Dr. Drew Pinsky joins us for an in depth conversation on marijuana, COVID, opioids, the scientific method, practicing medicine, and why young people are the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol-addicted, and drug addicted generation in history.
00:00:00.000Today in the Charlie Kirk show, Dr. Drew joins us for an in-depth conversation on marijuana, COVID, opioids, the scientific method, practicing medicine, and why young people are the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol-addicted, and drug-addicted generation in history.
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00:02:51.000But the fact that we've not been able to have a rational conversation about this chemical for at least 25 years has been deeply, deeply disturbing to me.
00:03:00.000So my take on it is people try to always paint you into a cartoon character.
00:03:06.000And of course, what goes viral is never what you said.
00:04:03.000We can talk about this later, but it was profoundly predictable that lockdown would have massive mental health consequences.
00:04:09.000Take a nine-year-old and tell that nine-year-old, as our mayor did in this city, and tell him or her, shelter in place, hide under your bed every night, championing that as though an incoming nuclear weapon was coming.
00:04:21.000And if you crawl out from under your bed, you're going to kill your family.
00:04:24.000And in the meantime, the thing you need the most to be nourished is cognition, cognitive development, and social development.
00:04:30.000We're going to restrict you from access to that for two years.
00:04:33.000You don't think that's going to have mental health consequences?
00:05:07.000Something like 25% of these drug-induced psychosis patients go on to have permanent thought disturbances, and it's become increasingly common.
00:05:16.000I actually, for a long time, didn't believe that it was a significant issue, but now it's clearly causative in these higher concentrations.
00:06:12.000It's in the shell of the nucleus or cumbersome in the medial forebrain bundle.
00:06:15.000Tends to only happen in genetically predisposed individual.
00:06:18.000But once that kicks in, you now have a disorder, an illness that is a disorder of motivation where all usual motivations shrink, and the motivation to use the substance emerges as the ultimate priority.
00:06:32.000And cannabis can trigger that in some people, not everybody.
00:06:37.000Charlie, I'm not interested in bumming people's high or telling people they should never use a substance.
00:07:13.000And I guess a happy media middle ground should be things that are highly addictive typically come with some form of government regulation and informed consent.
00:07:22.000Vast majority of the American population has no idea, as you mentioned, potential schizophrenic paranoia, anxiety, depression.
00:07:30.000A new study last week of CNN of all places published that even casual marijuana use once a month could increase your risk of heart disease and blood clotting in the heart, you know, PACs, PDCs, all these sorts of things.
00:07:44.000Yeah, that, well, I mean, the arrhythmia is not surprising.
00:07:49.000Almost any substance can cause rhythm disturbances.
00:07:52.000But The issue of is does it cause coronary artery disease is now back on the table.
00:07:59.000I have to say, I have not seen, I've worked with and treated and known as friends a lot of chronic marijuana users.
00:08:06.000And I've not, it's not like cigarettes, whatever it's going to be, it's not going to be like cigarettes.
00:08:10.000So, the question is: does it impact it at all?
00:08:12.000So, the other thought that some people will say is that the marijuana of today is laced with other things.
00:08:44.000And adolescents are a special population, right?
00:08:47.000I mean, it's increasingly clear that not only does it interfere with the social-emotional development of children, there are brain changes associated with it.
00:08:55.000And it appears that some of these may be permanent, and there's grave concerns about that.
00:09:00.000How much do you have to use to get that?
00:09:05.000Kids go to great lengths to hide what they're doing from their parents.
00:09:10.000I have never met, and I hope maybe I'm not, maybe I'm meeting one and Charlie for the first time, but I've never met a 15-year-old that was absolutely always honest with their parents.
00:09:19.000I've not met that 15-year-old, at least not in the modern era.
00:09:21.000And so they are hiding things from you.
00:09:24.000And one of the things they universally hide is experimentation with substances.
00:09:29.000And if you are finding evidence of substance use, meaning they are getting so far down the road and so sloppy with their hiding of it, that you are finding paraphernalia, you're finding things in their backpack, you find things in their room.
00:09:43.000This is not a parenting problem any longer.
00:09:45.000This is a medical psychiatric problem.
00:09:48.000You need to get help if you are finding evidence of it.
00:09:52.000You need to, the parenting part is to make to kids super clear what the consequences will be of their using.
00:10:00.000And as someone that worked in this field for a long, long time, the clearer and the more severe, the better the outcome.
00:10:07.000Now, it doesn't mean they'll never use drugs, but you want to get them through adolescence.
00:10:10.000I mean, I look, I have a daughter who's a cannabis addict, and I got her through adolescence.
00:10:14.000She didn't use anything, straight edge.
00:10:16.000And then college, well, that whole other story.
00:10:23.000But, you know, if you can be all your job as the parent is to be the execute, to be the person that establishes the laws, communicates the laws, and then drops the axe where the laws are violated.
00:10:57.000I mean, kids are getting exposed to everything now in their early teens and pornography, cannabis, alcohol, it's happening earlier and earlier.
00:11:04.000And of course, the earlier, the more profound the effects on the brain.
00:11:08.000Not on everybody, but the potential for really serious effects is there.
00:11:11.000And certainly when it comes to all the pornographic images that rain down on them at age 10, 9, we have no idea yet the consequences that is having.
00:11:21.000So, Dr. Drew, the Wall Street Journal has come out and they say that we can now treat COVID like the flu.
00:11:34.000It's in most cases, it's not even the flu.
00:11:36.000It's more like just a viral cold is what we would call a cold.
00:11:41.000The reality is, though, that COVID does cause something we're beginning to conceptualize as a spike opathy, meaning the spike protein seems to be the pathogenic property.
00:11:53.000And if enough spike protein circulates, it seems to cause injury or inflammation to arteries, particularly small arteries.
00:12:00.000And that seems to be how one of the potential mechanisms whereby COVID does its thing.
00:12:04.000But what is driving me crazy, a lot to be said on that front, because one of the issues there is, well, then why did you create a vaccine against the very substance that causes the most serious parts of the illness?
00:12:16.000And then why demand that vaccine continue?
00:12:22.000The issue is whether or not it's the same as the flu, which it really is now.
00:12:27.000Nobody's hospitalized for COVID any longer.
00:12:29.000What drives me crazy is that when I raise issues about risk reward, such as, you know, should a 24-year-old or a 32-year-old male be getting this vaccine, given that there's a one in 5,000 or say 1 in 15,000 risk of myocarditis and a zero risk of COVID, should they be getting the vaccine?
00:12:49.000What is sort of splayed out in front of me invariably is data at the most, the most current would be from 2022, two years ago.
00:13:55.000And they, but the good news is only 10 to 15% of people are still taking the booster and taking the vaccine.
00:14:01.000So I guess almost no one gets hospitalized now for COVID.
00:14:04.000Is that because there has been built natural immunity over time, that the virus is lessening in its, for lack of a better term, ferocity or impact?
00:14:15.000Because people were being hospitalized for something a year and a half ago.
00:14:54.000If people want to tell us that this was actually for sure manipulated by mankind, let us know so we can understand your thinking in terms of worrying about mutations in a direction that just don't tend to happen in nature.
00:17:06.000Really, it was such a dereliction of duty.
00:17:08.000I was shocked that at least follow patients, at least stay with them, offer them something, even if it's just a steroid or an auction or something that you stay on top of the case.
00:17:18.000Instead, people were told by what I didn't understand was that they're essentially their employer.
00:17:25.000So it turns out that somewhere around two-thirds of physicians are actually employees and their jobs were jeopardized should they use their brain to do what was in the best interest of the patient.
00:17:37.000I didn't realize how much really it was the electronic medical record and the way we train physicians had become essentially box checkers.
00:17:46.000I'm struggling with a medical record right now.
00:17:47.000Every time you go to break, I'm trying to order a prescription for a patient because the pharmacies won't take calls in California.
00:17:54.000Now you have to do it on an electronic system.
00:17:58.000It's going to take me all an hour to get one prescription filled for a patient because of all the boxes I have to check out and chuck in with my office and make sure the boxes are checked on the records.
00:18:07.000It is not the youth to practice of medicine any longer.
00:18:11.000So we become criticized, we become discouraged from using critical thought, discouraged from putting the patient ahead of everything else, protecting the patient-doctor relationship.
00:18:24.000These things are all sort of gone, and physicians are employees.
00:18:30.000I mean, I fought against what the insurances were doing.
00:18:34.000It was egregious how they were controlling the care of patients, but now it's gone all the way where patients are active, physicians are actually employees.
00:18:43.000And they were told during COVID to stand down, essentially, which they did, which was shocking.
00:18:49.000And then the fact that physicians started jumping into camps where you were not allowed to talk about certain things, it's contrary to science.
00:18:57.000It was the exact opposite of the scientific method and the exact opposite of how progress happened in medicine.
00:19:04.000I mean, in my day, every at least twice a week, we sit in a room and criticize each other and propose provocative ideas and come up with new things in the literature and question what was out there.
00:19:16.000No, it was thus saith the Lord and no question.
00:19:20.000And then the latest thing that I've seen is the medical literature appears to be adulterated, which is just a shock to me that the data only goes one direction.
00:19:32.000And I keep hearing story after story of people, excellent researchers with extraordinary records and pedigrees, unable to publish data in the major journals if it in any way runs contrary to the prevailing wisdom, which is, again, the opposite of the purpose of medical literature.
00:21:18.000One of my most egregious sort of transgressions, I was talking to, oh, my aging brain.
00:21:26.000I'm going to blank on her name right now.
00:21:28.000The female, oh, well, she's well known, and she was talking about women empowerment, freedom fighter, and she has been raising issues about Naomi Wolf, raising issues about irregular Menses and bleeding issues in women.
00:21:43.000And when she first came on my streaming show and said that, I went, Naomi, everything affects women's hair.
00:21:53.000That was such a sexist attitude that was so male-centric.
00:21:57.000I really had to slap myself when I started thinking, well, not only was she right, and it had a major effect on things like fertility and whatnot.
00:22:06.000And lo and behold, you know, some people are questioning the LNPs now being distributed as well as certain aspects of the spike protein in the uterus, in the ovaries.
00:22:16.000And there's some data there and some concerns there.
00:22:18.000It's like, okay, well, I should have been listening because if I'd listened to women's complaints, I might have started to look down the road to see if there are any biological issues there.
00:22:26.000Now, I don't know whether it's a big deal or not, but the fact that I didn't listen is reprehensible, and I apologize.
00:22:32.000I apologize for being that male-centric.
00:22:36.000Well, we won't get an apology from Fauci or from any of the leaders at the top.
00:22:43.000The globalists are making it very clear that another pandemic could be just around the corner.
00:22:47.000They want us to live in fear, to be willing to sacrifice our freedoms.
00:23:06.000Rest assured knowing that you have emergency antibiotics, antivirals, and anti-parasitics on hand to help keep you and your family safe from whatever the globalists throw at us next.
00:25:19.000And I want you to remember, you know, Robespierre in his excesses, he was the head of a committee entitled the Committee for Public Safety.
00:25:29.000When things go off the rail, it is often in the name of safety.
00:25:32.000So safety uberalis is not a healthy place.
00:25:36.000Life is full of risks, and it's about assessing the risk-reward.
00:25:40.000And so risk-reward itself has been taken off the table.
00:25:44.000On top of that, the idea of pharmaceutical agents of any sort, whether it's a vaccine agent or whatever you want to call it, being risky, I don't understand what's happened.
00:25:54.000I was raised by a family practitioner.
00:25:56.000My dad was a family practitioner, and he would never let me take pharmaceutical agents.
00:26:01.000I remember the first time I took an antibiotic, I was 15 years old.
00:26:04.000And I remember when he gave it to me, he was like, all right, here we go.
00:26:07.000You're going to, your pediatrician wants you to take this.
00:26:09.000So I'm going to do it, but who knows what the consequence will be?
00:26:46.000So, Dr. Drew, I want to, I want to, yeah, someone in the chat just said, my 14-year-old already has, 14-month-old already had three antibiotic prescriptions already, not to mention creating superpathogens in response to the overindulgence on antibiotics and what it does to the gut and what it does to the ability to have a healthy gut microbiome.
00:27:09.000So, Dr. In the next segment, I want to talk about the wellness company.
00:27:12.000I also want to talk about how there is some hope of a new community of people that have a heightened sense of awareness around health and wellness.
00:27:19.000I being one of them, after we were lively propagandized by the CDC, I decided to take things into my own hands and to change my diet and to change the books I read.
00:27:30.000I think there's a growing community of people that do not want to just be controlled, that just want to be propagandized.
00:27:37.000There's a growing group of people post-COVID that care far more about their health, far more about what they put in their body than they did before COVID.
00:27:45.000It's not a majority of Americans, but it's young moms.
00:27:48.000I mean, the amount of young moms that are, let me just say, asking questions about vaccines, asking questions about antibiotic regimens, asking questions about, you know, the food they feed their kids is growing.
00:28:05.000And I, listen, I personally experienced it in the sense that I'm open to at least evaluating things I would have been very dismissive of just three or four years ago.
00:29:03.000And I'm telling you something, if you want to talk about this, the playbook they used in that epidemic, exact same playbook with COVID, exact same playbook.
00:29:11.000But anyway, as a result, now I am interested in empowering patients.
00:29:16.000And so I got involved with the wellness company in terms of giving access to people to get things they should have without having to go to an urgent care and spend $1,600 or wait two weeks for a doctor's appointment.
00:29:26.000There are better, cheaper ways to do this.
00:29:28.000And that's what we're doing at the Wellness Company.
00:29:48.000It's been really, they've exceeded my expectations, right?
00:29:51.000I've been skeptical of everything these days.
00:29:52.000And so I walked in slowly and I'm like, oh, we're going to do some good here.
00:29:56.000We're going to give people access to things that they can trust, that they can use on their own, that they can have a telehealth backup at a reasonable price if they want it.
00:30:56.000And by the way, on the top of that, the mental health part, I'm about to get involved with the delivery of mental health through the internet, through the telehealth and whatnot, because we have just, we've done a terrible job.
00:31:09.000Look, here's the one thing that I want to say, and you'll like this, Charlie, is that when Sigmund Freud first came to this country, right?
00:31:16.000The reporter put microphones in his face and said, Dr. Freud, what do you hope to accomplish?
00:31:21.000I guess they were taking notes back in those days with you here in America.
00:31:24.000He said, well, what I hope to do is establish the difference understanding of bona fide mental illness and ordinary misery.
00:31:33.000We have lost track of ordinary misery in this country.
00:31:40.000It builds character, resiliency, problem solving, building a self that is able to feel competent in the face of ordinary misery.
00:31:51.000And for me, just as a little aside for you all, if you have trouble functioning for more than two weeks or you're having dangerous symptoms, like you're overdosing on drugs or you're having suicidal ideation, then you have a medical problem and you need medical care.
00:32:33.000And this, and you see if you can name the players that were reflected in COVID that did the same thing.
00:32:39.000First of all, you needed a philosophy, a philosophy that developed in a discipline.
00:32:45.000In the case, what happened was there was an opioid epidemic in the 1890s and 1900s, and the Harrison Narcotic Act addressed that and physicians were put in jail.
00:32:55.000They say as many as 10 to 20,000, and that stopped opiate prescribing for 75 years to the point where cancer patients were now surviving in severe pain and we weren't prescribing opiates.
00:33:07.000Appropriately, a group stepped forward and said, this is ridiculous.
00:33:11.000We must reestablish opiate use for these pain patients.
00:33:14.000Then that same group coalesced into something called pain medicine, and they decided there should never be any pain ever experienced by anybody in the United States.
00:33:24.000That this was a calling, and several physicians in the pain management world became evangelists, not religious evangelists, evangelizing on the topic of no pain.
00:33:38.000Then pain became the fifth vital sign, and the VA adopted that as their policy.
00:33:43.000And the Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation, the regulators stepped in because of this discipline.
00:33:49.000And by the way, academia was completely captured by it.
00:33:54.000Think of who the evangelists were for, lockdown.
00:33:57.000And they captured academia, then captured the regulators, and then you were forced as physicians to fall in line.
00:34:05.000Now, people like me fought like crazy against it.
00:34:08.000And let me tell you, they were killing my patients hand over fist.
00:34:12.000I was sanctioned by the Joint Commission, by the Department of Mental Health, by the California Medical Association for what?
00:34:18.000For allowing my heroin addicts in withdrawal to be a little uncomfortable.
00:34:24.000They were trying to demand, I give them, get this, opiates.
00:34:28.000Heroin addicts in withdrawal in their treatment center demand that they get opiates because their happy face scale, when their fifth vital sign was assessed, was a little unhappy.
00:34:40.000It was, this is mind-boggling, and we will look at it with the same incredulity that we looked at Dr. Burke's running around the country evangelizing for lockdown, regulators capturing lockdown, and then the excesses of the regulators closing the beaches, closing the outdoor areas, closing the skate ramps.
00:35:04.000And as I explained earlier, of course, had negative consequences on our mental health.
00:35:09.000I am not saying, and by the way, don't accuse me of accepting it.
00:35:12.000It's always never what I say as people say I'm thinking.
00:35:16.000I'm not saying lockdown should never have happened.
00:35:18.000I'm saying the evangelizing and the excesses should never have happened.
00:35:23.000And the lack of risk reward analysis in all aspects of this pandemic as policies were stepped forward and the disempowerment of the physician and the patient.
00:37:00.000But for you idiots with your box checking, you know, to just sit in judgment in a cubicle in Chicago while I'm in Southern California, that is terrible and disgusting.
00:37:13.000And so, yes, the excesses now are deeply concerning to me as well.
00:37:16.000There's some bureaucrat at the AMA who's never actually had to.
00:37:20.000The AMA has so little to do with medicine.
00:37:22.000Listen, the FDA, I taught medicine for many years.
00:37:25.000Never once did I say, what does the FDA think about this?
00:37:46.000Those are those two agencies that people put it as somehow affecting medicine.
00:37:50.000No, they're not involved with medicine.
00:37:52.000They shouldn't be involved with medicine.
00:37:54.000The medicine is our professional societies.
00:37:57.000I'm with the Board of Internal Medicine, the Board of Addiction Medicine, surgeons with the American College of Physicians, the American College of Surgeons.
00:39:41.000And I'm actually bothered by how much the drug companies were held accountable for the opioid crisis as though they were the only perpetrators and bad players.
00:39:52.000As you've said about COVID, I don't see any apologies from the Joint Commission or the VA for making pain the fifth vital sign and just stepping up and go, that was an insanity.
00:40:02.000Your pulse is not as important as your pain assessment.
00:40:55.000Well, in the eyes of the law, it was because these people were not prescribed.
00:41:00.000I was saying that as far as sending a message that we're going to go after the rank and file as much.
00:41:07.000The reason, the main reason the opioid thing got going in the first place was they fined physicians outside of malpractice civilly and criminally for under-prescribing of pain medicine.
00:41:20.000That was happening in North Carolina, Florida, and California.
00:41:54.000But of course, now it's become excessively the other direction, but not because of that.
00:41:59.000It's because of the regulators getting in the way.
00:42:02.000And the DEA of all people has gotten way over their skis in terms of helping us or hurting us from being able to treat people in suffering.
00:42:09.000So one thing you learn as a physician, you go in, one of the things you go into is reduce suffering.
00:42:50.000And what needs to be, what can be done societally, culturally, and politically to at least make some progress with these awful metrics?
00:42:59.000You know, I have trouble being happy myself when the next generation, which is the millennial generation, is suffering so much.
00:43:08.000It really bothers me more than anything.
00:43:10.000In fact, I like visiting certain parts of the country where I see millennials out and doing things and working and starting businesses.
00:43:16.000Like I noticed in southern Florida and Tennessee, I can fill my lungs with air when I see them enjoying their lives, which is exactly what they should be doing.
00:43:27.000Number one, fun has been eliminated from their lives.
00:43:32.000We got to encourage them to have fun, and we have to help them understand that things are not as bleak as the press and their academic settings have led them to believe that we are still that country where there is opportunity, there is dynamism.
00:43:48.000I know plenty of millennials that are doing extraordinarily well, but you got to go do it and you have to start somewhere.
00:43:56.000They feel, look, I think even in their sort of it really, I think, may have started in their interpersonal life.
00:44:01.000I've not really said this out loud, but I'm beginning to think that, you know, I noticed when they were in college, that age group, they were so beaten down by being told they were toxic.
00:44:13.000The men were beaten down and told there was something wrong with them that they became fearful of interacting with female peers.
00:44:23.000They certainly wouldn't do it with a beer in their hand.
00:44:26.000And they lost the opportunity for some of the usual milestones for the development of the skill to date and learn people and have fun with people and enjoy your time together and not be.
00:44:37.000I read something on BuzzFeed today where it was listing these word complaints doesn't quite capture it.
00:44:45.000These experiences of young men and how depressed they are about their ability just to go out and interact with people they'd like to interact with.
00:45:32.000We have to literally market to them a different way of looking at life and maybe elevate their peers that are enjoying themselves and are doing well and tell them those stories and use that to inspire them.
00:45:42.000This is kind of a superficial way of looking at this, but I don't know.
00:46:50.000The microdosing is not going to be your answer.
00:46:55.000Engagement is the answer, not a chemical.
00:46:58.000And I hope that we can reduce some of the use of SSRIs and things.
00:47:01.000Again, if you're having trouble functioning, there's going to be more mental health stuff that does require some real medical intervention, but let's do it on a limited basis.
00:47:08.000And let's get people a spiritual life, an interpersonal life.