Pastor Robert Morris has officially stepped down after being accused of sexually molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s. Also, we are talking about weed, the effects of weed, and how the Cairns who stand against things like weed are in fact the sentinels of our civilization.
00:00:00.000Mega Church Pastor Robert Morris has officially stepped down after being accused of sexually molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s.
00:00:10.060Also today, we are talking about weed, the effects of weed, the consequences of legalizing weed,
00:00:16.360and how the Cairns who stand against things like weed are, in fact, the sentinels of our civilization.
00:00:24.820This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
00:00:27.180Go to GoodRanchers.com, use code ALI at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com, code ALI.
00:00:40.520Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday.
00:00:43.740Hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far.
00:00:48.300All right, I've got an update on the Pastor Robert Morris situation.
00:00:52.940We went in-depth on that incident yesterday, but there have been some developments.
00:01:00.020So just a quick recap for those of you who may have missed it.
00:01:03.160Gateway Church founder and pastor Robert Morris was accused by a woman named Cindy of molesting her in the 1980s when she was only 12 years old.
00:01:16.900She says that the abuse happened from age 12 to age 16, and she told her parents about it.
00:01:25.160Her dad went to the church leadership where Morris was a pastor at the time and said,
00:01:32.260if you do not remove him from ministry, I'm going to go to the police.
00:01:35.740As I said yesterday, he should have gone to the police because child molestation is not just a sin.
00:01:40.900It is a crime. It should be reported to civil authorities.
00:01:46.260Civil authorities gave us civil authorities in order to help keep evil in check.
00:01:52.600So that should have been the process there.
00:21:24.480They say that they're in jail because of weed, but really it was because they had cocaine on them
00:21:30.000or there was a much more serious crime and they have been pled down to that charge so they would get less time in jail.
00:21:37.960There aren't all of these people rotting away because they had like a little bit of marijuana on them.
00:21:44.140That's just a myth that you hear a lot.
00:21:46.860We're also talking about it because we have seen how it has harmed once beautiful cities like the city of Denver.
00:21:54.800They've got a weed shop on every corner and homelessness and poverty and crime and ER visits are all up.
00:22:05.420Now, you could say that's a correlation causation fallacy, but the timeline matches up a little too much for you to invoke that accusation, I would say.
00:22:31.140This includes its dried flowers, leaves, stems, and seeds.
00:22:34.300The plant contains over 500 chemical substances and CBD is one of those chemicals.
00:22:41.480Marijuana refers to the parts of or products from the cannabis sativa plant that contain substantial amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol.
00:22:51.920This is the main chemical, cannabinoid, that causes mind-altering effects, makes you feel high.
00:23:00.560Marijuana is one of the most used drugs in the U.S., particularly among young adults.
00:23:05.200In 2021, 35.4 percent, that's crazy, of people aged 18 to 25.
00:23:11.58011.8 million people reported using marijuana in the past year.
00:23:15.760Scientifically, there are many unknowns regarding marijuana.
00:23:19.940Researchers are still studying the long-term and short-term effects of the substance.
00:23:24.620Scientists have historically classified marijuana as a hallucinogen.
00:23:28.380However, not all instances of marijuana use cause hallucinogen-like effects like LSD and ecstasy.
00:23:35.080The FDA, which I understand we don't trust the FDA on everything for a good reason, but they classify marijuana as a Schedule I substance.
00:23:43.180This means that it has no currently accepted medical uses and a high potential for addiction.
00:23:48.100The Biden admin is currently working to make it a lower-tier substance, Schedule II.
00:23:54.260Of course, they are, because the Biden administration is hell-bent on the destruction of American society and everything that is good, right, true, and healthy they are going to oppose.
00:24:06.620Cannabis is currently legal in 24 states for recreational use.
00:25:31.960You cannot tell me that it makes someone more put together and more successful, more sober-minded, more caring and considerate, a better citizen, a harder worker, a better mom or dad.
00:25:49.160Like, you should be able to go to a park, even in a city, walk downtown with your kids in a stroller without worrying about being absolutely oppressed by a wall of the smell of weed.
00:27:02.160A study published in May, led by researchers from the University of Toronto, found an 11 times higher risk of developing a psychotic disorder among teenagers who used cannabis compared with those who did not.
00:27:15.860When the analysis was limited to just emergency room visits and hospitalizations, there was a 27-fold increase in psychotic disorders in teenagers who had used the drug.
00:27:28.960When I see youths with psychotic symptoms, they're almost always using lots of cannabis, said Dr. Leslie Holvershorn, a child psychiatrist and chair of the psychiatry department at Indiana University who was not involved with the study.
00:27:51.360So she has seen this so much that she says she almost never sees a child, a young person come in with some kind of psychotic episode going on who wasn't smoking weed.
00:28:04.160The new research published in the respected journal Psychological Medicine includes data from over 11,000 teens and young adults who are ages 12 to 24 at the beginning of the study.
00:28:15.240The authors polled from the annual Canadian Community Health Survey focusing on 2009 to 2012.
00:28:23.600The participants were followed for up to nine years after the initial survey.
00:28:48.880Maybe mental health disorders have increased because of COVID.
00:28:51.900No, this goes a long way back, over 11,000 participants, apparently.
00:28:56.920Of the teens who were hospitalized or visited emergency rooms for psychotic disorders, roughly five in six have reported previous cannabis use.
00:29:06.460New York City psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Soltan says that in over the last decade of diagnosing countless young patients with new psychotic disorders,
00:29:14.220I can't think of a single one who wasn't also positive for cannabis.
00:29:20.080So this is another psychiatrist, another doctor saying the same thing as the Indiana University doctor said.
00:29:29.040While it's possible, this is according to that Dr. Holvershorn, while it's possible that teens who are prone to develop psychotic disorders could have also been more likely to use cannabis,
00:29:38.540it's unlikely because of how striking the association was.
00:29:43.340The magnitude of the effect here is just hard to believe, and it's not related that it's not related to cannabis.
00:29:49.320There was no association between cannabis use and psychotic disorders in people ages 20 to 33 in this particular study.
00:29:57.140So it's really talking about those formative years when the brain is still so rapidly developing.
00:30:05.080Again, that's in this particular study, by the way.
00:30:08.100That doesn't mean that those psychotic disorders are not more likely in that adult range, but in this study, they were proven more likely in the teenage range.
00:30:17.320This study really puts a fine point on delaying cannabis use in your 20s until your 20s may mitigate one of the most potentially serious risks.
00:30:32.680Kind of worded weirdly, but you understand.
00:30:35.440Nearly one in three 12th graders reported using it in the previous year, according to the 2023 Monitoring the Future survey.
00:30:44.560Wow. One in three 12th graders, y'all.
00:30:48.380I don't even know if I knew what weed was when I was in high school.
00:31:56.660But we had a 24-7 policy at our school that if you were caught at any point, at any time in the year, at any time of the day,
00:32:07.140having sex, drinking, or doing drugs, you would be expelled from school.
00:32:13.660That was the kind of Christian school that I grew up in.
00:32:17.720And even though that was not the thing that stopped me from doing those things, I just wasn't in that crowd.
00:32:24.680Of course, I had very involved, and I would say, I would have said at the time, strict parents who gave me a curfew and cared about where I was and put rules in place that I know that I thought at the time were absolutely ridiculous.
00:32:38.120And so I was protected in a lot of ways.
00:32:39.920But I guarantee you, for some students whose parents weren't as involved in their lives, that 24-7 policy stopped them from doing drugs and drinking, partying, having premarital sex in high school.
00:32:56.140And so you can laugh at that rule all you want to.
00:32:59.740I guarantee you, though, that at least for some, and probably even more so today, that rule protected teenagers from smoking weed and dealing with suffering from these psychotic side effects that are now being discovered through these scientific studies.
00:33:23.220So my lesson there is, parents, don't be afraid to be involved in your kid's life, to care about where they're going, to care about who they're hanging out with.
00:33:33.520And I would say that alcohol is the gateway to weed.
00:33:40.100And that weed is, I know it's like people say, oh, it's such a boomer thing to say that weed is the gateway to other drugs.
00:34:35.300When you're around alcohol, especially when you are a teenager, your state of mind changes, you're lowering your inhibitions, you're more likely to smoke weed, and then you're more likely, at least over time, eventually, to do other things.
00:34:57.520Look, with the availability of drugs now, I mean, alcohol, of course, in general, before you're 21, while it's a crime, it should never be engaged in.
00:35:08.120But it's not even, even if you set that to the side, it's not harmless.
00:35:17.800And as I said, it can lead to the use of drugs.
00:35:20.920And with the availability, accessibility of drugs today, because of their legality, you are setting your child up for failure.
00:35:29.780And not only that, but a lot of times nowadays, we are seeing weed that is laced with fentanyl and all kinds of drugs, like Xanax, that are laced with fentanyl, that kids are getting from other kids at school.
00:35:42.640We're talking even at like Christian private schools, this kind of thing is happening.
00:35:47.260I mean, this is a consequence of open borders.
00:35:49.020This is a consequence of absentee parents, in some cases, not all cases.
00:35:53.340This is a consequence, again, of the legality of weed.
00:35:56.320This is a consequence of social media and these things becoming popularized there.
00:36:01.500It's a consequence of lots and lots of things, of godlessness, of all of that.
00:36:06.460But one factor in this is certainly the marijuana.
00:36:09.600And I don't see any good case for making it easier for young people to access this psychiatric drug or this drug that can cause psychiatric disorders, rather.
00:36:22.320Evidence from separate Danish and British studies, this is also according to NBC this year, among others, suggests a link between heavy marijuana use and psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
00:36:36.020THC levels in marijuana have been getting stronger for decades.
00:36:41.180It's not the same as what you saw maybe 30 years ago when it really was just ski bums getting a little high.
00:36:48.460We're definitely seeing a rising cannabis-induced psychosis among teenagers, said child psychiatrist Dr. Christian Thurstone.
00:36:54.640She's an addiction specialist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.
00:36:58.460The more potent the cannabis products, the more likely users are to have adverse effects, said Nora Volcao, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
00:37:10.120There was a European study published in 2020 that found that high-potency cannabis products carried a greater risk of hallucinations and delusions compared with lower-potency types.
00:37:19.880As many as half of people with cannabis-induced psychosis may go on to develop either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, research suggests.
00:37:27.320So even if it's not acute, even if it's not immediate, it could actually have such an effect on the brain that you later develop these disorders that will affect your life, that will affect the lives of everyone around you.
00:37:39.920The more marijuana somebody is exposed to, especially in adolescence, the greater the risk of developing psychosis, schizophrenia, and severe mental illness.
00:37:49.040You know, it all just makes so much sense why the powers that be, why the left-wing zeitgeist wants to legalize and make more accessible marijuana, why our adversaries want to make marijuana more accessible, more legal in the United States.
00:38:05.700It's because you'll have a dumbed-down, numbed-out populace that cannot defend itself, that doesn't want to defend itself, that doesn't want to reproduce, that is in many ways probably unable to reproduce,
00:38:18.440that has to depend on all kinds of narcotics and antidepressant medications that can actually exacerbate the mental issues.
00:38:31.540It makes them pretty useless when it comes to defending their communities, defending their republic, defending their freedoms.
00:38:40.780If you can drug them out, then you can guarantee that they are easily controlled.
00:38:47.900They're not critical thinkers, they don't have the energy to research, they certainly don't have the energy to try to defend themselves intellectually, but also physically.
00:38:57.860So marijuana in the 60s, 70s, and through the 90s was 2-3%.
00:39:03.160Nowadays, the commercialized products are 20-plus percent, 10 times more potent.
00:39:09.880And again, very often being laced with other, stronger, deadlier drugs.
00:39:15.720There's no longer any scientific debate that marijuana can not just be psychologically addictive or habit-forming, but also physically habit-forming.
00:39:24.500It's a substance that produces tolerance, so people have to use more and more to have the same effect.
00:39:29.900About 1 in 10 people who begin using cannabis will become addicted.
00:39:37.300We have been lied to for so many years about weed, and we have all been called Karens for saying that weed is bad, that it shouldn't be legalized.
00:39:50.160All right, so cannabis linked to psychosis.
00:40:06.480Scientists believe that cannabis is interfering with our brain's ability to distinguish between what's going on in our heads versus the real world.
00:40:15.060One theory as to why it affects adolescents so much is that disruptions to the endocannabinoid system in adolescents may make psychotic symptoms more likely.
00:40:25.740The endocannabinoid system is a complex signaling system in the brain that marijuana targets.
00:40:31.780That could make it harder to distinguish reality from what is going on inside the head, leading to symptoms such as hallucinations, which is how schizophrenia usually manifests itself.
00:40:47.160And it does seem like these symptoms persist throughout someone's life.
00:40:55.900And I know some people will say that there is a safer marijuana that has different kinds of ingredients, but there really isn't a widely accepted standard of this.
00:41:08.920So I would say that that's not really true.
00:41:13.700There are some other stats and studies about this.
00:41:16.520A study from 2008 titled Cannabis Use and the Risk of Developing a Psychotic Disorder found that it's much more likely to develop a psychotic disorder when you've been using weed.
00:41:27.880The data suggested that in young adults ages 18 to 25, legalization of marijuana is leading to higher rates of cannabis use, particularly in Oregon and Washington.
00:41:37.680This is according to an analysis published in 2023 in the journal Substance Abuse.
00:41:43.200And then daily marijuana use among young adults has risen to record highs, of course, leading to many of these psychotic episodes.
00:41:55.260Now, for those who say, well, what about medical marijuana?
00:42:02.360Like, shouldn't I let my teenager or shouldn't I indulge in some medical marijuana because it is helpful to me?
00:42:09.280So according to the New York Times, medical marijuana is not regulated as most medicines are.
00:42:15.660Experts in the many specialties in which medical marijuana is said to be helpful have only rarely been able to demonstrate its purported benefits in well-designed scientific studies.
00:42:25.160For example, in Oregon, where both recreational and medicinal marijuana can be sold legally, all recreational marijuana must be tested for pesticides and solvents, but such tests are not required for most medical marijuana.
00:42:38.060Most of the same health concerns raised decades ago about using marijuana therapeutically are still unresolved, even as the potency of the plant's intoxicating ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, known as THC, has increased fivefold.
00:42:55.760Proponents of medical marijuana argue that cannabis is relatively safe and less expensive than licensed pharmaceuticals.
00:43:03.020It's often used for conditions for which effective therapies are lacking or inadequate.
00:43:06.620Opponents say that what is most lacking are standardized marijuana products and randomized controlled clinical trials that can clearly establish benefits and risks.
00:43:20.280Some people say it helps them with pain management, which, of course, I guess if you're high, you might not know that you're in pain.
00:43:26.020Some people say that it helps with MS.
00:43:29.120Some people say that it helps with glaucoma.
00:43:31.720And I'm sure there are doctors and there are patients that would say that that works for them.
00:43:36.720And I am OK with experimenting with alternative medicine.
00:43:42.440However, there just aren't a lot of studies that are proving that it is helpful right now.
00:43:47.300And even if we were to put that on the side, though, even if we were to say, OK, it can be used in controlled situations as prescribed by a doctor under stringent regulations, it still would not justify the mass legalization of weed, which I think absolutely is detrimental to society rather than helpful.
00:44:08.440You'll remember the story that we talked about, I don't know, a few weeks ago about the can of moms, the can of moms.
00:44:18.260These are the moms smoking weed to try to deal with the stress of motherhood.
00:44:24.500These are moms who admit that using marijuana makes them better parents.
00:44:28.080They refer to themselves as can of moms.
00:44:29.660It's a term you may not have heard of, but their budding movement has been in motion for several years.
00:44:36.440It helps them deal with the craziness of motherhood.
00:49:54.400Karens are the sentinels of civilization.
00:49:56.760Karens exist because we have devolved into a chaotic state with no good customer service and with no one acting like they've been somewhere.
00:50:09.820Y'all did not have a grandma named Dot who told you to act like you've been somewhere.