Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is running for president, and he's got a lot of baggage. He's been a governor for a long time, and now he's running to be the next president of the United States. But is he running because he's a crook, or because he just doesn't get it? We talk about that and much more on this early morning episode of the podcast with Ethan, the co-founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, a progressive organization dedicated to ending the war on drugs in America's most heavily regulated and heavily regulated state. We also talk about how Christie got into politics in the first place, and why he's not a good fit for the modern presidency. And we talk about why he s not a great fit for either of the other two major presidential candidates in the Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about it! Subscribe to the podcast and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks for listening and supporting the podcast! Timestamps: 5:00 - What s your favorite politician? 6:30 - Who's your favorite New Jersey governor? 7:15 - Is Chris Christie a crooper? 8:10 - Who do you think should win the election? 9:20 - Is he a good presidential candidate? 10:40 - How does he get the most respect? 11:00 16:30 17:00 Is he corrupt? 18:00 Can he run for president? 19:00 Does he have a chance? 21:00 What s his biggest weakness? 22:00 Do you think he s a good guy? 25:00 Who s the most likely to win the White House? 26:40 27:30 Is he the most corrupt person in New Jersey s biggest mistake? 29:30 What s he s going to win in 2020? 31: Is he running for President? 32:00 Would you like to vote for him? 33:30 Can he be a better than Joe Biden? 35:40 Is he really a good person? 36:00 How much money? 37:10 Is he better than John McCain? 39:00 Will he really be a good man? 40:10 45:30 Does he know what s he really need to do it?
00:00:16.000When it comes to legalizing marijuana, I mean, we got momentum that nobody could have believed we'd had just four or five years ago, right?
00:00:55.000I really think that that guy is so deeply embedded in corruption in New Jersey that the moment he actually becomes a serious candidate for president, I think this shit is gonna come out of the closet like a broken fire hydrant.
00:01:12.000I think also his popularity has fallen so low in New Jersey right now that he just wanted to get out of town.
00:01:17.000I think that's why he's running president.
00:01:19.000It's better than dealing with stuff in Trent and acknowledging all the screw-ups he's had.
00:01:22.000I mean, I'll tell you something, we led, Drug Policy Alliance led that effort to legalize medical marijuana in Jersey back a few years ago.
00:01:28.000Governor Corzine, last bill he signed, was that one.
00:01:30.000And then Christie came around, he diddled and doddled and didn't want to do it, wanted to have Rutgers University grow the weed.
00:01:50.000Now, mind you, New Jersey's still hobbling along, you know, and Christie, the funny thing also is when it comes to ending the drug war more broadly, he's highly unpredictable.
00:01:57.000You know, we took on the bail bond industry, the private bail bond industry that's trying to keep people locked up for as long as possible in local jails.
00:02:04.000And Christie ended up coming on our side.
00:02:06.000The bail bond industry was working to make sure that people stayed in jail?
00:02:10.000I gotta tell you, if you look at all the corrupt actors in the prison industrial complex, you know, you get the prison guards union, you get the private prison corporations, the private bail bond industry.
00:02:20.000I mean, if ever there was a sordid gang, that had to be it.
00:03:05.000New Jersey politics is so much more corrupt than New York politics, which is the most corrupt part of the country.
00:03:11.000Yeah, although, you know, we're breaking some records in New York.
00:03:13.000You think just last six months, both the head of the Assembly and the head of the Senate have both been indicted, you know?
00:03:19.000So, you know, it's neck and neck between us and Jersey, you know?
00:03:23.000I mean, New Jersey's got that strong tradition in history.
00:03:26.000I remember, you know, Christie made his name by being the federal prosecutor going after these guys.
00:03:31.000Then he gets himself involved in this Bridgegate scandal, you know, where the guy on one side of the bridge shut down traffic for two days because, you know, somebody had done something they didn't like.
00:03:40.000So I think Christie had his moment back in 2012, 2011 when he was hot and riding high in the polls and his whole bullying act was going over well.
00:03:48.000I think he's down and done with already.
00:03:51.000Well, you can only shine like that as a bully for so long.
00:03:55.000Because if you're that guy that's yelling and screaming at everybody else and sticking your fat gut out there, eventually people start going, hey man, what about you?
00:05:02.000I mean, because I live in New York City, and so I live in the center of the universe, and what you realize is that there's only so long the center of the universe can go on without, you know, people reinvesting in it.
00:05:11.000The island of Manhattan has got to be the most amazing island in the world.
00:05:15.000And, I mean, it's just glowing these days.
00:05:29.000And then as long as you can get out often, I mean, the key is being able to get out of town.
00:05:33.000And I'm out of town about half the time, so I get to go out, see the stars, see the ocean, you know, take hikes, and then go back and ride that energy.
00:05:42.000I love the fact that it's a pedestrian city.
00:05:50.000This past weekend, for the first time, Californians and others might not appreciate this, but you're all over the place.
00:05:55.000I drove my bike from the Upper West Side of Manhattan down to Brighton Beach, about a 20-mile bike ride, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Brooklyn, along the New York Harbor.
00:06:58.000My office is half a block from Penn Station.
00:07:01.000Jump on the train, one hour, then a half-hour ferry, and all of a sudden I'm on this gorgeous little island that's got no cars on it, and you just relax.
00:07:09.000And the no cars things is what keeps people away.
00:07:33.000Yeah, they're trying to do the same thing to the Hamptons, because the Hamptons has a real deer issue, and there was two options.
00:07:39.000One, bring in hunters, and they were going to hunt at night, snipers.
00:07:42.000You reminded me, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal I don't know, years, years ago, maybe decades ago.
00:07:48.000The Institute for Advanced Study is like, it's this gorgeous place next door to Princeton University, and it's where Albert Einstein was.
00:07:56.000Some of the greatest philosophers and scientists, it's where they go when they're in their older years and do their thinking, bucolic setting.
00:08:06.000Well, you couldn't shoot them in this bucolic place, right?
00:08:09.000So what they did was they hired archers, professional archers, to kill them with bows and arrows.
00:08:14.000And there was this uproar, you know, like this thunk, thunk, you know, all of a sudden, you know, there were the philosophers in the middle here, thunk, thunk, some deer bites the dust.
00:08:21.000But yeah, you know, one way or another, you got to deal with that stuff.
00:10:00.000Then it needs to be slaughtered in a special way, which for millennia was the most humane way of killing.
00:10:05.000It has to be absolutely perfectly sharp.
00:10:07.000In the last couple of decades, there's now a dispute, because in Europe, they're beginning to ban the kosher way of killing because it's no longer the most humane way, according to the science.
00:10:27.000It was a slaughterhouse for Fear Factor.
00:10:30.000We were doing a Fear Factor stunt there, and the stunt was these people had to dunk their head in these giant buckets of blood, so we had to have this cow's blood that was chilled to slightly over 32 degrees, and we could only keep it for a short amount of time, or it could possibly contain pathogens.
00:10:49.000It was really cold water, or really cold blood, rather.
00:10:52.000So they gave me a little tour of the place and explained to me how they do it.
00:10:56.000And they have this area where the cow goes in, they lock the cow in place, and a piston goes through the cow's head and kills him.
00:11:02.000But they're like, you know, the guy was pretty adamant about it.
00:11:05.000He's like, we have a rabbi that comes and they do the kosher slaughters.
00:11:11.000They hold the cow in place with the thing, and then they slice its neck, and it bucks and kicks and falls to the ground.
00:11:18.000For millennia, it was a more humane way, because in the old days, you just knock it over the head and all this stuff, and the kosher way was if the blade was not razor sharp, if it had the tiniest nick in it, and you discover that afterward the animal was not kosher.
00:11:30.000So there was a way of doing it that was closely better, you know?
00:13:07.000I've got to tell you, I mean, doing this thing here with you in California, you go to Manhattan Beach now, you go whatever, you've got the Trader Joe's, big kosher sections, and it's not just Jews, it's all sorts of other people who still see it as, and in fact, to some extent, it's more reliable, good quality.
00:13:22.000The highest end's not going to be kosher, but in terms of reliable, good stuff, you know, people say kosher's a pretty good bet.
00:13:50.000So they're a market, and you have Orthodox Jewish communities popping up all around the country, Manhattan Beach out here in California, LA's got a big Orthodox community, you know?
00:13:59.000And then there are people, a lot of African American people see it as basically, you know, they hear, there's kosher's better.
00:14:05.000And then, remember, the Muslim halal is very similar to similar rules.
00:14:09.000No pig, the slaughtering's, I think, somewhat similar.
00:14:12.000So a lot of people, a lot of Muslims buy kosher food, because for them- How ironic.
00:14:39.000The best pastrami in L.A. One of the problems, though, is some of these delis that used to be kosher, now they're just kosher style.
00:14:45.000It's like they got to pastrami and stuff like that, but it turns out, because it's expensive to pay the rabbi to bless it in the slaughtering, so I have to make sure it's actually strictly kosher.
00:15:16.000It's not going to happen in America, but look at what's going on in Israel, where the religious parties are becoming more and more powerful and dominant, and you go to Jerusalem, and here's the rules on the Sabbath, here's the rules on this, here's the rules on that.
00:15:27.000One can envision a generation from now that in Israel, you might have, you know, the religious folks driving everything and make a law like that.
00:15:34.000If they did that, and I'm still alive, I'll stop.
00:15:37.000So if they did that in Israel, you would stop in America?
00:15:45.000I'll tell you, the hardest thing when you keep kosher, I've never had lobster, never really had shrimp.
00:15:50.000You've never had lobster, that's right.
00:15:52.000The hardest stuff is when there's a beautiful steak or a beautiful piece of duck or a lamb out there, and it's basically no different than the kosher stuff, but I can eat it because they didn't pay the rabbi to bless it and they slaughtered it differently.
00:17:29.000And there's all sorts of other attachments to religious things, to types of gods, to habits, to name it.
00:17:34.000If it's not hurting anybody else, I can kind of, you know, I got that little empathic sense for what it means to be irrationally committed to something.
00:18:14.000I can't remember if it was the end of this year, beginning of next.
00:18:16.000So we've got four states that have legalized, each one of them doing it with 55% of the vote, typically getting more votes than the guys who are running for governor or attorney general in those states got those years.
00:18:31.000They basically said you can grow your own, you can transfer it, but they haven't set up formal sales yet because people worry that Congress will sort of put a hammer on them, right?
00:19:31.000I mean, D.C. was traditionally like two-thirds African-American.
00:19:34.000Now, as it's become more gentrified, it's still about 50% African-American.
00:19:38.000Well, the issue is not just the African-American, it's the poverty.
00:19:42.000There's massive poverty and crime in certain sections of D.C., and the fact that that's the nation's capital, they can't even clean up their own backyard.
00:20:16.000DC's weird in that you can go from really nice to really bad in a couple blocks.
00:20:22.000I was shocked when I was driving through DC because I was like, this is crazy.
00:20:26.000You've seen these really, you know, cute white couples with their little Stroller, and they're in these really nice brownstones, and they have a Volvo parked in front of the house, and right next to them is a BMW. And then you go two blocks down, and you see people drinking on the street,
00:20:43.000and there's kids with no shoes on, and it's garbage piled up everywhere.
00:21:00.000You saw the same thing in parts of New York City, right, with Upper East Side or Lower East Side.
00:21:05.000You know, it's when things begin to change that way that you get that kind of stuff.
00:21:09.000Well, isn't that the big complaint about New York City is that so many rich financial people have moved in that the entire city used to be this artist community and now that's kind of Brooklyn now.
00:21:19.000Well, the funny thing is now they're saying Brooklyn's becoming more like Manhattan and Queens is becoming the new Brooklyn.
00:21:25.000And I got to say, living in the Upper West Side, where it's...
00:21:29.000I mean, I'm lucky I'm in a rent-stabilized apartment there, and I live in a beautiful tree-lined street in a little apartment.
00:21:35.000But then you see the banks moving in and taking over the street corners, right?
00:21:39.000And you see more chain stores coming in.
00:21:41.000And so Manhattan has become this beautiful place, but less and less affordable.
00:21:45.000Now Brooklyn, most of the people who work for me in New York are living in Brooklyn, but now they've got to move out to the further, further away from Manhattan part of Brooklyn.
00:21:53.000And now Queens and the Bronx and Upper Manhattan are becoming the places.
00:21:57.000I mean, look, the city's hopping, it's great, it's amazing.
00:22:01.000The downside of our economic growth has been that.
00:22:05.000Wall Street is, the gap between rich and poor in New York City is horrific and huge.
00:22:12.000On the other hand, Wall Street is providing massive amounts of tax revenue, and New York City taxes itself at a very high level, so we actually have better services in New York City than most parts of the world.
00:22:22.000My friend Shane was living in Brooklyn, and me and my family came to visit, and we hung out with him one night, and he had this apartment that overlooks The Manhattan skyline.
00:22:32.000And we were looking at it and I was like, this might be the best looking view on the planet.
00:22:40.000I think there's two types of amazing views.
00:22:42.000There's the amazing views of the mountains and nature, which is pretty stunning.
00:22:47.000But there's something about the Manhattan skyline that is so insane that someone built that.
00:22:55.000It's gorgeous because it's all lit up and the shapes are cool and it has the history behind it and you're looking at all this activity and bustling people back and forth.
00:23:05.000And then there's also the magnitude of the amount of effort that was put into creating something like that.
00:23:11.000Occasionally I'll be on a plane that's coming from the north, say, from Albany or Montreal or wherever it's coming from, and it lands up going down the Hudson River, right?
00:23:20.000And, you know, Manhattan's basically a long island.
00:23:22.000It's like, I don't know, 15, 20 miles long and about a mile wide or so.
00:23:26.000And you look down at that thing in Manhattan and New York Harbor, and there's the Statue of Liberty, and there you can see Staten Island and Brooklyn and Jersey around it.
00:23:35.000And then you see the Empire State Building, and then you see the Freedom Tower, and you see Central Park in the middle of it, one of the largest inner city parks in the world.
00:26:06.000I don't know if you heard what's going on in Ohio, right?
00:26:08.000And Ohio's going to get to vote to legalize marijuana this year, 2015, the only initiative on the ballot this year as opposed to next year.
00:26:34.000We asked for our help in drafting it, and we said we'd help them draft it to get some good stuff in there.
00:26:38.000But the one thing they did that nobody likes is they put into the initiative that only the 10 investors, or technically the properties they own, will be allowed to produce marijuana wholesale in Ohio in perpetuity.
00:27:15.000Because what they're trying to do is they're trying to take something that's good and profit off of it in a way that only they can profit off of it.
00:27:22.000And lock everybody out, and they think they're being sneaky.
00:27:27.000Because on the other hand, if this thing wins this year, Ohio is a major swing state in American politics.
00:27:34.0002016, all the candidates are going to be vying in Ohio.
00:27:37.000Meanwhile, the thing will only be in theory, because it will not have been implemented, and there's all sorts of people trying to block the oligopoly provision.
00:27:44.000So an Ohio win, this oligopoly provision, if it all works out well, this thing wins.
00:27:51.000It opens up the national discussion, forces the candidates to talk about this issue, puts it in Ohio in a major way.
00:27:57.000Meanwhile, everybody's so revolted by the oligopoly model, you already have the state legislature trying to knock it out with a competitive initiative.
00:28:04.000The thing's going to land up in the courts anyway.
00:28:06.000I don't see any of the other states adopting this model.
00:28:09.000I mean, none of the other initiatives on the ballot in 2016 have this oligopoly provision in it.
00:28:13.000I think the sense of revulsion at kind of doing that sort of thing.
00:28:16.000So my sense is, if it all works out well, Initiative wins.
00:28:20.000The oligopoly thing never gets implemented.
00:28:27.000Now, do you face any pressure at all to not talk about the fact that you smoke weed yourself, being the fact that you're a part of this drug policy alliance and you have to put ties on and meet with some serious folks?
00:28:41.000You know, it's been an evolution, Joe, because I would say when I really got going in this in the late 80s, I was very careful about that, because that was the height of the drug war, right?
00:28:52.000And not only that, my dissertation research, I wrote my PhD at Harvard, and it was on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement.
00:29:00.000So just three years earlier, I had had a security clearance.
00:29:02.000I'd worked in the State Department's Narcotics Bureau.
00:29:05.000I'd wrote a classified report on drug trafficking and money laundering.
00:29:08.000I traveled all around South America and Europe interviewing DEA guys and foreign drug enforcement guys.
00:29:13.000I'd written a dissertation and the book On international drug controls called Cops Across Borders.
00:29:18.000So I just knew these guys, and they had opened their doors to me.
00:29:21.000And now three years later, I'm out there saying, we've got to talk about legalization.
00:29:24.000And at that point, when the drug war was like McCarthyism on steroids, right?
00:29:30.000I never would deny that I had smoked marijuana, but I would never talk about being a current consumer.
00:29:35.000And then as things began to ease up into the late 90s, early 2000s, I began to be a little looser with it, but I still would not say go to the cannabis cups would invite me and I maybe showed up at the hemp fest in Seattle a couple of times, but I'd still be careful.
00:29:53.000And it's a lot like the evolution with gay people in America, right?
00:29:55.000At the points at which different people feel comfortable coming out and all this sort of stuff.
00:29:59.000And so now I'm quite comfortable saying, yeah, you know, I smoke weed.
00:30:02.000I've been an occasional consumer since I was 18. It's been a net positive in my life, you know?
00:30:08.000Actually, even a few years ago on Psychedelics, we do this big biennial conference, and a few years ago it was in LA, and I said, this is the kind that I did it, I said, you know, I'm Jewish, right?
00:30:21.000And so once a year, I fast on Yom Kippur.
00:30:26.000I think it's good for the soul to, you know, do a fast once a year.
00:30:30.000And I say that's the way I view doing psychedelics as well, you know, that people should keep doing psychedelics at least once a year, well into their elderly years, because it's a good way to stir up the emotional sediment, the intellectual sediment, and stay honest as you grow older.
00:30:44.000And so I think, you know, I felt coming out about that as well, I think the times, you know, we're in a day and an age in America right now where we can talk about this and need to talk about it more openly.
00:30:54.000And what is your psychedelic of choice that you like to do annually?
00:30:58.000Well, mushrooms is sort of the standard.
00:31:21.000I mean, ayahuasca I've done a few times, both once in a Santa Dime ceremony and once in just a more laid-back way, and that was really amazing.
00:31:29.000You know, LSD, you know, that one, I mean, I've enjoyed it.
00:31:50.000I mean, there was one time somebody had made up a guy who was a good scientist, had made up a thing that was a combination of DMT and ketamine.
00:33:11.000Well, I remember reading that book, Confessions of an Itinerant Science.
00:33:13.000And for your listeners who don't know, right, John Lilly was the great pioneer of satician communications, communications with whales and dolphins and all that.
00:33:20.000And also the person who may have invented the isolation tank.
00:33:24.000And he goes through this period in his life where he starts injecting ketamine every hour on the hour in his isolation tank, like 12 to 18 hours a day.
00:34:16.000I mean, you're more aware and you can shut it off at any time.
00:34:22.000It's more of a conscious decision to enter into the psychedelic state.
00:34:25.000But when you add that to the ketamine, apparently it's just this unbelievable journey through the mind and Todd was just not prepared for it.
00:34:33.000So Lily, who had another tank next to his other tank, gets in the second tank, whacks himself out and visits him.
00:34:42.000Goes and visits him in the fucking ketamine dimension while they're both in side-by-side parallel isolation tanks.
00:34:51.000That's something to tell your grandchildren about, in my opinion.
00:34:53.000Forget about who won the World Series.
00:34:55.000So you've done psychedelics in your isolation tank?
00:34:58.000I've only done mushrooms and edible weed in the isolation tank.
00:35:52.000It's a really joke because I tell you, for me, I mostly associate the high dose edible with just being knocked on my butt and just like, you know.
00:36:39.000And then, you know, give the ticket, get on the plane, and then once I sit down, I'm like, okay, at least I know I'm going to be here for the next six hours.
00:36:45.000And then the universe dissolves and you get shot through some wormhole and to the center of your mind and you reexamine your childhood and like, fuck!
00:36:57.000I've got to tell you, I've done that edibles on planes a few times.
00:36:59.000One time, just somebody, like you said, don't want to carry on a plane, have a little nibble before, Chicago to LaGuardia, I land and, oh my God, please, somebody get me home here, you know?
00:37:10.000On the other hand, another time I'm thinking, flying to Europe, I'm thinking, God, this stuff knocks me out of time.
00:37:14.000Why don't I just do a little edible instead of a sleeping pill?
00:37:16.000Because I don't like some of the sleeping pill effects.
00:37:19.000It was kind of fidgety and it was closed and you know, so I've stayed away from the edibles on the plains of late They're very tricky because you you really have to be in the right state of mind and you really you have to treat them with respect I think edibles have always been associated with silliness and I think that's the trick that they've played on us like Have a little pot brownie man.
00:37:43.000It's serious business And the fact of it, I mean, it's funny because now with all the concerns about edibles, you know, somebody asked me the other day, what's the thing that most surprised me about the evolution of this whole marijuana reform thing in the last 5-10 years?
00:37:54.000And it's been the emergence of the edibles.
00:37:56.000If you had asked me 5-10 years ago, I would not have anticipated that edibles and drinks and oils would play such a major role in legal marijuana.
00:38:25.000Me and Tommy Shigura, who's a good friend of mine, stand-up comedian, we tore one in half and ate it on a plane.
00:38:30.000We were doing some gigs in Florida, popped it on the way to, it was a nighttime flight, a red eye, and we landed and we both turned and looked at each other and we were like, how terrifying was that?
00:38:44.000Well, I got to tell you, dealing from a policy perspective, I mean, we're doing everything we can to have some responsible regulation in this area.
00:39:10.000Well, what I'll do is I'll get a candy bar that's broken up into bits of 10, and I'll split it a little more than half or something like that.
00:39:15.000So that's like a calm, mellow, easy kind?
00:39:18.000It's calm, nice to kick back, relax, maybe go for a swim, go for a massage, maybe go to a movie.
00:39:25.000And the higher level can be good, too, but it's got the risk of knocking me on my ass.
00:39:29.000The higher level to me is like this, it's a potential like a treasure hunt maybe.
00:39:37.000A treasure hunt for ideas or an exploration of maybe there's something I missed.
00:39:43.000You know, maybe like, because I'm always trying to like dig down into my psyche and find out what I don't like about me or what I need to improve or what I need to work on more or what...
00:39:52.000What aspect of my career, my life I need to be putting more attention to?
00:39:56.000And usually the pot sort of lets me know about that.
00:40:14.000I may be sitting in a concert and had an edible or smoke, and all of a sudden, like, my brain's flying, and I'm getting stuff down, you know, listening to music.
00:40:22.000But for me, the thing about the mushrooms, which I don't like to do, and also when you get older, it takes more of a toll.
00:42:05.000I took two tabs, and the experience was beautiful, and it taught me so much about insecurity, so much about, like, the way I behave and the way people behave and interact with each other.
00:42:16.000How much of it is just based on insecurity, you know?
00:42:34.000It's so funny you say that story, because I remember one time with a group of close friends, and some of these friends are, like, leading academics and in drug policy, drug studies, and, I mean, major figures.
00:42:44.000And we'd become good friends, and we would occasionally get together and do, you know, do an MDMA thing, like, once a year.
00:42:49.000And I just remember one of my friends who's a distinguished professor, four of us were sitting on the couch, and he just laid down on top of our knees, and we all just put our hands on him.
00:43:04.000The MDMA, apparently they say, I've never tried, I said I only did it once, but people say that it's really hard to have sex when you're on it.
00:43:17.000And it's, you know, something you can get aroused on it, but it's, you know, at some point, that's been my experience.
00:43:22.000You can get aroused and all that sort of stuff, but at some point, the energy is shifting towards more hug energy, empathic, loving energy, you know, whereas, for example, psychedelics can sometimes go in a highly sexual direction.
00:43:42.000I mean, I kind of like the theory, the notion of hunter-gatherers and the hunter-gatherers who consumed, you know, psilocybin mushrooms or whatever were the ones who were going to be better at whether it was warfare or hunting or a whole range of other things.
00:44:01.000I only met him a few times, but one of the last times he called me up because I think he was supposed to speak at UCLA or USC, and at the last moment they were going to prohibit him from speaking or whoever was loaning them the hall or something like that.
00:44:14.000And so he just called me up and I called the local ACLU and they got on it and we solved the problem.
00:44:51.000There was a guy, Polish guy, who would do an occasional ayahuasca ceremony where he would invite musicians who would then make music together under the influence of ayahuasca.
00:45:00.000And then I was invited because the organizers wanted to know how does ayahuasca connect to broader drug policy reform.
00:46:20.000But I'll tell you, the ayahuasca thing, too, it reminds me, when you read about the emergence of LSD and mescaline in the 50s, and the guys who went around dosing people, you know, Cary Grant, famous actors, politicians.
00:46:31.000Cary Grant used to He didn't dose people?
00:46:33.000No, he didn't dose people, but he became an enthusiast.
00:46:36.000She was a famous female swimmer who then was in movies.
00:48:08.000And his thing was like, all the media ever tells you about is these negative drug stories about a guy jumped off the roof.
00:48:14.000Well, I mean, as marijuana is becoming more legalized in our society and hopefully around the world, and as we move forward on the psychedelics to begin to open them up as well, and now all the new psychoactive substances and some of the synthetics, which may have some upsides to them,
00:48:31.000but the key is going to be putting out a norm out there about what it means to use it safe.
00:48:36.000I mean, for example, doing mushrooms or LSD and going to a concert with 50,000 people around or 10,000 people around, generally not a good idea.
00:48:44.000Unless they're also on LSD and you know them all.
00:49:08.000He thought an animal was trying to eat him alive, right, while he was flipping out.
00:49:12.000And fortunately, you know, Rick Doblin, the guys at Maps, had set up these kind of, you know, safety zones.
00:49:17.000And so they were able to get this guy away from the cops, because the cops were going to shackle him, put him on a helicopter, and take him to a jail, which could have been horrible.
00:49:25.000And instead, they gave them to Rick, and Rick was able to talk this guy down and, you know, do it.
00:49:30.000But we have to be aware that when people are taking these powerful, mind-altering substances, which can have these wonderful things, as you and I have experienced, we've got to be aware that there are people who are not as stable as they think they are, people who have deep-seated shit going on, and they don't know what's buried that's going to come flying out,
00:49:46.000people who don't understand that, yeah, if you're going to jump, jump from the first floor, not the fifth floor.
00:49:59.000Just to shift away from the silos for a second, one of the issues we're working on big time is trying to reduce the number of people dying from overdoses involving either heroin or pharmaceutical opiates.
00:50:10.000The last couple of years, more people have died of an accidental overdose involving heroin or other pharmaceuticals than in a car accident.
00:50:18.000It's the number one cause of accidental death in America today, right?
00:50:24.000And in fact, when we say overdose, it suggests you took too much.
00:50:27.000Most of what are overdoses actually are drug combinations.
00:50:29.000They're typically doing this opiate, your pharmaceutical opiate, oxycodone, whatever it might be, might even be prescribed to you, with booze or with benzos, Valium-type drugs, right?
00:50:38.000So what we're trying to do is to put out there the notion that if you're doing opiates, don't combine it with booze.
00:50:55.000We're passing 9-1-1 Good Samaritan Laws, so if people are around and a buddy of theirs overdoses, they don't just flip out.
00:51:01.000They call 9-1-1 right away the way they do with a heart attack.
00:51:03.000So, you know, it's true with the psychedelics of marijuana, but even with the drugs that we see as less elevated in a way, but that huge numbers of people are using, like the opiates, it's really important that we become more and more of a society that understands the notion that we need to make it safer to use these drugs,
00:51:21.000We've got to keep people from getting hurt the way that people get hurt.
00:51:25.000Well, we had a guy on here yesterday, two guys, Chris and Mark Bell, who they were a part of a documentary called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which was about steroids, and now they have a new one called Prescription Thugs, and it's all about the opiate pill industry.
00:51:43.000How many people die from it and how many people are addicted to it and the numbers I wasn't prepared for the numbers when we had them on and we started exploring the numbers They were talking about this from 2010 there was 8.7 million people Abusing these pills on a daily basis in this country.
00:52:00.000Yeah, I mean that's a staggering I mean, nobody really knows the number, right?
00:52:05.000Because what it means to abuse it and whether it is abuse.
00:52:07.000But, you know, 20 years ago, you had a massive problem of the undertreatment of pain, right?
00:52:14.000That people were so flipped out about using opioids that people who were terminally ill...
00:52:18.000Children who are terrible burn victims, people going through a traumatic post-operative recovery from surgery and stuff like that, were not having their pain treated.
00:52:28.000And the failure to treat pain appropriately can shorten people's lives, lead to major depression, lead to other drug-taking, and all that sort of stuff.
00:52:35.000So over the 90s, early 2000s, we began to solve that problem.
00:52:39.000So now opioids are used much more correctly.
00:52:41.000But then what happened is that what we really have in America is an epidemic of chronic pain.
00:52:49.000Lower back pain, sciatica, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel.
00:52:55.000I mean, tens of millions of Americans, maybe close to 50 or 100 million Americans, go through some chronic pain episode during the course of every year or two, whatever it might be.
00:53:05.000And it turns out that for many people going through dealing with chronic pain, opioids don't work that well, right?
00:53:23.000And they're taking opioids, and the doctor's giving them the opioids, and then they're building up tolerance.
00:53:27.000So they're taking higher doses, which is building the risk, right?
00:53:29.000And then maybe they're combining it with like a Valium-type drug to reduce their anxiety, or maybe they're taking alcohol because that makes them feel better.
00:53:36.000And then what happens is at some point your heart, you know, your breathing stops, right?
00:53:40.000And so what we need to do, that overprescription of these opioids, it's not just by physicians who are criminals and are doing these things for money.
00:53:49.000It's not just black marketeering of this stuff.
00:53:52.000It's also a lot of people just trying to help, good meaning doctors trying to help people who are suffering with pain by giving them the opioids they think they want and need, when it turns out that's probably not the best way to deal with it.
00:54:05.000Well, there's an issue that people have with pain that comes from work.
00:54:13.000There's an issue that people have from not taking their body as important or taking the health of their body as significantly as they should.
00:54:23.000I think that there's a lot of people that just don't know the consequences of sitting at a desk with bad posture all the time.
00:54:31.000Like these chairs that you're sitting in?
00:54:32.000These things are special ergonomic chairs that make you kind of support your body weight up straight.
00:54:38.000They're called Capisco chairs, which is a company called Ergo Depot.
00:54:42.000But before I got these, I sat in regular office chairs.
00:54:45.000At the end of every episode, my fucking back, the middle of my back would be killing me.
00:55:47.000The idea is that there's a benefit for that suck.
00:55:50.000One of the things I love about weed is I love to stretch when I do weed.
00:55:56.000I get into my body, you know, and that's the thing.
00:55:59.000It's just whether it's swimming, but the only time I like feeling that, you know, stretching my...
00:56:03.000I hate stretching my hands, but when I'm high, Yeah.
00:56:07.000Well, you know, that's what McKenna believed that yoga was in the first place.
00:56:11.000Yoga said, McKenna had this one lecture that was talking about yogis and that the real secret about sadhus is that they're high as fuck.
00:56:20.000And what yoga really is, is it's almost like a how-to manual on how to properly use cannabis.
00:56:27.000and that they believe that eating cannabis especially or smoking hash and then going into these yoga poses would they would achieve these higher states of consciousness and so they would pass this down from generation to generation and the Indian in India rather the Hindus Have a long history of both eating hash and smoking hash,
00:56:46.000and he believed that that was the dirty secret of yoga.
00:56:50.000That yoga was really all about how to use cannabis correctly, which is why it feels so good to stretch when you're high.
00:56:56.000I'll tell you a few things about that.
00:56:57.000One, I think it was the San Francisco Chronicle, just last month or so, had a piece about yoga where they basically asked people to smoke before they go and do the yoga class.
00:57:05.000The other thing is, have you seen this book?
00:57:30.000Alex is the one who did the artwork for it, and Alan Bediner did the writing.
00:57:34.000And as I recall, what the book is about is he was struck by all of these kind of Zen spiritual leaders in America for whom their psychedelics experience in their younger years was pivotal to their evolution and to their becoming a master of some type of meditation,
00:57:54.000And it's very interesting because, you know, there's also, you have in some of these, you know, spiritual worlds, whatever, that they're looking down on the use of marijuana or psychedelics, that you should keep your body as a sacred vessel and keep it free from these substances.
00:58:07.000But in fact, you see a lot of evidence that these things go really well together.
00:58:10.000Well, the issue is legality and also most of these people have actual jobs.
00:58:15.000And when you have an actual job and you start talking about drugs, people look at you like you're some sort of a fucking crazy person.
00:58:22.000If you work as an insurance company and you say, well, on the weekend, you know what I did this weekend?
00:58:26.000I smoked DMT with my friends and I experienced God.
00:58:29.000They're like, what the fuck is wrong with Ethan?
00:58:48.000Or what about if your kids are inviting their friends over, and then you have to worry about that your kids' friends will tell their parents, oh, so-and-so's parents smoke weed or whatever, and then all of a sudden you have the neighbors and the fellow parents getting all worked up about that or telling their kids they can't go over.
00:59:21.000And you're also an independent operator, as am I, but it's so true.
00:59:25.000I gotta tell you, the emails I get from people who, you know, solid employees for 20 years, and then a drug test popped out, and they were totally fine at work.
00:59:34.000It's just because they got high on the weekend and they lose their job after 20 years.
00:59:55.000So, back in 2010, the ballot initiative in California legalized marijuana.
01:00:00.000Richard Lee, the fellow who was driving that, and we agreed.
01:00:02.000We put in a provision there that basically said people could not be fired for testing positive for marijuana so long as they were totally competent at work, not high at work.
01:00:12.000And we wanted to protect people who were having a joint in the evening or on the weekend, right?
01:00:19.000And the problem is, is you don't want to provoke some very powerful bears and all this sort of stuff.
01:00:23.000So now when we're drafting these initiatives around the country for 2016 and beyond, what we find is we do not include a clause protecting people because we know the one thing that might get the Chamber of Commerce to all flip out, you know, and to basically defeat the initiative.
01:00:37.000And then what you basically hope is that as marijuana becomes more legalized...
01:00:43.000I haven't looked as yet in Oregon and Washington, but my guess is that the number of employers who are drug testing for marijuana is decreasing, right?
01:00:51.000I mean, look, it's always been a bad way to determine performance, right?
01:00:55.000Because we know marijuana stays in the system.
01:00:56.000You know, the craziness of drug testing.
01:00:58.000If you want to get totally bombed on a Friday night and be okay at work Monday morning in terms of drug testing, don't smoke a joint, right?
01:01:05.000Alcohol and cocaine is the right combination for you.
01:01:07.000That's a crazy message to send with drug testing, right?
01:01:11.000Yeah, because cocaine's out of your system in like 24 hours or so.
01:01:17.000It's really stupid, and these stereotypes are ridiculous.
01:01:19.000These stereotypes of pot smokers are dumb and lazy, and they insult me.
01:01:24.000It really drives me nuts, and I hate having to defend it, because you're defending just these ignorant stereotypes that were propagated by reefer madness.
01:01:34.000I mean, that was like we really started it all off, and the effectiveness of the propaganda that Hearst Publications put out in the 1930s, it's Amazing how well that worked almost a hundred years later.
01:01:59.000And therefore, their image of who was gay was determined by what they saw in the media, somebody getting arrested in a men's room, or somebody flamboyantly walking down Christopher Street in New York City, or people who are very, very effeminate, right?
01:02:11.000Now, of course, everybody knows a gay person, right?
01:02:14.000It could be their cousin or their employer.
01:02:48.000Now, mind you, the kid who just got straight A's and is going to an Ivy League school or to UC Berkeley or Stanford or whatever, and who's also smoking weed, that kid's being more discreet.
01:02:58.000And nobody knows he's doing weed except his friends.
01:03:00.000So we have a biased image of who, in fact, the marijuana user has been in America.
01:03:05.000Now, as it becomes more legalized, as people become more open and out with it, I've been struck at all the people I've known for many years who are finally saying to me and admitting to me that they've been using marijuana or psychedelics regularly for a long time.
01:03:17.000Now we're seeing that thing begin to shift in our society the same way we saw it happening with gay people in this country.
01:03:23.000I think you're right, and I think I've seen a giant shift just within the last 15 or so years.
01:03:28.000You know, I started smoking pot when I was 30. I'm 48 now, so I've been smoking pot for 18 years.
01:03:35.000And before I smoked pot, I thought it was for losers.
01:03:40.000I met my friend Eddie Bravo, and he is this really creative musician, and he explained to me that it helps him, like, write music and create music, and he's this interesting guy that I used to do jiu-jitsu with.
01:03:52.000That's also a weird thing about martial arts.
01:03:55.000A tremendous amount of UFC fighters smoke pot.
01:04:18.000Possibly the NFL. I met a retired football player, Marvin Washington, at the end of last year.
01:04:23.000And he was getting involved in the medical marijuana thing, but he's a really brilliant guy and cares about the broader policy issues.
01:04:30.000We landed up drafting with him and three other Pro Bowl winners basically a public letter calling on the NFL to change its marijuana testing policy.
01:04:42.000To admit that marijuana has medical value, that it's safer for many players, that when it comes to dealing with concussion injury, that marijuana may actually have a therapeutic dimension to it.
01:04:57.000Do you see the U.S., the International Olympics Committee, what they've done now is I think they've changed the level or when they test for marijuana.
01:05:04.000So they basically are saying, if you haven't used marijuana within 24 hours before a match, you're not our concern anymore.
01:05:12.000So you see an evolution happening, and at different rates in different types of professional sports.
01:05:45.000You know, being a professor at Princeton, late 80s, early 90s, and I saw the kids, like, they knew they were going to be applying for jobs where you needed to be drug tested.
01:05:54.000And it just began to shape the whole way they thought about this sort of stuff.
01:05:57.000Yeah, it's just so unfortunate because it doesn't make you a bad person.
01:06:15.000Well, I would say this, because what I always want to do is to give the other side what I think might be true or might conform with their own experience.
01:06:23.000For some people, marijuana, smoking too much marijuana does make them lethargic.
01:06:40.000You know, it can be amotivating for some people.
01:06:43.000Look, it's a drug, and that means that some people can use it in the wrong ways problematically.
01:06:47.000The problem is, and this is where we fundamentally agree, the large majority of people who use marijuana do so responsibly and are not having a problem with it.
01:06:56.000And there's a huge number of people who use marijuana in a way that actually enhances their life.
01:07:00.000And there are many of them who find it preferable to using pharmaceutical medications or alcohol or things like that.
01:07:06.000There are people, I know brilliant intellectuals and academics, who've done some of their best work and come up with some of their best ideas under the influence of marijuana or psychedelics.
01:07:14.000So marijuana can be a huge positive in many people's life.
01:07:17.000It can be neither here nor there in some people, and for some people it's a negative.
01:07:21.000Including Carl Sagan, who was a huge proponent of marijuana.
01:07:24.000I think that the people that have issues with marijuana have issues.
01:07:29.000And that's one of the things that's been sort of dusted under the rug.
01:09:50.000All I know is something – sometimes you think it could be that something involving a friend of theirs, a kid of theirs, their own personal experience.
01:09:57.000I think it's something personal oftentimes.
01:10:00.000And with Jerry Brown, I've heard rumors with both governors that they used to smoke.
01:10:03.000I've never heard – I've heard other people say, oh, no, these guys are – Jerry Brown in California didn't used to smoke?
01:10:10.000But I mean, I got to tell you, Jerry- He's probably high right now.
01:10:11.000You talk to Jerry, I don't know, Jerry, you think, oh, marijuana's the downfall of American civilization, right?
01:10:15.000I mean, but there's a part of him- Is that what he says?
01:10:17.000He actually, he does say that, publicly and privately.
01:10:19.000And he actually seems to almost believe that at times.
01:10:22.000And I think the other part of his brain is smart enough to know it's ridiculous.
01:10:25.000But there's a lot of people who have had a negative encounter with marijuana.
01:10:29.000They've had a kid who started smoking weed and waking and baking and went out and got into bigger trouble with other drugs.
01:10:34.000And I think they just, this is bad, this is bad.
01:10:37.000Or there are people who've had experienced problems with alcohol in their family and they think if alcohol was that bad, weed's going to be even worse.
01:10:43.000I think there's still that irrational stuff driven oftentimes by knowing somebody or knowing of somebody where they associate marijuana with bad things having happened to that person.
01:10:53.000I think Jerry Brown's got a bigger problem in that no one even knows he's the governor.
01:10:57.000That guy became the governor of California after Arnold Schwarzenegger, and no one paid any attention.
01:11:02.000Literally, no one even knows he's the governor.
01:11:04.000You never fucking hear Governor Jerry Brown.
01:11:47.000And I actually, I mean, from New York, you know, it's funny.
01:11:49.000When I bumped in on a plane, we're chatting, and then we're making chit-chat as the plane lands, and he goes, how's that New York governor of yours doing, Cuomo?
01:12:25.000In 2008, when we had a ballot initiative that would have been the biggest prison reform ballot initiative in the history of America, and Jerry Brown was then the Attorney General, and he did everything he could to kill it.
01:12:40.000I think at that point, he wanted to run for governor.
01:12:42.000He wanted to have the prison guards behind him.
01:12:45.000The Prison Guards Union was making very clear that if they were going to be supported, he had to block this.
01:12:48.000They got every former governor and governor and gubernatorial candidates to get up and stand up against this.
01:12:54.000I got to tell you, if California passed that ballot initiative, Prop 5, back in 2008, it would have solved the big part of the prison problem in this state at that time.
01:13:07.000When I feel like a guy is doing for his own benefit, trying to block something that would be beneficial to people, especially recognizing that we have a huge issue with the prison industrial complex in this country, and the idea that we had privatized prisons in the first place, the idea that someone's profiting off of putting people in jail,
01:13:24.000and the idea that they're actively lobbying to make sure that there's more laws in place that are going to incarcerate people so that they can make more money, the idea that that's illegal, that drives I gotta tell you, between the prison guards union on the one hand and the private prison corporations on the other,
01:13:41.000I mean, just thank God they hate one another, the prison guards unions and the private prison corporations, because those guys have just been venal in that regard.
01:13:49.000Whenever you get money involved in anything, when you get money involved in pharmaceutical industries, when you get money involved in the marijuana thing with these five different corporations that are going to control all the pot, money.
01:14:03.000It is, but the basic idea, Joe, where you were saying before that you have a prison guards union that needs to keep the prisons full in order to pad their overtime pay, or that you have a prison corporations that are making money if more people get incarcerated,
01:14:19.000and they'll end up becoming advocates for laws that lock up more people, or advocates for opposing the reform of laws that are blocking up too many people.
01:14:26.000Look, being a prison guard is a shitty job.
01:14:28.000What those dudes need to do is grow weed.
01:14:33.000Prison Guards Union did not oppose the Marijuana Legalization Initiative in 2010. Really?
01:14:38.000Yeah, and I think the reason is, I think there's two reasons.
01:14:41.000I think one is, marijuana prohibition sends a lot of people to local jails, but not that many to state prison.
01:14:47.000But the second reason is, if you're a prison guard and you're living in the middle of God knows where, you know, California, surrounded by nothingness, what do you want to do when you get home from work?
01:14:59.000In fact, my guess is the Prison Guards Union is like anybody else right now.
01:15:02.000They probably got members of their union who are medical marijuana patients and dealing with state laws that probably prohibit their using marijuana.
01:15:09.000Do you think that with the current climate that we have with social media and the ability to distribute information and when outrageous laws are trying to get passed, you can tweet them and Facebook them and people find out about them and there's online petitions.
01:15:29.000Is lending itself more to transparency and this transparency is beneficial to getting these more rational laws passed or more rational ideas promoted?
01:15:45.000It means that the ability of young people to express themselves to legislators, the fact that more and more legislators pay attention to Facebook and Twitter and things like that, I think that's generally good for us.
01:16:13.000An absolute humanitarian and social and racial nightmare, right?
01:16:28.000It's flaca or bath salts or synthetic cannabis or blah, blah, blah.
01:16:32.000And then there's this knee-jerk reaction, like, you know, criminalize first, ask questions later, right?
01:16:37.000And that's the thing we're still dealing with, that people will begin to come to their senses about more sensible policies, and then they get scared.
01:16:45.000And when they get scared, they do dumb things and pass bad laws.
01:16:49.000That's interesting, because things like bath salts only exist because what we would call, quote-unquote, legitimate drugs are illegal.
01:16:56.000So you find a workaround What's the market for synthetic cannabis?
01:17:01.000Most of that has to do with the fact that people are worried about drug testing for marijuana.
01:18:14.000And it actually has, like, flavonoids in it, and, you know, like, vegetable proteins, or, you know, what are the properties of vegetables that are healthy, like...
01:18:25.000Phytonutrients like different like it's actually good for you.
01:18:28.000You're chewing green vegetables 20 years ago the World Health Organization organized a global study of coca and cocaine they had experts from 19 countries and after this extensive survey what they found were two things one was that the vast majority of people who use cocaine sniff cocaine whatever did not have a problem with it were not addicted to it even though there was obviously a minority who had a big problem and The second thing they found was that the chewing of coca leaf by the Indians probably had a net benefit from a health perspective for exactly the reasons
01:18:59.000There were vitamins in the leaves that they were consuming.
01:19:02.000When you chew coca leaf during the day, you're consuming essentially the equivalent of a few lines of cocaine, which over the course of a day is like having a few cups of coffee in a way, right?
01:19:12.000And what they found is the only downside was that to release the cocaine from the coca leaf, you had to add a little lime, and the lime could hurt, I think, something in the cheek.
01:19:56.000If you look at the 10 to 20 million kids, teenage boys in America taking Ritalin or these other things so they can focus better in school, some of them being prescribed it appropriately, others not, that's essentially the same as amphetamine or methamphetamine.
01:20:10.000And the methamphetamine that people are smoking and getting in trouble with, if you take that in an oral form, like a pill, it's essentially indistinguishable from the Ritalin the kids are taking in schools.
01:20:19.000You know, I was reading an article on sugar and the negative aspects of sugar, of processed sugar, and how much of it is in our diets and how much of it is in things that you don't even consider.
01:20:29.000And that's really essentially the same thing when you're talking about extracting it from fruits.
01:20:33.000Because everybody agrees that eating fruits is healthy.
01:20:35.000And that's, you know, I mean, when you're eating bananas and you're eating apples and oranges, why does it taste good?
01:20:44.000But those natural sugars, when you get them in that form with the fiber, with the plant itself, with the vegetable itself, is actually good for you.
01:20:59.000And that the ability of the sort of food producing corporations and their, you know, science and their ability to produce products that kind of, you know, hit that part of the brain in a way that sort of is beyond your capacity.
01:21:11.000When they look at the explosion of obesity and people being overweight in America and many other parts of the world, part of that is about the parts ability of food producing companies to produce products that hit that part of the brain.
01:21:22.000I remember Chris Rock, he at one point doing a routine, and he was talking about Krispy Kreme donuts.
01:21:28.000And he goes, I found the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme donuts.
01:21:34.000But in point of fact, if you think about it, I remember walking past the Krispy Kreme donut outlet when they first opened up, and you could not walk past it without this part of your brain twitching.
01:21:43.000In the same way that somebody who's addicted to drugs gets a twitch when all of a sudden they smell or see that drug in place.
01:21:49.000So the power of those substances, their psychoactive properties, we're used to them.
01:21:54.000These are powerful drugs we know and love.
01:21:56.000But in point of fact, if you ask what's doing more harm to the health of Americans today, sugar, refined sugar, or cocaine or heroin, could well be refined sugar.
01:22:08.000Well, there's an article, like I said, that I was reading that was...
01:22:11.000They were making the argument that it's a toxin.
01:22:14.000They were saying, essentially, sugar is a very common toxin that people consume.
01:22:18.000But as you say, when it's consumed in natural forms, or for that matter, consumed in moderation, no big deal.
01:22:24.000But when you're taking large amounts, we see all the...
01:23:37.000I travel a lot, and my one nightmare is sitting next to somebody who's just kind of double-sized, and all of a sudden part of them's in my seat.
01:24:19.000Well, Ralphie's had a couple of surgeries.
01:24:21.000I think he's had at least two of those lap band things and he blows through them.
01:24:24.000I know several people who've had that operation broke whatever they fixed.
01:24:31.000You know, like they shrink your stomach down and then you wind up having to go back and having another operation because you're stretching this tiny new stomach out too much.
01:24:41.000Because it's a psychological issue more than it is even a physical issue.
01:24:46.000It's the same thing when you're talking about people that abuse marijuana.
01:24:49.000Well, is it marijuana that's causing you to do that, or is it some underlying trauma that you're trying to smother with food, with sugar, with pot, with alcohol, with whatever the fuck it is?
01:25:00.000It seems like this psychological issue is as much of a factor as the physical addiction.
01:25:06.000There can be no doubt there are physical addictions to food and sugar, but what is really going on there that's overwhelming your life and making you indulge in it?
01:25:16.000What some people would say, and I think there's really something to this, is that if we have an epidemic of anything in our country and maybe in many modern societies, it's pain.
01:25:28.000And it's a combination of pain that sometimes manifests physically, but actually has to do with emotional pain and a sense of emptiness, and that food and psychoactive drugs are ways of filling this sort of stuff.
01:25:40.000I mean, I will tell you that we were talking about, you know, back pain and all this sort of stuff before and about the overuse of opioids.
01:25:47.000Probably back in the early 90s, two things happened to me in short order that really affected, really powerfully affected my understanding of the mind-body relationship.
01:25:56.000The first one was doing MDMA for the first time.
01:25:58.000And that was sort of just kind of not just mind opening, but opening of my consciousness around mind-body consciousness.
01:26:04.000But the second one was I had gone through three terrible episodes of back pain and sciatica.
01:26:11.000And, you know, I got MRIs and CAT scans, and I had the herniated discs, the L4-L5, L5-S1, the whole sort of thing.
01:26:17.000I was 48 hours away from being operated on, you know, and surgery was risky.
01:26:22.000And then I called a friend of mine, Andy Weil, Dr. Andrew Weil, who's a well-known integrative medicine guy, and he said, don't get the surgery.
01:26:29.000He said, go see this doctor, this guy named John Sarno at the NYU Institute.
01:26:44.000And his theory is that what's really going on is that there's nothing physically wrong with your body, that there's underlying emotional anger, angst, whatever it might be, and that your brain plays a trick by turning this emotional pain into physical pain.
01:26:58.000And it does that through a process of reducing the flow of blood around those nerves and muscles, etc.
01:27:03.000So without going on with this, this approach, Sarno approach, worked for me.
01:27:07.000I went from having this horrific pain to sort of coming out of it very quickly, being able to pick up my little daughter again, do the sports I used to do, and seeing myself as having a totally healthy back.
01:27:19.000That it's not just lower back pain and sciatica.
01:27:24.000His stuff is 90% supported by the science on this stuff, more than any other theory of this stuff.
01:27:31.000But his thing is that a lot of pain is probably underlying emotional pain being turned into physical pain.
01:27:37.000And then we deal with that through food, through alcohol, through opiates, whatever it might be.
01:27:41.000And the reason why we land up getting in such trouble with drugs or with food is because we're trying to address this underlying almost existential pain, not by dealing with what's really causing it, but by trying to feed it things that we think will cover it over.
01:27:55.000Now, if Sarno's right, and I can't prove he's right, but based upon my own personal experience and my reading and my understanding of what's going on with drugs and food in this country, I think there's a lot there.
01:28:06.000Well, Sarno's certainly has some really good points, but there are definitely some physical aspects to numbness and bulging discs impeding on nerves and atrophy, like atrophied limbs, which is a big problem with athletes that have nerve issues where bulging discs push down on nerves and it actually cuts the nerve supply to the muscles themselves and cause them to atrophy.
01:28:30.000I think it's very important, though, that you recognize, and that everybody hearing this recognizes, that there are legitimate injuries that you have where your discs bulge out and impinge on nerves, and you need to get that treated.
01:28:43.000And there's a bunch of different ways to treat that that don't involve surgery.
01:28:49.000Another one is decompression, because I've gone through all this.
01:28:53.000I've had some serious bulging disc injuries from jujitsu, and I've had MRIs that show this issue, and I've dealt with all of it without surgery.
01:29:02.000So it can be done, but I think it's important to see.
01:29:05.000There are people that have legitimate injuries.
01:29:15.000See, part of what Sarno points out is that now that we have MRIs and CAT scans being done commonly in our society, that if you take 100 people who are showing that they have herniated discs, right, and you have 100 people who are showing no herniated discs, you'll have the same incidence of back pain.
01:29:32.000What he'll show is that the evidence that when you see that, that people assume there's a causal relationship between that MRI or CAT scan of the herniated disc and that lower back pain.
01:29:41.000Now, it could be that you've had a serious injury, right?
01:29:43.000You've been hit by a car, you've been in a sports injury, where there really is something going on there.
01:29:47.000But for many people, There's not a serious injury.
01:29:50.000There's some little thing that kind of triggers it, but then somehow it transforms in this.
01:29:54.000And then he looks at people who live in other societies where lower back pain and sciatica are not sort of accepted reasons for missing days of work or all this sort of stuff.
01:30:02.000And he finds much lower incidence of these pain, right?
01:30:05.000And the same thing, look at the carpal tunnel thing.
01:30:08.000I mean, people have been using typewriters forever and ever and ever.
01:30:11.000And all of a sudden we have this epidemic of this thing, right?
01:30:13.000And then somehow that epidemic begins to fade and is replaced by something else.
01:30:17.000Well, let's hold on a second there, because carpal tunnel is real, and one of the reasons for carpal tunnel is repetitive stress.
01:30:23.000And repetitive stress causes inflammation, and inflammation locks up.
01:30:26.000When you're forced to sit at a keyboard in the same position over and over again and repeatedly do the same exercises, you absolutely do put undue stress on your hands and on your wrists.
01:30:35.000And if you're not prepared for it, if your body's not conditioned and you're not a rigorous person, you can have real issues with it.
01:30:42.000My mom had to have surgery for carpal tunnel.
01:30:46.000But then raise the question, we had in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, tens of millions of American, mostly women, who were typing eight hours a day, 12 hours a day.
01:30:55.000Well, first of all, you couldn't type as fast because there was a whole reason why the QWERTY method was invented to keep the keys from binding up because now we don't need that because you have your fingers just gently touch these things.
01:32:00.000I'm no expert on all that sort of stuff, Joe, so I don't know.
01:32:02.000I'll say that my takeaway from going through that pain experience and all the reading I've done on this thing is that when it comes to treating certain forms of chronic pain like this, that the approach that works best is the one that one most believes in.
01:32:16.000Whether it's chiropractic, whether it's yoga, whether it's Sarno, whether it's surgery, the reason why surgery tends to have the most immediate benefit right away is because surgery is effectively the most powerful placebo there is.
01:32:30.000But when you see research that's showing that three years after people who have had back surgery are as likely to have a back problem as the people who did not have the surgery, you have to start questioning the evidence around some of that surgery.
01:32:40.000Well, actually, it's because of lifestyle choices.
01:32:42.000I mean, if you think about a person who has surgery for a back issue and then three years later they have more issues, most likely they're living their life in the exact same way, which means they're putting the same stresses on their body they were doing before, like sitting at a desk all day or doing something, like you're picking stuff up.
01:32:58.000Folks that work in the warehouses and things along those lines, you have to pick stuff up all the time and your body's not conditioned for it, so you have repetitive stress in that regard.
01:33:07.000You know, you may be right, that could be it, and that certainly can trigger the pain, but I'm gonna tell you, having been through the Sarno experience and have met many people since that for whom it worked, I think, and because the Sarno approach, if it works for you, is one where you get to see your body as whole once again and not as vulnerable,
01:33:27.000and because it pushes you to deal with underlying emotional stuff that may be driving some of this physical pain, I mean, for all those reasons, I think—my view is, when people ask me, and I'll say, read Sarno's book, you know, on back pain, right, or healing back pain, and I'll say, if it doesn't make sense to you,
01:33:43.000But the thing about the Sarno thing is, if it does work for you, it's in some respects the most miraculous of all time.
01:33:49.000Well, I think the Sarno approach is a great approach, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive to taking care of your body in a physical sense.
01:33:55.000I think that most people just don't take care of their body in a physical sense.
01:34:00.000I think exercise and especially treating your core as if it is the foundation of your body, something that supports you all day long, your back.
01:34:08.000You know, there's very few people work out their back in a sense of like long static exercises like yoga where you're holding poses for 30 seconds.
01:34:17.000You know, and doing one after the other and doing it over a course of like a night.
01:35:23.000And that walking is one of the safest, even for people who don't want to take out the time to exercise because walking is the way we get places.
01:35:30.000It turns out that we end up to live relatively healthy lives in a place like Manhattan, notwithstanding all the craziness.
01:35:35.000I mean, what are you doing when you're walking?
01:35:37.000What do you weigh, 180 pounds or something like that?
01:35:39.000You're carrying that 180 pounds around, whereas that amount of energy and that amount of calorie expenditure is lost if you're sitting in the car, driving to work, getting in an elevator, going to your office, sitting in your cubicle.
01:35:54.000And it's probably thousands of calories a day.
01:35:58.000You're also making me think about, when I remember my experience with MDMA, you know, how there are some people when they do MDMA and they just like to sit and get in a place.
01:36:09.000And other people like me just want to move, move around, you know, get the energy going and such, you know.
01:36:14.000I also found sometimes, you know, we talk about going back to the whole mushroom thing.
01:36:18.000I remember feeling, especially, sometimes the mushrooms, you take them and they start to come on.
01:36:22.000And I can find, like, it's like this energy force going into your body.
01:36:25.000And in some ways, the best way to deal with that stuff is movement.
01:36:32.000Like, opening up your body to let that powerful energy in.
01:36:34.000Yeah, I think there's a lot of tension that people carry around their bodies where their bodies just aren't being used correctly or they're bunched up or they're not stretched out and they're confined and bound up and they have poor posture and then the stress of life and bills and all the things that are weighing down on you.
01:36:49.000I think in that sense Sarno's got an excellent point that pressure and stress and pain and just frustration just causes you to be tense and everything is fucked up and if you can address that and sort of relax a little bit, Just that alone just will alleviate a lot of tension,
01:37:05.000and that's a lot of what people carry around them.
01:37:07.000That's also a lot of what people like about pot.
01:37:10.000Like you said, how we like to smoke pot and stretch out.
01:37:39.000Look, I mean, I work in an office a lot of the time, and it's just so easy.
01:37:42.000You get in that zone, you're in front of that computer, that's what you're doing, you know, and all of a sudden you realize your shoulders are gone.
01:37:48.000When you're carrying, especially if you have bad posture, you're carrying it.
01:37:51.000Like if you're sitting, like when I had my back injury, which was sports related, but when I started getting treatment for it, I realized there's a lot of other underlying issues.
01:38:01.000And one of them is, if you're sitting in a desk and you have poor posture, the strain, there's been a lot of studies done on this, the strain is in a very specific area.
01:38:10.000So instead of being straight, where your back Is carrying the weight in an even form through, you know, the top of your head all the way down to your lower back.
01:38:20.000You're causing this undue spot, this weird spot in the middle by slumping where you get all this pressure in this one area that really shouldn't be there.
01:38:29.000And over time, like cab drivers that have a thick wallet and they keep it in their back pocket and they sit on there, they develop bulging discs in their back.
01:38:38.000It's just the slow water that causes the rock to go smooth.
01:38:44.000I mean, for me, the thing I've learned from so many people, and it's basically the kind of common ingredient in almost all spiritual practices, meditative practice, is just simple deep breathing, right?
01:38:55.000Because just having to fill your lungs, it just forces you to have to sit up all of a sudden.
01:39:01.000If you want to fill your lungs, and that breathing, just the slow breathing gets one to focus, To center.
01:39:08.000I mean, I know that when I'm stressed, oftentimes rather than just grabbing a drug, because I think that's the wrong way to use drugs.
01:39:13.000Just trying to remember, take a breath.
01:39:16.000Try to take five breaths, ten breaths, slowly, in and out.
01:39:19.000And that's one of the best centering things there are.
01:39:22.000Well, you know, I've been teaching that to my five-year-old.
01:39:25.000I kind of taught her when she was three.
01:39:27.000We started talking about it, like she would get upset, like something would happen, like she would, like, stub her toe, or not even like a big deal, like hurt, or something would, something would get her upset, and she would cry, and when she was crying, and then I felt down, and I'd be like, you gotta breathe in and breathe out.
01:39:50.000It's hard for them because they're they're hyperventilating and but it made me realize like well That's a lot of people that go through that with issues in life You know you have some incredibly stressful issue and it just overwhelms you And you take this shallow panicky breath and you know It's one thing when a three-year-old doesn't know how to deal with you know hurting herself or falling down or whatever what is it made her upset but When an adult,
01:40:15.000you know, gets to 50 years old and they still don't know how to deal with stress, it's kind of a tragedy.
01:40:22.000Well, we don't really teach that in our society in any way.
01:40:25.000You know, it's interesting, my niece has just started medical school and I was asking her what she was thinking, specialty she was thinking about, and I was saying to her that I think if I had ever decided to pursue medicine instead of what I did do, I think the single most fascinating area of medicine right now is pain management.
01:40:42.000It is the most interdisciplinary of all areas because it requires you to understand physical pain, requires you to understand pharmaceuticals and, you know, biochemistry.
01:40:52.000But it also requires that element of understanding things like breathing and exercise and the body.
01:40:58.000And it's that area, I mean, the pain is such, physical pain is such an epidemic in America today for all these reasons.
01:41:07.000You and I are giving different reasons and agreeing on a lot of it.
01:41:09.000But I think that becoming a more thoughtful and sophisticated society in terms of how we deal with this, how we alleviate it, how we prevent it.
01:41:17.000And doing so in a way in which the government is playing a positive role as opposed to a destructive role.
01:41:23.000Because right now, right, the role of the government vis-a-vis physicians who want to properly deal with pain management is intimidating them and scaring them.
01:41:31.000The way in which the pharmaceutical companies drive what drugs people have means that oftentimes people don't have access to the things they need.
01:41:38.000Meanwhile, the failure to think about The importance of breathing in our society, of posture, the things you're talking about, exercise, is another element of all this sort of stuff.
01:41:47.000And on some level, I think, you know, look, a lot of the drug problem has to do with issues of race and class and stuff like that, but a lot of it also has to do with this kind of pervasive sense of pain, physical and emotional pain, that people are trying to treat in all sorts of ways.
01:42:03.000I think it's also the requirements of life are really unnatural.
01:42:08.000The life that we've set up for ourselves, the requirements of managing bills and dealing with taxes and dealing with the stress of marriage and the nonsense that comes with divorce and the chaos that comes with all sorts of different aspects of our life.
01:42:25.000And then the existential angst of your own mortality.
01:42:28.000Compounding every day that the futility of getting up every morning when you want to stay in bed The alarm goes off hit that fucking button you get up and you put your fucking clothes on just like every other day And you drink your coffee and you do your rituals and you go to a job that you find unsatisfying That is the vast majority of Americans and I'm probably of people in the world I think that you live a fulfilling life.
01:42:51.000You're doing what you enjoy doing, and I'm very lucky to feel the same way.
01:42:54.000But I think that we're in the minority, and I think there's a large amount of people out there that are longing for something better than what they have.
01:43:02.000Whether it's a better relationship, or it's a better connection to their family, or it's a better, some rewarding thing to do with their time.
01:43:08.000Well, you see, I mean, part of that explains why more and more people are seeking out the church, whether it's evangelical churches or other types of things.
01:43:16.000I mean, look, you see those numbers growing, these megachurches that are happening, and you see other...
01:43:20.000But I think that the numbers of people that are involved in organized religion are actually dropping.
01:43:24.000I think the ones who are going to the conventional churches, the more mainstream churches and synagogues, that's what's dropping.
01:43:30.000The ones who are being drawn to evangelical ones, the ones where they sort of are more attentive to bringing the spirit and the body into the practice of religion, right?
01:43:39.000Many of these evangelical churches, you know, you dance, you move, you do all this sort of stuff.
01:43:44.000I think people doing the same thing in the world that we know of psychedelics and doing these things.
01:43:48.000People want to link their body, their mind, their spirit, community.
01:43:54.000Look at millions of people, young people now, going to sort of the whole kind of dance world, the nightlife world, all that stuff.
01:44:01.000Same thing, that kind of almost collective, quasi-religious, communitarian feeling of letting go in the company of others.
01:44:09.000I think people are so much want and need that.
01:44:12.000And it's a good thing for people to do that, to the extent it's not hurting other people or people not getting hurt in the process.
01:44:18.000And that's another—one thing we started at Drug Policy Alliance is a whole project on trying to keep young people safe as they're in this whole nightlife situation.
01:44:26.000People are taking all these drugs, they're doing things, sometimes they're drinking too much, they're overheating, and people get hurt.
01:44:32.000And the question is, young people going out and enjoying themselves for hours or days, listening to music, being one another, moving, drinking, and even doing mind-altering drugs can be a perfectly healthy and good and even liberating thing, good for their lives.
01:44:45.000But we need to make sure it's being done safe.
01:44:48.000That notion of making the Our society is as safe as possible for people to open up and let go.
01:44:55.000Whether it's with or without drugs, I think is something we have to evolve towards.
01:45:00.000But I also think that the issue is that we haven't built a foundation of stability in these people up to this point where they're taking these drugs.
01:45:10.000I mean their their foundation is fucked up there You know, there's so much going on outside of that they need to take care of before they just dive into the world of psychedelics That's one of the reasons why people have bad trips.
01:45:25.000You're resisting all the things that these drugs are exposing you put these blinders on gone through this life and whether it's childhood trauma or You know, unfulfilled expectations that are haunting you, whatever it is that is causing the quote unquote bad trip,
01:45:40.000a lot of what that is is resisting the message that these boundary dissolving experiences are giving you.
01:45:53.000You're unhappy in almost like a cellular level and that it's not as simple as just like diving in and having a mushroom trip and it's all going to clear out.
01:46:03.000You've got to deal with the foundation of your own personality.
01:46:20.000Look, just stand on any corner and see the number of people walking around looking at their, you know, little gadget, looking at their Facebook, looking at this or whatever, right?
01:46:29.000People are interacting with the world in an entirely different way.
01:46:32.000And then, of course, the way society is evolving so quickly.
01:46:35.000You know, entrepreneurial folks can thrive, but for huge numbers of people, there's no sense of security about what the economy, the society, is going to be like in the future.
01:46:44.000I mean, we are kind of hurtling into the future.
01:46:47.000Artificial intelligence is going all sorts of crazy places.
01:46:50.000All sorts of jobs are being displaced by robotics and things like that.
01:46:54.000So, you know, I'm talking with my daughter, who's now about to be 27, and, you know, the world is...
01:47:04.000The pace of change is so remarkable in this regard, and there's so few guides, and the ability of the parental world to play a constructive role.
01:47:12.000First of all, many parents aren't that good as parents, or they're not that good at helping young people, you know?
01:47:18.000But beyond that, they're so disconnected sometimes from what's going on for, you know, kids growing up in a whole different way, right?
01:47:24.000I think when I was growing up in the 60s, in the early 70s, you know, the pace of change was so much slower then than it is now, right?
01:47:32.000I don't know what the cure to all that stuff is.
01:47:35.000Yeah, I think we're gonna have to adapt to this new world where people are getting information at such a staggering rate that you gotta decide how to manage it.
01:47:43.000And you know, some, like my friend Ari, Ari Shafir, he switched to a flip phone.
01:47:47.000He's like, fuck this, I can't do this anymore.
01:47:49.000Because he would say, he would tell me that he would get up in the morning and then he would spend like a half an hour going over Facebook and going over all this and that before he ever got anything done.
01:48:52.000I've backed off way hard over the last few months.
01:48:57.000Over the last few months, I very rarely even go on my own message board.
01:49:01.000I have a message board on my website that I've had since 1998, and I go on there occasionally and check to see what's going on in the news or what people are talking about or debating and this and that.
01:49:11.000I find it to be, there's a massive requirement of time to check all these different things, to check Facebook and Twitter and then there's social media, there's websites that I visit, there's message boards that I visit, different websites that aggregate news stories and it's just too much.
01:49:30.000I back way off of it over the last I try to stick with the discipline that there will be at least once or a few times a year where I will go into a total blackout on any communication using that gadget.
01:49:44.000I did a vacation a few years ago for seven days where I did not pick up my laptop, computer, even my phone, you know, nothing, right?
01:49:54.000And, you know, for the first day or two, my hand was, like, fidgeting, you know, like it was going through withdrawal from that whole sort of thing.
01:50:00.000But I have to say, I got to day six, and I had achieved a level of calm that I associated with, like, you know, bodding surfing as a 12-year-old on the beach.
01:50:29.000Well, I certainly don't think that we're designed to deal with the influx of information and the opinions of other people thrown at you en masse like we get with social media.
01:50:41.000I just think it's too much, and I think it's very addictive.
01:51:03.000And I don't think we're designed, even media, I think just movies and songs.
01:51:08.000There's a bunch of people running around out there that don't have a realistic view of human beings.
01:51:13.000Because their view of human beings is based on heroes in movies and songs playing when people talk.
01:51:19.000Everybody either acts nobly or they act obviously evil.
01:51:23.000It's like these ideas of human beings are shaped by fiction.
01:51:27.000And when people are doing that, you're getting, as opposed to reading, reading novels as I did when I was younger but barely do today, you get a much more deeper and nuanced sense of human beings by reading novels than you possibly can by watching a movie or by watching a thing, right?
01:51:42.000Same thing with body shapes, body consciousness, all the ways in which that's so screwed up in our society, once again shaped by the media.
01:51:48.000I mean, I'm trying to do my few little disciplines, like trying not to look at my phone over the last hour before I go to sleep, because they say you sleep better if you don't do that.
01:51:58.000You know, just trying to find some space, some time, trying to turn off the ringer, you know, more often.
01:52:04.000Just some way of carving out that space.
01:52:06.000Yeah, I think that that's a good thing.
01:52:08.000It's a good thing to manage what's coming in.
01:52:11.000It's a very good thing to manage what's coming in because you just can't rely on all these other people to have access and to be able to input into your own mind.
01:52:40.000And he's using this as a vehicle, like a whiny baby, screaming out for attention.
01:52:45.000And oftentimes that squeaky wheel does get the grease.
01:52:47.000No, I say, I don't even read a lot of that stuff that shows up on various, you know, public outlets when I, when I speeches go up on YouTube or stuff like that.
01:52:56.000The other thing, of course, there's a power dynamic here, which is that for people who work for somebody, the risk that we're moving into society where your boss or your employer expects you to be accessible.
01:53:08.000So I let my staff all know at Derrick Halls the Alliance, if they get an email from me on a weekend, which they might because I sometimes work on weekends, there is no obligation and no expectation that they answer that thing until Monday.
01:53:19.000Just so people know there's a sense of space.
01:53:22.000I have a friend who goes to work on Monday, and his boss will get pissed at him if he doesn't answer emails from the night before.
01:53:30.000Like, he'll get an email at night, and he's like, why didn't you respond to that email?
01:53:34.000And he's like, look, I came home, I want to spend time with my family.
01:54:09.000If you've been up all night because you were in pain or having a fight with your wife or your kid was sick, that may affect work performance.
01:54:17.000But the fact that you smoked a joint on a Saturday or did something else and you're fine on a Monday, none of their damn business.
01:54:22.000This is ultimately about sovereignty of our own minds and bodies, right?
01:54:26.000I mean, the core principle right here is that we are all sovereign over our own minds and bodies and that my boss, my government has no power to tell me what I do to my own body, you know, or my own mind so long as I am not hurting another soul.
01:54:39.000That has to be the core principle of a free society.
01:54:42.000Not only that, it's the same sort of argument in respect to doing crimes when you're on these drugs.
01:54:48.000Like, the crimes themselves are the issue, and the punishment should be in relation to the crimes.
01:54:54.000It should have absolutely nothing to do with what substance caused you to do the crimes.
01:54:59.000My view on this thing is that if you use drugs and you don't hurt another soul, that's none of the government's business.
01:55:04.000If you use drugs and you go out and hurt somebody, well, the fact that you use drugs or that you were addicted, you have to be held just as accountable.
01:55:14.000Somebody's drug addiction cannot be an excuse that will allow them to do harm to others.
01:55:18.000That said, and there's a little position in the middle, that if a judge, in his wisdom, or somebody else decides that you hurt this person and it was driven by your drug addiction and decides that you should go to some treatment program instead of jail because that's better for you and better for society, then that might be the reasonable compromise.
01:55:35.000But ultimately, people need to be held responsible for their actions as it affects other people.
01:55:44.000But it's very difficult to leave that in the hands of the judges, because when you let judges impose their own moral ideas and attach their own...
01:55:52.000I mean, there's been so many instances just really recently, there was a guy who got in a fight with his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and beat him up, and the judge told him that if he didn't want to go to jail, he had to marry the girl.
01:56:06.000And here's another one where this young boy, he's 19 years old, he was on this social media application, I think it's called Hot or Not, where someone decides whether or not they think you're hot.
01:56:18.000So he contacts this girl, she's 17, goes and drives to her house, has sex with her.
01:56:23.000Turns out she's 14. So now he's locked up, they put him in this database as a sex offender, I read about this.
01:56:31.000Yeah, and one of the judge's statements is that sex should be something that people do when they're in love, and that it should be this very important thing, this sacred thing.
01:56:42.000And you shouldn't be involved in these social media things where you just go around fucking each other.
01:56:50.000I gotta tell you, for Drug Policy Alliance, the problem of drug court judges...
01:56:54.000I mean, some of these guys are doing the Lord's work, but so many of them are simply imposing their own moralistic views about drug use.
01:57:00.000They're telling people, okay, I won't send you to prison as long as you're clean and sober for the rest of your life, for as long as you're under my supervision.
01:57:06.000And if somebody wants to smoke a joint, that then becomes a basis for taking away their freedom.
01:57:09.000So there's something fundamentally wrong with assuming that judges who are not trained in these areas, who have their own biases and prejudices, should be determining how people live a life when they haven't done anything to hurt anybody else.
01:57:21.000Well, it comes down to human beings being put in positions of power over other human beings.
01:57:27.000And once you can dictate what happens to that person's freedom, that's an intoxicating feeling to a lot of these guys or gals.
01:57:35.000And they just choose to impose their own viewpoints on that person because they can.
01:57:41.000Because that's how they get their rocks off.
01:57:44.000That's how they avoid their own existential angst.
01:57:47.000That's how they avoid their own depression, by imposing power.
01:57:58.000The most venal of all the actors, but we're talking about the role in which money is driving the prison industrial complex and what you're saying about judges.
01:58:05.000The worst of all the actors are the prosecutors.
01:58:08.000Those guys, because it's all about power.
01:58:42.000It's not that you were incorrect in assuming that he had broken the law and should be punished by the laws of our society, by the rules that we've agreed to govern ourselves by.
01:59:07.000Why does America have the highest incarceration rate in the world?
01:59:11.000Why do we have the highest incarceration rate of any democratic society in history?
01:59:15.000Why do we lack up more black people at a rate that far exceeds the rates of incarceration in the Soviet gulags of the 30s, 40s, and 50s?
01:59:22.000In part, it's because we have an adversarial system that's fundamentally broken, and where the cops and the prosecutors drive this thing overwhelmingly, and where if you are the typical person in that system who doesn't have money to hire a good lawyer, stuff like that, you are going to be reamed, and you're going to be caught in a system where you may never escape it.
02:00:11.000Because in California, you've got the sheriffs who are the ones trying to build new jails and keep marijuana illegal and all this sort of stuff.
02:00:17.000That gross engorgement of power in the hands of people whose job it is to take away people's freedom is And to use no judgment in the ways they do that, or minimal judgment, and the presumption that if you violate a law, you have to lose your freedom, that's what screwed things up so badly in our society.
02:00:33.000That's the movement we're trying to build to end.
02:00:36.000And on that, Joe, I've got to go to my next meeting.