07/29/20 Christoph Buerki
Dr. Christoph Buerki is a Swiss Psychiatrist who pioneered their Heroin injection program. Over the more than two decades, Swiss citizens have injected pure Heroin more than 20,000,000 times with zero overdose deaths.
Dr. Christoph Buerki is a Swiss Psychiatrist who pioneered their Heroin injection program. Over the more than two decades, Swiss citizens have injected pure Heroin more than 20,000,000 times with zero overdose deaths.
Interview with Dr. Christoph Buerki the designer of the Swiss Heroin injection program that since 1993 has allowed for more than 27,000,000 injections of pure Heroin with zero overdose deaths.
CULTURAL BAGGAGE
MAY 29, 2019
TRANSCRIPT
DEAN BECKER: I am Dean Becker, your host. Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud, misdirection, and the liars whose support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies, enriches barbarous cartels, and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent US gangs who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is Cultural Baggage.
Hello, my friends, I am Dean Becker, the Reverend Most High. This is Cultural Baggage, and I think it's very important to recap what I learned last year in Switzerland, where they have had twenty-seven million injections of pure heroin with zero overdose deaths.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Christoph Buerki, I'm a psychiatrist in Bern, and I've been with heroin prescription from the very beginning, which is, if I recall it right, 1993, we started with that. And, I think you should, if we talk about prescribing heroin in Switzerland, we should also mention the time before, before that.
DEAN BECKER: Oh yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Because, there was a very, very big open drug scene here. We'll walk past the park where the drug scene was. We really had an epidemic of heroin overdose, for a small country, six million people, it was extraordinary, some -- up to five hundred persons a year died of heroin overdose.
Now, I know in the US you have a bigger epidemic right now, but, sizewise, it was still very significant.
DEAN BECKER: And, approximate population of Switzerland at that time?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Six million.
DEAN BECKER: Six million. Yeah that's --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Six and a half million, it was, yeah. Yeah. And so, we just needed to have new ways, and that was one of the new ways. There was different, new ways and initiatives. One was a safe consumption room, that exists also until today in Bern, as well as in many other cities, where people can go consume their own drugs.
DEAN BECKER: Right. With supervision.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: That they bring with. Under supervision, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I've been to Insite in Vancouver, which is probably similar.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah, very much. I visited, like, a week after it was opened, and it's very similar to our injection room.
So, that was really a major initiative from big cities in the mid-'90s to find ways to close down those huge open drug scenes.
DEAN BECKER: Sure. Sure.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, an important element was this -- was the heroin prescription. Of course, we couldn't just do it like that, we needed a legal basis for it, and we did this within a research frame.
So this was a huge, multi-center study, as we call it. It's called PROVE, P-R-O-V-E, where, sort of, we did it under that research -- research umbrella. So, it was --
DEAN BECKER: How large of an undertaking, a project, was that, the PROVE?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: In the beginning, it was like some 800 patients, and some -- some 16 or 18 centers, all around Switzerland.
DEAN BECKER: Good.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, the reason it was important to -- it wasn't a gold standard research in the sense, as you would do it in medical science, for to prove something, like, in the sense of a gold standard where you have two groups --
DEAN BECKER: Oh yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- that you directly compare with each other.
DEAN BECKER: One placebo group, maybe.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Even placebo, which is difficult to prescribe a placebo, if you're heroin dependent you'd immediately realize that it's placebo.
DEAN BECKER: Where's my heroin?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Right. So, that sort of methodological -- it's not a flaw, but it's, it can be proved methodologically.
DEAN BECKER: Well, sure. It was the best --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: At the time --
DEAN BECKER: -- possible, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: At the time, it was what we could do. What we did basically was, we started taking people in. We couldn't take in everyone.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: We could only take in people who had a certain history of addiction, who had certain -- more than one, several -- several attempts of quitting, with the heroin addiction. Mostly methadone, but also inpatient detox. They'd have to prove, or we would have to prove together with them, that they really tried to stop in other ways.
They needed to have certain social or psychological, somatic complications of their addiction.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: So, in the end, we -- we could only take them off and -- take them in and get permission if we could prove all those things.
DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, then we -- we started, and you will find -- you will find how it works in detail.
DEAN BECKER: Well, Christoph, what you're saying about, you know, these, the patients, more or less having to prove the need, or the mental framework, that would allow them to go ahead and use the heroin.
Doctor Goulão there in Portugal was talking about, they have the dissuasion committees that try to convince people to quit using drugs, but some people say, no, I'm a heroin user, I will keep using it, and therefore they're allowed to continue, you know, without interference.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's nicely put, the dissuasion committee. Actually this is just part, of course, of everyday -- of our everyday work, it was at the time. And that's, I think, is the most important aspect of heroin prescription.
You treat the patients, of course you give them out heroin, and that's why they come to you. But, it provides a whole opportunity to treat, to talk, to provide social -- social support, housing, finance, and so on, to provide medical support, to provide psychiatric support.
Many of those people have a dual diagnosis, in the psychiatric sense. They have maybe psychosis or depression, or anxiety disorders.
DEAN BECKER: May I ask you a question?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I would surmise, I have no proof of this, but I would surmise that many of these people who use drugs, and wind up on heroin, have suffered a penalty, or ostracized by either law enforcement or family, or whomever, for their drug use, which may lead them even further in that direction. Is there -- ?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. Many, many of the people who entered the program had a previous history of -- of court problems, of prison stays, of delinquency of some sort, of course.
DEAN BECKER: Yes sir.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And that was also one of the findings, one of the most important findings, also, besides, that people simply survive their addiction, another important finding was that rates of criminalization, of delinquent behavior, decreased massively once patients have entered the program.
DEAN BECKER: Now, is that -- I would guestimate a couple of reasons why, one is, they're no longer having to devote time looking for heroin, and perhaps no longer having to scrape up money with which to buy it.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. Of course, yeah. That's a very important thing, to have a structure during the day.
They get up and they go to bed, at some time, two times when they need to appear in the distribution center, in the clinic, and they get their heroin, and they don't need to run around, they don't need to prostitute themselves, or rob old ladies of their handbags, or do worse things, or, by the way, deal with drugs. They don't need to do that, as well.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: So, that's a massive, massive improvement over the life of an addict before he or she enters a program.
DEAN BECKER: Hi, this is Dean Becker, I wanted to remind you, you're listening to Cultural Baggage on Pacifica Radio and the Drug Truth Network. This interview was recorded in Bern, Switzerland, in the office of Doctor Christoph Buerki. He's the designer of the long-term, very successful, Swiss heroin injection program.
We talked briefly out there on the street about the US having a major problem.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Sixty thousand dead last year, they say, and I close my radio program with this thought, okeh? Because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag, please be careful.
And it's -- I think that's, at its worst in the United States, best I understand it, with the fentanyl, carfentanyl, the mixture, that's being sold, and people just don't know what they're taking. I wonder how often it even contains heroin. Your response, please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course, that's one of the major issues, if you're a drug addict on the street, you just have to consume or take whatever your dealer sells you as being heroin, and that can be, especially -- we also do street surveys of street drugs, up to today in the canton of Bern, regular samples are taken in the low-threshold street agency, and it's really a problem, because it contains between two or three percent of heroin, up to forty or sixty percent of heroin.
DEAN BECKER: Oh, my.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: That's a very, very dangerous situation. Many people might -- can overdose in those situations. If you're used to heroin of five percent and then you suddenly get heroin, street heroin, of sixty percent, it can be a death penalty.
DEAN BECKER: There you go.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It could be really, really dangerous. So, of course, that's one of the things that, even up to today, where we've done it twenty-five years now, almost. I'm not aware of a single patient who has died of an overdose in a heroin injection -- of a heroin injection in a heroin prescription clinic. Not a single overdose death.
DEAN BECKER: That's wonderful. The best outcome you could hope for, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I think it's, for the individual patient, it's the best outcome one can hope for. Yeah, it is. And, also many people, they -- I mean, one big criticism of heroin prescription is that you keep patients forever, sort of, for the rest of their life.
Which, for some patients, it's true, one has to say, it's true, they are so heavily addicted, and they can't, despite all the motivational efforts by staff and psychotherapists, doctors, social workers, they cannot be motivated, they cannot be pushed into trying to quit or doing something different, which is one of the issues, of course.
But then again, those people, would they find a way out if they lived just on the street, on street heroin? Probably not. Most of them would be dead by now.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah. Well, right, because of the impurities, the -- and again --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Lifestyle.
DEAN BECKER: -- and not knowing what is in that bag.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Like I say. There was a gentleman, one of the founding members of Johns Hopkins University, very prestigious outfit over there in the US.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: He was known as a lifelong morphine addict. He was, and I'm trying to remember his name [sic: Dr. William Stewart Halsted], but he was declared to be the father of modern surgery, he was that good.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And, I often like to ask folks, if he were your surgeon, would you want him to have his fix before or after he cut you open? And my thought is, I think he should have it before he cuts me open, but, he had a very productive life just the same, and do you find some of your patients nonetheless have very productive lives despite -- ?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. That's, I mean, that's the ultimate goal of the program, to have, yeah, a fulfilling or productive life, somehow. That meant -- might mean totally different things for different people.
It might mean that you have a job, that you have a family, for others it might mean that you don't die of suicide or you don't die of a major mental illness. So that's a -- that's an individual thing, what is a fulfilling life.
But that's the ultimate goal, of course, in all the treatments that we do as doctors, as institutions.
DEAN BECKER: Right. Well, and, that's very admirable, I, that's why I'm here, you know, to learn about it.
We'll be back shortly after this quick break.
It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Blistering or peeling skin, swelling of eyelids, throat, and lips, blurred vision and yellowing of eyes, black tarry stools, vomit that looks like coffee grounds. Time's up! The answer: Celebrex.
Again, we're speaking with Doctor Christoph Buerki, the inventor of the Swiss heroin injection program.
My hope, my goal, and again, I'm a former cop, I want to legalize all drugs.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I want them to be made by Merck and Pfizer.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Not some Mexican farmer who's mixing cartel --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- fentanyl all together.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. And, may I say something?
DEAN BECKER: Please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Because I have been to the US as well, like, last year, and I, with a big smile, I drove through Colorado and listened to the radio ads of marijuana.
DEAN BECKER: How good this one is, that [unintelligible] the other, yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I think it's great, that tendency, that marijuana is taken out of, I mean, to punish somebody because he consumes marijuana, it's frankly quite a stupid thing to do.
And, however, I think it's a bit problematic, as a psychiatrist, I'm of course aware that marijuana is not without risks.
DEAN BECKER: No, no.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, if we talk about legalization, I would very strongly think we should prohibit commercial advertising --
DEAN BECKER: Well --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- for those [unintelligible]
DEAN BECKER: I'm with you. I'm with you.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, same with cigarettes and alcohol, it shouldn't be advertised, on TV and cinemas, on billboards somewhere. It shouldn't --
DEAN BECKER: That's just glamorizing it.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. And the same thing, we shouldn't do with drugs, be it marijuana, be it whatever psychoactive substance.
DEAN BECKER: The --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Bit of a criticism to the legalization movement in the US. It goes like from one extreme, the total demonization of relatively, a relatively harmless substance called marijuana, to a consumer product that even needs advertising and --
DEAN BECKER: It doesn't need much advertising at all.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's a bit extreme, those pendulum swings.
DEAN BECKER: I like to look back, the United States had a 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- which said -- up til then, it had been snake oil salesmen, and, you know, buy this, it will --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- give you a [unintelligible], or whatever, but, the truth was, the 1906 Act required that the manufacturer label very specifically what was in the product.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And I think that's -- we could stop right there, because, like I told Doctor Goulão, that, you know, if somebody, if there's kerosene and foot fungus in the cocaine, which there is, coming out of Colombia, because of the manufacturing process, maybe small amounts, but if somebody likes kerosene and foot fungus and they're willing to buy it, seeing it there on the label, then we ought to let them buy it.
And, I guess the point I'm getting at is, you know, people are going to do brave things. I think that's a lot of what drug use is, is bravado, thinking I can face down this lion. I can do it on a daily basis.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I don't know. I'm drifting off here, but I think the point I'm getting at is that there are a lot of factors that lead people to take drugs. I'm not saying that kerosene and foot fungus is one, but I'm just saying, through labeling the product, people would know exactly what they're buying, and they would be liable for that.
Then, we could judge people by their actions, like we used to, rather than the baggy in their pocket. Your response to that, please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Well, it's a philosophical question, because we're in both our societies very far away from such things, and our compromise in Switzerland, and I think it's not a bad compromise, is --
DEAN BECKER: Oh, no, I admire it.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- is starting prescribing it through doctors, the heroin. Yeah, I mean, heroin is strong stuff, one must admit, and it is, you can get over it, of course, but it doesn't go easily. It does have side effects, it also restricts your life at the moment, the way you -- the way it's prescribed in the clinic. There's no take home doses of heroin. It's no fun to be a patient in a heroin prescription clinic.
But it's a compromise, it's medicalized through that, it's made sure that what patients get and take is clean and pure. And maybe also one aspect, I think it's important to realize, it's also, the heroin prescription, giving out the heroin every day, is only a means to get into touch with people.
DEAN BECKER: Sure.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And to really get them into treatment. I think that's the biggest value of this type of program, that you can get in touch with people. You see them every day twice, you can intervene, when they have a pneumonia, when they -- many of them are HIV positive. I mean, we started at a time when we didn't have anti-retroviral substances yet.
DEAN BECKER: And, the -- it was taking off, the --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And it was exploding. The numbers were exploding. And, or they have hepatitis C, or all those things. And you can, you see them, you can intervene, you can -- when, when somebody gets psychotic because of their underlying psychoses, you can medicalize them with an anti-psychotic medication.
You can give them out anti-depressants if they're depressed, and so on, you can do psychotherapy for certain situations, in order for them to find -- find a way to be with their problems in life.
So, there's a lot of things you can do in that accompanying --
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- treatment, and they're only possible because your patients come to you.
DEAN BECKER: Once again, a reminder, you're listening to Cultural Baggage on Pacifica Radio. This interview was recorded in the office of Doctor Christoph Buerki in Bern, Switzerland. Got a lot smarter.
Now, in the US, we've, there's talk of legalizing marijuana at the federal level.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: But then there's this roadblock that's always put up, that, oh, we can't do that, we're party to the UN treaties and it wouldn't allow for, and it brings me to my next question to you. How did you get through, or work around, that situation?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: You're asking me something that you should ask somebody from the federal government. I'm sorry, I'm not quite aware -- if I remember it right, the -- what's clear is that members of the United Nations Narcotics Control Bureau [sic: Board], they have been here several times, have visited, and overall, were absolutely impressed, and -- impressed by the quality of the treatment, by the seriousity -- how it was done.
They didn't have to complain about anything with the -- in that regard. So, it is possible, within UN framework, to do something like that, there's no doubt.
DEAN BECKER: Hard to chastise you for success and keeping people alive, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It is, it is.
DEAN BECKER: All right. Well, I was just going to say, Doctor Buerki, if you would, tell me what I'm leaving out. What should be let my listeners know about the success of your project?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, walk around Bern. Have a look around. You can -- there's no corner in Bern that you cannot walk around.
DEAN BECKER: The criminality is down.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Criminality is so much down. Drug related crime, delinquency, petty crimes, stealing, all those things, so much better nowadays than it was 25 years ago. That alone is a huge success for it.
And, on the individual level, you have many, many lives who are saved. You have --
DEAN BECKER: Prolonged.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Many people who are still dependent on drugs, somehow, some of them, for some of them it's a phase in their life, for some of them it's a phase that never ends, or for some of them, still it is a phase that ends their life. But, overall, many, many people have survived or even survived in good health, basically, unfortunate addiction.
DEAN BECKER: Right. Well, you know, I -- I grew up in the '60s. I tried heroin, I never did like downers, it just didn't appeal to me. Got into speed for a while, and, you know, and noticed that I was going to have a son, kind of caused that to end, you know, that affection for the speed.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And, I think, in many cases, that tends to be the case, that a job or a wife or a kid, or some other happening to your life, tends to help many people, you know, walk away from the dangerous part of their habit, at least.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Has that proven to be true for many of these addicts, or is -- or were you dealing more with the more serious, committed addicts, I guess is what I'm --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, from epidemiological research we know that this is very true, that a lot of people use drugs, maybe even have an addiction over a certain time in their late teens, in their twenties, and once in their thirties they start thinking about families, about career, and so on, and they stop.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's the same with cigarettes, it's the same with excessive alcohol drinking. It's the same with drugs, generally. And, however in the heroin prescription program, as I lined out before --
DEAN BECKER: These were serious people.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- we have that, we have serious people, with serious addictions, with a lot of co-morbidities, of a psychological nature. So, they tend not to be that easy --
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- a population that can sort of, at the blink of an eye, quit their habit and go on with their lives.
DEAN BECKER: Time's up, I'm done.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yes. This is more something I do nowadays, I have a lot of, still a lot of patients in, with some sort of drug problem. For example, nowadays, young people, they tend to take more MDMA.
DEAN BECKER: Doctor Buerki, I want to thank you for your candid -- for being so candid with us, and for sharing your thoughts. The last question I want to present here is that, our president is talking about people who sell drugs, they need to be killed.
That's what he's been saying, consistently, for the last few weeks, that their lives are just not worth prolonging another moment. We're not talking -- you were not talking about selling drugs, but it just seems such a, I don't know how to phrase this without trying to drag you into something political.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Don't worry about it. I have my opinions. It's a war on drug -- it's a typical statement of a war on drugs person. I mean, we as a society, we have tried war on drugs for countless years. I think the war on drugs was formally declared by Richard Nixon, if I recall it right.
It has not proven to work. It has not proven to work. Let's look at the situation in the US. It's worse than ever, despite all the law enforcement efforts going into, into combating drugs, into having that war on drugs, so, all we can say is, more of the same, or even inhumane approaches to that war on drugs.
DEAN BECKER: He says we have to get tough, as if we haven't been.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I can't understand it. It's just not understandable, how somebody can say something like that, and how, I mean, there is -- he's also supported by many religious people, in your country, I know. How can somebody support a person who says such crazy things? With such disrespect for life? It's incredible.
DEAN BECKER: Again, that was Doctor Christoph Buerki, the inventor of the Swiss heroin injection program. Just enough time to remind you that because of prohibition you don't know what's in that bag. Please, be careful.
To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge of an abyss.
Dr. Christoph Buerki the Swiss designer heroin injection program Pt2, Howard Wooldridge Dir Citizens Opposing Prohibition, Sen Chuck Schumer, Dr Gupta & Dr Oz
CULTURAL BAGGAGE
MAY 3, 2018
TRANSCRIPT
DEAN BECKER: I am Dean Becker, your host. Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud, misdirection, and the liars whose support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies, enriches barbarous cartels, and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent US gangs who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is Cultural Baggage.
Indeed, this is Cultural Baggage, I am the Reverend Dean Becker. Thank you for being with us today for this edition of Drug Truth Network programming. I've got so much stuff, I'll tell you what, let's just get right to it here. There we go.
Over the last few weeks, I've brought on a couple of my allies from the Baker Institute, from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Today, I have another gentleman I've worked with for well over a decade now, a man who now has -- heads up Citizens Opposing Prohibition, a former cop, a former speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a man who patrols the hallways and the offices of our US Congress and Senators on a daily basis there in Washington, DC, my friend, my ally, Mister Howard Wooldridge.
How are you, sir?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Dean, real well here in the belly of the beast, good to hear from you.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah, now, thanks to your pioneering work, last month I went to Bern, Switzerland, while there I got a chance to meet your friend, Doctor Christoph Buerki, who is the designer, if you will, of the Swiss heroin injection program, and we featured half of my interview with him last week, we're going to feature the other half here in just a little bit, but, tell us, how did you meet Doctor Buerki?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: I met Doctor Buerki, in 2001, when he was the director of the treatment clinic for heroin addiction in the capitol of Bern, Switzerland, and we hit it off. Gave me a great tour. We stayed in contact, and 16, 17 years later, we're still professional friends and colleagues.
DEAN BECKER: Now, Howard, you have certainly toured Europe, the UN General Assembly or whatever, the meetings over there, a couple of times over the years as well. Tell us about that interaction, please.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Well, I've attended three of the United Nations conferences on drugs in Vienna, Austria, to see what could be done at the international level to end the worldwide prohibition which, you know, Dean, that 1961 Single Convention Treaty, and it was my analysis and that of LEAP's Neill Franklin and others, that the United Nations is worse, by far, than our Congress in terms of even approaching or talking about the issue of changing the prohibition.
So, I went in 2016, and unless something changes, I don't expect to go back, because it's just not worth the time and money and effort.
DEAN BECKER: Well, Howard, I talked to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction about the fact that it was fellows like Harry J. Anslinger, back in the early part of the twentieth century, that convinced America that the moral thing to do was to have this prohibition, and that he then took that to the United Nations and basically convinced the rest of the world. Am I right?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Essentially, plus, in 1961, the United States was the single biggest, dominant power in the world, even more than today, so, when we demanded the prohibition, the world just said okeh.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah, and what have we wrought, right?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Well, you know, I describe the war on drugs, this modern prohibition, as the most destructive, dysfunctional, and immoral, immoral policy since slavery and Jim Crow. Kids are shot every day selling drugs off sidewalks, and people just yawn.
DEAN BECKER: Right. And thousands, tens of thousands, are now dying each year from the contaminated drugs, and again, a big yawn, it seems, right?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Right. That's where the Swiss have been the pioneer, now copied in six European countries, where a small portion of their addicted population, they give them pure heroin twice a day, and no one has died after ten million doses, because it's pure, legal, heroin checked by technicians.
DEAN BECKER: Well, and, you know, I've been thinking back to when this all started. There was the great concern about the snake oil salesmen out there selling these unknown products to people, you know, with promises of great benefit. And I think in essence we still have snake oil salesmen out there, selling crap that people anticipate being of great benefit, but truth be told, nobody knows what's in that bag they're selling. Right?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: That is correct, and that's why we're losing about a hundred and twenty American citizens a day, because they don't know what they're buying, or they relapse and get the incorrect dose, and for those reasons, we need to look at the Swiss model as a great step forward in saving the lives of those people. If they had access to the same heroin that patients do in Switzerland, essentially nobody has to die tomorrow.
DEAN BECKER: And that is the point, isn't it, because of this prohibition, we're -- we set people up for failure, because there's just no telling what they're buying on any given day.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Right. And the general conception is still that, since the heroin is not good for you, of course, whiskey and cigarettes aren't either, but with the heroin, we still take the moral attitude that we must prevent you from having access to a safe drug, and not understanding addiction, we have those people going to the streets and dying at a hundred and twenty per day.
DEAN BECKER: And, Howard, you know, I had a really interesting time over there. I got to meet some of the top dogs, if you will, the, I got to interview Doctor Goulão, the Portuguese drug czar, Mister Wiessing, there at the European Monitoring Centre, and they even invited me to speak to their scientific group, to invite the police chief, and the commissioner, and it was a great discussion, with no fear of, you know, what topic we might open. Your thought there, please.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Well, certainly the Europeans are lightyears ahead of America in terms of applying science and research to the issue of drug use and abuse. The Portugal experiment -- not experiment, the Portugal experience now, what, 17 years running, has shown the world you can decrim and not increase drug consumption, and the Swiss model.
The good news is, some cheerful news, is that I'm going to speak to a group in Norway, in Oslo, in a week, and they are on the verge of going Portugal, which is amazing for a Scandinavian country that was always hard, hard line.
DEAN BECKER: But, they're learning from the experience in Portugal, as you say, that the sky will not fall, and lives will be saved.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Yeah, it only took 17 years of great research and numbers to convince the Norwegians, and nobody else has done it. As you know, Dean, in Europe, the Norwegians will be the first, if their plan goes forward as expected.
DEAN BECKER: Here in the United States, we have several cities, several county and city commissioners, people talking about the need for it here in these United States, no one has actually done it as yet, but the truth of the matter, the common sense of it all, is starting to shine rather brightly, is it not?
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: To be plain spoken, because you've got a hundred and twenty mostly white people and rich people dying, America is now actually searching for a solution more than just let them all die. As you know, the racism has been a fundamental part of this policy since Nixon declared the war on black and brown people, back in 1971, but still, despite the great numbers of white people dying, the white power structure has been slow, and is just now beginning to take notice that they should do something different besides let them all die.
DEAN BECKER: The recent issue of information from Doctor Sanjay Gupta, the guy who put forward the idea that marijuana was good for kids with epilepsy, and whose thought caught traction across the country, helped to create new laws across these United States, is now saying that marijuana is of benefit for those trying to quit opium addiction.
I have high hopes that he's going to swing that cat widely again. Your thought there, Howard Wooldridge.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: And this is just a sign of the times, that you have highly respected doctors who are pointing out that god's green medicine is highly effective in a number of areas, and we're just scratching the surface.
And certainly, from little boys and girls with the grand mal seizures, up to people who are addicted to heroin and dying on the streets today, we need to open up the plant for research and immediately allow people to use this, like our veterans, who are suffering from PTSD and dying at twenty per day.
The veterans are also a big voice now in Washington, DC, in the halls of Congress, to move the marijuana research forward, based on, we need to take care of our veterans. So, it's a gathering storm of supporters from all over the place to move the issue forward. I'm highly optimistic that it's going to be done in the next two calendar years.
DEAN BECKER: From your mouth to god's ear. Folks, we've been speaking with Mister Howard Wooldridge. He heads up Citizens Opposing Prohibition, out there on the web at CitizensOpposingProhibition.org. Howard Wooldridge, thank you sir.
HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: You're welcome, Dean, keep it up.
DEAN BECKER: This is Doctor Sanjay Gupta, speaking to Doctor Oz.
SANJYA GUPTA, MD: Here's the most compelling thing for me, was that when you take opioids, within a few days, your brain changes. That's what they call the brain disease, your brain is changed, and you are no longer able to really have the same judgment, the same decision making, the same ability to quit. You can't just say no anymore, it's egregious to ask people to just say no, if their brain is changed in this way.
Cannabis, specifically a component known as CBD, can help heal the brain. So treat the pain, treat the withdrawal, heal the brain. If you had to design something, Oz, to get us out of this opioid epidemic, it would probably look very much like cannabis, and it needs to be studied. It needs to be treated with the respect that it deserves.
DEAN BECKER: It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Shortness of breath, slow heartbeat, weight gain, fatigue, hypotension, dizziness, may mask the symptoms of low blood sugar, stopping therapy abruptly has led to chest pain and heart attacks. Time's up! Talk about dependence, the answer, from GlaxoSmithKline: Coreg, for hypertension, heart failure, and heart attacks.
All right. This is the Reverend Dean Becker. As I was mentioning to Howard, we did that interview with Doctor Christoph Buerki, half of it last week, we have the other half for this week. Let's see if I can get it cued up here and share it with you. And here we go.
The following is part two of my discussion with Doctor Christoph Buerki, the inventor of the Swiss heroin injection program.
My hope, my goal, and again, I'm a former cop, I want to legalize all drugs.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I want them to be made by Merck and Pfizer.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Not some Mexican farmer who's mixing cartel --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- fentanyl all together.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. And, may I say something?
DEAN BECKER: Please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Because I have been to the US as well, like, last year, and I, with a big smile, I drove through Colorado and listened to the radio ads of marijuana.
DEAN BECKER: How good this one is, that [inaudible] the other, yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I think it's great, that tendency, that marijuana is taken out of, I mean, to punish somebody because he consumes marijuana, it's frankly quite a stupid thing to do.
And, however, I think it's a bit problematic, as a psychiatrist, I'm of course aware that marijuana is not without risks.
DEAN BECKER: No, no.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, if we talk about legalization, I would very strongly think we should prohibit commercial advertising --
DEAN BECKER: Well --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- for those [inaudible]
DEAN BECKER: I'm with you. I'm with you.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, same with cigarettes and alcohol, it shouldn't be advertised, on TV and cinemas, on billboards somewhere. It shouldn't --
DEAN BECKER: That's just glamorizing it, yeah.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And the same thing, we shouldn't do with drugs, be it marijuana, be it whatever psychoactive substance.
DEAN BECKER: The --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Bit of a criticism to legalization movement in the US. It goes like from one extreme, the total demonization of relatively, a relatively harmless substance called marijuana, to a consumer product that even needs advertising and --
DEAN BECKER: It doesn't need much advertising at all.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's a bit extreme, those pendulum swings.
DEAN BECKER: I like to look back, the United States had a 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- which said -- up til then, it had been snake oil salesmen, and, you know, buy this, it will --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: -- give you a [inaudible], or whatever, but, the truth was, the 1906 Act required that the manufacturer label very specifically what was in the product.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And I think that's -- we could stop right there, because, like I told Doctor Goulão, that, you know, if somebody, if there's kerosene and foot fungus in the cocaine, which there is, coming out of Colombia, because of the manufacturing process, maybe small amounts, but if somebody likes kerosene and foot fungus and they're willing to buy it, seeing it there on the label, then we ought to let them buy it.
And, I guess the point I'm getting at is, you know, people are going to do brave things. I think that's a lot of what drug use is, is bravado, thinking I can face down this lion. I can do it on a daily basis.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I don't know. I'm drifting off here, but I think the point I'm getting at is that there are a lot of factors that lead people to take drugs. I'm not saying that kerosene and foot fungus is one, but I'm just saying, through labeling the product, people would know exactly what they're buying, and they would be liable for that. Then, we could judge people by their actions, like we used to, rather than the baggy in their pocket. Your response to that, please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Well, it's a philosophical question, because we're in both our societies very far away from such things, and our compromise in Switzerland, and I think it's not a bad compromise, is --
DEAN BECKER: Oh, no, I admire it.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- is starting prescribing it through doctors, the heroin. Yeah, I mean, heroin is strong stuff, one must admit, and it is, you can get over it, of course, but it doesn't go easily. It does have side effects, it also restricts your life at the moment, the way you -- the way it's prescribed in the clinic. There's no take home doses of heroin. It's no fun to be a patient in a heroin prescription clinic.
But it's a compromise, it's medicalized through that, it's made sure that what patients get and take is clean and pure. And maybe also one aspect, I think it's important to realize, it's also, the heroin prescription, giving out the heroin every day, is only a means to get into touch with people.
DEAN BECKER: Sure.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And to really get them into treatment. I think that's the biggest value of this type of program, that you can get in touch with people. You see them every day twice, you can intervene, when they have a pneumonia, when they -- many of them are HIV positive. I mean, we started at a time when we didn't have anti-retroviral substances yet.
DEAN BECKER: And, the -- it was taking off, the --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And it was exploding. The numbers were exploding. And, or they have hepatitis C, or all those things. And you can, you see them, you can intervene, you can -- when, when somebody gets psychotic because of their underlying psychoses, you can medicalize them with an anti-psychotic medication. You can give them out anti-depressants if they're depressed, and so when you can, to psychotherapy for certain situations, in order for that to find -- find a way to be with their problems in life.
So, there's a lot of things you can do in that accompanying --
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- treatment, and they're only possible because your patients come to you.
DEAN BECKER: Once again, a reminder, you're listening to Cultural Baggage on Pacifica Radio. This interview was recorded in the office of Doctor Christoph Buerki in Bern, Switzerland. Got a lot smarter.
Now, in the US, we've, there's talk of legalizing marijuana at the federal level.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: But then there's this roadblock that's always put up, that, oh, we can't do that, we're party to the UN treaties and it wouldn't allow for, and it brings me to my next question to you. How did you get through, or work around, that situation?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: You're asking me something that you should ask somebody from the federal government. I'm sorry, I'm not quite aware -- if I remember it right, the -- what's clear is that members of the United Nations Narcotics Control Bureau [sic: Board] have been here several times, have visited, and overall, were absolutely impressed, and -- impressed by the quality of the treatment, by the seriousity -- how it was done.
They didn't have to complain about anything with the -- in that regard. So, it is possible, within UN framework, to do something like that, there's no doubt.
DEAN BECKER: Hard to chastise you for success and keeping people alive, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It is, it is.
DEAN BECKER: All right. Well, I was just going to say, Doctor Buerki, if you would, tell me what I'm leaving out. What should be let my listeners know about the success of your project?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, walk around Bern. Have a look around. You can -- there's no corner in Bern that you cannot walk around.
DEAN BECKER: The criminality is down.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Criminality is so much down. Drug related crime, delinquency, petty crimes, stealing, all those things, so much better nowadays than it was 25 years ago. That alone is a huge success for it.
And, on the individual level, you have many, many lives who are saved. You have --
DEAN BECKER: Prolonged.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Many people who are still dependent on drugs, somehow, some of them, for some of them it's a phase in their life, for some of them it's a phase that never ends, or for some of them, still it is a phase that ends their life. But, overall, many, many people have survived or even survived in good health, basically, unfortunate addiction.
DEAN BECKER: Right. Well, you know, I -- I grew up in the '60s. I tried heroin, I never did like downers, it just didn't appeal to me. Got into speed for a while, and, you know, and noticed that I was going to have a son, kind of caused that to end, you know, that affection for the speed.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And, I think, in many cases, that tends to be the case, that a job or a wife or a kid, or some other happening to your life, tends to help many people, you know, walk away from the dangerous part of their habit, at least.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Has that proven to be true for many of these addicts, or is -- or were you dealing more with the more serious, committed addicts, I guess was the way I --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Basically, from epidemiological research we know that this is very true, that a lot of people use drugs, maybe even have an addiction over a certain time in their late teens, in their twenties, and once in their thirties, they start thinking about families, about career, and so on, and they stop.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's the same with cigarettes, it's the same with excessive alcohol drinking. It's the same with drugs, generally. And, however in the heroin prescription program, as I lined out before --
DEAN BECKER: These were serious people.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- we have that, we have serious people, with serious addictions, with a lot of co-morbidities, of a psychological nature. So, they tend not to be that easy --
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- a population that can sort of, at the blink of an eye, quit their habit and go on with their lives.
DEAN BECKER: Time's up, I'm done.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yes. This is more something I do nowadays, I have a lot of, still a lot of patients in, with some sort of drug problem. For example, nowadays, young people, they tend to take more MDMA.
DEAN BECKER: Doctor Buerki, I want to thank you for your candid -- for being so candid with us, and for sharing your thoughts. The last question I want to present here is that, our president is talking about people who sell drugs, they need to be killed. That's what he's been saying, consistently, for the last few weeks, that their lives are just not worth prolonging another moment. We're not talking -- you were not talking about selling drugs, but it just seems such a, I don't know how to phrase this without trying to drag you into something political.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Don't worry about it. I have my opinions. It's a war on drug -- it's a typical statement of a war on drug person. I mean, we as a society, we have tried war on drugs for countless years. I think the war on drug was formally declared by Richard Nixon, if I recall it right.
It has not proven to work. It has not proven to work. Let's look at the situation in the US. It's worse than ever, despite all the law enforcement efforts going into -- into combating drugs, into having that war on drugs, so, all we can say is, more of the same, or even inhumane approaches to that war on drugs.
DEAN BECKER: He says we have to get tough, as if we haven't been.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I can't understand it. It's just not understandable, how somebody can say something like that, and how, I mean, there is -- he's also supported by many religious people, in your country, I know. How can somebody support a person who says such crazy things? With such disrespect for life? It's incredible.
TOMMY CHONG: Hey, this is Tommy Chong for the Cultural Baggage show, telling everybody out there, don't let free speech go up in smoke, man.
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER (D-NY): I'll be introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level --
DEAN BECKER: This is Chuck Schumer.
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: -- from one end of the country to the other. The legislation is long overdue. I've seen too many people's lives ruined because they had small amounts of marijuana and served time in jail, much too long. It affects communities of color disproportionately and unfairly. And, ultimately, it's the right thing to do. Freedom. If smoking marijuana doesn't hurt anybody else, why shouldn't we allow people to do it and not make it criminal?
We allow the states to decide, so each state can decide on their own, but there'll be no federal agents or anything like that, except, if a state that has legalized marijuana, say Colorado, is shipping marijuana to, say, Illinois, which has not. The federal government can still try to stop the shipments to the state where it's not legal.
INTERVIEWER: Why have you changed your mind on this issue?
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: Well, number one, I studied the issue, and we've now had some evidence. State of Washington, other states, where it has done lots of good and no harm. Justice Brandeis said, let the states be laboratories. Now we've had a few states, we've had a few laboratories. The experiment's been a success. Let's nationalize it.
INTERVIEWER: Is it a conscience issue for you?
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: It's conscience. It's also practical.
DEAN BECKER: All right, that was Senator Chuck Schumer, talking about his bill to basically decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. That seems like a really good idea to me. I hope you guys out there will get in touch with your local officials as well. Please visit our website, nearly seven thousand radio programs at DrugTruth.net.
And once again, I remind you, that because of prohibition you don't know what is in that bag, and I urge you to please, be careful.
To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge an abyss.
Dr. Christoph Buerki the Swiss designer of their decades old, very successful heroin injection program, Prof William Martin of James A Baker Institute, Asha Bandale of DPA re Prince OD, Dr. Sanjay Gupta re cannabis relieving heroin addiction.
CULTURAL BAGGAGE
APRIL 26, 2018
TRANSCRIPT
DEAN BECKER: Broadcasting on the Drug Truth Network, this is Cultural Baggage.
Hi folks, this is the Reverend Dean Becker. I'm glad you can be with us this week. Last week, we had Major Neill Franklin. He was the executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, talking about our alignment, the Drug Truth Network and their outfit.
And today, I want to talk about another outfit, more local, here in Houston, that deems to grant me the -- as a contributing expert to their efforts. They're based at Rice University, the James A. Baker III Institute, and I want to welcome the director of that drug policy group, Professor William Martin. Hello, sir.
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: Hi Dean, good to talk with you again.
DEAN BECKER: Professor, you know, the truth about the drug war is slowly being recognized. I think it's been available to people if they just wanted to absorb it, but it's beginning to be recognized as valid, and needing, or creating need for change. Your thought there, sir.
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: Oh, that's absolutely true, and the media picked up on this now for -- for the last three, four or five years, and people are -- people can't help but see it, they can't help but be exposed to it. When they are exposed to it, it's so clear that it's been such a mistake that I've run into people, it doesn't matter whether it's at a church, or at a gathering of soft Republicans, and they'll just say, you know, we've got to change this, this doesn't work. We've got to try something else.
So, yes. The drug war is on the run.
DEAN BECKER: And, you know, I mean, I've been preaching this for, you know, nearly 20 years, we're empowering terrorists, enriching barbarous cartels, we give reasons for these gangs to exist, and we have created this situation where we're leading the world in overdose rates of our children because nobody knows what in the hell they're buying. Am I right, sir?
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: That's true, and when you're -- when you buy an unregulated product, sold to you by a criminal with no incentive whatever to be concerned about purity or quality or strength, then you are taking much more of a risk than if it were in the hands of a regulated industry that had to follow rules regarding quality and strength and purity.
DEAN BECKER: Now, Bill, we've had a couple of events within the last month at Rice University, two events looking at cannabis, cannabis laws, the future of cannabis, if you will. It's become a very mainstream topic, has it not?
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: Oh, it has, and there it was -- my colleague Katie Neill, who you know, attended a conference last week, I'm attend -- may attend one tomorrow, I haven't yet decided. I'm going to attend a harm reduction meeting in San Antonio that's going to have some high level leaders of that at that, to talk about syringe exchange and other harm reduction measures, that's recognizing that we've got to do -- we've got to do things differently.
DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir, and you know, I just returned from Switzerland and Portugal, and over there, I was able to talk to, and I'll just be, you know, rough with it, the top dogs, the drug czar, the guy who designed the heroin injection program, the head of the European Monitoring Centre, the top scientist there.
They're willing to talk to me, and here in the US, for twenty years, I've tried to get the drug czar, you know, the head of the ONDCP, the DEA, all of these guys whose opinion matters, if you will, it certainly matters in the legislators' opinions, in forming or continuing these laws, and I guess I want to get your thought there, sir. It's time for everybody to face down this lion. Every official. Am I right?
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: Well, that is true, and I appreciate so much the way you have gone after this for so many years, and although you haven't gotten all the people that you wanted to get, you have gotten a tremendous number of people of substance, and you're the -- I'm happy to have a new audience for you to reach. I'm sure there will be a lot of people following you from your old time, but I'm happy that you'll also pick up some new people to see what a unique contribution you have made.
What's the number now, is it above 1,500 people you have interviewed?
DEAN BECKER: Oh, I haven't actually tallied it. Once I got above a thousand I kind of quit, and that was about six years ago. So ---
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: It's way on up there, but, and we at the Baker Institute, we are so pleased now for several years to have, to serve as an archive for that resource, and just as, you know, your book, To End The War On Drugs, which we helped to -- helped to publish and also to distribute, helped with financing of that to some extent.
DEAN BECKER: Yes sir.
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: And, which is in itself, which you did, based on the interviews that you've done over the years, sort of topic by topic of the drug war, and then much more even really quite currently, we have on the first page of our website, you can go to -- you can google Baker Institute Drug Policy, and you'll come up on the front page, and there's an article there that I put together about law enforcement in Houston favoring drug policy reform.
Even though I put it together, it came from your interviews with the past and present chiefs of police, the sheriff, the DA, and with other people who have minor roles in that article, but not minor roles in -- all of these people agree that the drug war has been a failure, and we need to do something else besides lock people up.
DEAN BECKER: Well, Bill, I appreciate that endorsement, and you know I send it right back to you guys for standing so tall and so honest in this regard. Please point them to that website one more time, Bill.
WILLIAM MARTIN, PHD: Okeh, you can just go to drug -- Baker Institute Drug Policy, and it will pop up.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/drug-policy-program/
DEAN BECKER: The following segment comes to us courtesy of MIC.com.
ASHA BANDALE: On the anniversary of Prince's death, what I want people to think about, more than anything, is that we don't have to lose another life. We don't have to have people dying of overdose. My name is Asha Bandale, I'm a senior director at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Prince meant so much to me, because he was black excellence and because he was free. Gave me the ability to claim my own freedom, and be who I was. I'm here talking about addiction and talking about drug use, because I loved Prince.
When I think about Prince, I think about a man who probably felt a lot of stigma because he was in pain, and because he didn't feel like he could ask for help. And so when we use terms like crackhead, junkie, addict, and we just dismiss the humanity of people, they don't feel like they can come to us and ask for help, they feel shame.
Each year in America, somewhere around 64,000 people die needlessly of drug overdoses, about 42,000 of those deaths are driven by opioid use. From marijuana to heroin, 75 to 90 percent of the people who use them never become addicted.
So we need to begin to look at what are those things that are present in the lives of people who do become addicted, and often what you find are things like lack of access to healthcare, loss of hope, loss of jobs, loss of family structures, and so we have to not think about addiction as this isolated sort of craziness that some person who's a freak lives in. We have to think about our social responsibility and what we're not providing people.
There are nations like Portugal that once had an overdose epidemic, much like the one we're having here in the United States. Portugal took drugs to the maximum extent possible out of the criminal justice system, and put it inside their public health system, and so when they've done that, what they've actually seen is a reduction in young people who use drugs. They've ended their overdose epidemic. They've almost exclusively curtailed, almost entirely, the transmission of HIV through shared needles.
So Trump's approach about killing the drug dealer is his lazy, scientifically unsound, and morally unethical approach to, actually, what we need to have a leader of this nation do, which is figure out how to save lives.
donald trump: If we don't get tough on the drug dealers who are wasting our time, and that toughness includes the death penalty.
ASHA BANDALE: The war on drugs has been an abject failure and we've known it. People are going to use drugs. Our job as a society should be to save lives, but we're more concerned about morality than we are with saving lives, and my plea to anybody who's within reach of my voice, is choose life first. Wouldn't we want Prince still here? Wouldn't we want Whitney Houston still here? Wouldn't we want our own loved ones, who we've buried to drug use, still here?
They could be, if we actually let go of our morality and chose their lives first. That is the true morality, to me.
DEAN BECKER: All right, folks, that was Asha Bandale from the Drug Policy Alliance. I toured Portugal with her, Lisbon, we interviewed the drug czar over there, each of us.
I want to say this. I have a local minister, he's here in studio with me, he's going to be anonymous for today, but he just wants to see what's going on. He's thinking of joining forces with us, and I'm hoping he's the first of many local officials, ministers, you know, county commissioners, and whomever, police chiefs maybe. It's time to challenge the logic of the drug war. It has no reason to exist.
You know, after I left Lisbon, I went to Bern, Switzerland. There, I got a chance to interview Doctor Buerki, Christoph Buerki. He's the inventor of the, how do you call it, the heroin injection program, which has saved a lot of lives. We're going to hear half of that discussion today. This is Doctor Christoph Buerki.
It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, face chomping, lip eating, heart devouring, brain slurping, ecstasy, suicidality, zombie-ism. Time's up! The answer, according to law enforcement, from some crazy-ass chemist somewhere: mephedrone, otherwise known as bath salts.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Christoph Buerki, I'm a psychiatrist in Bern, and I've been with heroin prescription from the very beginning, which is, if I recall it right, 1993, we started with that. And, I think you should, if we talk about prescribing heroin in Switzerland, we should also mention the time before, before that.
DEAN BECKER: Oh yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Because, there was a very, very big open drug scene here. We'll walk past the park where the drug scene was. We really had an epidemic of heroin overdose, for a small country, six million people, it was extraordinary, some -- up to five hundred persons a year died of heroin overdose. Now, I know in the US you have a bigger epidemic right now, but, sizewise, it was still very significant.
DEAN BECKER: And, approximate population of Switzerland at that time?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Six million.
DEAN BECKER: Six million. Yeah that's --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Six and a half million, it was, yeah. Yeah. And so, we just needed to have new ways, and that was one of the new ways. There was different, new ways and initiatives. One was a safe consumption room, that exists also until today in Bern, as well as in many other cities, where people can go consume their own drugs.
DEAN BECKER: Right. With supervision.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: That they bring with. Under supervision, yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I've been to Insite in Vancouver, which is probably similar.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Yeah, very much. I visited, like, a week after it was opened, and it's very similar to our injection room.
So, that was really a major initiative from big cities in the mid-'90s to find ways to close down those huge open drug scenes.
DEAN BECKER: Sure. Sure.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, an important element was this -- was the heroin prescription. Of course, we couldn't just do it like that, we needed a legal basis for it, and we did this within a research frame.
So this was a huge, multi-center study, as we call it. It's called PROVE, P-R-O-V-E, where, sort of, we did it under that research -- research umbrella. So, it was --
DEAN BECKER: How large of an undertaking, a project, was that, the PROVE?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: In the beginning, it was like some 800 patients, and some -- some 16 or 18 centers, all around Switzerland.
DEAN BECKER: Good.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, the reason it was important to -- it wasn't a gold standard research in the sense, as you would do it in medical science, for to prove something, like, in the sense of a gold standard where you have two groups --
DEAN BECKER: Oh yes.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: -- that you directly compare with each other.
DEAN BECKER: One placebo group, maybe.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Even placebo, which is difficult to prescribe a placebo, if you're heroin dependent you'd immediately realize that it's placebo.
DEAN BECKER: Where's my heroin?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Right. So, that sort of methodological -- it's not a flaw, but it's, it can be proved methodologically.
DEAN BECKER: Well, sure. It was the best --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: At the time --
DEAN BECKER: -- possible, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: At the time, it was what we could do. What we did basically was, we started taking people in. We couldn't take in everyone.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: We could only take in people who had a certain history of addiction, who had certain -- more than one, several -- several attempts of quitting, with the heroin addiction. Mostly methadone, but also inpatient detox. They'd have to prove, or we would have to prove together with them, that they really tried to stop in other ways. They needed to have certain social or psychological, somatic complications of their addiction.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: So, in the end, we -- we could only take them off and -- take them in and get permission if we could prove all those things.
DEAN BECKER: Yes, sir.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And, then we -- we started, and you will find -- you will find how it works in detail.
DEAN BECKER: Well, Christoph, what you're saying about, you know, these, the patients, more or less having to prove the need, or the mental framework, that would allow them to go ahead and use the heroin. Dr. Goul?├║o there in Portugal was talking about, they have the dissuasion committees that try to convince people to quit using drugs, but some people say, no, I'm a heroin user, I will keep using it, and therefore they're allowed to continue, you know, without interference.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It's nicely put, the dissuasion committee. Actually this is just part, of course, of everyday -- of our everyday work, it was at the time. And that's, I think, is the most important aspect of heroin prescription.
You treat the patients, of course you give them out heroin, and that's why they come to you. But, it provides a whole opportunity to treat, to talk, to provide social -- social support, housing, finance, and so on, to provide medical support, to provide psychiatric support. Many of those people have dual diagnosis, in the psychiatric sense. They have maybe psychosis or depression, or anxiety disorders.
DEAN BECKER: May I ask you a question?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: I would surmise, I have no proof of this, but I would surmise that many of these people who use drugs, and wind up on heroin, have suffered a penalty, or ostracized by either law enforcement or family, or whomever, for their drug use, which may lead them even further in that direction. Is there -- ?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. Many, many of the people who entered the program had a previous history of -- of court problems, of prison stays, of delinquency of some sort, of course.
DEAN BECKER: Yes sir.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: And that was also one of the findings, one of the most important findings, also, besides, that people simply survive their addiction, another important finding was that rates of criminalization, of delinquent behavior, decreased massively once patients have entered the program.
DEAN BECKER: Now, is that -- I would guestimate a couple of reasons why, one is, they're no longer having to devote time looking for heroin, and perhaps no longer having to scrape up money with which to buy it.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. Of course, yeah. That's a very important thing, to have a structure during the day. They get up and they go to bed, at some time, two times when they need to appear in the distribution center, in the clinic, and they get their heroin, and they don't need to run around, they don't need to prostitute themselves, or rob old ladies of their handbags, or do worse things, or, by the way, deal with drugs. They don't need to do that, as well.
DEAN BECKER: Right.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: So, that's a massive, massive improvement over their life of an addict before he or she enters a program.
DEAN BECKER: Hi, this is Dean Becker, I wanted to remind you, you're listening to Cultural Baggage on Pacifica Radio and the Drug Truth Network. This interview was recorded in Bern, Switzerland, in the office of Doctor Christoph Buerki. He's the designer of the long-term, very successful, Swiss heroin injection program.
We talked briefly out there on the street about the US having a major problem.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Sixty thousand dead last year, they say [sic: that's all drug overdose deaths], and I close my radio program with this thought, okeh? Because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag, please be careful. And it's -- I think that's, at its worst in the United States, best I understand it, with the fentanyl, carfentanyl, the mixture, that's being sold, and people just don't know what they're taking. I wonder how often it even contains heroin. Your response, please.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course, that's one of the major issues, if you're a drug addict on the street, you just have to consume or take whatever your dealer sells you as being heroin, and that can be, especially -- we also do street surveys of street drugs, up to today in the canton of Bern, regular samples are taken in the low-threshold street agency, and it's really a problem, because it contains between two or three percent of heroin, up to forty or sixty percent of heroin.
DEAN BECKER: Oh, my.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: That's a very, very dangerous situation. Many people might -- can overdose in those situations. If you're used to heroin of five percent and then you suddenly get heroin, street heroin, of sixty percent, it can be a death penalty.
DEAN BECKER: There you go.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: It could be really, really dangerous. So, of course, that's one of the things that, even up to today, where we've done it twenty-five years now, almost. I'm not aware of a single patient who has died of an overdose in a heroin injection -- of a heroin injection in a heroin prescription clinic. Not a single overdose death.
DEAN BECKER: That's wonderful. The best outcome you could hope for, right?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: I think it's, for the individual patient, it's the best outcome one can hope for. Yeah, it is. And, also many people pay -- I mean, one big criticism of heroin prescription is that you keep patients forever, sort of for the rest of their life. Which, for some patients, it's true, one has to say, it's true, they are so heavily addicted, and they can't, despite all the motivational efforts by staff and psychotherapists, doctors, social workers, they cannot be motivated, they cannot be pushed into trying to quit or doing something different, which is one of the issues, of course.
But then again, those people, would they find a way out if they lived just on the street, on street heroin? Probably not. Most of them would be dead by now.
DEAN BECKER: Yeah. Well, right, because of the impurities, the -- and again --
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah. Lifestyle.
DEAN BECKER: -- and not knowing what is in that bag.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: Like I say. There was a gentleman, one of the founding members of Johns Hopkins University, very prestigious outfit over there in the US.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: He was known as a lifelong morphine addict. He was, and I'm trying to remember his name [sic: Dr. William Stewart Halsted], but he was declared to be the father of modern surgery, he was that good.
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Yeah.
DEAN BECKER: And, I often like to ask folks, if he were your surgeon, would you want him to have his fix before or after he cut you open? And my thought is, I think he should have it before he cuts me open, but, he had a very productive life just the same, and do you find some of your patients nonetheless have very productive lives despite -- ?
CHRISTOPH BUERKI, MD: Of course. That's, I mean, that's the ultimate goal of the program, to have, yeah, a fulfilling or productive life, somehow. That meant -- might mean totally different things for different people. It might mean that you have a job, that you have a family, for others it might mean that you don't die of suicide or you don't die of a major mental illness. So that's a -- that's an individual thing, what is a fulfilling life.
But that's the ultimate goal, of course, in all the treatments that we do as doctors, as institutions.
DEAN BECKER: All right. Once again, that was Doctor Christoph Buerki, the Swiss scientist who came up with the Swiss heroin injection program, as he says, almost 25 years in existence now. Nobody's ever died of heroin there in Bern, Switzerland, since they came up with that program. I got to tour the facility, a six story building. I got to see how they store the heroin, how they dispense it, how they control, you know, who gets what.
Twice a day, people come in, get their heroin fix, then they go back to work or tending their children or whatever it might be. But, it is a much better way than we have, where people are buying crap on the street, they've got no idea what's in that bag. And yet, you know, they keep buying it just the same, because, well, that's the way America likes their drug war, deadly and dangerous, I suppose.
I've got a track I want to share with you about something that's fixing to happen, and I hope you will tune in, because I'm certainly going to.
donald trump: We're going to work with the people who are so addicted, and we're going to try like hell to get them off that addiction.
SANJAY GUPTA, MD: A national epidemic. Trump campaigned to end it. As president, he promised to fix it.
donald trump: The scourge of drug addiction in America will stop. It will stop.
SANJAY GUPTA, MD: But one year later, it hasn't stopped. People are still dying. A hundred and fifteen Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. More than car accidents, breast cancer, or guns.
VOICE ONE: Literally everyone we know knows somebody who has died of an overdose.
SANJAY GUPTA, MD: And two and a half million Americans are currently struggling with opioid addiction.
VOICE TWO: I was completely helpless, where I just was like suicide is a constant thought.
jefferson beauregard sessions III: People need to take some aspirin sometimes, and tough it out.
SANJAY GUPTA, MD: A solution some believe is this: cannabis. It's controversial to many. Is cannabis a gateway drug? But a gateway to recovery for others.
Did it help you get off of the opiates?
VOICE TWO: Absolutely.
VOICE THREE: Cannabis has given me a reason to live.
SANJAY GUPTA, MD: Join us as we investigate, search for answers, and meet potential pioneers and outspoken critics. Whether you struggle with opioids, or know one of the millions who do, decide for yourself.
DEAN BECKER: It shall air Sunday, April 29, at 8pm eastern on CNN.
I hope you tune in. It's going to be, I think, very instrumental in changing America's perspectives on this. It was Doctor Sanjay Gupta about four or five years ago who came forward, talking about the benefits of medical marijuana, for all those little kids with epilepsy, and how it made them able to have a fairly normal life, how a small dose of cannabis was able to twerk or tweak their brain to where they were able to, you know, lead a more productive life, go to school, learn to walk, talk, all those good things we want our children to do.
I got to wrap it up. Once again though friends, I want to invite you to contact me, especially if you're a minister, a commissioner, or whoever out there. Our number, our email is Dean@drugtruth.net, and again I remind because of prohibition you don't know what's in that bag. I urge you to please be careful.
To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge an abyss.