Alex Berenson joins us to talk about his new book, Tell Your Children The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, and why it's time for America to admit it has a marijuana problem. The New York Times admits that they've been right all along, and why now is a good time to start your kids on the path to freedom.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:02:15.000So, I mean, by the way, it's interesting you mentioned about the book because even before the Times put this out, it seemed to me that there was something in the ether happening with people becoming aware, increasingly aware of the problems with cannabis and THC.
00:02:28.000I think principally because so many, you know, so many young people are using and using very high potency vapes, what's called dabbing, which is essentially smoking chunks of THC, which is the active chemical in cannabis.
00:02:43.000And when you use that way in particular, you can really knock yourself out and become psychotic very quickly.
00:02:51.000And so I do think that this is unfortunately just something that's happening to people that their friends are seeing, that their family members are seeing, that their parents are seeing.
00:03:01.000And, you know, for whatever reason, the book was starting to sell a little bit more even before the Times thing.
00:03:07.000And now all of a sudden, it actually has sort of taken off again in terms of sales, which is pretty amazing because it came out sell your children seven years ago.
00:03:15.000And I promise you, I will tell you the Times, my view on the Times, which I think it's very important that they did this, but I want to tell you something even more important that happened in the last 48 hours, which is that a conservative commentator, a young woman named Brett Cooper, who you may know, posted.
00:03:40.000My mom and I have been told that my brother's psychosis, now full-blown, diagnosed schizophrenia, is most likely drug-induced from his years of smoking weed.
00:03:51.000This drug isn't harmless, no matter what our culture and screaming people in comment sections tried to tell us.
00:04:00.000Because in the end, you know, the Times can write what it writes and I can write about statistics and journal articles and stuff, but people react to individual stories.
00:04:11.000And, you know, especially when it's personal, right?
00:04:14.000When it's, this is my brother and look what happened to him.
00:04:16.000And that's been viewed almost 5 million times on X right now.
00:04:20.000And so unfortunately, that is what's happening out there is that people are seeing, you know, family members or friends or friends of friends who've had real problems.
00:04:30.000And they say, well, you know, this person wasn't using cocaine or methamphetamine or, you know, or mushrooms.
00:04:38.000They were using these vapes and suddenly they wound up in the ER and or maybe they have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and their lives are really wrecked by this and their families are getting messed up by it too.
00:04:50.000And I need to figure out, I need to learn about this drug.
00:04:54.000So what the Times wrote was sort of the broader, you know, the bigger picture question, which is this is happening against the background of the legalization of cannabis.
00:05:08.000And so legalization, you know, many states have legalized in the last 10 to 15 years.
00:05:16.000There's been a very aggressive, very pushy, very effective, you know, for lack of a better word, propaganda campaign selling cannabis and THC as medicine.
00:05:28.000If we're going to legalize it on any basis, it's got to be as a recreational intoxicant that's got downsides and that needs to be regulated carefully.
00:05:36.000But that's not how the industry got people to legalize.
00:05:39.000They got people to legalize by telling them, hey, this is medicine.
00:05:42.000And if you have seizures, it's good for you.
00:05:44.000And if you're, you know, if you have cancer, it's good for you.
00:05:46.000And it's going to keep people away from opioids, all this stuff, most of which has essentially no basis in science.
00:05:53.000There's a couple of things where there's some evidence that cannabis and THC might be valuable, but mostly it doesn't.
00:06:30.000It basically was like a super drug, if anything.
00:06:33.000And yeah, and the New York Times, it says in this article here, you know, in our editorials, we described marijuana addiction as relatively minor problems.
00:06:42.000Many went further and claimed marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits.
00:06:47.000And we said that legalization might not lead to greater use.
00:06:51.000And the number they have here is insane.
00:06:53.000It went from about 1 million daily users in 1992 to more than 18 million daily users today.
00:07:01.000So the thing about cannabis, it's actually more addictive than alcohol, considerably more.
00:07:05.000If you look at the number of people who use compared to the total number of the number of people who use daily, let's say, compared to the total number of users.
00:07:13.000Okay, there's about 100 million adults in the U.S. who use alcohol on a regular basis, about half the population, a little bit more than half, okay?
00:07:22.000So maybe a little bit more than 100 million.
00:07:24.000Of those people, fewer than 20 million drink every day, okay, based on the studies.
00:07:30.000And most of those people aren't drinking all day, every day.
00:07:38.000When it comes to cannabis, there are more people using every day than use alcohol every day, even though the total number of cannabis users are much smaller than the total number of alcohol users.
00:07:50.000And those people, those cannabis users, when they're using every day, they are waking and baking for the most part.
00:08:26.000Well, and Alex, you're kind of zeroing in on the young male cohort when you're talking about video games, vaping.
00:08:32.000And this actually tends from what I'm gathering online, this young male, super high dose of THC, developing brains, leading to schizophrenia.
00:08:45.000This actually, to me, is one of the more terrifying aspects of increased pot usage and us normalizing it and us sort of deifying the drug as like the only drug in the universe that doesn't have any side effects.
00:08:59.000Young men seem to be particularly vulnerable to schizophrenia.
00:09:04.000We actually have a cut here from Brett Cooper talking about it 495.
00:09:08.000My mom and I have been told that my brother's psychosis, now full-blown diagnosed schizophrenia, is most likely drug-induced from his years of smoking weed.
00:09:16.000This drug isn't harmless, no matter what our culture and screaming people in comment sections tried to tell us.
00:09:21.000The story is that my brother Reed, who is 12 years older than me, became a pothead, I would say, late in high school.
00:09:26.000Prior to this, he never showed any signs of mental illness.
00:09:30.000He never showed any signs of psychosis.
00:09:31.000But for the last decade, my brother Reed has been in and out of psychiatric facilities.
00:09:36.000He has been on and off the streets in states like California and Idaho and Tennessee.
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00:11:27.000I guess, Alex, some perspective I'd like on this is just how the New York Times kind of acts like they were, you know, they made an error of judgment, but it strikes me, I just feel like so much of these outcomes were obvious that there has to be this element where a lot of people realize they could make a lot of money off of this, that they could, like, they were creating something they knew would be super addictive and there would be a huge market for this.
00:11:54.000And now a ton of people are getting rich off of these 18 million people a day who are using marijuana every single day.
00:12:19.000Yeah, they know, they know how addictive this stuff is.
00:12:22.000And they've been working for 30 years to make cannabis more potent, to make the, you know, what's called flower cannabis, what's in the joints, stronger, but also to produce these vapes, which are essentially pure THC.
00:12:34.000And they know exactly what they've been doing.
00:12:36.000And those, a lot of those people want to get rich.
00:12:38.000If you look at the times, you know, unfortunately, it's the same kind of sort of useful idiocy that these people played when they called for schools to be locked down during COVID, when they went crazy with the Russian collusion hoax.
00:12:52.000You know, there is a groupthink on the left in elite journalism that blinds people to facts that should be obvious.
00:12:59.000And you, the data on this, what I'm going to tell your children, it was 2019.
00:13:04.000And I was able to draw on 20 years of data showing the sort of the harmful links between cannabis and severe mental illness.
00:13:12.000And that's even counting the links between cannabis and, let's say, sort of bad life outcomes because you just don't achieve very much because you're smoking every day and you're not working very hard and your life is just sort of passing you by.
00:13:25.000I'm talking about the really severe mental illness outcomes and frankly, the downstream violence from that, which is an issue we don't even have to begin to talk about.
00:13:34.000But people at the Times, people at the Washington Post, people at the Atlantic, all these places that think they're so smart, they didn't look at the data and they just told themselves over and over again, well, this is just being used to put black men in prison.
00:13:54.000It hadn't been true for a really long time.
00:13:56.000Let me tell you one quick thing that I discovered when I was writing Tell Your Children, which was people, as I think Andrew said, you know, they always say, well, we got banned in 19 in the 1920s and 30s because there was perception that it was a Mexican drug, that it was a drug that was being brought up from Mexico.
00:14:16.000What people don't tell you, what they didn't ever know, all these supposedly smart people, is that Mexico actually banned cannabis first because Mexicans saw what it was doing to their culture and country and they didn't like it.
00:14:31.000So whenever this drug has become widely used, whether it's in India, whether it's in Mexico, whether it's in African or in North African countries, eventually there's a backlash to what it does to people.
00:14:42.000And the fact that we thought we could rewrite the rules on this, that a bunch of nice liberals who basically had smoked pot a few times in college thought they could totally rewrite history and human biology and legalize this and there'd be no consequences just tells you once again what a bubble the left is living in and now by the way you know some of these people what's happened is they've seen their kids get completely screwed Screwed up on high potency cannabis and THC or their friends, and now they realize the truth.
00:15:12.000I think here, here, let's do like a little rapid fire question and answer here.
00:15:41.000So even if let's say 30% of young men are using in a dangerous way, that would not result in such a huge number that it would be immediately obvious, even though this is a really severe illness.
00:15:53.000But what I, what I say, and I say this with confidence now, is that there are probably hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly men, but some women in the United States and Canada who become severely mentally ill as a result of cannabis use, who wouldn't have been.
00:16:08.000Hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, hundreds of thousands of families, because what you heard with Brett is this destroys families, right?
00:16:17.000When you're the family member, the brother or sister, I mean, God forbid you're the child, but brother, sister, parent of somebody with really severe mental illness, your life is misery.
00:16:29.000So even if you don't get psychosis, if you're using weed nearly daily from age 16, how bad of an impact is that going to have on your cognitive baseline?
00:16:39.000How many IQ points are you going to lose?
00:17:16.000So why didn't they tell your children there was evidence that in the states that had legalized early, there was a rise in sort of in violence, basically, essentially in severe violence.
00:17:26.000Now, nationally, we've been on a downtrend in terms of violence.
00:17:30.000Obviously, cannabis psychosis is only one component of violence, right?
00:17:34.000There are many, many different components of what make people violent, whether, you know, how we treat people who are, you know, who do we incarcerate people for a long time?
00:17:43.000Obviously, that gets them off the streets.
00:17:46.000Are the cops getting better at solving gun crimes because they, you know, they have more surveillance?
00:20:08.000Now, not only do you have a majority of the country against the way you're enforcing laws, but affordability has been revealed to not be because of legal entrance.
00:20:16.000And you guys have a real problem heading into the midterm.
00:20:19.000So unless you do something about health care costs, you're screwed, basically.
00:20:28.000I agree with some parts of it, disagree with others.
00:20:32.000I mean, first of all, the Save Act, the majority of the country is in favor of that.
00:20:37.000You know, across the board, even I think a majority of Democrats are in favor of it, but certainly African-American voters, Hispanics, Republicans, Independents think it's kind of common sense that you should have voter ID laws.
00:21:09.000So to the extent that those continue to be issues that are of primary concern to voters, and most polls suggest that they are, I think the administration and the Republican Party has some work to do.
00:21:28.000My take on the economy, as far as Trump is concerned, is that he's got a story to tell.
00:21:36.000There are plenty of good numbers when you talk about the Dow and all that.
00:21:39.000The problem that he has is a perception problem because people think the economy sucks, even though there are aspects of the economy that are really good.
00:21:46.000But when Trump goes out there and says this is the best economy in the world and voters don't think that, then he looks like he's gaslighting and there is this discrepancy between what their perception is and what Trump is telling them the reality is.
00:22:00.000And so that's really an issue for him to go out and prove to the American people that he is focused on this issue.
00:22:07.000It's more of an almost an empathy type question to say, instead of saying affordability is a hoax or instead of focusing on taking over Greenland, for example, which occupied like seven days of the media landscape and all the oxygen, right?
00:22:21.000For him to be doing these events, if you remember back to his first term, he was doing events at the White House with like truckers and welders and, you know, he had CEOs.
00:22:37.000He did one speech on the economy at the end of last year in Detroit.
00:22:41.000And that kind of got overshadowed by the fact that he flipped some guy off and had this thing with this factory floor worker.
00:22:47.000He did another event recently in Iowa, which was supposed to be focused all on the economy, and then went out like two hours afterwards and tweeted that he's got the fleet steaming toward Iran.
00:23:00.000They've got to do a better job, in my opinion.
00:23:03.000The administration has to do a better job of having events and focusing on the economy and then sort of letting the you know staying out of their own way so that the people, the perception out there changes on how the economy is doing.
00:23:16.000Yeah, Tom, that's what I find myself thinking and asking on the affordability issue, on the economy issue.
00:23:22.000I, I, there's sometimes people have this debate: are we in a vibe session where the idea is people have gotten used to the idea that they just say affordability is their go-to acceptable expression for things just don't always feel awesome.
00:23:36.000And I guess the part that goes with that is: does Trump doing events meaningfully help on this question?
00:23:44.000How do you actually imprint the idea, oh, actually, the economy is doing well, or at least this administration is improving things?
00:23:52.000I guess I don't see the obvious link between him doing an event at the White House and better poll numbers necessarily.
00:24:00.000It's more of a question is, you know, he's also trailing on this question when pollsters ask: does the president care about people like me?
00:24:23.000But it was an event where I think, you know, the focus was on, hey, this is how we help the younger generation, the next generation, actually, you know, invest and save and get ahead of the game.
00:24:36.000I mean, he's fighting the problem that he's fighting right now is, you know, he can say, well, inflation's down.
00:24:42.000Okay, it's down, but we just went through five years where we had, you know, mid to high single digit inflation, which compounded.
00:24:52.000And so people, you know, things are 30 or 40% more than they used to be.
00:24:56.000And we're talking about healthcare and, you know, college tuition and groceries and all those things.
00:25:01.000And while Trump can point in the sort of short term, well, you know, the price of eggs are down, people are still not feeling, that's why they feel the economy sucks is because they've been battered for four or five years with inflation that has eroded their buying power.
00:25:13.000And so I think one of the things that he needs to focus on from a policy perspective that would help him is to tell people and impress upon people that wages are rising faster than inflation.
00:25:50.000He's focused on the things that I care about, that we care about and my family and that we're talking about on the kitchen table.
00:25:56.000He's not off, you know, focused on stuff going on overseas or Venezuela or even building a new wing on the White House.
00:26:06.000I mean, those kind of things are just, they're catnipped for the media and they help shift the issue away from where I think the public wants it to be and where Trump needs it to be.
00:26:17.000Tom, so I'm struggling, especially on this economic question here.
00:26:45.000It says family financial situation, living comfortably is at 40%, just getting by 45%, but that's up nine points from November of 2025.
00:26:56.000So you see, it's almost like you're getting two sets of data.
00:26:59.000It's like if you ask the question one way, people are positive.
00:27:03.000If you ask it another way, it's almost like the Biden-year hangover and maybe this cognitive dissonance with what Trump is saying, they just can't get, they can't connect with it.
00:27:25.000I think the economy is getting better.
00:27:27.000I think people are feeling a little bit better about the way things are going.
00:27:31.000But Trump has about, you know, the Republicans have until about June.
00:27:35.000And basically, by that point, if anything that happens after that won't accrue to their benefit probably in the midterms.
00:27:42.000The other thing about these polls too, Andrew, is, you know, you really do need to go in and look at the sort of partisan splits here because, you know, there's this question, if you go back and look, how's the economy doing?
00:27:56.000Well, when Joe Biden was in office, you know, Democrats, 75% of Democrats said the economy was great and 5% of Republicans said it was great.
00:28:03.000You know, Republicans thought the economy sucked.
00:28:05.000And the minute Trump gets into office, that number flips, right?
00:28:08.000It's just a partisan sort of lizard brain thing.
00:28:11.000And so Democrats are, even if they feel the economy is getting better, they're certainly not giving Trump or the Republicans credit for it.
00:28:18.000And Republicans probably feel the economy is pretty good and they like and support Trump.
00:28:23.000Like they're the ones, and again, it's a 15 or 20% part of the electorate, but they're the ones who truly do move back and forth based on what they see in their daily lives.
00:28:35.000And they're going to be an important part of the midterms in November as well.
00:28:38.000Tom Bevin, co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics.
00:28:41.000Again, so great to see you last night and to be a part of that great event.
00:28:45.000Thanks for having me and for honoring Charlie.
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00:31:14.000485 this was his final message was faced with the question if i am just a a too skinny weak guy alone in an apartment with cancer what am i and i meditated and the answer came through i I am worthy of God's love.
00:33:48.000And it's very understandable, you know, whether he literally was or not, why that's a useful way to look at it.
00:33:54.000That when you allow certain mind viruses, certain brainworms into yourself, and if you indulge them endlessly, that can really take over you as a person.
00:34:07.000It's why Charlie would talk about this, why he would try to listen to music that elevates the spirit, holy music, why you avoid certain things, because we are so heavily influenced by what we choose to marinate in and what we choose to be around.
00:34:35.000We have a lot of responses on marijuana.
00:34:38.000We got another email, I believe she'd contacted us before from one.
00:34:42.000I don't want to say the name, but she has a brother who he's basically been in and out of homelessness due to marijuana use that shattered his mental health.
00:34:54.000And we have another one, Gary, who says, these are all legal because people are making money off of it.
00:35:01.000And I think Alex definitely drove that home for us.
00:35:04.000Yeah, we got one from Clarence saying, be honest, and I'm not trying to be stupid here, but marijuana kept me from drinking because I knew what drinking was about and it wasn't good for me.
00:35:14.000I would say to you, Clarence, that just because it kept you up drinking, being, you know, smoking a lot of pots, probably not good for you either.
00:35:34.000I would say the numbers reflect, if you look at it, when you are hooked on one thing, the pattern is that it makes it easier for you to be hooked on other things, which is one reason making marijuana so widely available was such a mistake.
00:35:47.000Like for the people at the bottom of society, it was like throwing one more problem onto another.
00:35:53.000So it's not that we have 20 million people who use weed and then 20 million people who drink too much and then another 20 million who gamble too much.
00:36:01.000It's often the same people doing all these things.
00:36:04.000They do too much weed and they drink and they gamble away their money and they're hooked on, they play too many video games and they also are abusing prescription drugs.
00:36:13.000And that's one reason the health of a lot of the American underclass is just totally disintegrated.
00:36:26.000It would be bad enough if we just had people with drinking problems, for example.
00:36:30.000But if you have a drinking problem and you're abusing your pills and you're taking a bunch of weed, it's very bad for you.
00:36:37.000And we have to conquer these one at a time.
00:36:40.000But the easiest way to not fall into this trap is to just make sure you never set down that path in the first place.
00:36:45.000And that's why Charlie was such a great example.
00:36:48.000Well, you know what's interesting, though, just looking at our emails, there's a lot of you that are a little skeptical about our weed take still.
00:37:50.000That's why Charlie would advocate marriage, children.
00:37:53.000You become a stronger person when you actually have responsibilities and duties to fulfill.
00:37:58.000And all these addictions we push everywhere, they are encouraging people to abdicate their duties towards others, which are part of what make us fully human beings.