Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

One of my earliest memories

is of trying to wake up
one of my relatives and not being able to.

And I was just a little kid,
so I didn't really understand why,

but as I got older,

I realized we had drug addiction
in my family, including cocaine addiction.

I'd been thinking about it a lot lately,
partly because it's now exactly 100 years

since drugs were first banned
in the United States and Britain,

and we then imposed that
on the rest of the world.

It's a century since we made
this really fateful decision

to take addicts

and punish them and make them suffer,

because we believed that would deter them
and give them an incentive to stop.

And a few years ago, I was looking at
some of the addicts in my life who I love,

and trying to figure out
if there was some way to help them.

And I realized there were loads
of incredibly basic questions

I just didn't know the answer to,

like, what really causes addiction?

Why do we carry on with this approach
that doesn't seem to be work,

and is there a better way out there
that we could try instead?

So I read loads of stuff about it,

and I couldn't really find
the answers I was looking for,

so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit
with different people around the world

who lived this and studied this

and talk to them and see
if I could learn from them.

And I ended up, I didn't realize I would
end up going over 30,000 miles at the start

but I ended up going and meeting
loads of different people,

from a transgendered crack dealer
in Brownsville, Brooklyn,

to a scientist who spends a lot of time
feeding hallucinogens to mongooses

to see if they like them

-- It turns out they do, but only
in very specific circumstances --

to the only country that's ever
decriminalized all drugs,

from cannabis to crack, Portugal.

And the thing I realized
that really blew my mind is,

almost everything we think
we know about addiction is wrong,

and if we start to absorb
the new evidence about addiction,

I think we're going to have to change
a lot more than our drug policies.

But let's start with what we think
we know, what I thought I knew.

Let's think about this middle road here.

Imagine all of you, for 20 days now,
went off and used heroin 3 times a day.

Some of you look a little bit more
enthusiastic than others at this prospect.