Can One Man End the Global Drug War?

71605_150514_ja_006893OzyIn between slurps of soup and sips of coffee,  Jindřich Vobořil  tells a story of his youth that would sell out a Broadway theater. He lived on and off the streets in his hometown of Brno, Czechoslovakia, running with local gangs. By age 12, he was burning through 30 cigarettes a day and says he moved on to hard drugs by his teenage years. By the mid-’80s, Vobořil was a 17-year-old dropout who played guitar in a rock band and had joined the nation’s pre-eminent anti-communist organization, Charter 77, before becoming … a Catholic, organizing underground religious activities (back then, religious practitioners were persecuted by the government).

Friends, meet the unlikeliest top-level bureaucrat on planet Earth.

The 49-year-old Vobořil isn’t your typical paper pusher. Think of him as the drug czar, coordinating and setting drug policy for the Czech Republic. But he’s no hammer-fisted police officer — he’s a psychotherapist and the founder of one of the country’s largest drug-related nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who’s using a variety of progressive programs to tackle record-high underage drinking and smoking, as well as rising meth production.