00:00:01.000Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, is weed good for you?
00:00:04.000A contrarian take on marijuana with Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children, and then Charlie Hurt, not Charlie Kirk, Charlie Hurt, great American.
00:00:14.000We have a good conversation about what's happening in our country.
00:00:59.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:11.000Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
00:01:14.000For personalized loan services, you can count on.
00:01:16.000Go to andrewandodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
00:01:23.000With us right now is Alex Berenson, who deserves a lot of credit for his research throughout the entire pandemic and kind of being a contrarian data-focused voice, which I think he deserves just our praise because it came at great cost for him personally and professionally.
00:02:18.000So Tell Your Children came out in 2019, about three and a half years ago now, almost.
00:02:23.000And I wrote it over the previous couple of years.
00:02:27.000My wife is a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, actually.
00:02:31.000So that means she deals with the criminally mentally ill mainly.
00:02:35.000And she had seen a lot of patients who had committed crimes under the influence of cannabis and sometimes other drugs too, and sometimes alcohol.
00:02:47.000But cannabis really was the thread that was common in all of these.
00:02:52.000So she encouraged me to look at this connection.
00:02:56.000And, you know, I'd been a reporter for the New York Times for 10 years and I'd covered mainly the pharmaceutical industry, but I really didn't have much of a view about cannabis legalization.
00:03:07.000I'd used a handful of times in my life, but it was not a drug that I'd used a lot or cared particularly about either way.
00:03:15.000And what I found was that she was right.
00:03:19.000She treated these people and knew what she was looking for and knew what had happened.
00:03:25.000But there's a huge body, a huge and growing body of scientific research that cannabis really is dangerous to a lot of people's mental health.
00:03:34.000That, you know, it's not just that it can sap your motivation or make you sort of fat and lazy, these sort of these tropes about stress.
00:03:44.000It's that if you use too much, especially at a young age, if you start at a young age, if you start in your teens, you're early to mid-teens, and you use heavily, and it is addictive.
00:03:55.000So people will, you know, a lot of people wind up using more than they think they're going to use.
00:04:03.000And you can sometimes, some people, probably people with a genetic predisposition, although it's not always clear, may develop permanent psychosis, a permanent psychotic condition known as schizophrenia after using cannabis.
00:04:16.000And this is, you know, this is very hotly debated outside the scientific community, but I would say it's not that heavily debated inside the scientific community.
00:04:27.000I would say the main debate inside the scientific community is not whether or not this happens, but how frequently it happens and whether or not, you know, there's a genetic predisposition causing it to happen.
00:04:39.000So yeah, just really quick, just, you know, I'm a layman when it comes to marijuana.
00:04:43.000I've never used it, so my knowledge is very limited.
00:04:45.000I do know that it kind of goes all across the map, though.
00:04:48.000I know people that use marijuana and they get super anxious when they use it and people that have a totally different experience.
00:05:01.000And like a lot of drugs, and also it's changed a lot.
00:05:04.000And this is something that's gotten a lot of attention in the last several years that I try to highlight in the book that I think people are finally waking up to.
00:05:12.000It really is not the same product it was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
00:05:17.000What's happened is that with legalization, the people who promoted legalization always said, oh, this is going to help make a broad variety of product available to people.
00:05:28.000There's going to be low strength cannabis, medium strength, high strength.
00:05:31.000And that's really based on the amount of THC that is in the cannabis.
00:05:36.000It turns out that most people who use a regularly want very high strength cannabis.
00:05:41.000Or they want to just smoke or vape pure THC, or they want edibles, which are, you know, which are basically pure THC in some kind of cooked form.
00:05:51.000And so that's what the industry's provided.
00:05:53.000You know, we're very good in this country at giving people what they want.
00:05:56.000And what they want is really strong cannabis.
00:05:59.000And unfortunately, although as you would expect, the stronger the drug, the more likely you are to have severe side effects.
00:06:08.000We've gone from people who don't use, or I think people, you know, I'm in my 40s, people my age or older have a vision of this drug as, oh, you know what?
00:06:16.000Like it's a little spliff that gets passed around at parties.
00:06:19.000Or, you know, maybe there's a bong that I smoked once in college at a party or something like that.
00:06:25.000This is something that this, this, this relatively small group, although it's millions and millions of people, are waking up and using day after day after day.
00:06:34.000And they are going, I mean, they are going through life basically high on, you know, on THC for in some cases, essentially their whole lives.
00:06:43.000And that has had really harmful effects on a lot of them.
00:06:48.000So let me ask you, there's some people that say, but there's potential medical benefits or natural benefits.
00:07:34.000I mean, the claims basically are that this thing cures everything.
00:07:38.000And basically, unfortunately, when cannabis and THC and the chemicals in cannabis are tested rigorously, most of the time they don't work to cure anything.
00:07:50.000My surprise, actually my greatest surprise about this is they don't really even they don't really even work on pain.
00:07:56.000And you would think that because the drug gets you high, it would work very well on pain, but because it enhances sensation, that's actually probably not something you want to do when you're in pain.
00:08:06.000So marijuana is not a very good medicine for almost any of the conditions it's touted for.
00:08:11.000There's a couple minor exceptions um and, by the way, it's not really a good anti-anxiety drug uh, for most people, because The unfortunate thing about anti-anxiety drugs, and this is true of benzodiazepine, it's true.
00:08:23.000I mean, drugs like Xanax or Valium, people who use them and then try to stop using them often have very bad rebound anxiety.
00:08:30.000And that can happen with cannabis too.
00:08:32.000So you use, you feel better, but then you stop and you get even more anxious than you were before.
00:08:38.000So as a medicine, cannabis is essentially useless for most for most conditions.
00:08:45.000As a political stance, though, this was brilliant.
00:08:48.000And so that got that built up this sort of for-profit industry in places like California.
00:08:54.000And then they started agitating and saying, you know what?
00:08:58.000It's silly to make people go get a medical marijuana card when we know most of these people are just using to get high.
00:09:24.000I mean, you know, there's some evidence.
00:09:27.000What there really is evidence of is heavy use in those states.
00:09:31.000And I mean, we haven't talked about the crime issue at all, but one of the promises made was, oh, if we legalize the cannabis, then police officers won't have to worry about users and they'll be able to focus on serious crime and we'll see a decrease in violent crime.
00:09:46.000Well, as you know, in the United States, there's been a terrible increase in violent crime and murder in the last couple of years.
00:09:51.000And in many of the cities that were early legalization, it's actually been even worse.
00:09:56.000And that's an even harder correlation to make.
00:09:58.000And we'd have to have a whole nother segment about it.
00:10:01.000But because psychosis and severe mental illness are major drivers of violent crime, there's a real case to be made that some of this increase is being driven by legalization.
00:10:20.000Look, we may have been able to stop the Ministry of Truth, but we know they'll be back with something else.
00:10:26.000We are facing the biggest threat to your constitutional rights in our lifetime.
00:10:30.000Look, I am proud to support and partner with Patriot Mobile, America's only Christian conservative cell phone provider.
00:10:36.000The folks at Patriot Mobile make it easy for you to be able to stop funding these left-wing carriers who give all their money to groups like BLM and all these awful places and instead have a cell phone company in alignment with your values.
00:10:51.000Patriot Mobile has plans to fit any budget and their U.S.-based customer support team provides exceptional customer service.
00:10:58.000Most importantly, Patriot Mobile shares your values, supports organizations fighting for religious liberty, constitutional rights, and the sanctity of life.
00:11:27.000So the issue about marijuana and crime is, I would say, even more controversial than the issue around marijuana and psychosis because people, you know, marijuana supporters are always saying, oh, it just makes people mellow.
00:11:39.000And the only thing that I've ever murdered is a bag of Doritos.
00:11:53.000And so, you know, you bars get loud, and sometimes, you know, and sometimes what might have been a verbal argument turns into a fight.
00:12:00.000What might have been a fight turns into an aggravated assault.
00:12:03.000It's it sort of takes things up a notch.
00:12:05.000Marijuana can cannabis can make people very relaxed and mellow, but it can also make them agitated and paranoid.
00:12:12.000And when people get paranoid, really paranoid, and certainly when they're psychotic, they can lash out and they do so in ways that are very unpredictable.
00:12:21.000So, so psychosis and schizophrenia are connected with a lot of violent crime.
00:12:29.000The best estimates are that, you know, anywhere between if you're a person with schizophrenia and your illness is uncontrolled, you have between a five and 20 times, five and 20 times increased risk for severe violence, for committing severe violence.
00:12:46.000And so, so, given that, it is, and given that we know that cannabis can produce this paranoid and sometimes psychotic reaction in people, there's there's reason to believe, and it's supported in data, that cannabis can drive violent crime.
00:13:05.000Um, and so, and you see it, I mean, I mentioned it and tell your children, I mentioned many, many cases where we, you know, where that where there's a apparently a clear causal link, but more than that, you're seeing it in sort of national and state level data that the legalization of cannabis has certainly not been linked with a decrease in violent crime, it's been the opposite.
00:13:27.000And look, violent crime is a very complicated phenomenon, it's multifactorial.
00:13:32.000Um, you know, people on the left will say, Oh, it's just guns, people on the right say, No, it's just you know that the police have been undercut.
00:13:39.000You know, it's it's a whole bunch of factors.
00:13:41.000And I'm certainly not saying that cannabis legalization is the only factor or even the primary factor.
00:13:46.000But what I am saying is that when you look at specific cases and at broader trends, you can see a connection here.
00:13:54.000So, shifting gears really quick, tell us about your lawsuit with Twitter.
00:13:58.000So, so by the way, one great thing about tell your children is that the book is three and a half years old and it's sort of just come back to life.
00:14:05.000So, when you write some stuff that's true and nonfiction, it can come back.
00:14:10.000And that is actually giving me a really good feeling about pandemia, which is my book about what we did with COVID the last couple of years and what we should have done and the mistakes that we made, and the fact that we shouldn't have locked down or shut schools.
00:14:23.000So, as you know, I've been a contrarian about the vaccines, just like I've been a contrarian about cannabis.
00:14:29.000And I've argued that we don't have great evidence that the vaccines are working very well.
00:14:33.000That's certainly infection and transmission, they don't reduce at all.
00:14:37.000It looks like they may even increase your susceptibility to being infected.
00:14:42.000Okay, all of that led me or led Twitter to kick me off last August.
00:14:48.000I sued Twitter in December, and in April, April of this year, I got the very good news that my lawsuit had survived the motion to dismiss.
00:14:56.000And this was a Clinton judge who said, You know what?
00:15:00.000This guy's got a case, I'm going to let it go forward.
00:15:02.000So, right now, I, and this is a public, uh, you know, this has been reported.
00:15:07.000I'm negotiating with Twitter about a settlement that, you know, and I can't talk about what the terms might be, but I'm also proceeding with this lawsuit.
00:15:16.000And one of the things that the lawsuit is going to allow me to do is see whether or not there were communications from the federal government and from drug companies and everybody else to Twitter about me.
00:15:27.000So, when we have these debates about Section 230 and people say, oh, you know, these companies, these social media companies, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or anybody else, are just acting as censors for the federal government.
00:15:41.000And it's going to happen very rapidly.
00:15:43.000It's going to happen before Elon Musk could possibly take over Twitter, even before, you know, even assuming the deal goes through.
00:15:50.000So I'm in this, like, I'm in a unique position, and I am aggressively raising money for this.
00:15:55.000I have a GoFundMe that's got my name on it, and it's called Fight Social Media Censorship.
00:16:01.000And you can read about what I'm doing on my sub stack, which is unreported truths, is what it's called, unreported truths at Substack, because Substack does allow free speech from both the right and the left.
00:16:13.000But that's, you know, that's where I am.
00:16:15.000I'm very, you know, excited is the wrong word, but as somebody who's, you know, who's been a reporter for a long time, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to, you know, to get a look under the potential censorship that the government may have driven in my case.
00:18:19.000So, Charlie, there's a lot of different stories that we can unpack.
00:18:22.000You know, I just want to kind of ask you a broader question.
00:18:24.000Where do you think we are, you know, politically?
00:18:27.000I did a whole kind of monologue, I guess you could say, a thesis, trying to basically making the argument that we're in this final phase, that conservatives were not falling for the bait from the left anymore.
00:18:38.000We don't care what names they call us.
00:18:40.000And basically, the left, in a kind of last move of desperation, they become just basically enamored with brute force, punishing and politicizing, you know, the criminal justice system against their political opponents.
00:18:52.000Where do you think we are just from a 35,000-foot view?
00:18:57.000I think that you, I think we're actually on the exact same spot on this.
00:19:04.000I think we are emerging into sort of this like post-leftist world.
00:19:10.000And I hate to, I almost hate saying this publicly because I don't, I hate, I don't want to sound pollyannish.
00:19:18.000And I'm not trying to sound hopeful, but I can't help but be hopeful because you captured perfectly.
00:19:28.000I think that all of their ideas have run their course.
00:19:33.000And sadly, it's taken us not Destroying education, destroying the treatment of lots of people that the left claims to care about, whom they do not care about, for them to kind of run out of excuses.
00:19:50.000And every time something big comes up and they come up with a new grand idea, whether it's global warming or racism or guns, every single one of those issues, if you think about it, if you look at it the right way, none of them are solutions.
00:20:06.000They're all excuses and distractions from their miserable failure on everything they've ever promised, whether it's ending poverty or whatever it is that they claim to care about and claim to want to have a solution to, but they don't.
00:20:28.000The only thing they have, the only solution they have is a solution for giving themselves more power and more money taken from you.
00:20:39.000I really do think we've reached the end of it.
00:20:41.000And I give President Trump so much credit for this because I think, and the question that we always have is: well, I wish he wouldn't tweet, or I wish he wasn't such a jerk.
00:20:54.000I don't know that we get to the spot without him being in jerk.
00:20:59.000Tell us why, because some of our audience will disagree.
00:21:02.000Tell us why you think that's the case.
00:21:05.000Because our reflexive reaction to any problem, whether it's a school shoot, whatever, is to assume that the people we're arguing with are operating from a place of good faith and that they want to accomplish the same thing we do, like the humanist thing to do, right?
00:21:26.000And if you start, you've lost the fight, if you're dealing with these people, you lost the fight the minute you make that assumption.
00:21:34.000And that's just what decent people do.
00:21:36.000And let's be clear: our side is filled with decent people.
00:21:42.000The other side is not filled with decent people.
00:21:45.000There are a lot of decent people that fall for it.
00:21:50.000But the people that are guiding the sort of thinking on the left, these are not opportunities to fix problems.
00:21:57.000These are opportunities to seize more control.
00:22:00.000And so you have to be a single-minded a-hole like Trump to sit here and stand up for that stuff and to fight it.
00:22:10.000And from the beginning, say, no, you're not being an honest broker on this.
00:22:14.000You're actually trying to do something.
00:22:16.000You're either trying to distract or you're trying to gather, you know, figure out some way to exploit the strategy for your own personal gain.
00:22:25.000And that's not the way this is going to work.
00:22:28.000The way this is going to work is to have actual common sense, thoughtful, intelligent approaches to things that actually, you know, forever mindful of our constitutional rights and how not to make the quote-unquote solution even worse than the problem that you're supposed to, you know, that we want to solve and that our opponents don't even want to solve.
00:22:58.000And so we're kind of in this final moment.
00:23:01.000You've been in the conservative movement for quite a while, longer than I have.
00:23:04.000Are you starting to see a difference in how conservatives, especially kind of those conservatives that could go either way, either be with the base on certain issues or be with kind of the chamber and the moderates?
00:23:16.000Are you starting to see kind of a turning moment where the kind of attacks from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the kind of weaponizing of name-calling matters less?
00:23:27.000Are you starting to see a sea change in that regard?
00:23:42.000And even you and I have fallen for it.
00:23:44.000We get into these arguments with people about whether there are two genders or 18 genders, right?
00:23:51.000And the mere fact that we're having that discussion means that we're not having a serious rational discussion about anything.
00:23:59.000We're just, and also, by the way, we look ridiculous engaging in a, you know, mud-smearing fight with an idiot.
00:24:12.000I mean, no one comes out of that looking intelligent.
00:24:16.000And if that's what happens, then they win, because then they go to the next thing.
00:24:20.000And I do think that it's so, and some, and part of the reason that they do that, of course, is so that rational, common sense, good-meaning Americans tune out.
00:24:33.000And they just, they assume that political discussions are about whether or not there are eight genders.
00:24:39.000I mean, you know, the University of Virginia, one of the most prestigious medical universities in the world on the planet, teaches that there are eight genders, offers you eight genders when you enroll.
00:24:55.000And that kind of thing, when people think that that's what political discussions are about, then good people walk away from that and they say, you know, I got to teach my kid how to play baseball.
00:25:09.000So this is, I'm just going to leave this alone.
00:25:13.000I'm going to leave this for the morons to discuss.
00:25:16.000And then, of course, you and I are left, you know, doing our best to sort of have to sort through the argument because, yeah.
00:25:25.000And unfortunately, we look like idiots because we're like, because if there is any bigger moron than somebody who thinks there are eight genders, it's the person trying to correct that idiot, you know?
00:25:41.000But anyway, so, but I do, I really do, I do think that that stuff is wearing through.
00:25:47.000And, you know, obviously what we saw with the recall of Chesapeake in San Francisco, and even bigger than that, of course, in a lot of ways, was the recall of those school board members there.
00:26:04.000And honestly, I think if Glenn Young were on the ballot today as opposed to six months ago, it was shocking to me that Terry McAuliffe got 48% of the vote in Virginia in my home state.
00:26:20.000Just like it's shocking that millions of people did vote for Joe Biden.
00:26:24.000But I think that if you were to have that election again today, I think that Young probably would have won by a whole lot more.
00:26:34.000And once people start realizing, yeah, it really is as ridiculous as you think it is.
00:26:41.000What they're doing really is as appalling as you think it is, then that accrues so that in a year from now, Glenn Young will have like 70%, you know, 60% approval rating in Virginia.
00:26:56.000I really do believe that that's kind of, that's how this works.
00:26:59.000It has to, or else the entire civilization falls apart, right?
00:27:02.000I mean, these, and this is something you've written about before.
00:27:05.000It really is kind of the tyranny of these fringe academic theories, kind of the ideologues.
00:27:10.000And that's what you saw in San Francisco.
00:27:12.000I mean, you could not have a more ideologically pure, and I put that in air quotes, than Boudin, right?
00:27:18.000Abolish the police, don't have any sort of law enforcement whatsoever.
00:27:23.000But it's kind of, we have to eventually come down to those pesky shackles of reality, don't we?
00:27:27.000And isn't that kind of our great hope?
00:27:30.000And I'm so glad you used the word tyranny because the word tyranny is exactly, it's precisely the word that our founders would have used to describe exactly this.
00:27:41.000Tyranny for them, yeah, they were concerned about tyranny of the government and tyranny of leaders.
00:27:49.000But they were also, when they talked about tyranny, they talked about tyranny, the minority within the government.
00:27:55.000But they also were talking about tyranny of a thug walking down the street willing to take your life, a citizen's life, for no reason or for his own selfish reasons.
00:28:10.000And the reason that they were so adamant about us being self-governed and having, say, for example, gun rights, as well as everything else, free speech rights and religious rights and all this kind of stuff, is that we ourselves are responsible for protecting ourselves against the tyranny of a thug walking down the street wanting to hurt us, our families, or our neighbors.
00:28:35.000And we were able to, we have the right to stand up and stop that, which of course we didn't see in Uvalde, which is one of the unending tragedies of that situation.
00:28:49.000Look, the world situation is getting worse every single day.
00:28:52.000We're suffering from high inflation, outrageous gasoline and diesel prices, skyrocketing food prices, a bad economy, and so much worse.
00:29:01.000Are you prepared in case a food shortage hits and you can't get food at the grocery store for months and months?
00:29:07.000If not, then please go to preparewithkirk.com and you'll save $150 on a three-month emergency food kit from my Patriot Supply.
00:29:16.000This three-month kit gives you a wide variety of delicious daily meals, breakfast, lunch, dinners, drinks, and snacks for three full months per person.
00:29:24.000If the worst happens and you don't have this emergency food, you'll regret it.
00:30:15.000So Charlie, you know, as I travel the country and I talk to people, people are much more concerned about the open border, the destruction of their history and their culture, the fact they can't afford gas than kind of some of these debates happening in DC.
00:30:29.000And I'm not trying to minimize any of the suffering of the families, obviously, neither Buffalo or Uvalde, but it feels to be a very DC-centric conversation.
00:30:41.000And, you know, again, you know, going back to what we were just talking about a minute ago, about how we approach these things from sort of a standpoint of decency and it automatically, you know, because we don't, we're horrified by what we saw.
00:31:01.000And so you start from the standpoint of, oh my goodness, is there something I could have done?
00:31:07.000It's just like anytime you read a bad story in the newspaper about something, a car accident, anything that happens, you say, is there something I could have done?
00:31:14.000There's something we could have done to prevent that.
00:31:16.000And you can't, it's a basic human emotion of decent people.
00:31:21.000But the real people who are denigrating and belittling the pain of the families in Uvalde and Buffalo are the politicians who look at that and say, oh, well, I could have fixed this if we had done this, if you just let me do this.
00:32:06.000Yeah, let me just interject really quick, though, Charlie.
00:32:08.000This is very difficult for some conservatives, especially conservatives that have been around for 30 or 40 years, to agree with that we're not dealing with decent people.
00:32:17.000I think there is a desire, or at least kind of a willingness is the wrong word, but they cannot get over the hump of being like, are we really dealing with the indecent?
00:32:30.000I mean, look what, again, let's go back to Donald Trump.
00:32:35.000Look what they did for six years to Donald Trump.
00:32:39.000And whether you like Donald Trump or not, or and whether you think he fed into it and made things worse, they really did spy on his campaign.
00:32:49.000They really did use a whole of government approach to weaponize a Democratic campaign against him, both inside and outside of the government, to make up stories.
00:32:59.000And they use the entire media to spin lies and tell fantastical lies and weave these completely unbelievably ridiculous conspiracy theories against him, all for their own political benefit.
00:33:15.000But if you take all that apart and you go down to the basic sort of the platform of what the guy stood for and what he wants to do, the America First agenda, there's nothing controversial about it.
00:33:27.000The reason the left, the reason Washington despised Donald Trump is not because he was radical, and it wasn't even because he was a bombastic jerk.
00:33:37.000The reason they opposed him is because when you take all that away, his policies were so mainstream, he terrified them.
00:33:50.000Sadly, he terrified a lot of Republicans in Washington who had their little feistoms built around lobbyists and staffers and all that kind of stuff.
00:34:00.000And he was, and his simple approach, simple, practical, common sense approach, pro-America approach to every problem threatened them.
00:34:10.000And that's why, did the guy have to be a jerk?
00:34:12.000I don't know how, I don't know any other way.
00:34:15.000You can't deal with people like this nicely.
00:34:18.000You don't hire a perfume salesman to do plumbing work when your toilet is plugged up.