It's a pleasure for me today to conduct this conversation with René Zagarias, who is the leader of drug policy in Amsterdam and has had an opportunity to look at what policies work, what don't work.

Amsterdam in the mid 1980s looked like San Francisco today.

They made, that Dutch government made many of the same mistakes that many of the

many of the same mistakes that many of American cities are making today.

And there were 3,000 deaths, overdoses in Amsterdam alone annually, very, very similar to what we're seeing in San Francisco today.

There were open drug markets in the street.

There were people drug addicts shooting up in doorways.

Tourism was affected.

The businesses were affected. there were homeless problems that were

amplified by the addiction.

And Amsterdam today, in all of Holland today. There's only 300 overdoes a year and

Amsterdam is now really a model for now to solve these problems and the methodologies and protocols that they've developed there

would be useful for other cities.

Renee has had the opportunity to look at a lot of American cities,

as a very clear idea of what, of course,

the pathway out of the current crisis that we have.

And it all begins with first acknowledging

that there's a crisis and not papering it over.

And Renee, after that long introduction welcome to this conversation.

Yeah, thank you very much. You have a very good impression of what we did and you know how we make a lot of mistakes in Amsterdam and it would be

silly if you made the same mistakes and that's that's why I'm very

I'm honored to have this conversation with you just to help you that you are able to

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