If you'd like to know how you can scale service design in a sustainable way and how the role of service designers is changing, keep watching because these are the topics I'm going to discuss with a guest of this episode. Hi, I'm Louise and this is the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome to a brand new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to create more human-centered businesses. And the way we do it is by studying the success of some of the world's best service designers. On the show we talk about topics ranging from design thinking and creative leadership to organizational change and customer experience. If these are the topics you're interested in, be sure to know that we bring a brand new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So if you don't want to miss anything, click that subscribe button. My guest in this episode is Louise Down. Louise is the director of design within the UK government. And for the next 30 minutes or so, Louise and I will be talking about these two topics. How do we scale service design in a sustainable way and why do we need to rethink the role of a service designer? If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. And in case you prefer to listen to a podcast version of this episode, head over to servicedesignshow.com slash podcast where you'll find this episode and other previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Louise. Hi. So happy to have you on this evening in Utrecht or, yeah, it's evening in London. You're based in London, right? I am, yeah, in sunny white chapel. You can see it. Louise, the first question I ask everyone that comes on to the show is do you recall your very first encounter with service design? I do, yeah. I probably had a similarly revelationary moment to a lot of people who kind of moved into the practice from doing something else. I was a producer at the Take Gallery and my job was essentially making the in-gallery interpretation materials so, you know, kind of mobile tours, videos, things stuck on the wall to help people to understand artworks at the Take Gallery. And one day I was going to the gallery to test a new audio tour that I had just made. It was one of the first ones that you could just download onto your phone and just simple videos on an HTML site so it was really accessible. I'm really excited about this kind of new way of providing a mobile tour and then you walked into the gallery to find a big sticker on the outside of the gallery saying, please don't use your mobile phones. I sort of thought to myself, this is insane. How can we not be designing all of these things at once? There must be some form of design where you design everything at the same time rather than one thing separately to another thing and then start googling a thought I invented service design because I was like, I'm sure there's designing something as a service and then, you know, kind of that's where it started and I moved into services line from there. So this must have been back in 2004, something like that? Earlier? When was that? Yeah, something like that, yeah. A long time ago. Well, in the early days of service design, that's nice. Louise, we have two topics that we will talk about in the next 25 minutes and super interesting topics. We'll be co-creating the questions as we go along. So, yeah, the main question is, are you ready? I am ready. All right. Let me pick the first topic and I've got it over here. And this topic is called Sustainable Scaling. Can you make a question related to this? So I suppose my question related to this is, I guess, a sort of how might we kind of question because it's something that I think potentially as an organization who has been working on the service design here in the UK government but also as an industry is something we're starting to find is an issue that we need to think about and that's how do we go beyond purely trying to kind of get people to believe that service design is an important thing to actually scale in that across a very large organization and actually making that sustainable over time so that we're not just designing the service once but the service is repeatedly designed and iterated live and in the open. That's a holy grail. Yeah, absolutely. I've heard a lot of people talking about what it means for services to be growing up and I think we're definitely in that space here in government and I think it's an interesting topic for probably the industry to kind of think and talk about a little bit as well. So yeah, what are your findings so far? What isn't and is working related to scaling service design? So I think one of the things that we realized very early on in terms of scaling service design was that as an organization GDS is at the very heart of government so we're part of the Cabinet Office which is an organization that essentially helps government to design and deliver better services. So we realized about a year ago that actually the right approach to scaling better services was government wasn't to put a full agile team on every single service from GDS but that our approach should be to enable the rest of government to design and deliver better services. So we've taken a number of different kind of tax to that one of which being massively trying to increase the number of service designers in government so we've gone from something like 50 and two years ago to over 800 service designers and interaction designers and graphic designers across government and ten heads of design in different departments across government so we've seen massive growth in that time which has been brilliant but one of the things that comes from massive growth is then having to share standards and patterns and ways of working so we then sort of have kind of taken our focus from that and obviously we're still focused on building that community but to supporting that community to work on shared patterns so we have been building a design system which is a kind of based on some prototype versions that we've had running for a very long time that shared patterns that will help people to be able to contribute to the way that designs should be kind of implemented in services so if one person in one department comes up with one way of asking a question about sex and gender that another service team in the department of government are able to use that pattern and put it into their service very easily because that service that pattern itself rather is fully coded so it's just an element they can add to their service and focusing on also a way of those patterns being iterated as well by their community because the last thing we want to do as the GDS design team is to stipulate what standards people work on when actually we're not as close to services as everyone else is so we've been putting a lot of effort into making sure that those that design system is easy to contribute to as it is easy to consume the patterns in that product Super interesting because I think there aren't that many standards related to service design and services in general the question that came up to my mind related to scaling is what you hear often is when agencies scale it's really hard to keep the culture of the agency Is that an issue that you see happening? So scaling from how many, 50 to 800 How do you make sure that people share the same core beliefs, same values? So one of the things actually we did very early on when GDS was first founded five years ago was to create the design principles so that's a set of principles I think it's now been translated into 30 different languages there are many governments across the world using those principles and the first one of those principles says start with user needs and that has, those things have really formed a foundation on which a culture has kind of been built and people, you know, I kind of like to ask people in interviews whether or not they're okay working on a black and white website because ultimately government UK and the services that are on there are not, you know, the most visually interesting things in the world and neither should they be I find that designers don't join government to work on, you know, kind of beautiful creative things they join to solve problems so they're already part of a group of people who feel very dedicated to a movement and feel very dedicated to public service so there's an existing culture around public service that is already in the civil service now anyway but we do an awful lot of things to make sure that culture of the design team stays strong we have regular meetups every eight weeks where we get guest speakers in and we get people to show their work we've also got a mailing list that's got something like 4,000 people on at the moment so more than just those 800 designers there's more people interested in design there are people who are actually designers which is great and that has, you know, kind of daily questions of people, you know, kind of saying I'm designing a service that is, you know, kind of looking to help people to, you know, kind of come to the UK and stay, has anyone had any experience on working with people who are migrating to a new place and people will start sharing their experience around those things so a lot of the tech that we use is very old school in terms of kind of sharing so it's things like meetups and mailing lists but they work because we can never predict the types of technology that people are using in civil service because it's so big so, yeah, we certainly put a lot of effort into making that community feel as if it's a strong community that people want to be part of Yeah, and I think there's the key and I'm really interested to learn more about that because what I see a lot with people creating patterns or standards is that, you know, you put up a website or you document something and it's one-off effort and it's really hard to keep that alive and to make sure that people use that, right? You contribute upfront and then nobody uses it you document it really well and then nobody uses it How do we go about solving that issue? Yeah, well, so we have a number of different controls to make sure that services actually are consistent across government so GDS has control of spending in IT across government, we also have control over what services get added to Goddard UK so in order to go on to Goddard UK, a service must show that it's using design patterns it's actually intrinsically baited into the way that stuff is published and things are worked on, but more than that, I think there's as I was saying, the culture of the designers who join government don't join to, you know, kind of make amazingly kind of sort of personally creative decisions about what colour a service should be they join to solve a problem so actually when it comes to the use of patterns most people want to use those patterns because they would rather spend their time solving a really important problem than figuring out a new way to do a radio checkbox because it's already been figured out and no one needs to or needs to all want to do that more than once So the selection of the people working in your agency is the key to success, right? Yeah, absolutely, I like to think of it as a kind of mixture between kind of idealism and pragmatism you know, people have to be idealistic about what it is they want to achieve and making services better for users but they have to be pragmatic about how they get there and I think that that kind of brings true for the majority of the 800 people working in design across government is that we wouldn't be here unless we wanted to do something really radical to make the lives of users better but you don't go into government with any kind of probably false sense of the fact that you know that's not going to be a slow process potentially and be difficult and for all the right reasons that government is very risk averse because it has to look after people it doesn't mean that it's quite difficult place to work sometimes for designers so I think it's a temperament of people who join that kind of work in that way So sort of wrapping up this topic what kind of challenges do you foresee related to scaling in the next two, three years? So I think one of the biggest challenges that we have actually is just the pure scale of the task actually so there are about 4,000 services across the UK central government we're actually the oldest and largest service provider in the UK and there are 500,000 people working in civil service so we are 3,000 people in total doing user research, designing content about 0.5% of the civil service so we're very, very simple in comparison to kind of where we need to be and what we're seeing is actually that there aren't enough people in universities or who want to move into service design at the moment to bring us up to the scale that we need to be so we're doing an awful lot of work with universities and much, much earlier with schools to encourage people to get into service design and particularly designing the public sector because we just simply can't kind of work with the current kind of group of people who are out there equally we have real problems finding people with the right type of skills and I'll maybe talk about that in the next kind of section but the service design market doesn't have the type of skills that we're looking for most of the time but I think equally on the flip side of it not just scale sustainability is a really big issue as well and so it means that our service designers have to think about how the things that they make get implemented so all of our designers can code it's really important that if they're working on something that goes on the internet that they understand how the internet works it's a bit like being a carpenter if you didn't understand how wood worked then you would be in trouble so for a service designer who's working on digital things you have to know how digital works so we're finding that kind of dealing with sustainability dealing with something that rather than trying to design the future designing things that can be designed in the future is actually a task that means that we need to get into very detailed conversations about how technically things work so we need people who don't have an aversion to getting their hands dirty and talking about code and about data and other things Interesting, let's use your opening and move on to the second topic because you said something about people having the right skills and that you require maybe different skills than are typically asked for in the market so the second topic we can talk about is called the role and again, can you formulate a question around this one? So, good question, asking a question around that so my question would be is the current understanding in the service design industry of what a service designer does fit for purpose and fit for the future of what service design is and becoming So let's really find what a service designer is Let's go Right, let's do it now I sort of touched on that a little bit earlier but service design in government is a very embedded practice so our designers are working in multi-disciplinary agile teams they work with developers, user researchers, delivery managers product managers to really just understand what a service should be to write down into the implementation of that thing and how that thing works, how that thing is operated and run in a sustainable way What I've found is that the history of service design is very much a kind of agency-based role and I certainly know this from having come from agencies a lot of what you're taught and encouraged to kind of hone in terms of your practice in an agency is actually your skills of facilitation and of presentation and making really nice diagrams and slide decks to prove your point and with us, actually we don't need to do a vast majority of that because we're working with an embedded team that's already brought in I'm not saying there isn't a fair bit of facilitation that goes on with more complicated contentious decisions and that diagramming isn't occasionally important but we need our service designers to actually be able to design a service and one thing I find actually quite frightening is that when I talk to people in interviews about service design and I ask them, what is a service? What do you think service design is? I get an hour's worth of response and to me and to government a service is something that helps someone to do something and service design is the design of services and unless someone can understand that and can be able to actually physically design a service then I can't employ them as a service designer and that's a real problem for us because as I said we're dealing with massive scale here we need people with those skills and yet universities are not seemingly teaching those skills their perception of industry is still very much based on the skills that are needed by agencies agencies themselves when designers go from university to an agency environment their skills get completely warped into the type of thing that an agency needs and we're actually just finding that after 5-10 years of working in an agency a designer just isn't able to change their mindset and actually think, well maybe I should learn to code so it's the delivery actual delivery of what you've designed delivery is part of the design process right? Completely and it should be and it comes back to that point about sustainability because unless we're building unless we're designing at the core face of delivery in the long term we're going to design services now and then in 5 years time find that those things are as failing as they are now because we haven't iterated them over time and that's actually iteration is the real test of a good design that lasts not how well it performed when it first came out so we need designers that can work with developers that aren't afraid of getting into the details but also we need people who are very critical and understand that actually their role as a designer is often as an ambassador for users and if technology asks the question of what can be done and design often asks the question of what should be done and unfortunately practical delivery skills and criticality are both things that are not either encouraged by the agency world or encouraged by universities unfortunately at the moment so hence a lot of our service designers are not from a design background we have a lot of artists we have a lot of people from social sciences they moved into design in their later careers but they weren't initially taught in design I think that's potentially a real testament to where design education needs to go in the future to support I think an increasing industry where service design is moving in-house because it's very difficult to perform the type of improvements to a service that you need to when you're in an agency you don't have actually the access to change processes to change stuff that's the challenge I think a lot of agencies face that they get to the point where they get the conceptualization of a service and then there is a really big gap how to follow up on that and you don't have that gap no and I don't think that gap should exist and in a way I used to work for agency before I was brought into government to kind of build service design as a thing and part of the reason why I was keen to leave was because I was in the same situation as most people in agencies I had spent the last six years basically creating PowerPoint decks to make people in executive positions look good and I looked back on my career and couldn't point to one single thing that I could concretely say had been delivered and it's both really dissatisfying as a designer because I think all designers have a slightly God complex we want to see our things living in the world but it's also not an effective industry if that is the product of what we're doing so what do you think would have to change in order to change this so I think we all want to make impact we all want to change the world for the better Yeah, obviously I would say this but I would say getting more designers in-house so I think there's a perception potentially amongst designers who work in agencies that you're not going to get to work on the variety of stuff that you do in the agency world that potentially it might be slower various other kind of rumors which I think maybe were true probably eight or so years ago definitely not true now I mean there's no bigger variety of types of things to work on than government, everything from bin collections to social housing to land management and animals take your pick and I think there needs to be a real growth in terms of the industry as a whole actually acknowledging that my role as head of service design for government is not as a client to agencies it's as a person who runs their own internal design organisation I think there's still a real perception and I suppose slightly looking down on people who work in-house by people who work in agencies and I think if I'm perfectly honest I think their days are numbered and I think we're going to start seeing more and more designers I hope move into organisations and move right to the kind of coal face of delivery and actually start kind of delivering on some of the promises that service design has always promised Super interesting and what I see happening or at least what I'm getting from your story and I recognise this from our own practice here so often it's still like there's an agency and there's a client instead of what in my opinion should be a partnership so an agency supporting something that is already happening on the client's side I think that's a much healthier situation but for that you need clients that are more mature and that have their own in-house capabilities right and I think also you need agencies that are more mature as well I mean I think it's a little bit like the well in Britain there's a kind of analogy that a dentist always have the worst teeth because and I think it's the same for service design agencies always are the worst designed in terms of the service they provide to their clients and I can count the numbers of service design agencies that have ever done any user research with their clients on one hand I think it's a very rare thing to do and actually we've often been in a situation where we need extra people and we need them very quickly to work on very certain kind of things at that point yes we do need to work with an agency but I've been in situations where I'm having a conversation with that agency and someone's telling me that it needs to take six months to do and they need a ten person team and that ten person team are not going to work in my office and they're going to work in a completely different way to the way that we always work you know and I think there's a real upping of the game that agencies need to do to actually treat themselves as they would the projects they work on and actually go you know what are the user needs of my service that I provide as an agency so Super interesting I always have a question and or at least I always give my guests the opportunity to ask a question to the people who are listening or watching these episodes is there a thing you'd like to ask them I would be interested to know if potentially people have the same prediction about the service design industry kind of moving or in-house and it's true I mean it's certainly kind of true from my anecdotal kind of experience of looking at other large organizations but I think I'd ask that question and I would ask the people analyze their own practice and their own skills and start to think about if that is the case what is it that they need to start doing in order to be able to kind of work in those sorts of environments what is it that if they're running a design education organization what is it they need to start teaching and to really start analyzing that and to kind of really now at a point in the maturity of the service design industry to start really looking at our practice and thinking about the next phase of it rather than potentially where 10 years ago which was really just making the case for service design to happen with a point of scale and sustainability and delivery and that means a whole set of skills so I think maybe it's not quite a question but it's more just a sort of ask to kind of go in and think about what they're doing and whether or not they're doing what they need in order to be able to kind of meet that next phase of service design I think this new way for scaling service design is what makes this field so interesting because 10 years ago we were like sort of inventing what was happening and how we should communicate this and what it is we actually do now we have a whole sort of new challenges and for me that's what makes this field so interesting Yeah absolutely and I think what's really interesting is actually that I've seen in the last three years suddenly in government is actually the conversation has moved on from my having to convince people that service design is important to almost having to kind of do the opposite of saying well yes it's designing the services is of course the right way of doing it and having service designers working on it is the right thing to do but that isn't going to change overnight and it will take time and the service design is not a silver bullet that you can just apply the service design and then suddenly things will be better and I think that's a conversation that needs to be had about actually what are the differences of service design so that we don't become in a way potentially what Agile in some places has become which is a kind of people have a sort of methodology fatigue before Agile there was Prince 2 I'm sure there were a billion other things and what we don't want is service design to become the new methodology that promised the world and delivered nothing and I think part of that is actually focusing on actual delivery rather than on methodology for service designs and this refers back to the guest who was on the previous episode Hartmut Esslinger who said that the problem with design thinking and service design is often that there are no consequences when results are not delivered and that is a real big task and challenge we should take upon ourselves as an industry yeah completely I mean look at any other industry if they just didn't deliver the things that they said they were going to deliver then it's not good enough for us to be satisfied with doing a 2 day workshop or just doing a research you know and I fully agree with you on that yeah and you know I think you can really tell when you look at service design conferences how many people are actually showing real results and statistics of you know like this change from this to this versus the number of people who show the process and some diagrams and I just I don't think that's good enough I don't think it's good enough personally for those people to accept that of themselves I don't think it's good enough for design conferences to keep promoting that type of work and I certainly don't think it's good enough for universities to start teaching people or keep teaching people that that is good enough but there's a real gap in our knowledge I think is a practice on what service design as a delivery based practice actually looks like I mean certainly something we've been doing for the last two years but where is the shared knowledge around people who are also doing that in other organizations we might do a separate episode on that sounds super at the delivery based practice right that's what you called it yeah yeah absolutely Louise thanks for your time thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and ideas about where service design is heading it was really for me it was really valuable good yeah I enjoyed it thank you very much so what is your biggest takeaway from this episode share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments and remember more people like you are watching these episodes and your comment might just be the thing that helps someone to achieve his next meaningful breakthrough if you're interested in learning more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servicedesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show I'll see you in two weeks time with a brand new episode thanks for watching and see you then


God made Adam, and that's a whole lot. Obviously God made Adam, God made Eve, and God made Steve, but God's certain that I'd make Adam for Steve. It should never be that someone from the pool pit would have a dim view of someone calling out clear sin, sin that is outlined in the scripture that there is no debate about. That should never be, but what we have now is we have people, particularly this particular pastor, I think his name is Gino Gibson, who is, he has a problem with people calling out issues with the LGBTQ, and it's not that we have an issue with the LGBTQ, it's that the LGBTQ, it's that that particular group wants to put it in our face and are forcing us to deal with it. So guess what? We'll deal with it. Talk about the LGBT. No, don't do that. We wanna cancel them because we don't learn two or three scriptures.  The effeminate mannerisms that this guy is portraying, it's gonna come out with the hand moving and the bending of his wrist and so forth, that's gonna be an issue. And so that point should be apparent. That should not even be seen in a man. It just should not, even with the soft calling that some men wear and so forth, that should be a clear line between who is a man of God and who is not. And sealing it in the church. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And that's a whole lie, and Steve. And to call it a whole lie, he knows perfectly well what people mean by God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The point is, and he knows that mankind was not, man was not made for another man. I heard it put this way, that if you put 100 women and 10 men on an island, if we come back in 100 years, that island would be a thriving community with men, women, boys, girls, children, males, females of all ages. But if we put on that same island 100 trans women, that is, and it's not a real term, but men who want to be women with 10 real men, then in 100 years, that entire society would be dead. Why? Because it cannot fulfill the mandate that God has required of us to be fruitful and multiply. They can't be fruitful nor multiply. We just get an attitude if Steve like Adam. Well, we should get an attitude if Steve likes Adam. Now truth be told, again, we don't care about it as much as you think we care about it. The issue is you are putting it in our face, and so we deal with it. And what it seems as though that's happening, especially with you, is that you might be either giving approval to it, or you're certainly voicing your displeasure for someone calling out sin. Remember, Paul puts it this way. He says, speaking of this issue of sin in Romans 1.32, he says, and although they do not know the ordinances of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death. They not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. And so it seems as though either he's giving approval or at least not even expressing disapproval to this particular sin. That's a problem, especially from someone in the pulpit.  Now the issue is that people aren't, and you may not like the way that people are bothered by them, express their displeasure with it, but the Bible is clear. It says that we do not rejoice in unrighteousness, but we rejoice in and with the truth. And so if we're giving the truth, you should rejoice in someone proclaiming that. That point should not be underscored. You have a problem with someone calling out sin and naming what the truth is. What they got to have pride about? Let me go on record and say this. Your pastor is 100% straight. Never in my life have I ever had to go out and defend my sexuality because it's never been an issue. It's never come up. No one's ever had a doubt about it.  That's not my issue. That's never or that I'm straight. I've never had to do so. And I would hope that no one would ever have to wonder that.  And that should never have to be an issue with you. But it makes us wonder and it causes us to wonder why are you actually defending or at least getting upset with people who are calling sin out? Listen to me. Don't even clap. Homosexuality has never been my issue. My issue was heterosexuality. So you say your issue is heterosexuality, we'll find. Some people's issue is homosexuality. Surely he's not blind to see what's happening out there. Everything is in a rainbow. No matter where you go, it's pride, there's pride there. And you mean to tell me you've got a problem with someone calling out or trying to help someone else sin? It's true. There are some people who might go about it the wrong way but what the pastor should do is show people how to do it the right way. The Bible says this about a pastor or about a preacher, about a pastor. He says that one, he must not be quarrelsome but be kind to all able to teach that part is called into question with him being able to teach patient when wrong. Verse 25, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition. In other words, folks who are doing wrong who are in opposition to the truth correct those who are in opposition to the truth. How so with gentleness? Didn't say don't correct them but how to do so with gentleness. Why if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth?  God is not asking you to only preach about what your issue is. He's asking the pastor, the preacher to preach about what his issue is. God is the one who has a problem with homosexuality. He has a problem with people who are also heterosexual who are sleeping around who are promiscuous. He has a problem with that. He has a problem with all sorts of sin but we wouldn't tell the person who has committed murder.  My issue has always been lying. No sin is sin and we call it out. And so it calls into question how serious you are about doing God's work. Maybe Paul is right that you only want to placate the people with itching ears to give them what they wanna hear or more to the point not want to defend them. But am I your enemy as Paul says because I am telling you the truth. I'm telling you the truth about this sin. Not saying that you have no value but the fact of the matter is God calls this a sin and so what should we do? We should out of love let people know that it is and it's something that God takes serious. Even though this pastor doesn't think it's serious we do and if you want to make us have pride in what you are pushing because it's not just that they wanna be left alone. That's not the issue. The issue now is that they want us to accept them. They want us to not only accept but also to see their pride and to rejoice in their pride. In other words rejoice in their sin. So let them have pride but not only that they also want us to celebrate it and promote it even if it means promoting it to our children. Well, because you're pushing it in our face we now have to deal with it. Unfortunately this pastor doesn't want to for whatever reason I can't speak to that but we know what we ought to do and that is be diligent and so if it's sin regardless if it's your sin or my sin if it's something I have to deal with personally or I don't deal with we still call it out. Amen.


Your story in your head or my head in this case is what creates reality This is kind of a bold assertion, but we're gonna verify this in one moment. I'd like you to Start asking yourself What's the story that goes on in your head right now as we speak? Your story could be okay. I'm watching this guy. He's kind of weird. Let's see what's happening But you need to really pay attention to the story of your life in that situation Are you sitting here and watching because you want to be more successful or perhaps you're searching for something searching for enlightenment searching for business success or Maybe just maybe you're just watching this because you believe.   I don't really am lazy. This is interesting. So I'm just gonna listen to him But what I want you to start noticing and verifying for yourself again Well, this don't listen to anything I say and take it for granted check it for yourself You'll start seeing that every single story that you have in your head regarding your life is Exactly the way that your life is looking right now So what I urge you to do is start changing the story that you have for yourself Let's say you want to become successful Notice that this story is cool. It means you'll find people will help you become successful It means that you're gonna build up, but try changing the story to I'm successful already or I'm already Have everything I need and you'll see how suddenly instead of looking for opportunities For mentors and people to help you for you know building up because again, that's part of the story You're gonna start seeing all sorts of opportunities for success that actually reinforce What you believe about yourself right now, which is that you are successful You can actually try that with anything That you want you can do that with being positive You know changing our outlook about life about money about relationships This is this is really cool. This is something that I urge you to try Also urge you to write down Your life story right now on a piece of paper or you know on the computer And just look at how Whatever you write your beliefs about yourself your life story, you know, where am I right now and where am I trying to go to? You're gonna see that these two stories are basically a direct mirroring of your life situation This begs the question does my life situation come from my Inner story or does my story create my life situation? Now what I Personally have found is that when you change the life story what goes on inside Everything outside starts changing as well. So again, you should try this right now Take a piece of paper or just write down on your computer The way that your life is looking right now How you believe your life is right now where you believe your life is going right now And try completely Rewriting the story, but in a way that makes sense to you where you can kind of skip steps Now this is called leapfrog theory. This theory is from a book called winning by intimidation. It's kind of a Very old book, but it's still relevant today. And what leapfrog theory means is that Whatever you want to become let's say you want to be an nba player You can be an nba player without going through the whole way up You can be a millionaire without first making 10,000 and then the other thousand And you can date the hottest girl without first dating hotter and hotter girls Because leapfrog theory says that if you only qualify as good enough For whatever level you want to get to you're already going to be able to be there So let's say you're good enough for the nba. You can already jump for the nba and just try applying there Let's say you want to be a millionaire and you already have certain skills Which you believe can generate millions You don't actually have to go through the whole process of first charging a hundred dollars then a thousand then 10,000 You can actually jump to the millions already So this is a really cool concept.


How does climate change affect food supply and how will this affect us? This is Fred. He is enjoying his lunch while watching the news, where he hears a lot about the effects of climate change. He likes the idea of the summertime being 2 degrees hotter, but is worried about how climate change will affect his lunch. The bread and vegetables Fred eats are threatened because climate change comes with an increase in both drought and heavy rain. These changes are both very damaging for all crops. Not only do crops need to deal with increased stress from drought and flooding, they also become more vulnerable to pest species. Sure, irrigation could be a solution for droughts, but increased evaporation will lead to salification of the soil. But what about the rest of Fred's sandwich? The cattle that provides the meat will also suffer from drought and flooding. Fred could always choose to eat fish instead. But fish reserves are already at an all-time low due to overfishing and pollution. Not only that, climate change will also have a negative effect on the fish stock. Carbon dissolves in ocean water, where it creates an acid, increasing the acidity of the water. Combines with this acid, reducing calcium availability for microorganisms. These microorganisms form the base of the entire oceanic food web. So if they are having difficulties, so is everything else, including Fred's fish lunch. Not only that, climate change will increase the sea temperature, and this is already leading to coral bleaching. And thus coral death. These corals are the place where many baby fish have the opportunity to grow up in safety. Without safe childhoods, many fish won't grow up at all, so Fred might actually be in trouble. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But it already affects many people. And it will affect Fred. And maybe even more important for Fred, it will impact his children. But it doesn't have to be this way. By decreasing carbon emissions right now, many of the bad consequences that will hurt Fred and his children, can be avoided. And everyone can help. Everyone can make a difference. By eating less meat, by reducing your own energy consumption, by taking the bus or bike instead of the car. By supporting your government in taking the right actions. By demanding that they meet the goals set by them in reducing their carbon footprint. All changes help, all changes will improve the world we leave for us and our children.


So, the first thing is, in order to be an effective modern male, one of the best things to be able to do is to think firstly nationally and then globally and to take advantage of the fact that this is an amazing time and place to be alive if you use it well. It's also a really difficult time and place to be alive if you are stationary, if you cannot pick yourself up and move to places where the opportunities are better. When I first started playing music, I was born and brought up in a city called Canberra, which is the capital city of Australia. Sounds cool when you say capital, but it's not at all a cool place. One of the most boring cities on the planet, the only people there are public servants and heron addicts and sometimes they're the same thing, but there's nothing much going on there. And myself and my crew started our band there. We got to the top of the scene, which meant not a lot. And at some point we realized that if we wanted to go anywhere else, there were systemic limitations to our location. And that's a really important thing to note, especially for people who are involved in – or everyone – but guys who are involving themselves in entrepreneurship, positive thinking, self-development. There's a lot that's talked about in terms of your mindsets, which is very important. It is very important to cultivate positive, effective mindsets. But it is also important to be realistic and recognize when the place you're in does not support you. For me at that time, that was not the place in Australia to be playing music. For a lot of guys who want to have some kind of artistic pursuit or entrepreneurial pursuit or want to be in a world where free creative thinking is fostered and supported, then your second, third, fourth tier city, where people do as told, is not necessarily the environment that you want to be in. Who's heard the saying that you basically are or resonate at the same frequency as the five people that you spend most of the time with? I don't know if I said the quote exactly right, but you get the idea. The people that you hang around with and are with most of the time, you tend to operate at that similar level. The people that I grew up with and still love to this day as close friends are not the people that I'm traveling the world with having crazy and wild, interesting adventures with because those people have chosen lives that are stationary, that are simpler, more predictable or whatever they've chosen, but the point being that if you want to be excellent in any field, one of the things you're going to need to do is move to a place where excellence is encouraged. There's a new archetype for masculinity, which has kind of appeared roughly around the time when Tim Ferriss wrote his book, The Four-Hour Workweek. Is there anyone who has not read this book in the room? Okay. Oh, there's a few. All right. Well, this archetype of a modern playboy entrepreneur, which differs from the successful male of say like the 80s, which was the Wall Street guy with the nice watch and the fast car, is more exemplified by a man who is pursuing excellence internally in terms of his mindsets, physically, in terms of the way that he uses his body, and then is hacking all sorts of systems in order to optimize what he gets out of life, right? So the Four-Hour Workweek laptop entrepreneur modern male when he gets up in the morning does something along the lines of drinking his bulletproof coffee, stretching for 30 minutes, 28 minutes is the most optimal length of time to stretch, opens his laptop, does a little bit of this, makes a few K, closes the laptop, then goes and does his workout, which is optimized perfectly so they're not a single motion or calorie is wasted, and he's doing this on a beach in Thailand or in Costa Rica or somewhere where it's beautiful and sunny, and then goes and eats some awesome paleo food with the right level of macronutrients, and then what he does the rest of the day, I'm not exactly sure because he's just got so much time to spend, and then goes to his evening routine where he has apple cider vinegar with some honey and listens to some meditation stuff that pulses in various ways and makes you meditate like a monk, and then falls into a blissful smug sleep of knowing that it not a second was wasted in that day, and I'm not making fun of that archetype because that is, well, I'm not, look I'm not doing what I did, this I mean this is actually a great model for a man compared to what the one of the what 80s and 90s was of like we're a card, play hard, snort cocaine, bang hookers or something like that, this is a you know this is a cool model because what it what is this using is using the resources and the knowledge of all of Western and Eastern psychology and so and health and all sorts of things in order to live a life that's excellent, right, it's a cool model, and people sometimes ask me James what's your morning routine, and I'm like well sometimes I get up in the morning and and and then I do whatever I feel like doing, I'm actually somebody who is incredibly undisciplined, who has no routine, except for the fact that I always get what I said I'm going to do done, right, that's that's kind of that's the way that I've managed to operate, I get up at all sorts of different times they had all sorts of different things, I try to eat healthy, I do stretch, not every single day, most days, I do work out not every day, but most days, I am do try to use optimizing techniques in all sorts of areas including my business, but my I've never been able to maintain a really heavy discipline that follows an extreme set of steps to get the the most out of life, and that's just the way I do things, I'm not necessarily the best model for someone looking to find optimizing routines, but the thing about this archetype is I've taught lots of guys who fit into this category because it works for some guys they go out and they figure out how to work from a laptop or how to have skills that are mobile and move around the world which is something I think is fucking amazing and awesome, photographers, but massage therapists, life coaches, all sorts of guys who do something on the internet and money appears, these guys are often my clients and also I bump into a lot of these different guys through my travels and my my work, and one thing I've noticed is that as effective as they may be there is something missing in this archetype, something very vital missing in it, which is that sitting on a beach in Thailand doing all that stuff is really lonely if you don't have a crew around you, is really unfulfilling if you're not actually able to like integrate into the society that you've decided to move and become part of, and especially if you're not able to go out and meet women and bring them into your life.


Good afternoon and welcome to the first of the John Jay College Office for the Advancement of Research's spring book talks. Each semester the Office for the Advancement of Research sponsors at least two book talks, one featuring John Jay faculty member who's recently published a book and the other featuring an external scholar, journalist, or other storyteller who we want to expose our faculty and students to. In this case we are doing the latter. Today's featured author is Mike Power. Mike is the author of Drugs 2.0, The Web Revolution that's changing how the world gets high. Mike is a freelance investigative journalist for British newspapers and organizations including The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, Reuters, Matter, The Sunday Herald, Drug Scope, and The Big Issue. He works as a freelance correspondent in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Columbia, exploring the links between civil conflict, human rights, and the drug trade. Mike's book, Drugs 2.0, is a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which the internet is changing the development, distribution, and consumption of drugs. It's published by Portobello in the UK and that version is available in the US through amazon.com and other vendors but the American edition, the expanded and updated American edition will be published by St. Martin's Press later this year, October and that will be available through those outlets as well. The book documents the emergence of legal highs and it was the first book to investigate the Silk Road which is the billion dollar online drug bizarre which was closed in October 2013. So welcome and please give a hearty round of applause to our guest Mike Thank you very much. So good afternoon and welcome to this this talk. The title of the talk is the same in my book that's Drugs 2.0. I started writing this book about five years ago I was at the time I was living in Columbia in Latin America and I was looking into the I'll just get my microphone in a good spot and let you guys come sit down as well. Okay so I should actually let you know at this point that we have a situation where my finger is the clicker for the slides so I will actually be giving a click like this each time I want to go forward and back. This is the book Drugs 2.0 and it's it was the first book to cover the emergence of legal highs. These are drugs which schedule up by chemical manipulation. It was the first book to cover the dark web the Silk Road and Bitcoin. So really the reason I started to write this book was because I noticed that drug culture in about 2009 was changing and by culture here I mean three things and the way that people were acquiring drugs the kind of drugs they were buying and the industry. So all of these things were changing and technology seemed very connected to this. So 25 years ago when I was in university which is a terrible admission 25 years ago there was only really full drugs anyone did. They were ecstasy cannabis amphetamines and LSD. Cocaine was kind of a rock star's drug. Heroin was kind of associated with innocent deprivation. That didn't apply to us. So at that time the drug market was kind of limited and there wasn't really very many drugs available. So after university I was working in Latin America and whilst in Latin America I became interested in the drug store Daniel. So I was working in Colombia and I became interested in the civil conflict. I was covering a series of war crimes. The Colombian government was killing young civilians and dressing them in gorilla uniforms and claiming that they were FARC gorillas. They were gorillas killed in combat but they weren't they were innocent young people much like yourselves. So it seemed to me that there was a story to be investigated and the more I investigated it I looked into this story and I found that the this is this is people protesting in Bogotar against the government killing and the government killing of the young innocent civilians. As I was there I decided that I could only understand the civil conflict by understanding the drug story. The Colombian drug story was very important at that point. At the time Colombia was exporting 600 tons of cocaine a year. So at 600 tons that was 60 percent of the of the global supply and both the FARC gorilla and the paramilitary armed groups they were funding their fight with the cocaine industry so I thought I should visit a cocaine plantation. So at the time the United Nations was trying to to destroy the cocaine industry by uprooting the plants and the next three slides show that one. So off we are going through the jungle and here's a coca plantation this is cocaine and at the back is the place where the cocaine is processed and so as we go to this plantation we start to uproot the cocaine this is the United Nations attempt to shut down the cocaine industry. So there we are there's a guy he was extremely careful to keep me in his view all day the next one shows people actually uprooting the coca and as we did this I walked into the next field and there was a guy this guy Jose a cocalero and I said so what will you do now that we've destroyed your livelihood we've destroyed your field what will what will you do and he said I'll go into the next field as soon as they go I'll be planting more coca in the next field and I said well tell me why he said well this bush grows back in nine months and it produces leaves every 60 days rice so 25 dollars a hundred right it takes five months of hard work and then needs to transport it by river. Coca pace goes for $1,000 a kilo and the plant needs no attention and he asked me what would you do and I asked you what would you do if you could increase your salary by a factor of 60 tomorrow what would you do so I realized at that point that by artificially inflating the price of cocaine or rather coca it's just such an inflated level that it was you know we were not there was no chance of ending the the the sort of cocaine industry by pulling up the plants by the roots it was it was it was effective and so at that point I decided that I wanted to look into the drug story more deeply and back in the UK I started to investigate the ecstasy trade now ecstasy is still very popular in the UK it's used by half a million people a weekend but in about 2008 2009 there was absolutely no MDMA there was no ecstasy in the UK man I started to look into this and wanted to know why I was finding that at the same time as the kind of the the cocaine industry was inexplicable to me this was also inexplicable what was happening in the UK in 2008 that there was no MDMA available on the streets and so I started to investigate them I'm a journalist after all so I looked back into the history of MDMA and there's Alexander Shulkin the man who resynthesized in the 1960s he was an American chemist he's still alive he made the drugs and then he he actually sampled them and tasted them himself recorded his experiences and one of the drugs that he created was or rather recreated was MDMA ecstasy now ecstasy here's his first ever hand-drawn kind of recipe for this for this drug this is the the first modern day synthesis of MDMA now that's right so I looked into it and in this notebook you can see if you go to the next shot you'll see how this drug is made in the modern era or rather where the base materials for it come from this is a distillery of saffron and if you go through maybe the next three slides we'll see this is in Cambodia what you can see here is a in the next one what you can see here is a distillery so saffron is an essential oil this is the oil which is made into MDMA or ecstasy or molly as it's called in the U.S. saffron is on the international watched precursor list you can't buy it unless you go to Phnom Penh then you can buy an awful lot of it from these guys you make it by stripping the the roots from the yellow camphor tree and then you steam the capture the oil and you sell the the resulting the resulting oil to Dutch chemists now in 2008 the United Nations again had made an attempt to control the global market in saffron and the global market in MDMA and they banned all of the saffron they could find they banned seven billion dollars worth back to the sewer now this this this had an unintended consequence in the United Kingdom and in Europe this burning of 33 tons of saffron changed the drug market completely it changed the drug industry in the UK for a couple of years almost irrevocably what happened then how it changed that oil would have been sent to laboratories in in Holland this is one in just outside Belgium and this is where the drug is produced in clandestine laboratories it would have been sent to places like this which is a a mobile MDMA laboratory to make the drugs so this is this is the kind of the kind of resourcefulness that the Dutch chemists have um so really at this point there was also there was a huge MDMA drug there was no MDMA in the UK so you have half a million people in the UK alone who can't get their drug choice and another shortage at that time in the UK was marijuana and Vietnamese gangs in the United Kingdom discovered that by spraying glass beads onto marijuana that they grow the Vietnamese criminal community in the United Kingdom control the hydroponic indoor marijuana sector they started to spray marijuana with glass beads which were invisible and kind of were just very slightly heavy and slightly visible and they kind of made it look like very high quality glistening marijuana however it was very harmful to the lungs and so people started to get fed up of it and this stuff that the spice drug came to the market which was a legal high a version of a version of a a chemical invented for for medical purposes repurposed for the illegal drugs trade semi-legal drugs trade rather so you have this situation where you have no MDMA in the United Kingdom and cocaine at the time became very very impure the cocaine was impure because well there'd been the credit crunch so with the collapse of the international financial system the pound value had also dropped by 25 percent now to buy cocaine you need pounds or you need dollars so if you want to buy dollars well suddenly everything was 25 percent more expensive so the cocaine quality in the UK plummeted the ecstasy was non-existent and so into the market stepped the new drug and the drug was called methadone now methadone was a drug which according to users felt very similar to MDMA ecstasy or cocaine it was a stimulants it was a euphoric intactogen and it helped well it helped a lot of Chinese people make an awful lot of money because the drug was made in China as you can see in this laboratory and we managed to I was doing an undercover investigation at the time for newspaper and we managed to get into the laboratory and we met the owner and he showed us his facilities and at this time in the UK it was you know it was a very it was a very unusual time the drug market where normally in the years preceding the rise of methadone methadone came to the market and it was suddenly the most well the fourth most popular drug in the UK within a couple just within a couple of years but it was legal this is the key thing it was a legal drug and it was sold on the internet for about 10 pounds a gram that compares to 100 pounds a gram for quality cocaine or 50 pounds a gram for MDMA so you had a situation at the time where you couldn't buy cocaine or ecstasy of any quality but you could buy a legal high you could buy this drug and the government had no idea what to do they had no way legitimately or rather legislatively how to handle this and to give you some numbers around that period in 2009 24 new drugs came to the market and then in 2010 when methadone was ultimately banned we had 41 new drugs come to the market in 2011 there were 49 new drugs in 2012 we had 73 new drugs and in by October of 2013 there were 56 new drugs registered for sale in Europe that makes 243 drugs and if you think about that in relation to the United Nations single convention on psychotropic substances the United Nations international global rule and treaty only bans 233 so we have more legal drugs for sale than we have illegal drugs and so this story fascinated me and I thought I should pursue it and these companies very quickly they very quickly diversified and if we can go through the next two slides they diversified and started to make new drugs and at that point I thought that perhaps I should test my own hypothesis and I thought that as well as writing about it I should actually try to see if what I was writing about was true and so I invented a new drug a completely new drug that was a legal drug that would be legal it would probably be illegal in the United States but in the United Kingdom it was completely legal and the reason I did that was because I wanted to explore and to kind of I wanted to look back I could see the drug culture was changing so I thought when was the first time that drugs and culture became entwined and to me that seemed to be when the Beatles first came to prominence now I'm from Liverpool if you're trying to place my accent and so the Beatles so it was an interesting story for me if you think about it drug culture only really became kind of popularized and in the mainstream view around about the 1960s the mid 60s when the Beatles first well it's okay let's leave it they took another drug for that and this is in 1962 and then they go off to Hamburg to to to play in the Star Club and here they are a year later the Beatles in this photograph are holding tubes of a drug called prelidin now prelidin was a a diet pill it was a diet pill that was used by many people you know it was used by all sorts of people from Trimacopolta to you know Marilyn Monroe even JFK used it apparently and if you look at the kind of the user base of all of those kind of drugs I mean in the United Kingdom in 1962 there were two million prescriptions for pet pills now before we kind of look at that a scans let's look at the statistics for say Adderall in the United States but the United States in 2010 which is the latest figures I could go prescribed 84 tons of Adderall now Adderall is just an amphetamine that's a drug active at 20 milligrams but you know 84 tons of it were prescribed to the United States it's not really prescribed in the UK or in much of Europe so I decided that it would be an interesting an interesting and diverting way to explore the change in the drug market and to explore the change in the in the way that the drugs are being brought into the United Kingdom in Europe by doing it myself for a feature so this is the chemical structure of fenmetrogen and in my investigations and through the writing of drugs 2.0 I I came across a guy who I refer to in this instance as Captain Beefheart he is an online entity who has instructed me and told me how to make the drug legal so I wanted to make a drug that would be legal and still be active as a stimulant and I wanted to do this to prove that this was possible and to prove how the drug market has changed so I'm going to go through the next three sides very quickly one two three and the next one and the last three slides where the laboratory that made this drug for me they synthesized it for me it took I kind of I wanted to to set it up in the most implausible way so I contacted the company and I told them that I wanted to make medicine for dogs you know I said I'm a veterinary surgeon I want to make a medicine for dogs and I want you to send it to me in the UK now this was obviously a lie because fenmetrogen is a very famous stimulant but the guy in the factory didn't really seem to mind and he he decided to send it to me you know he sent it across and here it is a bag of five grams of white powder now I didn't know what that was so there was only one thing for it I had to test it but not in the way that you might imagine I tested it using laboratory so we can go to the next shot and the drug in fact had actually worked and it was the correct drug we were there sorry back on so at the time I was thinking of the which drugs I was going to modify and I decided on fenmetrogen but I could have decided on LSD that was in fact one of the most famous drugs the Beatles ever took um but fact being strange in fiction while I was writing this story the legal highest market in the UK came out with these two drugs this one and the next one these are legal versions of LSD sold on the internet to anybody with a credit card of any age any time any place anywhere you can buy these drugs you can buy them on your phone they're delivered to your house and the police can't stop you now I don't say that in celebration I don't say that in I'm not gloating or happy about that it's just a description this is a documentary of what's happening in the drugs market and how it affects criminal law criminal justice harm reduction how it affects rehabilitation how it affects people's pleasure all of these different things are connected in the drug market and so we can even bring this closer to home and bring it into the United States in the last few months we've had the kind of molly MDMA ecstasy call it what you will it's all the same thing has grown to prominence in the United States now that's what you think but actually what my researcher shown we can go to the next slide let's look at the difference between those two molecules on the left we have MDMA and on the right we have another drug called methylone the only difference is that methylone until April last year was completely legal in the US or nearly legal semi-legal in the gray MDMA completely illegal now you can buy methylone by the ton from China you can buy by the kilo from China for two three thousand dollars and then you can sell it as MDMA in the US fifty thousand dollars what's important about that is that the two drugs have a slightly different effect the drug on the right is harsher drug it makes your heartbeat it makes you sweat it makes you put you in you know a stimulated and agitated state and what my researcher shown is that a good deal of the MDMA or molly in the in the US is actually so it's actually methylone it's been sold under false pretenses that is about 50 grams of methylone and that is a couple of grams of MDMA if you can go back on can you see the difference between them I'm not sure you could in a nightclub I'm not sure you could in a bag at a party or anything so this is what's going on in the 10th of April last year that drug was banned but then the Chinese laboratories they just very quickly came up with a new drug dimethyl same drug very slightly different so what we have is this situation where we are serially banning drugs and each time we ban a drug a new one takes its place it replace is replaced so that's the kind of legal high story and that's that part of my book so as I was writing it I was investigating into the the marketing online drug deal and interestingly enough I found that the very first thing ever bought and sold on the internet the very primal act of e-commerce the first thing that a human being ever bought or sold each other online was actually a bag of marijuana so there's really not that much new under the sun the very first thing it was back in 1971 when students from MIT and Stanford connected the cross art net and they sold they sold each other drugs it was the first thing they wanted to do there's something about the internet that makes drug dealing easy and it makes it quite attractive for people so as the story continued I was the first journalist to write about the silk road now there's the silk road back in I think that was back in 2012 and you can see on there that the prices of the drugs the silk road is a dark web website it's hidden it's a hidden service on an anonymous network on the internet this site was created by very very skilled coders who were ideologically opposed to the the market to prohibition of recreational drugs you can see on there that the prices are in nothing dollars but in bitcoins and it's interesting if you look at the prices of things there there's like 10 bitcoin today that 10 bitcoin price would actually be four thousand dollars the price of bitcoins is actually increased by a factor of about 400 in the space of a year so the silk road was a kind of an experiment in selling selling legal and illegal drugs across the internet anonymously using the anonymous cryptocurrency bitcoin so let's see the next slide and there's a listing there's an ant of mdi and at that time that was being sold for a couple of hundred dollars you could buy it you could have it delivered to your house and of course it was illegal but you could do that without much real danger of being captured so this seemed to me to be an evolution of the online drugs market from the very early days and then through the kind of the legal hires this seemed to be the next sort of generation this was the evolution and obviously it didn't last very long and in when was it it was October the second last year the site was closed and the owner was captured and jailed um that's a longer story that than we have time for today and if you want to find out about it you can you can read it in my book so again what what kind of tickled me what what amused me was that a month later the site was back online and the site is still online this is from this morning so I logged on this morning gone to the Silk Road and if I wanted I could have bought 200 milligrams of DMT the world's most powerful psychedelic a gram of pure flake cocaine for 108 dollars or if we get some Peruvian I fancy the change for 99 dollars so we have a situation where as each you know as each attempt to kind of change the the to shut down the drug markets and to stop people from buying and selling drugs there's always a new way to do some but I think it's kind of it's kind of interesting to look at the effect that stories and journalism like mine have and it's quite counterintuitive so here we have a Google Trends graph from March 2010 now in March 2010 there were four stories in the press on this day on this particular day you can't see the date in this in this graph on this day in 2010 two young people died in the UK so they died from taking methadone and the internet response was that vertiginous climb in search queries not for methadone death or methadone safety or for buying methadone so on the day that the news reports were coming in that people were dying from the new legal hands people have to buy them people wanted to buy them so as educators and as journalists and as storytellers I think that we need to be we need to be mindful of that and so let's look again at the next graph here we have the Silk Road URL in October 2013 on the day that the site was closed search traffic climbed to that high point massively high so in an in a kind of internet era in a connected age everything we do is it kind of influences each other and it pulls and pushes in one direction or the other so these are the kind of these are the these are the ramifications of the of the web revolution that is actually it's only it's only really been going down I think for about three or four years but I think it will continue to grow and I think we need to kind of ask what does this mean what what's the impact of this I mean this is the description we have the rise of legal highs we have the rise of dark web drug markets what you know what are the impact of these things and I think it's good to kind of look back and if you want to look back to one of the first times when when drugs really were kind of taken on maps let's look at Woodstock in 1969 in Woodstock there were half a million people there were half a million people and they were taking drugs but only two people died one person from heroin overdose and one person from a tractor accident so let's go forward in in town to 2013 and in 2013 a guy called Jonathan Graham and I team manager from Chelmsford England who was at the Brownstock festival in south of Woodstock and Ferris a tiny little hamlet there were just 5000 people present and he uh his is post mortem he was sold a drug at that festival called five EAPB a legal drug a legal alternative to a drug which had been banned just three months before a drug called six APB these drugs all have kind of chemical formula names and so this is the kind of this is the this is the impact of it what I've noticed what's happening is that each time we ban a drug something new comes on the market and it's it's often more toxic and I want to know you know if we as kind of experts analysts and advisors and academics think that is that the way that we should be driving policy every time we make an attempt to change the the drug scene for the better it very often becomes worse and so I think really to conclude what I would say in conclusion is that as we kind of as we go along in this in this kind of century of prohibition every time that we've tried to bring a new drug lord every time that any drug laws existed in in kind of any meaningful way a clear pattern has emerged as each law to prevent drug consumption is made and means the circumvent that law is sought and it's found and those means can be chemical they can be legal they can be social or technological and we stand today at a crossroads formed by those four elements with the web making possible communication between distant strangers and it facilitates the sharing of limitless quantities of information and it enables the distribution of drugs anywhere in the world so where do we go next and when I was preparing this speech I was thinking about the work of jock young the distinguished professional criminal justice and sociology here in the past November and I'm sure that he would have smiled in recognition at the moral panic that has been created over legal highs and the silk road itself now these new drugs that I've documented and I've even created are harmful all drugs are in some way harmful in the case of synthetic cannabinoids they're many times more harmful than cannabis themselves and so you know the synthetic cannabinoids have caused strokes they've caused deaths and that's something that cannabis cannot do if you wanted to kill yourself with cannabis you would need to eat about 700 kilos of it in 15 minutes you cannot kill yourself with it you could you beat yourself to death with it perhaps but you can't you can't do that you can't kill yourself with cannabis but with these synthetics you can so you know from the main the kind of the main message I want you to take away from this is that the drug culture has changed and it is changing it's atomized it's proliferated and there are now more drugs on sale in more ways at this point in human history than ever before now then the uk claims that there were 97 deaths from what we call novel psychoactive substances legal highs the legal drugs we've been discussing today the figure was actually 44 that's another story again that's but this is just 0.3 percent of all the drug deaths in the uk so it really isn't time to sound the moral panic about this but it is important to acknowledge that these new synthetic drugs are in many cases more harmful than the banned drugs that they actually replace and there's certainly more than none and you know that's the perspective from which the best seen you know I wouldn't I after five years of looking into this I wouldn't argue for legalization and I would say that our laws are currently workable I'd say that their counts are productive I'd say that the laws seem to increase harm they don't seem to reduce them we've lost sight of our original goals in creating drug policy we want to surely protect people from harm addiction and death our laws are not achieving that at the moment and I don't argue for legalization I don't even argue for decriminalization right now I think instead we need experimentation observation and regulation we need to control the market in a truly new and novel way because right now we've outsourced the production the distribution the sales and marketing of all drugs to international armed criminal organizations and Chinese pharmaceutical factories and that seems irrational to me you know trying to end the cocaine trade by approving individual plants in Colombia or stocking individual consignments or shutting individual distilleries in Cambodia it just doesn't work it's counts productive and while the law persists the law persists with this irrationally economics it we're not going to solve it I mean I want to know how is cocaine more valuable than gold cocaine costs in the UK $1,500 more or less for an ounce of high quality coke now gold yesterday costs $1,346 these are the economics of prohibition they're irrational now I was working with a great physician a guy called dr. David Colby caught guy in Australia he's working me on analogy on investigations and he offered me a great analogy he said let's see drugs as an illness and let's see prohibition as an antibiotic if you treated any illness with the same antibiotic for 15 years medical people will be stunned if resistance hadn't developed so instead of that instead of that prohibition I would argue that we need a system that experiments with new approaches one which regulates the production and distribution and the sound of mood altering drugs and one that approaches this this challenge with rational non-moralistic and a completely fresh mindset and that really is the work for people with a fresh outlook people who dare to challenge the status quo those who dare to think the unthinkable and make other people think it too in short it's people with open and inquiring minds people very much like yourselves