kind of sitting back against the wall and he says you know 25 years ago I knew that this whole war on drugs thing was was not working, could not work. Fascinating. So it's really interesting to see oftentimes older office. This is we've done a lot of events with law enforcement or have had law enforcement come to our events. And very often what you find is the longer people have been on the force, the more open they are to these ideas. Because we had another event that was one of our events. We had about 120 people there. And there were two sheriffs there. Both of them stood up and publicly said, we've been in law enforcement for 40 years. And what we're doing isn't working. We arrest the same people over and over again. And we're ready to make whatever changes the community wants to make. So that's here in Mississippi. These are conservative places and people are open to change. And part of what we're doing is helping them understand the change that could help and then allowing them to take that at their own pace. One community might say, hey, we can we could get behind, you know, some small change. And we say, great. If all that comes from leading that book discussion with that sheriff's department, maybe there's not a policy change right now that that community is open to, but maybe just the way that they police is different. Maybe their willingness to divert people into treatment instead of arresting them increases. Maybe the ability for them to give people a second or third chance instead of just going straight to the felony charge, that sort of thing. Those are huge changes that can affect people's lives really positively.