In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we're talking about the dumbest thing we can do to make money online, and it's not even close to being as dumb as we think it is. We're also going to talk about hemp, which is one of the funniest things ever, because it's illegal in this country and it doesn't even get you high. That's how stupid we are. Good googly moogly. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website. They have a whole e-commerce section dedicated to showing you how to figure this all out, and they have a self-help website that'll better deliver the customer experience. And for a free trial and 10% off your first purchases, go to sqarespace.com/joejoe and enter the code "JOE" to get 10% of your first purchase. You'll get that no-risk trial, a $110 bonus offer, including the digital scale, and up to $55 worth of free postage. And if you go to stamps.com and use the promo code JRE, you'll get $110 worth of FREE postage, and you don't have to worry about it at all. You don't even have to use your credit card to try it out! And we're also talking to Dr. Carl Hart later on Onnit. Onnit is a human optimization website that sells the best strength and conditioning equipment we can find. We essentially. We sell the best workout equipment you can get anywhere in the world. It's the best way to get the most bang for your money. It doesn't get any better than that you can buy it anywhere else. And it doesn t have to be fancy or expensive, it can be made in your local grocery store. We'll give you the best tasting coffee and you get it all the same thing you need to make the most of it. And it's cheaper than you'll ever get anywhere else but it's better than you're going to get in a store that's going to be able to buy it at a decent price and you're not going to pay for it in a nice little box, they'll get a carton of coffee and it won't be as good tasting and it'll make you feel like you're getting a good deal on it, too. We'll tell you what I mean by that.
00:00:03.000This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is supported by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website.
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00:05:04.000I've seen a bunch of your videos and read some of the interviews.
00:05:08.000And I think it's incredibly important to have a guy like you out there.
00:05:12.000It's incredibly important for a bunch of reasons.
00:05:15.000Because it's important to spread the truth about drugs and to have someone who's actually intelligent and a real professor who really understands what they're talking about.
00:05:47.000That's one of the coolest things about this whole Twitter, social media thing, is that I get to find out about people like you, and I get to be introduced by all these Twitter people that want to get us together.
00:06:00.000Well, again, I say I'm happy that there's a guy like you out there, because I've learned a lot from what you're doing, and I've learned a lot from some of the interviews that you've had, You know, you've had to kind of confront a lot of the ignorance that people have.
00:06:12.000And it even kind of exposed a lot of my own ignorance.
00:06:15.000And I thought that was really fascinating.
00:06:17.000And one of the things was that you did a John Stossel interview where you were talking about how many people use meth and coke and don't fucking ruin their lives.
00:06:25.000They figure out how to keep it together.
00:06:27.000Yeah, you know, that's one of the biggest myths is that people think that individuals who use drugs like crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, they think that the majority of the people who use those drugs are addicted and their life goes spiraling out of control.
00:06:40.000They think that because it makes great TV drama, for example.
00:06:45.000And so we reinforce it in our sort of pop culture.
00:06:48.000And also, we can always think of somebody who screwed their life up as a result of drugs.
00:06:53.000But the people who don't screw their life up, they don't talk about it.
00:06:57.000They just go about paying taxes, paying their bills, handling their responsibilities.
00:07:13.000Well, you know, I'm an educator first.
00:07:16.000And so when we think about hiding information or not telling people the truth because we're afraid that they can't handle the truth, that's illogical.
00:08:43.000There are certainly physical addictions, like people do get alcoholism where it actually makes them sick if they stop, right?
00:08:49.000Yeah, so like physical addiction, certainly that's a part of addiction, but that's not the sort of main point of addiction.
00:08:55.000Addiction, the main thing of addiction is like disruption of psychosocial functioning.
00:08:59.000You don't pay your taxes, you don't meet your obligations, those kinds of things.
00:09:02.000But you can get physically addicted to something like tobacco, although it's not life-threatening, but it's irritating.
00:09:09.000But the thing that we see that's more that we think is excruciating pain is heroin addiction.
00:09:15.000For example, we think that if someone is going through heroin withdrawal, They are in such agonizing pain that they are on the verge of death.
00:11:09.000There are a number of people who depend on this sort of Industry now or they depend on this approach and it's hard to get out of this approach because right now in the country we're talking about liberalizing drug laws.
00:11:21.000You can't liberalize drug laws unless you give police officers something else to do.
00:11:25.000You can't liberalize drug laws unless you give the treatment industry something else to do and that's one of the things we haven't really talked about in this whole conversation because those people are going to fight to keep their money.
00:11:47.000So it seems to me like there's a multi-point strategy that has to be hit in order to make a transition between the prohibition that we're experiencing right now and not having all these people completely fighting against it because of their jobs.
00:12:05.000Like there has to be some sort of a strategy for taking the resources that are being applied right now to this unsuccessful drug war and doing something healthy for communities.
00:12:14.000Yeah, you know, that's one of the things I wrote my book recently, High Price, and that's one of the things I tried to...
00:12:25.000Which is deeply personal, and it's not something that I'm so comfortable doing.
00:12:29.000But I had to do that in order to kind of contextualize the whole drug war and what it all means.
00:12:35.000And also, the science portion is there so people can understand what these drugs actually do and what they don't do.
00:12:42.000And if you have that sort of contextualization and an understanding of the science, now you can probably make some reasonable, logical decisions, some choices about how we should deal with drugs in the country.
00:12:53.000Now, when you see something like the country of Portugal, which decriminalized drugs less than a decade ago, right?
00:13:01.0002001. And their results have been pretty extraordinary.
00:13:04.000Yeah, you know, when you, like Portugal, let's just be clear so the audience understands what decriminalization means.
00:13:10.000Decriminalization is not legalization.
00:13:12.000Legalization is what we do with alcohol and tobacco.
00:13:15.000Decriminalization would be like treating drug violations like we treat traffic violations.
00:13:21.000You can't go to jail or get a felony charge, but you may be subjected to a fine or so.
00:13:26.000That's how they deal with drugs in Portugal, all drugs, from heroin to marijuana to methamphetamine to cocaine.
00:13:32.000Now, when you look at the major indicators, for example, drug use, they have less drug use than we do in this country.
00:13:39.000When you look at drug-related overdose death, they have less than we do in this country.
00:13:43.000When you have the amount of money that they pump into their prison systems and so forth, of course, they're pumping less than we do.
00:13:50.000And so they're doing better than us on all of these major indicators, and they have no sort of plans to Go another direction because they're happy with their current approach.
00:14:00.000And so that's one of the things I argue for in High Price, the book.
00:14:04.000I argue that we should decriminalize all drugs in this country.
00:14:07.000But in order to decriminalize drugs, one of the things we have to also do is we have to increase the amount of realistic drug education.
00:14:15.000Not that just say no stuff that we've been...
00:14:18.000Peddling for a number of years, but real drug education.
00:14:21.000It's pretty ridiculous to think that you can educate anyone to the dangers or lack of dangers in drugs in a 30-second commercial, right?
00:14:31.000Yeah, you know, but that's not the goal.
00:14:33.000That's one of the things that people have to understand is that those folks who came up with those 30-second spots, their goal was not drug education.
00:14:40.000Their goal was more propaganda and fear-based sort of education, if that's what we want to call it.
00:14:49.000But the goal was not really teaching people about drugs or what drugs really do.
00:14:54.000I had a joke in one of my old comedy specials about the Partnership for Drug-Free America because it was funded by alcohol and tobacco companies.
00:15:01.000And I was like, alcohol and tobacco companies going after marijuana is like hookers going after strippers.
00:16:26.000Why is it that this is something that's controversial to say?
00:16:30.000What you're saying right now on this podcast A guy who's a distinguished academic saying these things is very controversial.
00:16:39.000Why is that if they are true and you are an educator and you have that philosophy, which I admire greatly, why is that rare?
00:16:48.000For one thing, there are few people in the country who actually know what drugs really do and what they don't do.
00:16:56.000So when you think about, you know, I have 24 years of experience of giving drugs to animals and humans in a lab and carefully trying to understand the effect of drugs.
00:17:07.000A number of people just simply don't know.
00:17:10.000Another reason is that people, scientists, for example, are a conservative lot, and they are reluctant to speak to the media, in part because they don't want to get their words twisted or they don't want to appear to be wrong.
00:17:23.000And so, I mean, I respect that at some level.
00:17:27.000And so I think that contributes on the one hand.
00:17:30.000And on the other hand, we've had in this country for a number of years, people who were in control of the narrative were people who had an addiction, parents, law enforcement.
00:17:42.000None of those people are uniquely qualified to speak to this issue, but they have dominated the conversation.
00:17:51.000Now, how did you get involved in this?
00:17:53.000You started, you said 24 years ago, doing drug research on animals.
00:17:57.000What led you to want to go down this road?
00:18:00.000So I was in, I tell this story in the book, and so I was in the Air Force back in the 80s, like you mentioned about crack cocaine.
00:18:08.000So I was in the Air Force over in England, 86, 87, 88, and crack cocaine was a big deal in the United States, as you point out, and I grew up in the hood in Miami.
00:18:20.000And Miami was a cocaine capital in the United States.
00:18:23.000And so things that were happening in my community that were not good, high unemployment, crime, all of these kinds of things, I blamed crack cocaine for that.
00:18:34.000And so I thought that if I go to school and get a degree in order to study drugs, the effects of drugs on the brain, I could solve the problems that faced my community or the problems that I thought were in the community, particularly those related to drugs.
00:18:50.000And so I began studying drugs as an undergraduate and then went on to graduate school to study drugs on the brains of animals and to try to figure out the neurobiological mechanisms that were responsible for addiction.
00:19:03.000So you just got fascinated by this idea of fixing this issue that you saw in your community and then you just fell into a rabbit hole.
00:19:47.000And people said that our generation should be prepared to have an army of kids who couldn't learn because of being exposed to crack cocaine.
00:20:39.000And then that helped me to be more critical about my issue.
00:20:43.000Is there a difference in the effect of crack cocaine, the physical effect, and cocaine and heroin?
00:20:50.000So, let's think about crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
00:20:58.000The only difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is that the powder cocaine has this thing called the hydrochloride salt attached to it.
00:21:06.000That salt prevents it from being smoked.
00:21:08.000Now, you can dissolve the powder cocaine in water and then shoot it in your arm.
00:21:13.000And so you have the effects of cocaine, the onset of the effects within seconds.
00:22:16.000With crack cocaine, now you no longer need the ether.
00:22:20.000You just mix it up with baking soda and water and the cocaine and you mix it up and you get rid of that salt.
00:22:26.000So ether is no longer needed and it's not as dangerous.
00:22:30.000So that's one of the reasons that we have crack cocaine as a result of that.
00:22:34.000And it also, it made it so you could sell them in unit doses to make the drug appear to be cheaper because you also might recall in the early 1980s, 1970s, you had to buy cocaine powder in bulk and that made it more expensive.
00:22:49.000Crack cocaine made it a lot more simple for people to buy it who didn't have the kind of expendable income that was required before the mid-1980s.
00:23:01.000So essentially they just brought it down to bite-sized portions.
00:23:05.000Rather than selling this whole six-pack or 12-pack, now you can sell one item, one can or one bottle.
00:23:12.000I want to talk more about this, but I should just clarify that Richard Pryor changed his story as he got older and actually said that he tried to kill himself.
00:23:21.000I'm a huge Richard Pryor fan, and I know that that was originally what he had said, that he got burnt doing freebies, but I think he changed his story later.
00:23:29.000I actually worked with him a bunch of times right before he died.
00:24:22.000Well, let me clarify, because on the one hand, so when crack hit the market, it was first sort of talked about December 1984 in the LA Times, the first time we heard of crack.
00:24:34.000But it didn't become more widely known or available until maybe the mid-1985.
00:24:41.000Now, once crack cocaine hit the markets, what happened was that people were fighting over various new markets.
00:24:48.000Whenever there are new illicit markets, yeah, you're going to get some violent activity until the market settles down.
00:24:54.000That happened with any illicit market, and that certainly happened with crack cocaine.
00:24:58.000Now, there are a number of things that people attribute to crack in terms of crime and all of the sort of downfall of certain communities.
00:25:09.000They said that unemployment really rose as a result of crack cocaine being around.
00:25:15.000Now, 1982, the unemployment rate in this country was about 11% for white folks, and it was double that for black people.
00:25:23.000That was before crack, at least two, three years before crack even hit the market.
00:25:28.000Now, during the whole crack era, unemployment has never been as high as 1982. That's number one.
00:25:35.000People said things like, people from my community, crack cocaine was responsible for these mothers, these grandmothers now raising new generations of kids because their daughters were strung out on crack and so now they have to take care of these kids.
00:25:52.000It certainly happened in my community, but it happened before crack cocaine was ever on the market.
00:25:58.000It certainly happened in my family long before crack cocaine ever hit the market.
00:26:01.000When we look at other communities, like particularly immigrant communities, if you look at the Jewish community when they came over, the Eastern European Jews, when they came over in the country, The early 1900s, 1800s, and so forth.
00:26:15.000What you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomenon going on in those kind of communities.
00:26:21.000Irvin Howell, his great book, Land of Our Fathers, or Home of Our Fathers, he kind of described all of these pathological behaviors that happened in that community.
00:26:31.000Many of those same behaviors were attributed to crack cocaine in black people later.
00:26:37.000They were there long before crack cocaine was there, but crack cocaine became the scapegoat.
00:26:43.000That's a fascinating scapegoat because I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
00:26:46.000I really thought that there was a difference between the 1980s and the 1990s as far as like when crack was introduced, boom, it took off.
00:26:53.000It was sort of something that was just always discussed as like common fact.
00:27:25.000Well, there are multiple sort of factors and players involved.
00:27:29.000So when we think about the politicians, for example, politicians, if crack cocaine is the problem, Never mind the fact that unemployment rate was out of control before crack cocaine hit the market.
00:28:19.000And so politicians are happy to buy in.
00:28:21.000Now, one of the things about crack cocaine is that when we think about the law that punishes or punish crack cocaine a hundred times more harshly than powder cocaine and the vast majority of people who got punished under these laws were black eighty eighty five percent of the people even though they don't make up the majority of the users so people say things like well were those laws racist and The laws themselves weren't racist because the Congressional Black Caucus,
00:28:47.00017 of the 21 members, voted for these laws, for these laws that punish crack cocaine 100 times more harshly.
00:28:55.000But the point is that everyone bought into it.
00:29:50.000You know, one of the things that I've...
00:29:53.000I've talked to quite a few people about when it comes to issues like real complex issues like drug addiction and violence and poverty, is that once you feed it with any organism, whether that organism is law enforcement or that organism is education,
00:30:10.000whichever one you feed is the one that's going to grow.
00:30:12.000And once you feed the law enforcement one and you look at this really complex situation, I think law enforcement is important.
00:30:19.000But I think education is probably more important to avoid future law enforcement.
00:30:24.000I think the more education we have, the more nuanced our ability to raise children is, the more we understand that we're all in this together, the less you're going to need law enforcement.
00:30:35.000But when law enforcement becomes this machine that lobbies against the legalization of certain drugs, which when you start looking at the data, there's only one reason to do that.
00:30:44.000And the only reason is that you're trying to stay alive.
00:31:20.000There's that very famous speech where Eisenhower gets out of office, and as he's leaving, he addresses the nation, and he warns of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
00:31:30.000And it's a weird speech, because this is a sitting president, and he's leaving, and he's letting people know, like, there's a machine out here that's growing, and I can clue you into this.
00:31:58.000And people need to understand the conflict of interest that these folks have.
00:32:01.000And oftentimes when we have these types of discussions, one of the sort of impulses of the media or folks who have these discussions is that they want to invite law enforcement personnel.
00:32:12.000It's like, what expertise do they have to talk about drugs, really?
00:32:18.000Well, you remember Ronald Reagan when he was on TV? Maramona may very well be one of the most dangerous drugs we've ever discovered.
00:32:26.000You remember that, or whatever the exact quote was?
00:32:28.000No, no, I know, you know, I try to forget Ronald Reagan, but I hear you.
00:32:33.000I had a conversation today about actors with a friend, and we were talking about actors being in politics, like how crazy it is that you let someone who's a professional liar...
00:36:06.000My concern is that if you have performance-enhancing drugs and then people are given a drug in order so they can continue to perform even though they are hurt, that's my concern, that we run further risk of having people being injured.
00:36:21.000But in terms of training and that sort of thing, I don't have so much of an issue with that whole issue of using performance-enhancing drugs, as long as we're doing it in a safe manner in which people understand what's happening.
00:36:56.000So when we think about our ability in this country to train better than some of our opponents in the Olympics because we are a wealthier country, is that fair?
00:37:08.000We think about wealthier people whose kids can have access to prep tests before taking the SAT, before taking the MCAT or some other exam, whereas less wealthy people Absolutely not.
00:37:29.000When it comes to combat sports and athletics, though, obviously I have a vested interest in this idea and this debate, but I think there is an issue of two guys have very similar, almost identical economic situations.
00:37:42.000Identical training environments, identical amount of experience in martial arts, and one guy's taking a drug and the other guy isn't.
00:37:54.000Whatever the rules are now, we must adhere to them.
00:37:58.000All I'm saying is that I think that we need to make sure that we study the issue really well so that if one person has access to anything, the other person also should have access.
00:38:08.000But right now, the rules are that you can't.
00:38:13.000So what you're saying is you think that the rules should be based on scientific evidence of efficacy and of health benefits and risks and all that and have it laid out.
00:38:37.000They can't stop you from taking creatine.
00:38:39.000There's a bunch of stuff that, you know, caffeine, they'll let you take a certain amount, but if you get above like 200 milligrams in your system, they go, oh, no, you don't.
00:40:19.000So, like, kids who are trying to learn how to think critically, when people present them with things like drug-free, they should really question that sort of thing.
00:40:27.000They should be taught that this is part of critical thinking.
00:40:31.000Drug-free society just doesn't exist, so please don't feed me propaganda.
00:40:37.000So that really does exacerbate our issue, right?
00:40:39.000Because with all that ignorance out there, it makes it very difficult to have a real debate about it because people come into everything with preconceived notions.
00:40:47.000I don't know very much at all about chess.
00:42:13.000If I was pulling up in a Ferrari and I said that, maybe then they'd be like, hmm, I was driving a Volkswagen Corrado at the time.
00:42:20.000It was shocking how mean people could be because of that.
00:42:23.000We have, you know, certain things that we accept and certain things we don't accept.
00:42:28.000And when it comes to, you know, things that people talk about at cocktail parties and what have you, and if someone comes along and says heroin's not that addictive, cocaine doesn't ruin, a lot of people take it on a regular basis, you're going to encounter a bunch of know-it-alls, right?
00:43:19.000We were talking about the concept of building blocks of life coming in from asteroids, and that might be where a lot of things came from.
00:43:28.000And one of the things that we were discussing was psychedelic mushrooms, because Terence McKenna had this theory about psychedelic mushrooms coming, spores coming from another planet.
00:43:39.000It's very possible that asteroid impacts that carried all the other building blocks for life also carried psychedelic spores, which is why they're so uniquely different from any other planets on Earth.
00:43:47.000And I was asking him if he ever did mushrooms.
00:43:49.000This is my sneaky way of asking Michio Kaku if he did mushrooms.
00:43:52.000But he started going off about it, giving you brain damage and becoming addictive, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:43:57.000It's so unfortunate that he was talking about it ruining your mind.
00:44:04.000You're like a blind man describing a kaleidoscope.
00:44:06.000And unfortunately, it makes you question all the things that that guy's an expert in.
00:44:12.000Because if you know something to be untrue...
00:44:14.000And here's this brilliant guy who's telling you about the universe itself and the building blocks of matter, and he's so smart, and he's so definitive with his definitions and descriptions of these things, but then he tells you something that you absolutely know to be incorrect,
00:45:20.000And a lot of really smart people don't ever want to admit that.
00:45:23.000There's a lot of really smart people that are really smart about one thing, so you question them about things that they're not really smart about, where they don't really have as much information about, they'll bullshit sometimes.
00:46:33.000You know, it's like people are going to make mistakes.
00:46:35.000And we want them to be able to make the mistakes because in the process of trying to understand something, they might discover something really fascinating or good.
00:46:45.000And so they should be able to make a mistake, but they have to also be able to say, I screwed up.
00:46:56.000If you're a flip-flopper, we don't want to think that anybody learned from their mistakes and changed their opinion or had some new information come in, they reconsidered their ideas.
00:47:05.000Well, the people who say that this guy flip-flopped or this and that, they don't speak for me, and I hope they don't speak for the rest of the country, although they may have the microphone, but I hope people see through that nonsense.
00:47:19.000They do, but there are, I think what they're trying to get at, for the most part, I mean, I think we're certainly right when it comes to, like, you can learn, you can change your opinion.
00:47:28.000I certainly learned in my life, and even I've recently changed my opinions on things, but I think they're just concerned with bullshit politicians that are just completely playing the breeze.
00:47:43.000So you have that issue where people are, like you said, they are trying to make sure they have all the bases covered, and they say one message to one group and a completely different message to another group.
00:48:30.000I think, well, I got on in 94, and I think it's generally considered like 93 was like, when I say pre-internet, like, I think it all started around that area.
00:48:59.000But for a long time, I mean, we think about...
00:49:03.000From Reagan to Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2, even Obama at the beginning of his first term, attitudes about drugs, they hadn't changed that much.
00:49:16.000I mean, the bottom line was that drugs...
00:49:45.000I think Michelle Alexander wrote an important book called The New Jim Crow to help people to understand the fact that we now have 2.3 million people in our prisons and largely because of the war on drugs.
00:49:59.000You know, so it's like we have 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prison population.
00:50:05.000And then we start looking at the racial sort of discrimination in terms of who's in prison.
00:50:11.000Black men make up 5% of the population or 6% of the population.
00:50:33.000I am on A number of boards, respected scientific boards, I have played the game, mainstream game, and then I'm saying, I've done the studies, and I'm telling you, you've been misled.
00:50:49.000So I think the economy, the fact that we don't have the kind of money that we once had, particularly in the mid and late 1990s, where we could build prisons and we could put all this money in law enforcement, I think all of those things have helped people to understand that maybe we're doing something wrong.
00:51:10.000And now with Colorado, one of the things, Colorado and Washington, those two states have legalized marijuana.
00:51:16.000And one of the things that's being really talked about is the amount of tax revenues that the marijuana in Colorado is going to generate.
00:51:25.000In this country, ultimately money remains king.
00:51:32.000You know, I like to think that empirical evidence helps to really shape the way people think, but money is really king.
00:51:39.000And I think that all of these kinds of things, the economy, Colorado, some information, the fact that we don't want to be an immoral people, all of those kind of things are coming together to help people to rethink what we're doing with drugs.
00:51:53.000And if you looked at our culture, If you looked at our civilization scientifically and saw those statistics, those unbalanced statistics, at the very least, you would have to say, well, there's an incompetency in engineering their culture.
00:52:09.000If it's not racist, if they're not victimizing a certain percentage of the population that can't defend itself as effectively and taking advantage of them, at the very least, it's a very poor engineering of the civilization.
00:52:25.000You know, the thing is, is that this is one of the things, one of the things I did, I actually believed many of the American sort of mythology that we were a fair people that, you know, equal rights for everyone.
00:52:36.000And so I think a lot of us believe that.
00:52:38.000And so I think as a result of us believing that sort of mythology, and then actually looking at the data, I think people are disturbed.
00:52:47.000I think that people are understanding that we're just about 50 years removed from the March on Washington and the famous Martin Luther King speech, I Have a Dream, and that sort of thing.
00:53:41.000It's one of the big issues when it comes to the difference between a democratic leader and a republican leader is the way they treat some social issues.
00:54:24.000You know, I think about when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, and I remember the excitement that the country had because we thought that the war on drugs and all these things were going to reverse.
00:54:36.000Then it turns out Bill Clinton, under his administration, more people were arrested than any other administration for these sort of violations.
00:54:46.000And so I think a similar thing kind of happened under the Obama administration.
00:54:50.000It's hard for the Democratic sort of leadership or the Democratic candidate or president to go in a different direction for fear of being considered soft on drugs, on crime.
00:55:08.000As of late, it's the only administration that said that they were going to change the way that the justice system, for example, enforced mandatory minimum drug laws.
00:55:21.000They said they wouldn't be enforcing those laws anymore.
00:55:25.000This administration said that they would leave Colorado and Washington alone, those states that have legalized marijuana, because under federal law, marijuana remains illegal.
00:55:36.000So technically, the federal government can come in and stop that.
00:55:39.000But they have said they're going to allow it to happen.
00:55:42.000They said it's an important sort of experiment.
00:56:05.000Is that just a part of what we were talking about earlier, that just the machine needs to be fed?
00:56:10.000It's way easier to do that than to knock on some trailer that's got smoke coming out of it in the middle of the desert and some dude comes out with a machine gun.
00:56:18.000You go into one of those medical marijuana, you get a nice clean bust, you bring in a lot of cash, and if people don't know the racket, it's kind of hilarious.
00:56:38.000They take all the weed and they take all the money.
00:56:43.000And then they say that they'll be in touch with you.
00:56:47.000They say that they'll review your case, that charges will be pending, they decide when they're going to press charges, when they're going to put your thing into a system.
00:56:56.000So then these people have to decide whether or not they go back to work.
00:56:59.000Do they decide whether or not they go back to work?
00:57:01.000No one's been charged with anything yet.
00:57:02.000You got arrested, they took all your shit, and then they let you go.
00:57:05.000And so you're sitting there, terrified and broke, trying to figure out, is this worth doing more of?
00:57:10.000And the people that work there often quit.
00:57:33.000No, I mean, these kinds of things, they need to be highlighted, and people need to really publicize these things because, I mean, as you just described, obviously most of us are horrified at those kind of events, but people need to know.
00:57:46.000I mean, this has been going on in this country for decades.
00:57:51.000Yeah, it seems like there's got to be a way to balance it out.
00:57:55.000There's got to be a way to take all these industries that are profiting off of It being illegal and locking people up and making sure there's, you know, law enforcement officers that are being paid.
00:58:07.000There's got to be a way to shift that into something else.
00:58:41.000People have been talking a lot about heroin overdose deaths and those sorts of things, saying that heroin is cut or laced with some sort of other compound.
00:58:52.000For example, whenever they confiscate something like heroin, why not do the chemical analysis and make sure it's posted in those local regions so people understand what the drug actually contained?
00:59:02.000I mean, we can have police outreach doing this sort of thing.
00:59:05.000Okay, you want to avoid this because this compound is dangerous.
01:02:15.000I mean, if you don't go out and get your news on your own, if you're one of those people that you get home from work and you turn on the evening news and you sit in front of the dinner table and you watch the evening news, if that's the only way you get your information, like, wow, we're fucked.
01:02:56.000Some of the comments and the statements that people tweet at me, I mean, they are a lot more critical about this issue than my generation was.
01:03:05.000And so when I speak on this issue, as you pointed out how frustrating it might be to deal with certain people, I'm not really dealing with those people.
01:04:48.000I mean, and so you want to make sure that people, we want to encourage people not to behave like that.
01:04:52.000Yeah, and it's got to be really hard for the cops as well if this is what they've done always their entire career and then all of a sudden the laws change and they have to adjust.
01:05:43.000The amount of money that those folks are projected to make in terms of taxpayers' money.
01:05:49.000I assure you, you're going to have former DEA agents involved in the marijuana industry, police officers involved in that industry, relatively quickly.
01:06:00.000So when you say it's going to take a long time, no, it won't take a long time.
01:06:03.000All you have to do is just change the orders or the contingency, the contingency in this case, money.
01:06:11.000So you can actually do it if you have a commitment to doing it.
01:06:18.000When you look at Colorado, when you look at Washington State, do you think that the genie's out of the bottle and that's just going to spread now?
01:06:24.000The genie is out of the bottle and it will depend, whether the genie stays out of the bottle depends on how much tax revenue is generated.
01:06:57.000What a freak fucking group of humans we are.
01:07:02.000It's really strange, but it's exciting.
01:07:05.000I mean, I hate the fact that the situation exists as is.
01:07:08.000I hate the fact that just this giant percentage of our population is imprisoned for nonviolent crimes and involve personal choice and either drug use or even selling drugs.
01:07:17.000It's unbelievably hypocritical when you have drugs everywhere you look.
01:07:22.000But at least I'm encouraged that I see this shift in the young people.
01:07:28.000And that's the thing that keeps me going.
01:07:30.000That's the thing that keeps me on the road with this book talking to people about this issue, trying to educate people.
01:07:35.000I mean, because I think that they're going to do it better than we did it.
01:07:40.000And if I could play any role in helping them do it better, let's do it.
01:07:44.000What's been the biggest resistance out of all these years of studying drugs and studying the reactions of drugs?
01:07:51.000What do you feel has been the biggest resistance or the biggest hurdle that you've had to overcome?
01:07:55.000Because I'm sure it must have been pretty difficult to get this going, especially in the 90s.
01:08:01.000Yeah, you know, so when you say what's been the biggest hurdle to overcome, I'm not sure if you mean professional hurdle or personal hurdle, because, you know, in the book, it's personal and professional.
01:08:12.000And so it all kind of combines it all.
01:08:15.000So I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this.
01:08:18.000Well, either one, either or, but what I meant is the resistance to your research.
01:08:21.000Yeah, so the resistance to the research, the biggest sort of resistance has been primarily from law enforcement community and treatment providers, those two communities, in part because, I mean, I understand that I'm messing with their money at some level.
01:08:45.000My major thing is that if I can just get people to focus on the evidence, the real evidence and not the hysteria, not anecdotes, although anecdotes can be important, if I can get people to focus on evidence, I think I'll win them over.
01:09:00.000Yeah, when I tell people how marijuana was initially made illegal, they look at me like I'm crazy, like I'm making things up.
01:09:07.000And I give them the William Randolph Hearst story and how they used this term, marijuana, that was a wild Mexican tobacco.
01:09:14.000And the people that were making marijuana illegal didn't even know they were making hemp illegal.
01:09:45.000And that was the original reason why marijuana was illegal.
01:09:48.000It had nothing to do with even the psychoactive form of it.
01:09:51.000Well, you just kind of talked about my book.
01:09:53.000You know, that's the sort of theme of the book is that when we talk about these drugs, when we look from marijuana to heroin, what we find is that the illegality of these drugs have less to do with the pharmacology and more to do with these social and economic reasons that you just laid out.
01:10:12.000What's really interesting is that there are laws in two states, in Colorado and Washington, making marijuana legal.
01:10:18.000Even though hemp has been non-psychoactive and used in this country legally since...
01:10:24.000I mean, you could buy it from Canada, like we do at Onnit, and we bring it over, and it's totally illegal to possess, but you can't grow it.
01:10:32.000They won't let you grow it, which is just unbelievable.
01:11:54.000That's a tough question because I don't know all of the history related to it.
01:11:59.000One of the things that I do know is that the Bureau of Narcotics, headed up at the time by Harry Anslinger, his bureau got more money as a result of going at the marijuana or vilifying marijuana.
01:12:14.000And so I know that played a big role in the driving of making marijuana illegal.
01:12:21.000But in terms of the Hearst family, that whole storyline, I know it slightly, but I don't know it as well as I know the Harry Anslinger story.
01:12:31.000Apparently it was originally financed by a church group.
01:12:55.000Beginning in 38, 1939, and through the 40s and 50s, the film was rediscovered in the early 70s and gained new life as a satire among advocates of cannabis policy reform.
01:13:52.000That's disturbing to hear for some people, that our entire society is being engineered by money.
01:13:59.000Well, you know, it's one of these things that you hope people behave in a moral fashion, you know, despite the fact that we have these sort of interests, these monetary interests.
01:14:10.000But if people are hearing for the first time that it's about the money, well, they are kind of late to the game.
01:14:34.000It's a great show about the pathway, the highways between Florida and the rest of the country, that Florida's drug use and the OxyContin prescriptions were so high.
01:14:47.000I think Florida had some insane amount, like more than the entire country combined, We're good to go.
01:15:11.000But they had these pain management centers that were built in.
01:15:13.000They had a doctor and a pharmacy right there.
01:15:24.000So you could go to one doctor and get a prescription.
01:15:26.000Then you go down the street and go to another doctor.
01:15:28.000And they weren't able to exchange information and find out that this guy, this Joe Rogan character, has a hundred different prescriptions for OxyContin.
01:15:35.000He's just driving around all day with a backache.
01:15:57.000One of the reasons that they do poor jobs is because they highlight these sort of aberrations, the worst-case scenario.
01:16:05.000And then so me, the viewer, we get outraged because we see this abhorrent behavior that's going on.
01:16:13.000And then what happens is that you get this crackdown so severe that people who are in pain who actually need the medication find it difficult to get the medication.
01:16:23.000So it'd be nice if we just had like our routine sort of policing of all of these activities.
01:16:30.000When we find that people are abusing the system, we deal with it.
01:16:33.000But don't exaggerate our sort of punishment to the extent that we're doing more harm.
01:16:40.000So, on the one hand, Folks, if they are using OxyContin, I would much prefer them use OxyContin than that they use street heroin.
01:16:49.000In part because OxyContin, we know it's 100% pharmaceutical grade and the adulterants, there are no adulterants in that OxyContin versus heroin where there are Adulterance in the street-level heroin.
01:17:02.000So on the one hand, you have to think about, we have to weigh all of these sort of potential risks and benefits.
01:17:09.000And oftentimes, it's a one-sided story.
01:17:36.000Yeah, that is one of the issues of another article that I was reading on Bloomberg about these pain victims that were trapped in this prescription crackdown.
01:17:44.000And that the amount of OxyContin prescriptions has dropped dramatically.
01:17:49.000Dropped by 97% after a joint U.S. state task force made 2,150 arrests for offenses ranging from improper sales to over-prescription by doctors.
01:18:02.000There are far more good doctors out there who are trying to be responsible than the wayward ones that you describe.
01:18:10.000And the ones who are trying to be responsible, they say, I'm not prescribing these pain meds because I know there's too much potential for risk or harm there.
01:18:20.000Not so much for the patient, but for myself in terms of losing my license.
01:18:25.000Somebody may think that I'm doing this intentionally.
01:18:28.000And so I worry about that, how we crack down too severely.
01:18:33.000Yeah, that's the whole point of this one article on Bloomberg.
01:18:39.000And if anybody wants to check it out, that's the name of it.
01:18:41.000Florida Pain Victims Trapped by Prescription Crackdown.
01:19:28.000And so when we think about drug users, that's your typical drug user.
01:19:32.000That's a great example of it because, I mean, who better?
01:19:35.000A guy who's anti-drugs, who happened to be on drugs, and a guy who's a mouthpiece for the right-wing machine, which has always been anti- quote-unquote drugs.
01:19:47.000Fucking elephant-sized doses of this shit every day.
01:19:51.000He's got his nanny out there running around, or whoever it was, his housekeeper, running around out there buying more heroin for him, and she got popped.
01:19:59.000It's hilarious that that guy was like an anti-drug guy.
01:20:09.000But it's fascinating that those guys exist, that the Bill O'Reilly's, the Rush Limbaugh type characters, the people that really are putting on an act.
01:20:17.000And, you know, Stephen Colbert, everybody thinks of him as, you know, caricature.
01:21:55.000I don't know what the LD50 for Oxycontin is.
01:21:58.000But one of the things about heroin or just any other opiate like Oxycontin is that if you've been using it for a while, that means you can really increase your dose of the drug.
01:22:32.000And that doesn't even concern me if he was using large doses if he had developed tolerance.
01:22:38.000So if you develop tolerance and you're taking, say, 50 pills a day or whatever he was taking, that's no more dangerous than taking one or two pills a day if you don't have the tolerance for it?
01:22:49.000See, one of the things that people don't talk enough about in terms of drugs is the sort of protective effects of tolerance.
01:22:56.000So when people develop tolerance to any drug, whether it be marijuana, alcohol, heroin, it protects you from some of the toxic effects.
01:23:04.000So you can really push the dose without having harmful effects.
01:23:08.000Let me just give you an example from an animal study.
01:23:11.000One of the things that we reported that was reported in the literature with laboratory animals and methamphetamine is that you give them a whopping dose of that drug, you can cause neurotoxic effects.
01:23:25.000Now, if you allow that animal to develop tolerance by giving escalating doses over several days and then you give them that whopping dose, you block the sort of neurotoxic or brain cell death.
01:23:37.000As a result of them developing tolerance.
01:23:40.000So tolerance is important to protect the animal from some of the toxic effects of the drug.
01:23:47.000So the LD50 rate will absolutely change with those who are tolerant to it from continued use.
01:23:52.000Yeah, so the lethal dose will look different based upon the user's history.
01:23:58.000Okay, so when they say like lethal dose 50% or 50% of the population being, you know, like if you have 100 people and then you give them a certain amount of heroin, 50% of them die.
01:24:08.000As soon as they start taking that heroin, that number changes.
01:24:57.000So if you develop dependence on alcohol, you should probably be admitted to a hospital in order to receive benzodiazepines, something like diazepam or Valium, which acts in a similar way as alcohol, but it's longer lasting.
01:25:13.000The benzodiazepine slowly leaves the body, whereas alcohol abruptly leaves the body And then that's what causes the seizure activity and those sorts of things.
01:25:22.000What is the physiological effect of the alcohol leaving the body and then the seizure?
01:26:15.000So the half-life is so short, once the alcohol has left the body and it's been depressing the central nervous system, the brain activity, now all of a sudden those cells fire wildly, uncontrollably, and that's what causes the seizure activity.
01:26:34.000So it's also unbelievably fascinating that it's been proven that alcohol actually suppresses the use of the mind, that the mind can't work as well.
01:26:42.000Well, I don't want to say that strongly.
01:26:47.000It certainly depresses certain neurons, a number of neurons.
01:26:52.000So like when you think about it, when you are anxious, if you're anxious and And you have some alcohol, if you have a benzodiazepine, it's suppressing certain type of activity.
01:27:02.000And so that's a good thing, and you might actually function better.
01:27:06.000Because if you think about going to a party or having some event, and you're so anxious where you can't, Perform as well, and you maybe have a drink, and now you're calm, and you might actually be more social, and you might actually perform more better in that situation.
01:27:21.000So I don't want to say that it's just sort of generalized bad effect on your behavior or the brain.
01:27:29.000So at certain low dosages, it can be beneficial, but at high dosages, it does shut down certain functions of the brain.
01:27:35.000Like, there's very few people that would score as well on their SATs after five shots of Jack Daniels.
01:27:41.000Yeah, I think that's one of the things we've been really good at public education.
01:27:45.000Most people know that they shouldn't do shots before taking the SATs for that reason, right?
01:27:50.000Can you imagine if it made you smarter?
01:27:52.000Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine anything that makes you smarter besides studying and working hard.
01:28:00.000But it's interesting, though, when you think about the idea that this is one of the most popular, if not the most popular recreational drug in the world, and one of the most popular, the only big time sanctioned one in America, where you don't have to have a sickness.
01:28:17.000That it's a prescription drug, whether it's good for you or bad for you, dangerous, incredibly potent, whatever it is, you have to get a prescription.
01:29:22.000And you control the intoxication simply by taking more or less of the drug.
01:29:27.000You can't do that with other drugs orally.
01:29:29.000And that's one reason that that's the case is because alcohol essentially has no barrier, blood-brain barrier.
01:29:38.000Like those other drugs, they have to cross the blood-brain barrier.
01:29:41.000With alcohol, there's essentially no barrier for alcohol.
01:29:45.000The pharmacokinetics or pharmacology properties of the drug makes it very convenient for a recreational drug.
01:29:52.000That's another important reason that it's legal.
01:29:56.000Yeah, that's a good point when you consider like if you were going to open up like a mushroom store and everybody would come in and sell mushrooms, you'd give them the mushrooms and be like, come back and hang out in an hour and 20 minutes because for the next hour, you know, nothing really is going to happen.
01:30:12.000But alcohol, one shot, two shot, you're feeling it in 15, 20 minutes.
01:30:17.000Yeah, you're doing it through the oral route.
01:30:18.000So when you take a drug orally, some of it will be broken down before it reaches the brain, which is a good thing because that means that you don't have such large doses being shot into your vein or smoked in your lungs into the brain.
01:30:30.000And so it's kind of protective in that way.
01:30:33.000And so those pharmacology properties, I can't think of another drug that has such good properties.
01:30:41.000Yeah, I couldn't think of another drug either.
01:30:43.000If you were doing marijuana, the issue would be that you would get people around you high as well through secondhand intoxication.
01:30:51.000You have to actually smoke it, but there are better methods now.
01:30:55.000You've got vaporizers and that sort of thing, so you can smoke marijuana more discreetly, and as these sort of methods are developed, it might become a more social drug, but we still have the issue of Getting large amounts into the bloodstream,
01:31:10.000therefore into the brain, in such a rapid succession.
01:31:13.000And that's the thing that worries us in terms of safety.
01:31:16.000And so people need to be able, need to be educated on how to make sure that they don't take too much of a large dose at once.
01:31:25.000And once you do that, you can help people be safe.
01:31:28.000But alcohol, don't have so much worry about it.
01:31:31.000The thing that we try and prevent people from doing has been shrinking because of Having large amounts in such a rapid amount of time.
01:31:38.000That it's just your body can't process it quickly enough?
01:31:41.000Yeah, it's just, well, you know, toxicity occurs primarily because of the large amounts in a rapid sensation, a rapid sort of, in rapid order.
01:31:52.000But what about, I mean, the other big issue with alcohol as opposed to marijuana is coordination.
01:33:05.000And I think we're doing a really good job at sort of alcohol-related drinking, I mean, driving problems.
01:33:13.000When we look at what issues we had in 1960s compared to what we have now, the number of accidents and deaths related to driving have dramatically decreased, all those sorts of things.
01:33:25.000In part because of our education, because of what we're doing.
01:33:29.000So I think we're going about that quite well and appropriate.
01:33:34.000What about tolerance in relates to that?
01:33:37.000Because for a person who doesn't drink at all, if they have a point, whatever, and then you get some dude who's just hitting it hard every night, and he's only had one or two beers, but if he gets pulled over, he's going to test too high, but his tolerance might be so that he would be fine.
01:33:57.000And that's one thing that these sort of criteria don't account for is tolerance.
01:34:02.000But a good lawyer who has to defend someone should probably bring in tolerance, particularly if their client is tolerant to the alcohol effects.
01:34:45.000It's the behavioral tests that are important.
01:34:47.000You want to see how behaviorally impaired the person is.
01:34:52.000Because if you have that in combination with the blood levels, then you have an increased confidence of what you're seeing.
01:34:59.000But if you have, for example, somebody testing over the limit based on their blood, but their hand coordination, they pass a sobriety test, Then you're less confident in what that blood level means.
01:35:11.000Is there any other variables as far as a person's ability to pass a hand-eye coordination test when they're drunk?
01:35:17.000I mean, athletic ability, things along those lines.
01:35:20.000Because some people, they could barely bend down to touch their shoes, whereas other people are yoga masters.
01:35:26.000If you've got a yoga master fucked up, he might be able to just put his foot over his head while he's hammered, and the cops would be like, this guy's sober.
01:35:57.000Now, how does a state like Florida become this weird aberration?
01:36:01.000How does a state like Florida have so many, like they said, 90% of all the oxycodone pharmacies, the pharmacies that are making it and selling it?
01:37:04.000And really, really fascinating documentaries that cover the whole cocaine era of Miami where one year the graduating class of the police academy, every single member either wound up dead from murder or in jail.
01:37:37.000You know, I haven't lived in Miami or Florida since 1984. Florida is a bizarre state in general, you know, so I have to say that I'm outside of the scope of my expertise when it comes to trying to understand Florida.
01:37:55.000Well, they said that there's more banks per capita in Miami than any other city in the country, and that is directly related to their ability to process money that was coke money.
01:38:04.000Yeah, I mean, I grew up in that era, you know, the late 70s and early 80s, and the Scarface era, you know, 1980 was a peak murder rate in this country.
01:38:16.000You know, one of the highest murder rates was in 1980, in part because of the cocaine sort of thing.
01:38:21.000Mind you, long before crack, but nobody's really talking about that.
01:38:26.000And so, yeah, I know that era, and I know that cocaine was a big deal in Miami.
01:38:32.000My friend Steve did his residency in Miami, and it was during that era.
01:38:37.000And he's got just crazy stories of violence, of just people coming in, just all fucked up.
01:38:53.000I mean, what took so long that it took the 1980s for them to get over here?
01:38:56.000Well, I think, well, the story that I've heard, and I haven't researched this to the best of my ability, so this is only what I've read superficially.
01:39:06.000Is that there was a crackdown on marijuana, a big crackdown in the 70s on marijuana.
01:39:11.000And then so the drug cartels brought in cocaine because it was smaller weight and you could make more money.
01:39:19.000And then so that was about the time when cocaine started to flood the U.S. markets.
01:39:24.000That's what I've read as far as that goes.
01:39:28.000But like I said, it's a superficial read of my understanding of it.
01:39:32.000So really, all crack cocaine was was like the second wave of cocaine.
01:39:37.000It's like cocaine came when they figured out there's an opening because of marijuana crackdowns, and then they said, well, we've got to figure out a way to get it to people that can't afford to buy a brick.
01:40:01.000Yeah, it is when you think about it that way.
01:40:05.000But that person is brilliant, whereas whoever rigged the laws in Florida to allow OxyContin to come in and we look at that and we go, well, this person, this is corruption.
01:40:36.000But it certainly doesn't seem to be playing out as well as we would have liked.
01:40:40.000Now, when you start to do these studies and you're in the 1990s and you're finding things that are contradictory to what we normally consider to be culturally accepted ideas about these drugs, what happens?
01:40:55.000Do you get resistance from people in universities?
01:40:58.000Do you get resistance from your peers?
01:41:27.000Over the years, I built on my findings and then it increased my confidence so much so that I thought that I should write a book in order to make sure the public understands what's happening.
01:41:39.000Because when you publish in the scientific literature...
01:41:42.000Five people read your paper, if you're lucky.
01:41:45.000You know, there's not many people who read the literature, besides those few people who are interested in your area.
01:41:51.000And so as I increased my confidence in the findings, I thought I wanted to publicize it because I thought what we were doing with drugs was inconsistent in terms of policy and the way we educate and treat drugs was inconsistent with the science.
01:42:05.000And the way that you communicate with the people was to write a book, a trade book.
01:42:45.000Who may say that they have some trouble with the conclusions that I draw, but the scientific community and the general public have been welcoming and it's been a breath of fresh air for most people because people already know this.
01:43:00.000The things that I'm saying about drugs like the fact that the vast majority of people who use drugs What's groundbreaking is that it's being said in a public forum,
01:43:20.000because it's never been said in a public forum.
01:43:24.000It's always been the propaganda and What's really refreshing about what you're doing is the fact that you're pushing fact first, regardless of how it's going to be accepted.
01:43:34.000You're just saying, look, I'm a scientist.
01:44:45.000So in this case, what I'm trying to do is make sure we avoid the exchanges of ignorance and making sure that if people engage in this conversation, that they have some expertise, some skills, some knowledge, and not just some emotion.
01:44:59.000Now, in a perfect world, would drugs be decriminalized or would they be legalized?
01:45:06.000Yeah, so in High Price, in the book, I argue that all drugs should be decriminalized.
01:45:10.000I say they should be decriminalized and then we should have this corresponding increase in realistic education.
01:45:16.000Now, when things are decriminalized, then that means that people can be fined.
01:45:24.000You don't necessarily have to be fined, but just like a traffic violation, you might get a fine or you may not get a fine.
01:45:30.000But the one thing that's important here is that they don't go to jail and they don't ruin their lives as a result of having a felony conviction.
01:45:39.000Because when we think about the last three presidents, Barack Obama...
01:45:43.000George Bush, Bill Clinton, all three of those guys used illegal drugs.
01:45:49.000Clinton marijuana, Bush marijuana, he's widely suspected of using cocaine.
01:46:33.000And so that's where we have to be smart as a society in terms of thinking about the administrative fees or the fines that we would charge people.
01:46:41.000Well, we set limits to make sure that we don't become excessive.
01:46:46.000For example, the greatest amount of fine that you can give someone, let's just say it's $25 or some amount that is not prohibitive and an amount that police departments can't depend upon for their budgets.
01:47:00.000And that money shouldn't be allowed to be used to support police budgets.
01:47:05.000That's an interesting way of doing it.
01:47:07.000Are you completely opposed to legalization?
01:47:10.000I mean, I am not completely opposed to legalization.
01:47:13.000My concern here is that the country, we're too ignorant right now for legalization.
01:47:19.000Not that people will go out and do some dangerous things related to drugs, but if you legalize drugs now, what will happen is that you will have the detractors say things like Any ills in the society is going to be blamed on the drugs.
01:47:32.000And we're so ignorant, we're susceptible to believing that.
01:47:35.000So before legalization, I'm arguing that we have this increase in education about what drugs do and don't do.
01:47:42.000So people cannot be susceptible to being hoodwinked like that.
01:47:47.000I'm arguing that the education provides an inoculation, if you will.
01:47:52.000So you're saying we can't handle the truth, essentially.
01:47:54.000What you're saying is that we need this decriminalization step before we get to a legalization.
01:48:00.000We couldn't just jump right into legalization.
01:48:02.000It would be too much change, pandemonium, people would go crazy, fear, people would use propaganda to set people against it, you know, to go against it.
01:48:11.000Yeah, so I'm thinking about, well, I'm not saying that it would be pandemonium.
01:48:15.000We have Washington and Colorado right now.
01:48:19.000Mark my words, there will be studies coming out of Washington and Colorado showing that young people in those states do more poorly on whatever measure you want to have as a result of marijuana.
01:48:33.000The data won't support that conclusion, but that's what people are going to be drawing from those data.
01:48:40.000And so this is my prediction right now.
01:48:43.000As a result of people's ignorance about marijuana, And that's marijuana, a drug that we have a lot more experience than with heroin.
01:48:52.000But mark my words, you'll see those studies come out.
01:48:54.000Now, isn't it problematic that marijuana is legal in two states, medically legal in what, like 18 or something now?
01:49:02.000But still a Schedule I substance, which means that it has no medicinal value.
01:49:08.000Whereas for folks who don't know, heroin and cocaine are both Schedule II, which is kind of silly.
01:49:16.000Schedule I also includes all of the non-lethal psychedelic variants like psilocybin, which the LD50 rated something fucking crazy.
01:49:24.000Marijuana, it's like 1,500 pounds inside of 15 minutes.
01:49:28.000Yeah, so to be clear, heroin is a Schedule I drug, not a Schedule II. What is Schedule II? Methamphetamine is Schedule II. Schedule II is methamphetamine.
01:49:36.000Cocaine is Schedule II? Cocaine is Schedule II. Morphine is Schedule II. So how do they get Oxycontins in then?
01:49:41.000Schedule II. Those are Schedule II. But it's heroin.
01:49:45.000Yeah, it's an opiate and they act at the same brain receptor.
01:50:21.000And so the fact that drugs are legal, you and I talked about this earlier, It has less to do with the drug's biological activity or pharmacology and more to do with the social conditions that were surrounding the legality of the drug,
01:50:55.000So heroin, crack, bad, Oxycontin, and, you know, all the other variants.
01:51:03.000Yeah, so the thing people have to understand is that these schedules are largely based on politics.
01:51:08.000They're more political than pharmacology, although...
01:51:13.000We say that they're largely based on pharmacology, but some of this stuff, as you're pointing out the inconsistencies in our logic, and you don't even study this.
01:51:21.000You just are just pointing this out, and you can see the flaws in our thinking, and you're absolutely right.
01:51:26.000So the scheduling thing is largely social, political, cultural.
01:52:12.000Lidocaine is related to cocaine, that's right.
01:52:14.000I had my nose fixed, and they threw some lidocaine up there, and they had the packing up there, and then they sprayed lidocaine, and I was fucked up all day, man.
01:52:25.000I wasn't high, you know, it wasn't like a cocaine high, but I was like, wow, I don't feel good.
01:52:30.000And I knew it was that lidocaine shit.
01:52:32.000I was like, I think I would rather have just felt the pain than to have all this weird stuff in my system, you know?
01:52:38.000Yeah, but without cocaine, you don't have the local anesthetic properties of lidocaine because it's a modification of the cocaine structure.
01:52:46.000Now, how difficult would it be to get these drugs that have these insane LD50 rates and have a wealth of medicinal benefits like marijuana and get them out of Schedule I? I think marijuana, there's a lot of movement now for marijuana to be moved away from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. I think if the public continues its pressure,
01:53:35.000Now, when you have something like marijuana that doesn't hurt people, that doesn't kill people, and then you hear, like you'll hear on TV, people come on and start talking about withdrawal symptoms and people that have withdrawals from marijuana.
01:53:50.000Are there physical withdrawals from marijuana?
01:53:54.000Yeah, I think I've published maybe, along with my colleagues, maybe 10 papers on marijuana withdrawal.
01:54:02.000So we have actually shown and demonstrated marijuana withdrawal.
01:54:06.000Now, I should say, in order to see marijuana withdrawal, you have to have people who smoke the drug every day, damn near every day, in multiple joints per day, and then you abruptly stop them.
01:54:18.000Now, you don't see marijuana withdrawal in everyone, but you certainly can see some marijuana withdrawal in some people.
01:54:23.000And when I say marijuana withdrawal, it's about like nicotine withdrawal.
01:54:28.000You know, people, they have sleep disruptions, they have eating disruptions, they are more moody.
01:54:35.000These are more psychological sort of issues.
01:54:38.000Certainly not life-threatening, but it's unpleasant.
01:54:42.000You know, if you can think about having withdrawal from tobacco, you probably have a good idea of marijuana withdrawal.
01:54:50.000So it would be as strong as tobacco withdrawal?
01:54:53.000Because tobacco withdrawal is a huge one.
01:54:55.000Oftentimes, it's connected to being as bad as heroin.
01:55:07.000Now, when we think about, again, I want to emphasize, when we think about marijuana withdrawal, it's only seen in the heaviest users, and it's not seen in even...
01:55:19.000And so it's something that you certainly can observe, but it's not common.
01:55:25.000And so when you talk about these absolutely extreme versions of people that are smoking multiple joints a day, every day, and then they stopped abruptly, then they just feel like shit for a little while?
01:56:42.000I mean, with marijuana, one of the nice things about marijuana is that it stays in the body relatively long, so the half-life of marijuana can be as much as 24 hours.
01:56:52.000Now, that allows the body to slowly detoxify, whereas with alcohol, it's gone within an hour, and it's like this abrupt shut-off.
01:57:01.000You're shut off, and now all of these compensatory mechanisms are hyperactive.
01:57:07.000Whereas with marijuana, these compensatory mechanisms are active, but they have an opportunity to slowly adjust.
01:58:11.000One of the things that heroin is really good at, and it's used medically for this reason, it had been used medically for this reason, is that it stops diarrhea.
01:58:20.000So people who have diarrhea that can cause death, for example, you give them heroin, it makes you constipated.
01:58:27.000That's a compensatory mechanism of heroin, right?
01:58:32.000So that's a compensatory mechanism of the body having it.
01:58:52.000When the heroin abruptly leaves, these overactive mechanisms now causes someone to have diarrhea because it was trying to get the system going.
01:59:03.000So the body is just trying to correct itself to be where you need to be because you need to go to the bathroom and the body is trying to make sure that happens because heroin is blocking that ability to do that.
01:59:17.000Now when you do heroin for long periods of time, like how long does it take for these compensatory mechanisms to really set in to the point where you hit a withdrawal syndrome?
01:59:33.000So if you only are using the drug intermittently, you don't have to worry about the body becoming, the compensatory mechanism becoming so active that you have to worry about withdrawal symptoms.
01:59:47.000It's only when it's a constant sort of administration of the drug, constant levels of the drug in the body that the body compensatory mechanism become hyperactive.
02:00:00.000Is that the case with cigarettes as well?
02:00:01.000Because you ever see that movie The Insider with Russell Crowe?
02:00:20.000It was all the guy who was talking about the 500-plus different chemicals that the government allows them to put in cigarettes that are all directly related to addictive.
02:00:30.000Yeah, I mean, well, tobacco has about 4,000 chemicals in it.
02:00:42.000The additional chemicals that the cigarette companies put in, which is what this scientist was highlighting, the guy who Russell Crowe played, what's going on there?
02:01:02.000You know, there have been so much said.
02:01:05.000For example, there are chemicals that I understand that they were trying to add to tobacco to make It more readily released the nicotine.
02:01:16.000There are chemicals being added to tobacco for flavoring, they say.
02:01:21.000There are a variety of sort of things, but I don't know exactly what you're getting at in terms of Why they add the compounds in terms of addicting people?
02:01:36.000Well, this is just from what I got from that movie.
02:01:38.000The movie, Russell Crowe plays this scientist who's testifying about how they had designed cigarettes to be much more addictive.
02:01:47.000Yeah, so one of the things that I think it was illegal to manipulate the nicotine content in the tobacco cigarettes because the tobacco company said that tobacco is a natural product, you know, so they don't do any manipulations.
02:02:03.000But then it was found out that they had...
02:02:06.000They had been growing this high nicotine strain tobacco somewhere in South America.
02:02:14.000And so that was one of those sort of issues related to this.
02:02:18.000The tobacco company understands pharmacology, or they understood pharmacology in terms of designing the cigarette.
02:02:25.000And the goal, one of the major goals, is that if you want to get someone addicted to a drug like tobacco or nicotine, Is that you want to make sure you can release the nicotine in a more rapid, efficient way to hit the lung and to the brain.
02:02:41.000And I think the argument was that tobacco had figured out how to release the nicotine more rapidly.
02:02:49.000And then one of the major theories in addiction work is that the more rapidly a drug hits the brain, the more addictive the drug is.
02:02:57.000And so, I don't know if all of that has been demonstrated, but I know a lot of this has been said, but I don't know what has actually been demonstrated in terms of what the tobacco company did and what scientists say.
02:03:13.000So it's all in dose and frequency, and that's how the compensatory mechanisms get set off.
02:03:19.000And so even heroin, which we've all thought that you can't do once, you'll go, man, they'll get you.
02:03:26.000You can, and you could probably do it twice, but you can't do it every week.
02:03:30.000You can't do it like every day for a couple weeks.
02:03:33.000If anybody out there have taken Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin, All of those drugs, you've taken those drugs for pain or whatever reason and then your pain is over and you go back to your life and you do your thing.
02:03:47.000You have essentially taken a low dose of heroin.
02:03:50.000And so the notion that someone can't take heroin more than once without becoming addicted That's just voodoo.
02:03:59.000That's 1937. But what about people that do take pills, and I have a relative, and he hurt his back, he was a construction worker, hurt his back, started taking pain pills, and became fucking a total junkie.
02:04:12.000He was responsible, he had a family, got divorced, wound up being this crazy liar, pill popper dude.
02:04:20.000Yeah, those are the toughest questions that people ask me, right?
02:04:24.000Because on the one hand, it's like, it's not the drug, I assure you that.
02:04:27.000So when you talk about him becoming a liar and becoming all these kinds of things, I don't know the guy.
02:04:31.000But the fact is, is that we know that people do become dependent on these drugs for whatever reason.
02:04:39.000I don't know whatever the reason was for him.
02:04:42.000But there can be a variety of reasons.
02:04:44.000A lot of times people become addicted on these drugs because they have co-occurring psychiatric disorders, because they have lack of better options, because they have other issues that's going on.
02:04:57.000I don't know, but I have to understand this guy's complete situation.
02:05:02.000But it's a fact that people do become addicted, some people, but the vast majority don't.
02:05:57.000I mean, that's one of the things that frustrates me in this sort of mission to educate the public is that People blame drugs for some of their shortcomings and some of the things that are not their shortcomings.
02:06:14.000But we don't get to figure out what's really going on when you simply blame the drug.
02:06:20.000So there are two crimes that are committed in that case.
02:06:23.000We don't get to figure out what's going on in your situation and then you're restricting access to the drug for other people who may do it and need it responsibly.
02:06:32.000And also, it's an incredibly complex discussion and we're breaking it down to these very simple terms that may or may not apply.
02:06:40.000My friend who I told you about that had a problem with heroin, who came over to my house to detox, his family was crazy.
02:06:47.000When I got to know him better and I sort of understood his family's medical history, I understood what was going on.
02:07:05.000And I think that's one of the great tragedies of what happened during the Reagan administration when they started releasing people out of the streets, homeless people that were interned before that.
02:07:34.000As a result of this show, your show, and other things that are going on, I just hope that they ask these tough questions and that they are critical in their own sort of views about these things because we can all learn as we go forward.
02:07:45.000Well, I think it all really comes down to people like you.
02:07:49.000And if it wasn't guys like you providing the data and doing the hard work and sticking your neck out there and doing all these shows and doing Bill O'Reilly and...
02:07:58.000You know, disseminating the actual facts and the data and doing so confidently, and I think it's awesome, man.
02:08:04.000I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you coming on the show, too.
02:09:08.000My friend, good friend Chris Ryan, told me I had to come hang out with you, so thank you, man.
02:09:13.000Yeah, I love Chris Ryan, and we do a podcast once a month together.
02:09:16.000We don't have a name for it yet, but what we do is, for folks who've listened to the ones with Duncan and Chris Ryan and me, we do my podcast, next is Duncan's, next is Chris's, and we just keep doing it, so we do one a month together.