The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #469 - Dr. Carl Hart

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00:03:17.000 We have hemp protein, and we're going to talk to Dr. Carl Hart later about hemp because it's one of the funniest things ever that hemp is illegal in this country.

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00:04:45.000 Alright, Dr. Carl Hart is here.

00:04:47.000 Cue the music, and let's get cracking.

00:04:58.000 Hey, man.

00:04:59.000 What's up?

00:05:00.000 Thank you very much for being here.

00:05:01.000 I really, really appreciate this.

00:05:03.000 I've admired your work online.

00:05:04.000 I've seen a bunch of your videos and read some of the interviews.

00:05:08.000 And I think it's incredibly important to have a guy like you out there.

00:05:12.000 It's incredibly important for a bunch of reasons.

00:05:15.000 Because 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.

00:05:23.000 And two, you look like us.

00:05:26.000 Well, thank you, man.

00:05:27.000 You look like a normal...

00:05:27.000 You don't look like some weird stuffy dude.

00:05:30.000 You got dreadlocks. 0.99

00:05:31.000 You look cool as fuck. 0.99

00:05:32.000 Like, I can hang with this guy, guaranteed. 0.99

00:05:34.000 Any dude who has dread...

00:05:35.000 You can't be uptight.

00:05:36.000 Look at your hair.

00:05:37.000 It's impossible, you know?

00:05:39.000 I think it's very important.

00:05:40.000 I appreciate it, man.

00:05:41.000 Thank you for having me, man.

00:05:42.000 People have been telling me that I've got to come check you out, so thank you.

00:05:45.000 Well, I'm glad they connected us.

00:05:47.000 That'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.

00:05:58.000 So it's pretty badass.

00:05:58.000 Right on.

00:05:59.000 I'm happy to be here, man.

00:06:00.000 Well, 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.

00:06:12.000 And it even kind of exposed a lot of my own ignorance.

00:06:15.000 And I thought that was really fascinating. 0.96

00:06:17.000 And 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. 0.79

00:06:25.000 They figure out how to keep it together.

00:06:27.000 Yeah.

00:06:27.000 Yeah, 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.

00:06:40.000 They think that because it makes great TV drama, for example.

00:06:45.000 And so we reinforce it in our sort of pop culture.

00:06:48.000 And also, we can always think of somebody who screwed their life up as a result of drugs.

00:06:53.000 But the people who don't screw their life up, they don't talk about it.

00:06:57.000 They just go about paying taxes, paying their bills, handling their responsibilities.

00:07:02.000 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:07:03.000 Do you get pressure to not say that ever?

00:07:06.000 Because people say, well, hey, you're going to encourage people.

00:07:09.000 And what if they go out and they do become addicted to drugs?

00:07:12.000 Are you giving them false hope?

00:07:13.000 Well, you know, I'm an educator first.

00:07:16.000 And 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.

00:07:24.000 I can't live my life like that.

00:07:26.000 I have children.

00:07:27.000 Thank you.

00:07:28.000 Thank you for saying that.

00:07:29.000 It's so important.

00:07:30.000 I mean, I have to teach my kids about sex.

00:07:32.000 I have to teach them about other potentially dangerous activities like driving their automobile too fast.

00:07:37.000 Drugs is just one of those sort of activities, and I'd be irresponsible if I didn't tell them the best information that I know.

00:07:44.000 That's so important.

00:07:45.000 That's such an important thing to say.

00:07:47.000 I've had that discussion with people before where they would talk about any sort of drug.

00:07:52.000 I don't want to let people know.

00:07:54.000 I don't want to talk about it because then I'll encourage them to do it.

00:07:58.000 A friend was telling me that about heroin.

00:08:00.000 He was saying, you know, heroin really is not that bad for you if you don't take too much.

00:08:04.000 It's really not that bad. 0.60

00:08:05.000 That sounds like sex.

00:08:06.000 I mean, it sounds like a number of things, you know.

00:08:09.000 It's like, we all know this.

00:08:10.000 I mean, it's just logical.

00:08:12.000 Anything that you overindulge in, you can get in trouble.

00:08:15.000 Heroin is not different.

00:08:16.000 But there's a few that we have, like, these unfair assumptions about.

00:08:20.000 Like, crack was the one for me.

00:08:22.000 I always heard, dude, you smoke crack once, you're hooked.

00:08:24.000 But I met a few people that have smoked crack, and I'm like, wait a minute, you just smoked it once?

00:08:28.000 Yeah.

00:08:29.000 And they're like, yeah.

00:08:30.000 So, if anybody ever tells you anything about, I did it once and I was hooked for life or I'm hooked...

00:08:35.000 That's a license to stop listening, because nothing in life you do once and you're hooked.

00:08:40.000 Nothing?

00:08:41.000 Nothing.

00:08:42.000 What's the quickest to addict to?

00:08:43.000 There are certainly physical addictions, like people do get alcoholism where it actually makes them sick if they stop, right?

00:08:49.000 Yeah, so like physical addiction, certainly that's a part of addiction, but that's not the sort of main point of addiction.

00:08:55.000 Addiction, the main thing of addiction is like disruption of psychosocial functioning.

00:08:59.000 You don't pay your taxes, you don't meet your obligations, those kinds of things.

00:09:02.000 But you can get physically addicted to something like tobacco, although it's not life-threatening, but it's irritating.

00:09:09.000 But the thing that we see that's more that we think is excruciating pain is heroin addiction.

00:09:15.000 For 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.

00:09:23.000 They're not.

00:09:24.000 If you've ever had the flu, you've had heroin withdrawal.

00:09:27.000 But the only one of the major drugs that we use today that can actually kill us from withdrawal is alcohol.

00:09:35.000 And most of the people who use alcohol don't come near experiencing alcohol withdrawal to the extent that it would kill you.

00:09:41.000 You certainly can't die from heroin withdrawal.

00:09:45.000 Wow, that's fascinating.

00:09:47.000 I've seen a guy going through heroin withdrawal.

00:09:49.000 I had a friend who was hooked on heroin and came out from New York to stay with me in California in the 90s.

00:09:54.000 And I didn't know it at the time, but his idea was that was how he was going to kick it.

00:09:58.000 So he came out to visit me and he was like, Like, he had the flu for a week.

00:10:01.000 He just laid around in bed, and then seven, eight days later, he was fine.

00:10:06.000 Not fine, but you know.

00:10:07.000 It's the flu, basically.

00:10:08.000 So if you've had the flu, you've had heroin withdrawal.

00:10:11.000 It's not pleasant, and I don't recommend that someone go out and get the flu or heroin withdrawal.

00:10:16.000 But the point is that it's not going to kill you, and it's not as excruciating as it's often portrayed in films.

00:10:22.000 And so those kinds of things, they just do a horrible job of educating the public or miseducating the public.

00:10:28.000 And it wouldn't be bad if, let's just say...

00:10:31.000 You do this sort of characterization, and it didn't have consequences.

00:10:36.000 The consequences is that we always have these repressive policies that follow.

00:10:41.000 And then people pay the price, not so much from the drugs, but from the repressive policies.

00:10:46.000 And that's a real concern that I have.

00:10:49.000 So the repressive policies lead to more prison sentences, lead to more private prisons, lead to essentially people becoming...

00:10:56.000 It's like a form of slavery that's state-sanctioned.

00:10:59.000 Certainly.

00:11:00.000 We have that.

00:11:01.000 And it also...

00:11:01.000 The major thing that it leads to is this sort of dependency on that economy, like law enforcement.

00:11:07.000 There are also treatment agencies.

00:11:09.000 There 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.

00:11:21.000 You can't liberalize drug laws unless you give police officers something else to do.

00:11:25.000 You 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.

00:11:37.000 And they sort of are now.

00:11:39.000 I mean, that is an issue now.

00:11:40.000 Prison guard unions lobby to keep certain drug laws in place.

00:11:44.000 Absolutely.

00:11:45.000 They are intense.

00:11:47.000 So 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.

00:12:05.000 Like 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.

00:12:14.000 Yeah, 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...

00:12:19.000 Well, I told this story.

00:12:20.000 It's a memoir and a science book.

00:12:22.000 So I told the memoir portion...

00:12:25.000 Which is deeply personal, and it's not something that I'm so comfortable doing.

00:12:29.000 But I had to do that in order to kind of contextualize the whole drug war and what it all means.

00:12:35.000 And also, the science portion is there so people can understand what these drugs actually do and what they don't do.

00:12:42.000 And 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.

00:12:53.000 Now, when you see something like the country of Portugal, which decriminalized drugs less than a decade ago, right?

00:12:59.000 More than a decade ago.

00:13:00.000 Almost more than a decade ago.

00:13:01.000 2001. And their results have been pretty extraordinary.

00:13:04.000 Yeah, you know, when you, like Portugal, let's just be clear so the audience understands what decriminalization means.

00:13:10.000 Decriminalization is not legalization.

00:13:12.000 Legalization is what we do with alcohol and tobacco.

00:13:15.000 Decriminalization would be like treating drug violations like we treat traffic violations.

00:13:21.000 You can't go to jail or get a felony charge, but you may be subjected to a fine or so.

00:13:26.000 That's how they deal with drugs in Portugal, all drugs, from heroin to marijuana to methamphetamine to cocaine.

00:13:32.000 Now, when you look at the major indicators, for example, drug use, they have less drug use than we do in this country.

00:13:39.000 When you look at drug-related overdose death, they have less than we do in this country.

00:13:43.000 When 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.

00:13:50.000 And 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.

00:14:00.000 And so that's one of the things I argue for in High Price, the book.

00:14:04.000 I argue that we should decriminalize all drugs in this country.

00:14:07.000 But 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.

00:14:15.000 Not that just say no stuff that we've been...

00:14:18.000 Peddling for a number of years, but real drug education.

00:14:21.000 It'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?

00:14:31.000 Yeah, you know, but that's not the goal.

00:14:33.000 That'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.

00:14:40.000 Their goal was more propaganda and fear-based sort of education, if that's what we want to call it.

00:14:49.000 But the goal was not really teaching people about drugs or what drugs really do.

00:14:54.000 I 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.

00:15:01.000 And I was like, alcohol and tobacco companies going after marijuana is like hookers going after strippers. 1.00

00:15:08.000 That's really what it's like. 1.00

00:15:09.000 The idea of alcohol and tobacco companies spending money to try to make marijuana illegal is unbelievably stupid. 0.99

00:15:16.000 I tell you, bro, if you studied this issue, You'll have a hell of a lot more material for your comedy routine, I tell you. 0.99

00:15:24.000 Because there are so many ironies that you wouldn't believe.

00:15:27.000 That's a brutal one, though.

00:15:29.000 Then they call this a partnership for a drug-free America, sponsored by drugs.

00:15:35.000 A gang war of drugs.

00:15:36.000 The name, a partnership for drug-free America.

00:15:40.000 First of all, there has never been a drug-free society ever.

00:15:44.000 Nor will there ever be.

00:15:46.000 And nor do you want to live in a society that is drug-free. 0.91

00:15:49.000 And so this whole notion of drug-free, it's ridiculous.

00:15:54.000 Yeah, drugs encompass everything from coffee to alcohol to cigarettes.

00:16:01.000 It just goes on to acai berries.

00:16:05.000 No, absolutely.

00:16:07.000 All of these things are drugs.

00:16:09.000 And so when people try to make the distinction like Heroin versus something like caffeine.

00:16:16.000 The body doesn't distinguish something based on the fact that one's illegal and one's not legal.

00:16:22.000 It has biological actions and consequences.

00:16:25.000 Both of those things.

00:16:26.000 Why is it that this is something that's controversial to say?

00:16:30.000 What you're saying right now on this podcast A guy who's a distinguished academic saying these things is very controversial.

00:16:39.000 Why is that if they are true and you are an educator and you have that philosophy, which I admire greatly, why is that rare?

00:16:48.000 For one thing, there are few people in the country who actually know what drugs really do and what they don't do.

00:16:56.000 So 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.

00:17:06.000 That's one reason.

00:17:07.000 A number of people just simply don't know.

00:17:10.000 Another 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.

00:17:23.000 And so, I mean, I respect that at some level.

00:17:27.000 And so I think that contributes on the one hand.

00:17:30.000 And 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.

00:17:42.000 None of those people are uniquely qualified to speak to this issue, but they have dominated the conversation.

00:17:51.000 Now, how did you get involved in this?

00:17:53.000 You started, you said 24 years ago, doing drug research on animals.

00:17:57.000 What led you to want to go down this road?

00:18:00.000 So 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.

00:18:08.000 So 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.

00:18:20.000 And Miami was a cocaine capital in the United States.

00:18:23.000 And 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.

00:18:34.000 And 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.

00:18:50.000 And 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.

00:19:03.000 So 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.

00:19:11.000 Yeah.

00:19:12.000 So when I started, along my journey, my path, I actually got an education.

00:19:17.000 And, you know, so as James Baldwin said, you know, the paradox of education is precisely this.

00:19:24.000 As one begins to become educated and conscious, one begins to question the society in which he's being educated.

00:19:31.000 And that's what happened with me.

00:19:33.000 And so along the way, I discovered things like, hmm, the majority of people who use these drugs are not addicted.

00:19:38.000 That was one thing I discovered.

00:19:40.000 I discovered that many of the things that we said about crack cocaine were just simply not true.

00:19:45.000 Like the whole crack baby myth.

00:19:47.000 And 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.

00:19:57.000 That just simply wasn't true.

00:19:59.000 When all the data came out, beginning in the mid-1990s, we realized that that simply wasn't true.

00:20:05.000 Other things that I learned that just simply wasn't true, things like one hit of crack cocaine, you're addicted.

00:20:13.000 Not true.

00:20:14.000 That crack cocaine was different from powder cocaine.

00:20:16.000 Not true.

00:20:17.000 All of these things I discovered along the way that they weren't true.

00:20:21.000 And not only that, I discovered that This wasn't new.

00:20:25.000 I went back to the early 1900s and saw the same sort of hysteria, mainly race-based hysteria surrounding drugs, occurred even then.

00:20:36.000 And so I thought, what's going on?

00:20:39.000 And then that helped me to be more critical about my issue.

00:20:43.000 Is there a difference in the effect of crack cocaine, the physical effect, and cocaine and heroin?

00:20:50.000 So, let's think about crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

00:20:58.000 The only difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is that the powder cocaine has this thing called the hydrochloride salt attached to it.

00:21:06.000 That salt prevents it from being smoked.

00:21:08.000 Now, you can dissolve the powder cocaine in water and then shoot it in your arm.

00:21:13.000 And so you have the effects of cocaine, the onset of the effects within seconds.

00:21:18.000 The same is true with crack cocaine.

00:21:21.000 The effects are, the onset of the effects are within seconds.

00:21:24.000 Now, the biological activity of cocaine is at the base.

00:21:30.000 So that hydrochloride portion on the cocaine powder, on the powder cocaine, has no biological activity.

00:21:37.000 So that means that crack and powder are the same drug.

00:21:41.000 They are exactly the same drug.

00:21:43.000 The same effect, same drug.

00:21:45.000 Wow.

00:21:46.000 So it's indistinguishable to the user.

00:21:48.000 Indistinguishable.

00:21:49.000 Now, why is it that they prepare it that way?

00:21:51.000 Like, what's the benefit of preparing it?

00:21:53.000 It's just so it delivers quicker?

00:21:54.000 Great question.

00:21:55.000 So one of the things that you...

00:21:58.000 Yes.

00:22:16.000 With crack cocaine, now you no longer need the ether.

00:22:20.000 You just mix it up with baking soda and water and the cocaine and you mix it up and you get rid of that salt.

00:22:26.000 So ether is no longer needed and it's not as dangerous.

00:22:30.000 So that's one of the reasons that we have crack cocaine as a result of that.

00:22:34.000 And 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.

00:22:49.000 Crack 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.

00:23:01.000 So essentially they just brought it down to bite-sized portions.

00:23:04.000 That's right.

00:23:05.000 Exactly.

00:23:05.000 Rather than selling this whole six-pack or 12-pack, now you can sell one item, one can or one bottle.

00:23:12.000 I 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.

00:23:18.000 He lit himself on fire, apparently.

00:23:21.000 I'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.

00:23:29.000 I actually worked with him a bunch of times right before he died.

00:23:33.000 It was a real honor.

00:23:34.000 He's a real special dude as far as stand-up comedians go.

00:23:37.000 Yeah, I'm with you. 0.99

00:23:39.000 But that style of freebase was a thing that we'd always associated with people that were really, really fucked up. 0.99

00:23:48.000 Like, the guy's doing coke. 0.99

00:23:49.000 Oh, well, he's probably going to mess up his life.

00:23:51.000 He's freebasing. 1.00

00:23:53.000 Oh, shit. 1.00

00:23:54.000 He's gone, man. 1.00

00:23:55.000 He's basing. 0.91

00:23:55.000 He's a basehead. 0.91

00:23:56.000 Right?

00:23:57.000 Basehead was the thing.

00:23:58.000 Before crack, it was baseheads.

00:23:59.000 Absolutely.

00:24:00.000 I describe a couple of people in the book from my neighborhood who got into freebasing in exactly the same way you just talked about.

00:24:08.000 Right.

00:24:08.000 Absolutely.

00:24:09.000 Now, everybody has this idea in their head that crime and that everything escalated and the world changed when crack was introduced.

00:24:19.000 Is that a myth as well?

00:24:21.000 Yeah, it's a myth.

00:24:22.000 Well, 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.

00:24:34.000 But it didn't become more widely known or available until maybe the mid-1985.

00:24:41.000 Now, once crack cocaine hit the markets, what happened was that people were fighting over various new markets.

00:24:48.000 Whenever there are new illicit markets, yeah, you're going to get some violent activity until the market settles down.

00:24:54.000 That happened with any illicit market, and that certainly happened with crack cocaine.

00:24:58.000 Now, 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.

00:25:09.000 Unemployment.

00:25:09.000 They said that unemployment really rose as a result of crack cocaine being around.

00:25:15.000 Now, 1982, the unemployment rate in this country was about 11% for white folks, and it was double that for black people.

00:25:23.000 That was before crack, at least two, three years before crack even hit the market.

00:25:28.000 Now, during the whole crack era, unemployment has never been as high as 1982. That's number one.

00:25:35.000 People 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. 1.00

00:25:51.000 That simply wasn't true.

00:25:52.000 It certainly happened in my community, but it happened before crack cocaine was ever on the market.

00:25:58.000 It certainly happened in my family long before crack cocaine ever hit the market.

00:26:01.000 When 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.

00:26:15.000 What you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomenon going on in those kind of communities.

00:26:20.000 What's his name?

00:26:21.000 Irvin 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.

00:26:31.000 Many of those same behaviors were attributed to crack cocaine in black people later.

00:26:37.000 They were there long before crack cocaine was there, but crack cocaine became the scapegoat.

00:26:43.000 That's a fascinating scapegoat because I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.

00:26:46.000 I 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.

00:26:53.000 It was sort of something that was just always discussed as like common fact.

00:26:58.000 Yeah, I know.

00:26:58.000 I bought into it, too, and that's what drove me to pursue my education in the way I did.

00:27:03.000 But as a result of pursuing that education, I discovered that it was not true.

00:27:09.000 So are these cultural myths the result of politicians, like political campaigns, where they're trying to clean up the streets and they...

00:27:17.000 Attributed to certain issues or is it something more widespread?

00:27:21.000 Is it the media just running with a narrative?

00:27:24.000 What is it?

00:27:25.000 How did it get started?

00:27:25.000 Well, there are multiple sort of factors and players involved.

00:27:29.000 So 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.

00:27:41.000 Unemployment was out of control.

00:27:43.000 A number of things were already problematic.

00:27:47.000 Now you have crack cocaine.

00:27:49.000 If you blame crack cocaine, it's really easy to simply say, we'll put more law enforcement, we'll hire more cops.

00:27:57.000 We'll put more efforts in controlling these drugs.

00:27:59.000 A lot easier to say, we'll lock people up for selling these drugs, for using these drugs.

00:28:05.000 In the process, what you do is you create jobs for a select group of people, and then you don't have to deal with the real issues.

00:28:12.000 The real issues of unemployment, of deprivation, all of these things you don't have to deal with.

00:28:17.000 They're far more complicated.

00:28:19.000 And so politicians are happy to buy in.

00:28:21.000 Now, 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,

00:28:47.000 17 of the 21 members, voted for these laws, for these laws that punish crack cocaine 100 times more harshly.

00:28:55.000 But the point is that everyone bought into it.

00:28:59.000 Parents bought into it.

00:29:00.000 Because for the parents, what this meant is that You don't actually have to educate your kids about this.

00:29:06.000 You just say that they're bad and stay away from it.

00:29:09.000 No education required.

00:29:11.000 Even scientists and treatment providers, they all bought into it because you got a problem, we're going to solve your problem.

00:29:17.000 So we are needed and we are valued.

00:29:20.000 So you have all of these sort of constituencies from society benefiting from the vilification or the scapegoating of crack cocaine.

00:29:27.000 All of those things came together nicely.

00:29:30.000 And then we think about the rappers.

00:29:32.000 They all came into the game too because it's like, I'm conscious.

00:29:36.000 I'm going to say that this is a problem in my community and I care about my community and this is the way that I can show it.

00:29:43.000 So everybody had a stake in this sort of thing.

00:29:47.000 Wow, that is absolutely fascinating.

00:29:50.000 You know, one of the things that I've...

00:29:53.000 I'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,

00:30:10.000 whichever one you feed is the one that's going to grow.

00:30:12.000 And once you feed the law enforcement one and you look at this really complex situation, I think law enforcement is important.

00:30:19.000 But I think education is probably more important to avoid future law enforcement.

00:30:24.000 I 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.

00:30:35.000 But 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.

00:30:44.000 And the only reason is that you're trying to stay alive.

00:30:47.000 You're trying to grow.

00:30:49.000 You're an organism.

00:30:50.000 You're trying to eat the sugar.

00:30:51.000 You're trying to keep going.

00:30:52.000 So you're creating more jobs by putting people in jail.

00:30:56.000 It's essentially, no one wants to look at it like this, but it's a form of slavery.

00:31:00.000 I think we, in the house I live in, the film, Eugene Drecke's film, I think that's the kind of analogy he was trying to draw in that film.

00:31:08.000 Absolutely.

00:31:09.000 So I think we get it.

00:31:11.000 I think a number of people get that.

00:31:13.000 That's exactly what it is.

00:31:14.000 Yeah, it's exactly what it is, and it doesn't seem like anybody's willing to address it.

00:31:19.000 No one's willing to change it.

00:31:20.000 There'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.

00:31:30.000 And 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.

00:31:40.000 Like, be aware of this thing.

00:31:42.000 This is the same with law enforcement.

00:31:44.000 It's the same with private prisons.

00:31:46.000 They become organisms.

00:31:48.000 They become individual things that are filled with people that are all working for the greater good of the great corporation.

00:31:57.000 Absolutely.

00:31:58.000 And people need to understand the conflict of interest that these folks have. 0.67

00:32:01.000 And 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.

00:32:12.000 It's like, what expertise do they have to talk about drugs, really?

00:32:17.000 None.

00:32:18.000 Well, you remember Ronald Reagan when he was on TV? Maramona may very well be one of the most dangerous drugs we've ever discovered.

00:32:26.000 You remember that, or whatever the exact quote was?

00:32:28.000 No, no, I know, you know, I try to forget Ronald Reagan, but I hear you.

00:32:33.000 I 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...

00:32:44.000 Try to tell people the truth.

00:32:45.000 I mean, that's what an actor is. 0.97

00:32:47.000 They're really good at bullshitting. 0.93

00:32:49.000 Like, they pretend they're really sad because someone they know just died. 1.00

00:32:52.000 Nobody fucking died. 0.99

00:32:53.000 There's cameras all around you. 1.00

00:32:54.000 There's lights on you.

00:32:55.000 You're wearing makeup. 1.00

00:32:56.000 But you're so good at bullshitting that I'm willing to pay money to see you bullshit. 1.00

00:33:01.000 Well, I mean, let's think about what we consider news in the country. 1.00

00:33:05.000 And we think about the people who are delivering news.

00:33:07.000 They are the same.

00:33:09.000 They're worse. 1.00

00:33:09.000 They're too stupid to be actors. 1.00

00:33:11.000 Right, right. 1.00

00:33:12.000 That's what most of them are.

00:33:13.000 And here's Bob with the weather.

00:33:15.000 Wow, what a day, what a day, what a day.

00:33:18.000 The wind's coming in from the northeast.

00:33:20.000 And I do these radio tours, and I'm sure you do them as well when you promote your books.

00:33:24.000 But you'll hear the same voice over and over and over again.

00:33:29.000 Like, somehow or other, these guys have plugged in to what they think is a radio guy.

00:33:33.000 And they're playing the role of a radio guy, and it's very strange.

00:33:38.000 Yeah.

00:33:39.000 Yeah, there's a lot of strange things that has happened on this book tour.

00:33:43.000 So that's the people that we have disseminating information and in some cases running the government.

00:33:49.000 The Arnold Schwarzenegger thing was so crazy. 0.99

00:33:52.000 We're running around telling everybody the fucking Terminator is the governor of the country. 1.00

00:33:56.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

00:33:59.000 There's so much to say about Arnold Schwarzenegger as it relates to drugs too. 0.92

00:34:04.000 Particularly when we think about performance enhancing drugs and those kinds of things.

00:34:08.000 We know about his use, and then you think about the hypocrisy of it all.

00:34:13.000 And that's the thing that's just disturbing.

00:34:15.000 If people just call it like it is and say what it is, you actually help people understand what these things do and what they don't do.

00:34:23.000 And then you don't have people have all of this cognitive dissonance about...

00:34:28.000 It's like, how can I get to that level?

00:34:30.000 How can I do this level?

00:34:32.000 When you know that those folks did performance enhancing drugs, so now they're saying that you shouldn't do performance enhancing drugs.

00:34:40.000 Yeah, that's an interesting situation.

00:34:42.000 I think there's a real issue with that in sports.

00:34:45.000 There's a bunch of different groups that are trying to clean it up.

00:34:48.000 Recently, the UFC has made big steps to try to limit the amount of performance enhancing drugs.

00:34:54.000 But unless you're watching guys all day, every day, it's really hard to tell without testing them.

00:34:59.000 Well, you know, I don't know how I feel about the performance-enhancing drugs thing.

00:35:03.000 The thing that I like to know, first of all, is that we get better information on it.

00:35:07.000 You know, and I don't want to have this sort of just-say-no attitude towards this stuff without really good information.

00:35:14.000 And I don't know if we're there yet.

00:35:16.000 I agree with you 100%.

00:35:17.000 I think the issue that people have, though, is the term natural.

00:35:22.000 Natural is an interesting term.

00:35:23.000 Is it still natural if you're taking multivitamins?

00:35:26.000 What if you've got creatine?

00:35:27.000 Is it still natural if you drink coffee?

00:35:29.000 Coffee is a drug.

00:35:30.000 You're kind of drug using.

00:35:31.000 Is it still natural if you use certain types of water that's treated certain ways to make your body process oxygen better?

00:35:39.000 Whatever new thing that comes out, is that still natural?

00:35:42.000 It gets real weird.

00:35:44.000 It's like, should people not be allowed to take any supplements so they just only have food?

00:35:49.000 Like, this is what you give them.

00:35:50.000 Just plants and animal protein and water.

00:35:53.000 And then we monitor what your diet is and then we let you fight. 0.90

00:35:56.000 Yeah, you know, there are a number of issues going on.

00:35:59.000 I mean, the whole notion of, like, natural, I think people need to grow up.

00:36:02.000 I don't even know what that means, natural.

00:36:05.000 That's not my concern.

00:36:06.000 My 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.

00:36:21.000 But 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.

00:36:35.000 I think the question is fairness.

00:36:37.000 That's the question.

00:36:38.000 Fairness?

00:36:39.000 Americans annoy me with fairness. 0.97

00:36:44.000 I mean, fairness, really.

00:36:46.000 Well, they're worried that someone is going to cheat and they're going to win when they're taking an illegal drug.

00:36:51.000 I mean, it's pretty simple.

00:36:53.000 That's the fairness argument.

00:36:55.000 That's the fairness argument.

00:36:56.000 So 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?

00:37:07.000 No, definitely not.

00:37:08.000 We 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.

00:37:29.000 When 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.

00:37:42.000 Identical training environments, identical amount of experience in martial arts, and one guy's taking a drug and the other guy isn't.

00:37:49.000 That guy has an unfair advantage.

00:37:51.000 Sure, certainly can be.

00:37:53.000 And that's fine.

00:37:54.000 Whatever the rules are now, we must adhere to them.

00:37:58.000 All 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.

00:38:08.000 But right now, the rules are that you can't.

00:38:11.000 That's fine.

00:38:12.000 Right.

00:38:12.000 So I totally understand.

00:38:13.000 So 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.

00:38:23.000 Absolutely.

00:38:23.000 It's not.

00:38:24.000 Absolutely.

00:38:25.000 Yeah, it really is.

00:38:25.000 It is kind of a weird thing.

00:38:26.000 Like, you can sell tests.

00:38:27.000 Like, on it, we sell a T-plus enhancer.

00:38:30.000 It enhances your body's ability to produce testosterone.

00:38:32.000 But it's legal.

00:38:33.000 I mean...

00:38:34.000 There is a bunch of stuff, like creatine.

00:38:37.000 Creatine's legal.

00:38:37.000 They can't stop you from taking creatine.

00:38:39.000 There'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.

00:38:46.000 Like, too much.

00:38:48.000 It's real weird.

00:38:49.000 Natural is a weird word.

00:38:52.000 It's a difficult one for me.

00:38:53.000 I don't know the performance enhancing world as well as I'd like to, but maybe that's an issue for another book.

00:39:00.000 Well, that's the term natural.

00:39:02.000 I got a conversation with a friend of mine and we were talking about pollution and all these different things that people do.

00:39:07.000 And we were saying what's really kind of weird is we always think of things that humans make as unnatural.

00:39:13.000 But they're all made out of stuff on Earth. 0.91

00:39:16.000 It's not like we're taking shit from another dimension and creating artificial things. 0.98

00:39:20.000 Yeah, it's like the marijuana smokers. 0.95

00:39:22.000 They say, well, weed is natural, so all drugs are natural.

00:39:26.000 You know, it's like heroin comes from the opium poppy.

00:39:29.000 Right.

00:39:30.000 Methamphetamine from ephedra-based plant.

00:39:33.000 You know, cocaine from the coca plant as well.

00:39:36.000 So it's like all of these things are natural, if that's what your definition of natural is.

00:39:41.000 Even the synthetic versions are created by earth-grown components.

00:39:44.000 Absolutely.

00:39:45.000 The synthetic versions might be better.

00:39:47.000 I mean, like aspirin comes from the willow bark, I believe.

00:39:52.000 But we have made it synthetic so we can harness the components that we need.

00:39:58.000 So that's a good thing.

00:40:00.000 And that's a drug.

00:40:01.000 Yes.

00:40:02.000 Yeah.

00:40:02.000 So a drug-free America would mean no aspirin.

00:40:04.000 No aspirin.

00:40:05.000 That's right. 0.99

00:40:07.000 It is pretty silly. 0.93

00:40:08.000 No Coca-Cola, either. 0.98

00:40:10.000 That's a drug.

00:40:10.000 That's right.

00:40:11.000 We're filled with it.

00:40:13.000 That's right.

00:40:13.000 Our culture's filled with it, and that's such a great point that you made earlier.

00:40:16.000 Every single culture.

00:40:18.000 Absolutely.

00:40:19.000 So, 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.

00:40:27.000 They should be taught that this is part of critical thinking.

00:40:31.000 Drug-free society just doesn't exist, so please don't feed me propaganda.

00:40:37.000 So that really does exacerbate our issue, right?

00:40:39.000 Because 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.

00:40:47.000 I don't know very much at all about chess.

00:40:50.000 I don't know who's the best.

00:40:52.000 I don't know what the strategies are.

00:40:54.000 I kind of know how the things move.

00:40:56.000 That makes two of us.

00:40:58.000 You know what I'm saying? 1.00

00:40:58.000 But if I came into chess going, oh, no, no, no, you guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about. 1.00

00:41:03.000 The way to do chess is you gotta just move faster than the other guy. 0.99

00:41:06.000 I had all this crazy, oh, I've fucking been watching on TV! And you were a chess master, you'd be like, bitch, what are you saying? 1.00

00:41:12.000 That's not how you play chess. 1.00

00:41:13.000 The fuck you talking about? 1.00

00:41:14.000 Crack babies, man! 1.00

00:41:15.000 The crack economy?

00:41:16.000 You're telling me crack didn't ruin our economy, bro? 1.00

00:41:18.000 Shut the fuck up! 1.00

00:41:19.000 It's like, people already have this in their head, like, they're already coming to the table with a bunch of bullshit. 1.00

00:41:25.000 Right on, I couldn't have said it any better, man. 0.98

00:41:28.000 It's gotta be really frustrating.

00:41:29.000 I mean, when you go to cocktail parties, and if I had a cocktail party, I'd invite you.

00:41:33.000 I'm a cool guy.

00:41:35.000 If you go to cocktail parties and people say, well, Carl, what do you do?

00:41:38.000 And you go, well, you know, I'm an academic.

00:41:39.000 I'd say I'm a shoe salesman, man.

00:41:44.000 That's a good way to get out of it.

00:41:45.000 I used to tell chicks that I worked for my father's insurance company.

00:41:49.000 Because working for an insurance company is so unglamorous. 1.00

00:41:51.000 But working for your father's insurance company means you're such a bitch you can't even get your own job in an insurance company. 1.00

00:41:57.000 You're just some ne'er-do-well that lives in his parents' basement. 1.00

00:42:00.000 And they would be so mean to me. 0.98

00:42:02.000 It was so crazy.

00:42:04.000 I was on television at the time.

00:42:05.000 I thought they'd be like, yo, you gotta inherit the company, so I should probably push up.

00:42:09.000 Nope, nope.

00:42:10.000 There was none of that going on.

00:42:11.000 I wasn't flashy enough. 1.00

00:42:12.000 I didn't have enough shit. 0.99

00:42:13.000 If 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. 1.00

00:42:20.000 It was shocking how mean people could be because of that.

00:42:23.000 We have, you know, certain things that we accept and certain things we don't accept.

00:42:28.000 And 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?

00:42:42.000 Don't you?

00:42:43.000 You must.

00:42:43.000 Of course I do.

00:42:45.000 You know...

00:42:47.000 So that means that I have to make sure that I don't engage in conversations with people who don't play by the rules of evidence.

00:42:55.000 And so if I engage in those kind of conversations, I'm too old for that, man.

00:43:00.000 And so I try to limit my exposure to people who are mainly faith-based in their sort of belief systems.

00:43:09.000 It becomes a real problem when they're really smart about something else.

00:43:12.000 I had a conversation with Michio Kaku once, and we were talking about panspermia.

00:43:18.000 It was on the Opie and Anthony show.

00:43:19.000 We 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.

00:43:28.000 And 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.

00:43:39.000 It'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.

00:43:47.000 And I was asking him if he ever did mushrooms.

00:43:49.000 This is my sneaky way of asking Michio Kaku if he did mushrooms. 0.99

00:43:52.000 But he started going off about it, giving you brain damage and becoming addictive, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

00:43:57.000 It's so unfortunate that he was talking about it ruining your mind. 0.99

00:44:01.000 Like, I'm trying to improve my mind.

00:44:02.000 I'm like, oh, come, sir.

00:44:03.000 Please.

00:44:04.000 You're like a blind man describing a kaleidoscope.

00:44:06.000 And unfortunately, it makes you question all the things that that guy's an expert in.

00:44:12.000 Because if you know something to be untrue...

00:44:14.000 And 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,

00:44:31.000 and you go, well, come on.

00:44:33.000 This is... 0.99

00:44:34.000 You're fucking awesome. 0.98

00:44:35.000 Why are you saying this? 0.98

00:44:36.000 Like, you're the one who's telling me about the cosmos.

00:44:37.000 You're telling me about all these other cool things that I know are amazing and scientifically provable. 1.00

00:44:43.000 But now you're saying some dumb shit as well. 1.00

00:44:46.000 I'm with you, man. 1.00

00:44:47.000 I mean, that's one of the things that we all try to guard against because we all have a limited sort of knowledge base.

00:44:54.000 We all do.

00:44:55.000 I mean, we can only be experts in so many areas.

00:44:57.000 I mean, it just requires so much work to be an expert in anything.

00:45:01.000 And so we have to have the humility to say, you know, I don't know that as well, but I'm willing to keep an open mind and learn.

00:45:09.000 So you're right.

00:45:10.000 I hope that I don't overreach like that on any subject matter because I know drugs very well.

00:45:16.000 Other things I know less well.

00:45:18.000 That's such an important thing.

00:45:20.000 And a lot of really smart people don't ever want to admit that. 0.97

00:45:23.000 There'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. 0.99

00:45:32.000 That's fucking dangerous. 0.99

00:45:34.000 I'm with you, man. 0.99

00:45:35.000 And I'm so glad that you exposed that kind of thing, and you highlight the concern related to that.

00:45:42.000 But, you know, we have to be able to say, I don't know.

00:45:46.000 Yeah, it's an important factor in distributing information.

00:45:51.000 We have to know that these sources that we reach, whether it's you or any other academic, is 100% honest.

00:45:56.000 And there's no ego or fuckery involved.

00:45:58.000 And when these guys show a little bit of ego where they don't want to show humility about their ignorance, they ruin the whole thing. 0.95

00:46:06.000 The whole discussion gets...

00:46:07.000 It's very difficult to take them as seriously.

00:46:10.000 Absolutely.

00:46:11.000 And it waters down all the things that they say that you know are true as well.

00:46:15.000 It's like...

00:46:15.000 Yeah, you know, on the one hand, it's like we should be allowed the latitude to have been wrong.

00:46:22.000 But as a result, we should also be able to say, oh, you know, I was wrong and I got this new information that made me see the light.

00:46:30.000 And so it's a two-way street.

00:46:33.000 You know, it's like people are going to make mistakes.

00:46:35.000 And 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.

00:46:45.000 And so they should be able to make a mistake, but they have to also be able to say, I screwed up.

00:46:50.000 Yeah, it's really unique, isn't it?

00:46:52.000 When people are running for president, we don't want none of that.

00:46:54.000 We want no flip-flopping.

00:46:56.000 If 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.

00:47:05.000 Well, 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.

00:47:19.000 They 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. 0.93

00:47:28.000 I 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. 0.94

00:47:38.000 That's right. 0.66

00:47:38.000 Like, where is it going? 0.66

00:47:39.000 I'm going this way!

00:47:40.000 I'm pro-abortion! 1.00

00:47:41.000 Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:47:43.000 No, no, that's right.

00:47:43.000 So 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.

00:47:54.000 No, I get that.

00:47:55.000 But then there are politicians, too, who actually learn new information to change their mind.

00:48:00.000 And then they get called the flip-flopper.

00:48:02.000 And that's bad.

00:48:03.000 Now, when did you do your first research?

00:48:06.000 Your first research on drug effects?

00:48:10.000 I think the first study I published was in 1992. And what was the climate like then in comparison to climate in 2014?

00:48:17.000 Because we're talking about pre-internet.

00:48:19.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:48:20.000 Damn, that's pre-internet. 0.98

00:48:22.000 Al Gore had, he then discovered internet in 92. What? 0.99

00:48:26.000 Al Gore probably already had it.

00:48:27.000 Probably already had a cell phone with it on.

00:48:29.000 All right.

00:48:30.000 I 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.

00:48:39.000 Right on, right on.

00:48:40.000 The attitudes hadn't really changed.

00:48:41.000 No.

00:48:42.000 I mean, the attitudes around drugs, they haven't really...

00:48:46.000 I mean, only until the past year or two have they really started to change.

00:48:51.000 Really?

00:48:51.000 A year or two?

00:48:52.000 Yeah.

00:48:53.000 People are starting to open their mind to these issues.

00:48:56.000 Maybe we've been hoodwinked.

00:48:58.000 Maybe we've been bamboozled.

00:48:59.000 But for a long time, I mean, we think about...

00:49:03.000 From 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.

00:49:16.000 I mean, the bottom line was that drugs...

00:49:18.000 We're bad.

00:49:19.000 And as a politician, what you say is that you're going to be tough on drug users and people who sell drugs.

00:49:26.000 And that was popular until recently.

00:49:29.000 Now people are starting to say, wait a second, maybe we have...

00:49:34.000 Maybe we've been doing this wrong, but that's a recent phenomenon.

00:49:37.000 What do you attribute the changing of that tide to?

00:49:40.000 Is it just the overwhelming information?

00:49:42.000 I think there are a few things.

00:49:45.000 I 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.

00:49:59.000 You know, so it's like we have 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prison population.

00:50:05.000 And then we start looking at the racial sort of discrimination in terms of who's in prison.

00:50:11.000 Black men make up 5% of the population or 6% of the population.

00:50:15.000 35% of the prison population.

00:50:17.000 If you start to look at all of these numbers, I think Americans are like, well, we are fair. 0.81

00:50:22.000 We are fair people in general.

00:50:24.000 And so I think they are disturbed by that.

00:50:26.000 I think that helped.

00:50:27.000 And I think the fact that my book, I'm a scientist.

00:50:30.000 I've been doing this for some years.

00:50:33.000 I 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.

00:50:46.000 So that has helped.

00:50:48.000 My book has helped.

00:50:49.000 So 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.

00:51:10.000 And now with Colorado, one of the things, Colorado and Washington, those two states have legalized marijuana.

00:51:16.000 And 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.

00:51:25.000 In this country, ultimately money remains king.

00:51:29.000 And so that has Open people's mind.

00:51:32.000 You know, I like to think that empirical evidence helps to really shape the way people think, but money is really king.

00:51:39.000 And 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.

00:51:53.000 And 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.

00:52:09.000 If 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.

00:52:24.000 I agree, man.

00:52:25.000 You 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.

00:52:36.000 And so I think a lot of us believe that.

00:52:38.000 And 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.

00:52:47.000 I 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.

00:52:59.000 50 years removed from that now.

00:53:01.000 And then we were all upset about the social injustice that happened during that era.

00:53:07.000 And now I think people are understanding that we have our own social injustice happening right before our eyes.

00:53:14.000 And then so the question becomes, well, where will history say you were on the issue?

00:53:21.000 And I think people are getting it.

00:53:24.000 But I think many people were just simply ignorant to it.

00:53:27.000 But I think the message is getting out now.

00:53:29.000 So it's just this combination of factors that are overwhelming.

00:53:32.000 The internet providing all this information.

00:53:34.000 Colorado and Washington State providing alternatives to the economic situation.

00:53:38.000 All the above.

00:53:39.000 All of it.

00:53:40.000 It is an issue.

00:53:41.000 It'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.

00:53:47.000 And that's a big one.

00:53:49.000 The way that the Obama administration sort of said that they were going to treat marijuana.

00:53:54.000 And then the way they did treat it.

00:53:56.000 Which is very different.

00:53:57.000 It was very...

00:53:58.000 Bush-like.

00:53:59.000 It wasn't much different.

00:54:01.000 I mean, they've started recently saying that they wouldn't go after these states, but there was a lot of people that went to jail.

00:54:09.000 A lot of people did time.

00:54:10.000 A lot of people are still involved in the court system.

00:54:12.000 I know people, personally, that have been busted.

00:54:16.000 And they were doing everything according to state law.

00:54:18.000 Fact.

00:54:19.000 So, what's that about?

00:54:22.000 That's a good one, man.

00:54:24.000 You 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.

00:54:36.000 Then it turns out Bill Clinton, under his administration, more people were arrested than any other administration for these sort of violations.

00:54:44.000 Until that time.

00:54:46.000 And so I think a similar thing kind of happened under the Obama administration.

00:54:50.000 It'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.

00:55:04.000 Now, I will say this.

00:55:06.000 This administration...

00:55:08.000 As 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.

00:55:21.000 They said they wouldn't be enforcing those laws anymore.

00:55:23.000 They said that sort of thing.

00:55:25.000 This administration said that they would leave Colorado and Washington alone, those states that have legalized marijuana, because under federal law, marijuana remains illegal.

00:55:36.000 So technically, the federal government can come in and stop that.

00:55:39.000 But they have said they're going to allow it to happen.

00:55:42.000 They said it's an important sort of experiment.

00:55:45.000 And so...

00:55:47.000 On the one hand, I certainly wish they would do more, the current administration.

00:55:53.000 But when we look at what previous administrations have done, they have done more than any other administration.

00:55:59.000 When it comes to drugs.

00:56:00.000 When it comes to drugs.

00:56:01.000 So there have been some horrible things like the busting of these medical marijuana dispensaries.

00:56:05.000 Absolutely.

00:56:05.000 Is that just a part of what we were talking about earlier, that just the machine needs to be fed?

00:56:10.000 It'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.

00:56:18.000 You 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.

00:56:25.000 Here's what they do.

00:56:27.000 They go.

00:56:28.000 They arrest you. 1.00

00:56:29.000 They come in jackbooted with fucking bulletproof vests on and machine guns. 1.00

00:56:34.000 They hold people down. 1.00

00:56:35.000 They step on your neck when you're on the ground.

00:56:36.000 There's videos of all this.

00:56:37.000 I'm not making this up.

00:56:38.000 They take all the weed and they take all the money.

00:56:43.000 And then they say that they'll be in touch with you.

00:56:47.000 They 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.

00:56:56.000 So then these people have to decide whether or not they go back to work.

00:56:59.000 Do they decide whether or not they go back to work?

00:57:01.000 No one's been charged with anything yet. 0.99

00:57:02.000 You got arrested, they took all your shit, and then they let you go. 0.97

00:57:05.000 And so you're sitting there, terrified and broke, trying to figure out, is this worth doing more of? 0.99

00:57:10.000 And the people that work there often quit.

00:57:12.000 You've got to find new employees.

00:57:14.000 College kids don't like getting boots put to their face and a gun in their back for weed.

00:57:19.000 And so this money just evaporates.

00:57:23.000 And it's been millions of dollars worth of money.

00:57:25.000 It just sort of goes away.

00:57:28.000 And you can't get it back.

00:57:29.000 It's not yours. 0.78

00:57:30.000 The weed, it's ours now.

00:57:32.000 It just goes away.

00:57:33.000 No, 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.

00:57:46.000 I mean, this has been going on in this country for decades.

00:57:51.000 Yeah, it seems like there's got to be a way to balance it out.

00:57:55.000 There'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.

00:58:07.000 There's got to be a way to shift that into something else.

00:58:10.000 And until they do, it's a hard road.

00:58:12.000 Well, you know, first of all, we have to have the conversation that it has to be a shift, like you're saying.

00:58:17.000 People are not even having that conversation.

00:58:19.000 People aren't having the conversation to say, well, what do we do with this machine that we built up over the past several decades?

00:58:27.000 I mean, I can think of a number of ways that we can use police officers in different roles than what they've been used currently.

00:58:36.000 I mean, I can think about the educational sort of thing.

00:58:39.000 Sometimes, let's think about heroin.

00:58:41.000 People 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.

00:58:50.000 We can use our police forces.

00:58:52.000 For 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?

00:59:02.000 I mean, we can have police outreach doing this sort of thing.

00:59:05.000 Okay, you want to avoid this because this compound is dangerous.

00:59:10.000 We can do those kinds of things.

00:59:11.000 We never do.

00:59:12.000 They never tell the public what's actually in the compound.

00:59:15.000 If something is in the compound, they say that, oh, it's cut with something.

00:59:19.000 Why not tell the public who is more likely to be susceptible to obtaining that type of heroin?

00:59:24.000 Completely agree.

00:59:25.000 But if you were on the Bill O'Reilly show, he'd be like, you're just going to encourage those kids.

00:59:29.000 Now they know what they can take and what not to take.

00:59:31.000 You're going to do the testing for them.

00:59:32.000 Who's going to pay for that testing?

00:59:34.000 Our tax dollars are going to go to give them the exact recipe of their heroin that they like. 0.89

00:59:40.000 So Bill O'Reilly, you know, he was generous enough to have me on his show.

00:59:43.000 And so some props to him for that.

00:59:46.000 But the thing about the Bill O'Reilly show is that people should not get twisted.

00:59:51.000 That is not news.

00:59:52.000 That is entertainment.

00:59:53.000 And the goal of what he's disseminating is not public education and not necessarily for the public good.

01:00:00.000 So if you want to be entertained, he's outstanding.

01:00:02.000 But if you actually want information, You're in the wrong place.

01:00:06.000 Wait a minute, man.

01:00:06.000 You didn't watch the thing about him talking about God making the tide go in and the tide go out and no one could explain it?

01:00:11.000 You didn't see that? 0.99

01:00:12.000 I watched that and I was like, okay, he's fucking trolling. 0.99

01:00:16.000 He's trolling. 0.99

01:00:16.000 He knows about gravity. 0.99

01:00:18.000 This motherfucker is saying we can't explain why the tide goes in and the tide goes out. 1.00

01:00:21.000 He knows they can explain that. 1.00

01:00:23.000 He's fucking with you. 1.00

01:00:24.000 Well, I mean, think about it. 1.00

01:00:26.000 The guys had the number one news show, quote-unquote, news, in the United States for about 15, 16, 17 years.

01:00:33.000 And that's the formula that he's used.

01:00:35.000 Why should he change?

01:00:37.000 Right.

01:00:37.000 So for him, it's like he might as well be like Stephen Colbert.

01:00:40.000 He's playing a role.

01:00:41.000 Absolutely.

01:00:41.000 It's just his role's not funny.

01:00:43.000 His role's just designed to scare the shit out of you and get you to want to build bigger borders.

01:00:47.000 Well, the thing about it is that you and I understand that he's playing a role and he understands he's playing a role. 0.80

01:00:52.000 But all of these networks like that, they're all playing a role.

01:00:55.000 But the thing is, we just don't caricature them like we do him.

01:00:59.000 But they're all playing a role.

01:01:00.000 Right, right.

01:01:01.000 They bring in so-called experts, but they think that they're the expert.

01:01:05.000 And so all of these guys are playing a role.

01:01:08.000 It's entertainment.

01:01:08.000 It's not news.

01:01:09.000 And that's one thing that the public has to understand.

01:01:11.000 That's not news.

01:01:12.000 You can't...

01:01:14.000 I mean, they give you news while they're giving you entertainment, but you're absolutely right.

01:01:18.000 It's entertainment first.

01:01:20.000 Yeah.

01:01:20.000 That's why they're wearing skirts...

01:01:22.000 That barely cover their vaginas. 1.00

01:01:25.000 I mean, those women on Fox News, those are some of the hottest legs you can see on television. 1.00

01:01:29.000 And they're giving you the news.

01:01:31.000 And they're crossing their legs back and forth when they're on the couch, hypnotizing you. 1.00

01:01:35.000 You don't know what the fuck they're talking about. 1.00

01:01:37.000 Syria or Ukraine. 1.00

01:01:39.000 Who knows?

01:01:39.000 Look at her legs.

01:01:41.000 Her legs are naked. 0.80

01:01:43.000 Imagine if guys wore skirts in interviews. 1.00

01:01:45.000 It would be the most ridiculous shit ever. 0.99

01:01:47.000 But somehow or another, you're allowed to see most of this woman's... 1.00

01:01:50.000 You know, sexually attractive legs. 0.93

01:01:53.000 You should actually go to the network. 0.94

01:01:55.000 And tell them that?

01:01:56.000 Or be there live?

01:01:56.000 No, no, actually go.

01:01:57.000 I don't want to.

01:01:58.000 I'd get tongue-tied and be able to talk.

01:02:02.000 Yeah, it's hilarious.

01:02:03.000 I mean, it's a propaganda factory.

01:02:05.000 It really is.

01:02:06.000 I mean, they're just trying to dance for you and get you to keep tuning in so they can sell shampoo.

01:02:11.000 No, I know.

01:02:12.000 Exactly.

01:02:13.000 But that's all we have. 0.99

01:02:15.000 I 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. 0.97

01:02:31.000 Yeah, that's right. 0.95

01:02:32.000 That's why I'm a college professor.

01:02:34.000 To help.

01:02:35.000 Yeah.

01:02:36.000 I mean, I guess, but that is the future.

01:02:39.000 Like, guys like you teaching young people so that they grow up in a different...

01:02:43.000 I mean, I think they're growing up in a different environment anyway, don't you?

01:02:45.000 I think so.

01:02:45.000 I think we're in a new moment, man, particularly as it relates to drugs.

01:02:50.000 This is something that we haven't seen before.

01:02:52.000 And the young people today...

01:02:53.000 I mean, you see it on Twitter.

01:02:54.000 I see it on Twitter.

01:02:56.000 Some 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.

01:03:02.000 And so I am...

01:03:03.000 I'm deeply encouraged.

01:03:05.000 And 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.

01:03:13.000 I'm really dealing with the future.

01:03:15.000 I'm speaking for history.

01:03:17.000 And that's really the only way you can change things, is to change the minds of the young people that are coming up.

01:03:21.000 The people that are set in their ways, they already have their mortgages that they have to protect.

01:03:25.000 Exactly.

01:03:26.000 Yeah, they can also justify that it's okay what they're doing because they've always done it, other people are doing it, and it's legal.

01:03:33.000 That's right.

01:03:34.000 So they don't think they're doing anything wrong.

01:03:35.000 I had a friend who was a cop who I did jiu-jitsu with. 0.99

01:03:37.000 He was always telling me, I don't give a fuck if they got a medical marijuana license. 0.99

01:03:41.000 If I catch them with weed, I'm busting them. 1.00

01:03:42.000 I'm like, dude, do you fucking listen to yourself? 0.98

01:03:44.000 You're a good guy. 0.98

01:03:45.000 Why are you talking like that? 0.99

01:03:46.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

01:03:47.000 You would take me, aren't we friends? 0.99

01:03:48.000 You'd take me and you'd throw me in jail for no reason? 1.00

01:03:50.000 Do you know how stupid that is? 1.00

01:03:51.000 For what? 1.00

01:03:52.000 But your friend, right?

01:03:53.000 You talking to your friend, I'm sure he respects you, so therefore he'd probably reevaluate what he just said.

01:03:58.000 I hope so.

01:03:58.000 I don't think so, though.

01:03:59.000 He's fucking crazy, that dude. 0.99

01:04:01.000 But he's a cop, and he thinks of it as us versus them. 1.00

01:04:06.000 He's got that mentality, us versus them.

01:04:08.000 And when there's a law, it allows that other person to be the them.

01:04:12.000 That's right.

01:04:13.000 If it's written down, oh, that's the them.

01:04:15.000 That's right.

01:04:16.000 I mean, that's one of the things...

01:04:18.000 That happens when people are involved in legal cases, divorces, disputes with their company.

01:04:23.000 It's us and them.

01:04:24.000 And we go into us versus them mode.

01:04:26.000 And cops are in us versus them mode when it comes to drugs.

01:04:29.000 They've lived their whole lives as police officers under the thinking that someone who's got drugs is a perp.

01:04:36.000 And then they can get that guy, and then that's something that they win.

01:04:40.000 They win.

01:04:40.000 The guy's in jail.

01:04:41.000 That's right.

01:04:41.000 They dehumanize the person and so forth and that person isn't really a person.

01:04:45.000 And that's a problem.

01:04:46.000 That's a major problem.

01:04:48.000 I mean, and so you want to make sure that people, we want to encourage people not to behave like that.

01:04:52.000 Yeah, 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.

01:05:02.000 Well, so I was in the military.

01:05:03.000 You know, we haven't talked about that.

01:05:04.000 And so I was a cop in the military for a short period of time.

01:05:08.000 And one of the things about cops that they're really good at, they're really good at taking orders.

01:05:14.000 So they will adjust if it comes down from the top.

01:05:18.000 But the pressure has to be put on the top to make sure that the sort of rank-and-file officers follow these orders.

01:05:28.000 But they're really good at following orders.

01:05:31.000 I'm sure they are.

01:05:33.000 I just would be concerned that it would take a long time to turn that battleship of intent around, change the way they look at it.

01:05:40.000 Look at Colorado.

01:05:41.000 Look at Washington, right?

01:05:43.000 The amount of money that those folks are projected to make in terms of taxpayers' money.

01:05:49.000 I assure you, you're going to have former DEA agents involved in the marijuana industry, police officers involved in that industry, relatively quickly.

01:06:00.000 So when you say it's going to take a long time, no, it won't take a long time.

01:06:03.000 All you have to do is just change the orders or the contingency, the contingency in this case, money.

01:06:11.000 So you can actually do it if you have a commitment to doing it.

01:06:14.000 I don't think it'll take a long term.

01:06:16.000 That's very optimistic.

01:06:18.000 When 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?

01:06:24.000 The 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.

01:06:35.000 That's number one.

01:06:37.000 If Colorado continues to generate the revenue that they've been reporting recently, the genie's out of the bottle for a while.

01:06:45.000 Especially in this economy, it's kind of a perfect storm, right?

01:06:47.000 This screwed up economy when everything's all...

01:06:50.000 That's right.

01:06:51.000 Especially in this economy, but in the United States, if you're making money, that trumps everything.

01:06:57.000 Right. 1.00

01:06:57.000 What a freak fucking group of humans we are. 1.00

01:07:02.000 It's really strange, but it's exciting. 1.00

01:07:05.000 I mean, I hate the fact that the situation exists as is.

01:07:08.000 I 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.

01:07:17.000 It's unbelievably hypocritical when you have drugs everywhere you look.

01:07:22.000 But at least I'm encouraged that I see this shift in the young people.

01:07:26.000 Yeah, me too.

01:07:27.000 I'm very encouraged, man.

01:07:28.000 And that's the thing that keeps me going.

01:07:30.000 That's the thing that keeps me on the road with this book talking to people about this issue, trying to educate people.

01:07:35.000 I mean, because I think that they're going to do it better than we did it.

01:07:40.000 And if I could play any role in helping them do it better, let's do it.

01:07:44.000 What's been the biggest resistance out of all these years of studying drugs and studying the reactions of drugs?

01:07:51.000 What do you feel has been the biggest resistance or the biggest hurdle that you've had to overcome?

01:07:55.000 Because I'm sure it must have been pretty difficult to get this going, especially in the 90s.

01:08:01.000 Yeah, 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.

01:08:12.000 And so it all kind of combines it all.

01:08:15.000 So I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this.

01:08:18.000 Well, either one, either or, but what I meant is the resistance to your research.

01:08:21.000 Yeah.

01:08:21.000 Yeah, 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.

01:08:41.000 But that's okay.

01:08:42.000 I expected that sort of thing.

01:08:45.000 My 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.

01:09:00.000 Yeah, when I tell people how marijuana was initially made illegal, they look at me like I'm crazy, like I'm making things up.

01:09:07.000 And I give them the William Randolph Hearst story and how they used this term, marijuana, that was a wild Mexican tobacco.

01:09:14.000 And the people that were making marijuana illegal didn't even know they were making hemp illegal.

01:09:20.000 That's right.

01:09:21.000 Which had been used for thousands of years.

01:09:23.000 That's right.

01:09:24.000 There was a product called a decorticator that was invented.

01:09:27.000 And when the decorticator was invented, it was a more effective way to process the hemp fiber.

01:09:31.000 And they were talking about hemp being a billion-dollar crop.

01:09:34.000 It was on the cover of Popular Science.

01:09:36.000 And everybody was like, well, this is it.

01:09:38.000 You know, hemp is going to make a new comeback because now there's a machine that allows people to process it easy. 1.00

01:09:42.000 And they shut that shit down. 1.00

01:09:44.000 So quick. 1.00

01:09:45.000 And that was the original reason why marijuana was illegal.

01:09:48.000 It had nothing to do with even the psychoactive form of it.

01:09:51.000 Well, you just kind of talked about my book.

01:09:53.000 You 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.

01:10:11.000 That's precisely it.

01:10:12.000 What's really interesting is that there are laws in two states, in Colorado and Washington, making marijuana legal.

01:10:18.000 Even though hemp has been non-psychoactive and used in this country legally since...

01:10:24.000 I 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.

01:10:32.000 They won't let you grow it, which is just unbelievable.

01:10:36.000 It's kind of hilarious.

01:10:38.000 And that's the real reason why marijuana is still illegal to this day.

01:10:42.000 It was all done just to keep hemp out, which is incredible. 0.84

01:10:46.000 Yeah, so there were...

01:10:48.000 And also, one of the things that we have to understand, too, is that there's always this sort of...

01:10:54.000 The time when we made marijuana illegal, it was a time when the country didn't really want to have federal laws.

01:11:02.000 And so you had to have...

01:11:05.000 Fuel. 0.99

01:11:06.000 And the fuel that we used was related to the Mexicans and black people using the drug. 1.00

01:11:11.000 So there were a number of people who genuinely believed that marijuana made these folks misbehave and engage in heinous crimes. 0.70

01:11:21.000 And so people thought that the drug was so awful that any responsible society would ban the drug.

01:11:30.000 That component of banning drugs existed before marijuana.

01:11:36.000 That's why heroin or opioids were banned.

01:11:39.000 That's why cocaine was banned earlier.

01:11:42.000 So, yeah, this song has been played over and over.

01:11:48.000 Who financed Reefer Madness?

01:11:51.000 Do you know?

01:11:52.000 Who financed Reefer Madness?

01:11:54.000 That's a tough question because I don't know all of the history related to it.

01:11:59.000 One 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.

01:12:14.000 And so I know that played a big role in the driving of making marijuana illegal.

01:12:21.000 But 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.

01:12:31.000 Apparently it was originally financed by a church group.

01:12:34.000 I think?

01:12:55.000 Beginning 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.

01:13:06.000 So again, it became about money.

01:13:08.000 It became a guy who realized he could make some money scaring the shit out of people and sell tickets to this movie.

01:13:13.000 Yeah, but also understand now, by this time, when the film really became big, 38, so the drug was already illegal.

01:13:20.000 The drug became illegal in 37. And so maybe the film was just capitalizing on the sort of mood at the time too of the country.

01:13:29.000 Right, that people were scared.

01:13:31.000 That's kind of interesting, though, that it was originally from a church group and then some dude who made money exploiting these fears.

01:13:39.000 Then he started doing it.

01:13:40.000 It really kind of goes along with what we've been saying the whole time.

01:13:43.000 It's all about the money.

01:13:44.000 Follow the money.

01:13:45.000 I mean, in many of these cases, follow the money.

01:13:48.000 It's like we all have our price.

01:13:49.000 Follow the money.

01:13:51.000 That's so disturbing, though.

01:13:52.000 That's disturbing to hear for some people, that our entire society is being engineered by money.

01:13:59.000 Well, 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.

01:14:10.000 But if people are hearing for the first time that it's about the money, well, they are kind of late to the game.

01:14:19.000 Yeah, it's sort of a duh.

01:14:21.000 Duh.

01:14:21.000 What do you think about, I don't know if you've ever watched the Vanguard show, the OxyContin Express.

01:14:27.000 Did you ever see that episode?

01:14:29.000 No, how about you tell me about it?

01:14:31.000 I got a lot to say about OxyContin, but tell me about it.

01:14:33.000 I don't know the show.

01:14:34.000 It'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.

01:14:47.000 I think Florida had some insane amount, like more than the entire country combined, We're good to go.

01:15:11.000 But they had these pain management centers that were built in. 0.63

01:15:13.000 They had a doctor and a pharmacy right there.

01:15:16.000 Hey, my back hurts.

01:15:16.000 Here you go.

01:15:17.000 Take this paper.

01:15:18.000 Go right next door and get your heroin.

01:15:19.000 And then people would do it under like 15 different names.

01:15:22.000 They had no database.

01:15:24.000 So you could go to one doctor and get a prescription.

01:15:26.000 Then you go down the street and go to another doctor.

01:15:28.000 And they weren't able to exchange information and find out that this guy, this Joe Rogan character, has a hundred different prescriptions for OxyContin.

01:15:35.000 He's just driving around all day with a backache.

01:15:38.000 You know, like that sort of thing.

01:15:42.000 I'm happy that people are concerned about the overuse of any drug, for example.

01:15:48.000 But the thing that concerns me about that sort of thing is that when you make these documentaries, they...

01:15:56.000 Invariably, they do poor jobs.

01:15:57.000 One of the reasons that they do poor jobs is because they highlight these sort of aberrations, the worst-case scenario.

01:16:05.000 And then so me, the viewer, we get outraged because we see this abhorrent behavior that's going on.

01:16:13.000 And 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.

01:16:23.000 So it'd be nice if we just had like our routine sort of policing of all of these activities.

01:16:30.000 When we find that people are abusing the system, we deal with it.

01:16:33.000 But don't exaggerate our sort of punishment to the extent that we're doing more harm.

01:16:40.000 So, on the one hand, Folks, if they are using OxyContin, I would much prefer them use OxyContin than that they use street heroin.

01:16:49.000 In 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.

01:17:02.000 So on the one hand, you have to think about, we have to weigh all of these sort of potential risks and benefits.

01:17:09.000 And oftentimes, it's a one-sided story.

01:17:11.000 And that bothers me.

01:17:14.000 Well, one of the things they were talking about in the documentary was how Florida was providing the rest of the country with OxyContin.

01:17:20.000 And that's why it was a big issue.

01:17:22.000 Sure.

01:17:22.000 Like I said, I know that Florida had these issues.

01:17:26.000 And that's fine.

01:17:26.000 And the authorities should take care of it.

01:17:28.000 They should do what's appropriate.

01:17:29.000 But I hope they don't exaggerate it.

01:17:33.000 Because typically that's what we do.

01:17:34.000 We go overboard.

01:17:36.000 Yeah, 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.

01:17:44.000 And that the amount of OxyContin prescriptions has dropped dramatically.

01:17:49.000 Dropped 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.

01:18:00.000 Yeah, docs are afraid.

01:18:02.000 There are far more good doctors out there who are trying to be responsible than the wayward ones that you describe.

01:18:10.000 And 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.

01:18:20.000 Not so much for the patient, but for myself in terms of losing my license.

01:18:25.000 Somebody may think that I'm doing this intentionally.

01:18:28.000 And so I worry about that, how we crack down too severely.

01:18:33.000 Yeah, that's the whole point of this one article on Bloomberg.

01:18:39.000 And if anybody wants to check it out, that's the name of it.

01:18:41.000 Florida Pain Victims Trapped by Prescription Crackdown.

01:18:44.000 It's under their health section.

01:18:46.000 In 2010, Florida had 90 of the nation's top 100 pharmacies buying oxycodone.

01:18:55.000 Wow!

01:18:55.000 Isn't that where Rush Limbaugh was getting his...

01:18:58.000 Yeah, he was popping some insane number too, that fat fuck. 1.00

01:19:02.000 He was throwing down like a hundred a day. 1.00

01:19:04.000 He's got a lot of bulk.

01:19:05.000 He's throwing heroin through.

01:19:08.000 You know, on the one hand, there's so much there.

01:19:12.000 Number one, he was on essentially heroin.

01:19:16.000 That's what OxyContin is, basically.

01:19:19.000 But yet he was going to work, he was paying his taxes, and he was handling his responsibilities, right?

01:19:24.000 Yeah.

01:19:25.000 Nobody pointed this out.

01:19:28.000 And so when we think about drug users, that's your typical drug user.

01:19:32.000 That's a great example of it because, I mean, who better?

01:19:35.000 A 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.

01:19:45.000 And here's a guy who's taken... 1.00

01:19:47.000 Fucking elephant-sized doses of this shit every day. 1.00

01:19:51.000 He'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. 1.00

01:19:59.000 It's hilarious that that guy was like an anti-drug guy.

01:20:03.000 I mean, it's...

01:20:04.000 He's performing.

01:20:06.000 You know, that's his show.

01:20:07.000 You know this.

01:20:08.000 Yeah.

01:20:09.000 But 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.

01:20:17.000 And, you know, Stephen Colbert, everybody thinks of him as, you know, caricature.

01:20:24.000 But they're all caricatures.

01:20:26.000 Absolutely.

01:20:27.000 That's how they make their money. 1.00

01:20:28.000 And you look at Rush Limbell's house, it's a fucking giant. 1.00

01:20:30.000 It's huge. 0.99

01:20:31.000 People like what he does.

01:20:32.000 He's out there golfing every day with a hearing aid now because he apparently did so much OxyContin he fucked up his hearing.

01:20:38.000 Well, don't blame that on OxyContin, please.

01:20:40.000 That's what Alex Jones told me.

01:20:41.000 Well, don't blame that on OxyContin.

01:20:43.000 Alex Jones explained it to me in some pseudo-medical terms and I'll just parrot right back at you.

01:20:48.000 No, I mean, you know, when you say the kind of Venom that that guy says, you know, somebody probably hit him upside the head.

01:20:56.000 But don't blame that on OxyContin.

01:20:58.000 Is it possible to take so much OxyContin that you go deaf?

01:21:02.000 I am not aware of that.

01:21:03.000 I am just not aware of that.

01:21:06.000 Yeah, I would have to do the research here.

01:21:09.000 No, I mean, I have been studying this issue for a while, and I just never ever heard of that.

01:21:15.000 I only heard it because of Alex Jones.

01:21:18.000 It's not the best...

01:21:21.000 He's not even Wikipedia.

01:21:23.000 He's a great guy and everything.

01:21:25.000 You go deaf. 0.97

01:21:26.000 Let's see if it's true. 1.00

01:21:28.000 Let's punch that shit in. 1.00

01:21:29.000 We live in strange times, you know? 1.00

01:21:31.000 Yeah, but...

01:21:32.000 Alright.

01:21:34.000 Really quickly, he acknowledged he had gone almost completely deaf.

01:21:38.000 No, he's not admitting it.

01:21:41.000 Who knows?

01:21:42.000 How much Oxycontin?

01:21:44.000 Like, what's the LD50 for folks who don't know?

01:21:47.000 LD50 is lethal dose, 50%.

01:21:49.000 So if you...

01:21:50.000 Some drugs, it's very high.

01:21:52.000 Some drugs, it's very low.

01:21:54.000 Marijuana, it's insane.

01:21:55.000 I don't know what the LD50 for Oxycontin is.

01:21:58.000 But 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.

01:22:09.000 So, you know, I've seen...

01:22:10.000 Heroin users take anywhere from 25 milligrams of that drug to 500 milligrams.

01:22:18.000 That's a why and be fine.

01:22:20.000 And so it all depends on the user's history of using the drug.

01:22:25.000 So I'm not surprised if he's been using a drug for a while that he was using large doses.

01:22:31.000 That doesn't surprise me.

01:22:32.000 And that doesn't even concern me if he was using large doses if he had developed tolerance.

01:22:38.000 So 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?

01:22:49.000 See, one of the things that people don't talk enough about in terms of drugs is the sort of protective effects of tolerance.

01:22:56.000 So when people develop tolerance to any drug, whether it be marijuana, alcohol, heroin, it protects you from some of the toxic effects.

01:23:04.000 So you can really push the dose without having harmful effects.

01:23:08.000 Let me just give you an example from an animal study.

01:23:11.000 One 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.

01:23:23.000 Brain cells die, right?

01:23:25.000 Now, 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.

01:23:37.000 As a result of them developing tolerance.

01:23:40.000 So tolerance is important to protect the animal from some of the toxic effects of the drug.

01:23:46.000 That's fascinating.

01:23:47.000 So the LD50 rate will absolutely change with those who are tolerant to it from continued use.

01:23:52.000 Yeah, so the lethal dose will look different based upon the user's history.

01:23:58.000 Okay, 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.

01:24:08.000 As soon as they start taking that heroin, that number changes.

01:24:11.000 That's right.

01:24:12.000 That number, you know, it's hard to predict when we start talking about people who have tolerance.

01:24:17.000 I mean, so when we think about the LD50, we're typically talking about folks who don't have experience with the drug.

01:24:23.000 And we do physically addict in some form to a lot of drugs.

01:24:28.000 You were talking about alcohol being one of the few that if you physically addict to it and you quit.

01:24:33.000 Isn't that what happened with Amy Winehouse? 1.00

01:24:35.000 Didn't they show that her system had nothing other than alcohol in it? 0.89

01:24:37.000 It had nothing but alcohol, but I'm not sure how she died.

01:24:41.000 I don't want to get this wrong.

01:24:42.000 Some folks do die that way though, right?

01:24:44.000 Oh yeah, you can die from alcohol withdrawal.

01:24:46.000 You die typically from seizures that's caused as a result of the alcohol withdrawal.

01:24:50.000 So if someone out there is addicted to alcohol, how do they kick alcohol?

01:24:55.000 Do they have to do it very slowly?

01:24:56.000 Yeah.

01:24:57.000 So 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.

01:25:11.000 So the body has a chance to detoxify.

01:25:13.000 The 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.

01:25:22.000 What is the physiological effect of the alcohol leaving the body and then the seizure?

01:25:26.000 What causes the body to just...

01:25:29.000 So when...

01:25:30.000 Have you ever had a hangover?

01:25:32.000 Yes.

01:25:33.000 That's alcohol withdrawal.

01:25:35.000 Really?

01:25:36.000 Yeah, that's alcohol withdrawal.

01:25:37.000 I thought it was dehydration.

01:25:38.000 It's part of alcohol withdrawal.

01:25:40.000 Dehydration is part of it as well, but that's like the mild symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.

01:25:46.000 But when you think about the severe sort of alcohol withdrawal, you're asking about what happens with the seizures.

01:25:52.000 So the idea is that alcohol, what it does is that it suppresses much of the brain activity.

01:26:00.000 You're telling me, man.

01:26:01.000 It is just suppressed.

01:26:03.000 And then for long-term use of alcohol, it really suppresses a number of brain cells.

01:26:07.000 And then all of a sudden, because alcohol's half-life, the time at which half of the drug leaves the body, is only about an hour.

01:26:14.000 It's really quick.

01:26:15.000 So 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.

01:26:32.000 That's unbelievably fascinating.

01:26:34.000 So 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.

01:26:42.000 Well, I don't want to say that strongly.

01:26:47.000 It certainly depresses certain neurons, a number of neurons.

01:26:52.000 So 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.

01:27:02.000 And so that's a good thing, and you might actually function better.

01:27:06.000 Because 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.

01:27:21.000 So I don't want to say that it's just sort of generalized bad effect on your behavior or the brain.

01:27:29.000 So at certain low dosages, it can be beneficial, but at high dosages, it does shut down certain functions of the brain.

01:27:35.000 Like, there's very few people that would score as well on their SATs after five shots of Jack Daniels.

01:27:41.000 Yeah, I think that's one of the things we've been really good at public education.

01:27:45.000 Most people know that they shouldn't do shots before taking the SATs for that reason, right?

01:27:50.000 Can you imagine if it made you smarter?

01:27:52.000 Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine anything that makes you smarter besides studying and working hard.

01:27:57.000 Good for you.

01:27:58.000 That's a very good way to say that.

01:27:59.000 That's so true.

01:28:00.000 But 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.

01:28:16.000 Almost every drug that we have...

01:28:17.000 That 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.

01:28:26.000 There has to be a reason for it. 0.98

01:28:27.000 You don't need a reason to get fucked up on booze. 0.97

01:28:29.000 There's Mikey's bar, and you walk on in, give me a double and a beer, and then boom, 20 minutes later, you're drunk. 0.99

01:28:36.000 We don't need any...

01:28:38.000 No reasons.

01:28:39.000 No doctor.

01:28:39.000 Nobody has to hold your hand.

01:28:41.000 You don't have to write anything down.

01:28:42.000 You don't have to give the guy your name and phone number.

01:28:44.000 So I'm trying to figure out, are you saying that's a bad thing or a good thing?

01:28:47.000 I'm fascinated by it.

01:28:48.000 I'm neither.

01:28:49.000 I'm not saying it's a good or a bad thing.

01:28:51.000 If I had to say, should it be legal or illegal, I would say absolutely legal.

01:28:54.000 I've enjoyed alcohol many times in my life.

01:28:56.000 I don't have a problem with alcohol.

01:28:58.000 But it is very telling and fascinating that that is the one drug that we chose.

01:29:04.000 Well, it is for a number of reasons.

01:29:06.000 I mean, when you think about it, how we do alcohol, we take it orally.

01:29:10.000 And so it's the only drug that we take orally that you can feel the effects almost immediately.

01:29:16.000 And so when you're at a party, you don't have to wait for the onset of the effects to happen.

01:29:21.000 It happens almost immediately.

01:29:22.000 And you control the intoxication simply by taking more or less of the drug.

01:29:27.000 You can't do that with other drugs orally.

01:29:29.000 And that's one reason that that's the case is because alcohol essentially has no barrier, blood-brain barrier.

01:29:38.000 Like those other drugs, they have to cross the blood-brain barrier.

01:29:41.000 With alcohol, there's essentially no barrier for alcohol.

01:29:45.000 The pharmacokinetics or pharmacology properties of the drug makes it very convenient for a recreational drug.

01:29:52.000 That's another important reason that it's legal.

01:29:56.000 Yeah, 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.

01:30:09.000 You're just going to start sweating.

01:30:12.000 But alcohol, one shot, two shot, you're feeling it in 15, 20 minutes.

01:30:17.000 Yeah, you're doing it through the oral route.

01:30:18.000 So 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.

01:30:30.000 And so it's kind of protective in that way.

01:30:33.000 And so those pharmacology properties, I can't think of another drug that has such good properties.

01:30:41.000 Yeah, I couldn't think of another drug either.

01:30:43.000 If you were doing marijuana, the issue would be that you would get people around you high as well through secondhand intoxication.

01:30:50.000 Well, it's not only that.

01:30:51.000 You have to actually smoke it, but there are better methods now.

01:30:55.000 You'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,

01:31:10.000 therefore into the brain, in such a rapid succession.

01:31:13.000 And that's the thing that worries us in terms of safety.

01:31:16.000 And 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.

01:31:25.000 And once you do that, you can help people be safe.

01:31:28.000 But alcohol, don't have so much worry about it.

01:31:31.000 The thing that we try and prevent people from doing has been shrinking because of Having large amounts in such a rapid amount of time.

01:31:38.000 That it's just your body can't process it quickly enough?

01:31:41.000 Yeah, 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.

01:31:52.000 But what about, I mean, the other big issue with alcohol as opposed to marijuana is coordination.

01:31:59.000 Drastically affects coordination.

01:32:00.000 Drastically affects your ability to move correctly, your response times.

01:32:05.000 Yeah, it all depends.

01:32:07.000 Dose, again, you know, so it all depends how much people are taking.

01:32:11.000 You know, like all of these drugs, one of the things I try and point out, the most important thing about drugs is dose.

01:32:17.000 You know, is you increase the dose, you increase the likelihood of toxicity.

01:32:21.000 Because there are doses in which you can take all of these drugs safely and accomplish whatever task you're trying to accomplish.

01:32:28.000 But it's all about dose.

01:32:30.000 So when we say general statements about what alcohol does or what cocaine does, we have to be cognizant of dose.

01:32:36.000 What about drinking and driving, though?

01:32:41.000 When you see the limits, I don't remember, what are the current national limits?

01:32:46.000 They've varied a little bit, and I actually think they've lowered them in certain places.

01:32:50.000 Do you think that they're fair where they're at right now?

01:32:54.000 Do you think they should be adjusted?

01:32:55.000 What are your thoughts on that?

01:32:56.000 No, I think they're fair.

01:32:58.000 I mean, they're the best we can do.

01:33:00.000 And then we also have those roadside tests and those kinds of things.

01:33:04.000 It's the best that we can do.

01:33:05.000 And I think we're doing a really good job at sort of alcohol-related drinking, I mean, driving problems.

01:33:13.000 When 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.

01:33:25.000 In part because of our education, because of what we're doing.

01:33:29.000 So I think we're going about that quite well and appropriate.

01:33:34.000 What about tolerance in relates to that?

01:33:37.000 Because 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.

01:33:56.000 You're absolutely right.

01:33:57.000 And that's one thing that these sort of criteria don't account for is tolerance.

01:34:02.000 But a good lawyer who has to defend someone should probably bring in tolerance, particularly if their client is tolerant to the alcohol effects.

01:34:12.000 But good luck.

01:34:13.000 That's a tough one because people think that they have this...

01:34:16.000 It's a definite measure and it tells them something.

01:34:19.000 And it really doesn't without understanding tolerance.

01:34:22.000 But you're absolutely right.

01:34:23.000 That's a great question.

01:34:24.000 So a universal number like that is inherently unscientific, knowing the understanding...

01:34:29.000 A universal number like that does not apply to everyone.

01:34:34.000 It does not consider tolerance.

01:34:36.000 That's right.

01:34:36.000 But it's the best that we have currently.

01:34:40.000 The hand-eye coordination drills.

01:34:42.000 That's right.

01:34:44.000 That's the thing.

01:34:45.000 It's the behavioral tests that are important.

01:34:47.000 You want to see how behaviorally impaired the person is.

01:34:52.000 Because if you have that in combination with the blood levels, then you have an increased confidence of what you're seeing.

01:34:59.000 But 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.

01:35:10.000 Right.

01:35:10.000 That makes sense.

01:35:11.000 Is there any other variables as far as a person's ability to pass a hand-eye coordination test when they're drunk?

01:35:17.000 I mean, athletic ability, things along those lines.

01:35:20.000 Because some people, they could barely bend down to touch their shoes, whereas other people are yoga masters. 0.68

01:35:26.000 If 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. 0.81

01:35:33.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:35:34.000 Well, that's right.

01:35:35.000 You know, if people have practiced with the test and they know how to do it really well, then maybe they're not impaired driving as well.

01:35:43.000 I don't know.

01:35:44.000 But yeah, all of those issues that you bring up, man, those are complex issues.

01:35:49.000 And those are issues that the society has to struggle with, but they won't struggle with it because it's too complicated.

01:35:54.000 And it's just nicer to have a number.

01:35:57.000 Now, how does a state like Florida become this weird aberration?

01:36:01.000 How 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?

01:36:11.000 How does that happen?

01:36:12.000 How does one state just go haywire?

01:36:15.000 I don't know the Florida law, but I'm sure it's related to the permissiveness of their law.

01:36:23.000 I think that that's the thing that contributed to this.

01:36:26.000 I mean, they probably were allowed to set up pain clinics in a way that...

01:36:31.000 You didn't require much sort of oversight.

01:36:35.000 So whenever those kind of things happen, there's a potential for abuse.

01:36:42.000 So I would probably guess that's what happened.

01:36:46.000 I was also wondering if maybe it might be some of the remnants of the cocaine era of Miami.

01:36:52.000 Did you ever see Cocaine Cowboys?

01:36:54.000 You ever see that documentary?

01:36:55.000 Yeah, I'm from Miami.

01:36:56.000 Okay.

01:36:57.000 Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys 2. Shout out to my friend Billy Corbin who made those movies.

01:37:03.000 I met that dude.

01:37:03.000 Very nice guy.

01:37:04.000 And 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.

01:37:21.000 For corruption.

01:37:22.000 Like they were just crazy and making money off of coke and coke is moving in and out.

01:37:27.000 And I had always wondered if maybe that had something to do with like sort of the echoes of this pervasiveness of drugs in that state.

01:37:36.000 Wow, man.

01:37:37.000 You 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.

01:37:52.000 I don't understand Florida.

01:37:55.000 Well, 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.

01:38:04.000 Yeah, 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.

01:38:16.000 You know, one of the highest murder rates was in 1980, in part because of the cocaine sort of thing.

01:38:21.000 Mind you, long before crack, but nobody's really talking about that.

01:38:26.000 And so, yeah, I know that era, and I know that cocaine was a big deal in Miami.

01:38:32.000 My friend Steve did his residency in Miami, and it was during that era. 0.94

01:38:37.000 And he's got just crazy stories of violence, of just people coming in, just all fucked up. 0.94

01:38:43.000 And a lot of it was drug wars. 0.99

01:38:45.000 Yeah.

01:38:45.000 How did that all of a sudden happen?

01:38:48.000 Do you know the history?

01:38:49.000 New drug markets.

01:38:50.000 How did these drug markets open up?

01:38:53.000 I mean, what took so long that it took the 1980s for them to get over here?

01:38:56.000 Well, 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.

01:39:06.000 Okay.

01:39:06.000 Is that there was a crackdown on marijuana, a big crackdown in the 70s on marijuana.

01:39:11.000 And then so the drug cartels brought in cocaine because it was smaller weight and you could make more money.

01:39:19.000 And then so that was about the time when cocaine started to flood the U.S. markets.

01:39:24.000 That's what I've read as far as that goes.

01:39:28.000 But like I said, it's a superficial read of my understanding of it.

01:39:32.000 So really, all crack cocaine was was like the second wave of cocaine.

01:39:37.000 It'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.

01:39:47.000 Yeah, no, absolutely.

01:39:48.000 Some industrious dealer figured out how to cook cocaine and mass-produce it in ways that people could smoke it at cheap unit doses.

01:39:59.000 I mean, that's brilliant, quite frankly.

01:40:01.000 Yeah, it is when you think about it that way.

01:40:05.000 But 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.

01:40:19.000 What they've done is terrible.

01:40:22.000 Well, you know, I don't know the law, so it's hard for me to speak on the specifics of that.

01:40:27.000 And so, I don't know.

01:40:30.000 I don't know.

01:40:31.000 The person could have had a great idea and probably meant well.

01:40:34.000 I don't know.

01:40:36.000 But it certainly doesn't seem to be playing out as well as we would have liked.

01:40:40.000 Now, 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?

01:40:55.000 Do you get resistance from people in universities?

01:40:58.000 Do you get resistance from your peers?

01:41:01.000 No.

01:41:02.000 You know, how science works is that you publish these stories.

01:41:06.000 One study doesn't mean as much as multiple studies.

01:41:10.000 And so you publish one study and it's like, that's a great finding.

01:41:13.000 Cool.

01:41:13.000 Let's see if you can replicate it.

01:41:15.000 Let's see if you can extend it.

01:41:16.000 Let's see if other people can replicate it.

01:41:18.000 And if other people can replicate it, you can extend the findings.

01:41:22.000 Now you feel more confident in what you're finding.

01:41:24.000 And so that's kind of what happened.

01:41:27.000 Over 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.

01:41:39.000 Because when you publish in the scientific literature...

01:41:42.000 Five people read your paper, if you're lucky.

01:41:45.000 You know, there's not many people who read the literature, besides those few people who are interested in your area.

01:41:51.000 And 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.

01:42:05.000 And the way that you communicate with the people was to write a book, a trade book.

01:42:11.000 Now, how's this book been received?

01:42:13.000 Is there any, like, have you had a debate about it?

01:42:16.000 Has anybody ever said, I challenge you on your ideas, these are not correct, this is not true?

01:42:20.000 Have you ever had to, like, sit down with Ann Coulter or anything along those lines?

01:42:24.000 Well, I don't think she's qualified to be challenging me, quite frankly, about drugs.

01:42:29.000 But she would do it anyway.

01:42:31.000 Yeah, I know.

01:42:33.000 She might embarrass herself if she did, I assure you. 0.55

01:42:39.000 I don't know if that's possible.

01:42:41.000 There have been people who...

01:42:45.000 Who 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.

01:43:00.000 The 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,

01:43:20.000 because it's never been said in a public forum.

01:43:22.000 It's always been the exact opposite.

01:43:24.000 It'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.

01:43:34.000 You're just saying, look, I'm a scientist.

01:43:36.000 This is what's going on.

01:43:37.000 And we have to really accept that in order to figure out what we're dealing with.

01:43:40.000 Yeah, man.

01:43:41.000 You know, science actually saved me.

01:43:43.000 I mean, the data.

01:43:45.000 The focus on what do the data say saved my life.

01:43:48.000 You know, without science, I'm not here.

01:43:50.000 And all I can do I mean, there are people who are smarter than me.

01:43:54.000 There are people who are more articulate than me.

01:43:56.000 There are people who are more wealthy than I am.

01:43:59.000 But the great equalizer are the data.

01:44:02.000 Whatever the data says is the position that I take.

01:44:05.000 And as long as I do that, I'm okay.

01:44:08.000 I can say anything publicly.

01:44:10.000 I can be in public.

01:44:13.000 Nothing intimidates me as long as I am on the side of the data.

01:44:17.000 Yeah, that is so important, and that's not what's been thrown around.

01:44:22.000 It's been, what ideology do you prescribe to?

01:44:25.000 What are your thoughts on free will?

01:44:28.000 What are your thoughts on a person's ability to handle certain things that other people can't?

01:44:33.000 That's what the discussion's always been, almost more philosophical.

01:44:36.000 Yeah, I know.

01:44:37.000 As long as discussion is at that level, and now we can engage in this Exchange of ignorance.

01:44:44.000 And that's what we've had.

01:44:45.000 So 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.

01:44:59.000 Now, in a perfect world, would drugs be decriminalized or would they be legalized?

01:45:06.000 Yeah, so in High Price, in the book, I argue that all drugs should be decriminalized.

01:45:10.000 I say they should be decriminalized and then we should have this corresponding increase in realistic education.

01:45:16.000 Now, when things are decriminalized, then that means that people can be fined.

01:45:21.000 That's right.

01:45:22.000 They may be subjected to fines.

01:45:24.000 You 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.

01:45:30.000 But 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.

01:45:39.000 Because when we think about the last three presidents, Barack Obama...

01:45:43.000 George Bush, Bill Clinton, all three of those guys used illegal drugs.

01:45:49.000 Clinton marijuana, Bush marijuana, he's widely suspected of using cocaine.

01:45:54.000 Obama used marijuana and cocaine.

01:45:56.000 All I'm saying is that let's make sure that the society has, everybody in the society has the same opportunities as those guys.

01:46:05.000 Now, in a decriminalized situation as opposed to a legal situation, how do we decide where the revenue comes from as far as tickets?

01:46:14.000 Isn't that an issue?

01:46:15.000 Because then it becomes a money thing again.

01:46:17.000 You can charge people a ticket for having marijuana.

01:46:20.000 Marijuana is decriminalized and all of a sudden we're getting tickets left and right for weed.

01:46:24.000 It's like a speeding thing.

01:46:25.000 It's like putting a 25 mile an hour speed limit on the highway when you know everyone's going to break it.

01:46:30.000 Yes.

01:46:31.000 No, no, that's exactly right.

01:46:33.000 And 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.

01:46:41.000 Well, we set limits to make sure that we don't become excessive.

01:46:46.000 For 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.

01:47:00.000 And that money shouldn't be allowed to be used to support police budgets.

01:47:05.000 That's an interesting way of doing it.

01:47:07.000 Are you completely opposed to legalization?

01:47:09.000 No, no, no.

01:47:10.000 I mean, I am not completely opposed to legalization. 0.89

01:47:13.000 My concern here is that the country, we're too ignorant right now for legalization.

01:47:19.000 Not 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. 0.82

01:47:32.000 And we're so ignorant, we're susceptible to believing that.

01:47:35.000 So before legalization, I'm arguing that we have this increase in education about what drugs do and don't do. 0.70

01:47:42.000 So people cannot be susceptible to being hoodwinked like that.

01:47:47.000 I'm arguing that the education provides an inoculation, if you will.

01:47:52.000 So you're saying we can't handle the truth, essentially.

01:47:54.000 What you're saying is that we need this decriminalization step before we get to a legalization.

01:48:00.000 We couldn't just jump right into legalization.

01:48:02.000 It 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.

01:48:11.000 Yeah, so I'm thinking about, well, I'm not saying that it would be pandemonium.

01:48:15.000 We have Washington and Colorado right now.

01:48:19.000 Mark 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.

01:48:33.000 The data won't support that conclusion, but that's what people are going to be drawing from those data.

01:48:40.000 And so this is my prediction right now.

01:48:43.000 As a result of people's ignorance about marijuana, And that's marijuana, a drug that we have a lot more experience than with heroin.

01:48:52.000 But mark my words, you'll see those studies come out.

01:48:54.000 Now, isn't it problematic that marijuana is legal in two states, medically legal in what, like 18 or something now?

01:49:01.000 About 17 or 18, yeah.

01:49:02.000 But still a Schedule I substance, which means that it has no medicinal value.

01:49:08.000 Whereas for folks who don't know, heroin and cocaine are both Schedule II, which is kind of silly. 0.86

01:49:16.000 Schedule I also includes all of the non-lethal psychedelic variants like psilocybin, which the LD50 rated something fucking crazy.

01:49:24.000 Marijuana, it's like 1,500 pounds inside of 15 minutes.

01:49:28.000 Yeah, 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.

01:49:36.000 Cocaine is Schedule II? Cocaine is Schedule II. Morphine is Schedule II. So how do they get Oxycontins in then?

01:49:41.000 Schedule II. Those are Schedule II. But it's heroin.

01:49:45.000 Yeah, it's an opiate and they act at the same brain receptor.

01:49:49.000 Right.

01:49:50.000 So your puzzled look just kind of explains or it typifies Americans' drug education because you were right when you said, but it's heroin.

01:50:03.000 Exactly.

01:50:04.000 But a better analogy is that morphine and heroin are essentially the same drug.

01:50:09.000 Like I explained the difference between crack and powder, that's morphine and heroin.

01:50:14.000 Well, that's why I was, I'm sorry.

01:50:15.000 Yeah, so morphine, heroin is just morphine with an acid group attached to it.

01:50:21.000 They're the same drug.

01:50:21.000 And 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,

01:50:40.000 more so than pharmacology.

01:50:41.000 That's interesting.

01:50:42.000 So cocaine, which is a Schedule II, is crack a Schedule I? Crack is a Schedule I, yes.

01:50:51.000 Oh, it gets squirrely, doesn't it?

01:50:53.000 That's right.

01:50:54.000 That's very squirrely.

01:50:55.000 So heroin, crack, bad, Oxycontin, and, you know, all the other variants.

01:51:03.000 Yeah, so the thing people have to understand is that these schedules are largely based on politics.

01:51:08.000 They're more political than pharmacology, although...

01:51:13.000 We 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.

01:51:21.000 You just are just pointing this out, and you can see the flaws in our thinking, and you're absolutely right.

01:51:26.000 So the scheduling thing is largely social, political, cultural.

01:51:32.000 That's fascinating.

01:51:33.000 I had always assumed that heroin was scheduled, too, just because I knew that Oxycontins were prescribed.

01:51:38.000 I didn't know.

01:51:39.000 And then the crack, the whole thing totally makes sense.

01:51:41.000 What is the medicinal use of cocaine?

01:51:44.000 Because there's medicinal cocaine.

01:51:46.000 Yeah, so let's think about it.

01:51:48.000 If you've ever gone to a dentist, right, you might have had Novocaine put on your gums.

01:51:52.000 Without cocaine, you don't have Novocaine, because cocaine was the first local anesthetic, right?

01:51:57.000 That's one.

01:51:58.000 But cocaine today is used primarily in minor surgeries in order to restrict the blood flow so people can operate in that environment.

01:52:07.000 That's what it's mainly used for.

01:52:09.000 So lidocaine also related to cocaine?

01:52:12.000 Lidocaine is related to cocaine, that's right. 0.93

01:52:14.000 I 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.

01:52:23.000 I mean, it was a weird feeling.

01:52:25.000 I wasn't high, you know, it wasn't like a cocaine high, but I was like, wow, I don't feel good. 0.99

01:52:30.000 And I knew it was that lidocaine shit. 0.98

01:52:32.000 I was like, I think I would rather have just felt the pain than to have all this weird stuff in my system, you know? 0.99

01:52:38.000 Yeah, but without cocaine, you don't have the local anesthetic properties of lidocaine because it's a modification of the cocaine structure.

01:52:46.000 Now, 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,

01:53:08.000 I think it'll happen.

01:53:09.000 But the public has to be vigilant, and they have to continue its activity and intensity.

01:53:15.000 Otherwise, it won't happen.

01:53:18.000 We sometimes think that these things are based mainly on medicine and the medical community, scientific community.

01:53:26.000 The public has an important role to play here.

01:53:28.000 So, public opinion and public, the tide, which way the tide is going is very important.

01:53:34.000 Yes.

01:53:35.000 Now, 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.

01:53:50.000 Are there physical withdrawals from marijuana?

01:53:52.000 Is it possible?

01:53:54.000 Yeah, I think I've published maybe, along with my colleagues, maybe 10 papers on marijuana withdrawal.

01:54:02.000 So we have actually shown and demonstrated marijuana withdrawal.

01:54:06.000 Now, 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.

01:54:18.000 Now, you don't see marijuana withdrawal in everyone, but you certainly can see some marijuana withdrawal in some people.

01:54:23.000 And when I say marijuana withdrawal, it's about like nicotine withdrawal.

01:54:28.000 You know, people, they have sleep disruptions, they have eating disruptions, they are more moody.

01:54:35.000 These are more psychological sort of issues.

01:54:38.000 Certainly not life-threatening, but it's unpleasant.

01:54:42.000 You know, if you can think about having withdrawal from tobacco, you probably have a good idea of marijuana withdrawal.

01:54:50.000 So it would be as strong as tobacco withdrawal?

01:54:53.000 Because tobacco withdrawal is a huge one.

01:54:55.000 Oftentimes, it's connected to being as bad as heroin.

01:55:00.000 Is that nonsense?

01:55:02.000 That's an exaggeration, yeah. 1.00

01:55:03.000 Goddamn cigarette smokers. 1.00

01:55:04.000 Yeah, that's an exaggeration. 0.99

01:55:07.000 Now, 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...

01:55:18.000 All of the heavy users.

01:55:19.000 And so it's something that you certainly can observe, but it's not common. 0.98

01:55:25.000 And 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? 0.97

01:55:35.000 That's it? 0.98

01:55:35.000 That's right. 0.98

01:55:36.000 That's it.

01:55:37.000 That's right.

01:55:37.000 No danger.

01:55:38.000 No, I mean, you'll be fine.

01:55:40.000 You're not in any physical danger.

01:55:43.000 Is part of it your brain just scrambling because all of a sudden it's not high anymore?

01:55:46.000 And you're like, what are we doing? 0.99

01:55:48.000 What the fuck is going on here? 0.99

01:55:49.000 Maybe that's the better way to put it. 0.99

01:55:51.000 You know, I was just trying to think of some scientific way of saying, but I think that might be a better way of just saying, you know...

01:55:59.000 Think about it this way.

01:56:01.000 Whenever you engage in some activity heavily for some extended period of time, and then you abruptly stop...

01:56:07.000 You know, your body, particularly when you take in some substance, your body adjusts to that substance being there.

01:56:13.000 And now that substance is abruptly removed.

01:56:16.000 And now all the compensatory mechanisms in your body and your brain are overactive.

01:56:21.000 And so that's part of the reason that you have the withdrawal symptom.

01:56:25.000 But eventually the body resets and goes back to its homostasis, its normal sort of balance.

01:56:31.000 Except in extreme examples like alcohol where you have to do something to bridge the gap.

01:56:38.000 Yeah, alcohol, it's too traumatic.

01:56:42.000 I 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.

01:56:52.000 Now, that allows the body to slowly detoxify, whereas with alcohol, it's gone within an hour, and it's like this abrupt shut-off.

01:57:01.000 You're shut off, and now all of these compensatory mechanisms are hyperactive.

01:57:07.000 Whereas with marijuana, these compensatory mechanisms are active, but they have an opportunity to slowly adjust.

01:57:16.000 That's fascinating.

01:57:17.000 So that's such a unique piece of information that the hangover effect is a withdrawal from alcohol effect.

01:57:26.000 I had always thought that it was just dehydration, but I'd always wondered, why is it so strong?

01:57:31.000 You've got to get really fucking dehydrated to get the kind of feeling that you get when you have a hangover. 0.80

01:57:35.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:57:36.000 Particularly, you know, just think about it.

01:57:37.000 You're pumping all this alcohol in your system.

01:57:40.000 People who have hangovers, all this alcohol.

01:57:42.000 And as you get older, you don't need to pump that much in.

01:57:45.000 You're pumping all this alcohol in your system, then all of a sudden it's gone.

01:57:48.000 It stopped.

01:57:48.000 And then your body was just adjusting to the drug being there.

01:57:52.000 So compensatory mechanisms are really, that's the mechanisms behind addiction.

01:57:58.000 Right.

01:57:59.000 That you're trying to reintroduce the drug to keep those compensatory mechanisms satisfied?

01:58:04.000 No.

01:58:05.000 Let me try.

01:58:06.000 How can I think of it?

01:58:07.000 Let's think about heroin.

01:58:08.000 That's an easier one for me.

01:58:10.000 We think about heroin.

01:58:11.000 One 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.

01:58:20.000 So people who have diarrhea that can cause death, for example, you give them heroin, it makes you constipated.

01:58:27.000 That's a compensatory mechanism of heroin, right?

01:58:32.000 So that's a compensatory mechanism of the body having it.

01:58:36.000 I'm sorry.

01:58:37.000 The compensatory mechanism of the body is that it tries to counteract the sort of constipation that heroin causes.

01:58:46.000 So it has to get the juices flowing again, if you would.

01:58:50.000 The body tries to do that.

01:58:52.000 When the heroin abruptly leaves, these overactive mechanisms now causes someone to have diarrhea because it was trying to get the system going.

01:59:03.000 So 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.

01:59:15.000 That's absolutely fascinating.

01:59:17.000 Now 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?

01:59:29.000 For heroin.

01:59:30.000 For heroin.

01:59:32.000 It all depends.

01:59:33.000 So 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.

01:59:47.000 It'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.

02:00:00.000 Is that the case with cigarettes as well?

02:00:01.000 Because you ever see that movie The Insider with Russell Crowe?

02:00:05.000 I did.

02:00:05.000 It was funny.

02:00:06.000 It was a comedy.

02:00:07.000 No, no, no, no, no, no.

02:00:08.000 It wasn't a comedy.

02:00:08.000 Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

02:00:09.000 It was about the guy who worked at a cigarette company who was a scientist?

02:00:11.000 No, I know which one you're talking about.

02:00:12.000 It was based on the 60-minute interviews and that sort of thing, right?

02:00:17.000 The 60 Minutes did an interview.

02:00:18.000 Yes, yes, yes.

02:00:19.000 I do know it.

02:00:20.000 Yes.

02:00:20.000 It 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.

02:00:30.000 Yeah, I mean, well, tobacco has about 4,000 chemicals in it.

02:00:34.000 Jesus.

02:00:34.000 Yeah.

02:00:35.000 Well, natural tobacco or...

02:00:38.000 Natural tobacco.

02:00:39.000 Okay, so natural tobacco has 4,000 natural chemicals in it.

02:00:41.000 About 4,000, yeah.

02:00:42.000 The 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?

02:00:52.000 Like, how were they able to do that?

02:00:53.000 Like...

02:00:54.000 When they're adding these things to cigarettes that make it so that you become more addicted more quickly, how are they doing that?

02:01:01.000 What are they doing?

02:01:02.000 You know, there have been so much said.

02:01:05.000 For example, there are chemicals that I understand that they were trying to add to tobacco to make It more readily released the nicotine.

02:01:16.000 There are chemicals being added to tobacco for flavoring, they say.

02:01:21.000 There 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?

02:01:36.000 Well, this is just from what I got from that movie.

02:01:38.000 The movie, Russell Crowe plays this scientist who's testifying about how they had designed cigarettes to be much more addictive.

02:01:47.000 Yeah, 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.

02:02:02.000 That was one of the things.

02:02:03.000 But then it was found out that they had...

02:02:06.000 They had been growing this high nicotine strain tobacco somewhere in South America.

02:02:14.000 And so that was one of those sort of issues related to this.

02:02:18.000 The tobacco company understands pharmacology, or they understood pharmacology in terms of designing the cigarette.

02:02:25.000 And 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.

02:02:41.000 And I think the argument was that tobacco had figured out how to release the nicotine more rapidly.

02:02:49.000 And 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.

02:02:57.000 And 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.

02:03:13.000 So it's all in dose and frequency, and that's how the compensatory mechanisms get set off.

02:03:19.000 And so even heroin, which we've all thought that you can't do once, you'll go, man, they'll get you.

02:03:26.000 You can, and you could probably do it twice, but you can't do it every week.

02:03:30.000 You can't do it like every day for a couple weeks.

02:03:33.000 If 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.

02:03:47.000 You have essentially taken a low dose of heroin.

02:03:50.000 And so the notion that someone can't take heroin more than once without becoming addicted That's just voodoo. 0.99

02:03:58.000 That's silly. 0.60

02:03:59.000 That'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. 0.99

02:04:12.000 He was responsible, he had a family, got divorced, wound up being this crazy liar, pill popper dude. 0.99

02:04:18.000 Like, what's that? 0.99

02:04:20.000 Yeah, those are the toughest questions that people ask me, right?

02:04:24.000 Because on the one hand, it's like, it's not the drug, I assure you that.

02:04:27.000 So when you talk about him becoming a liar and becoming all these kinds of things, I don't know the guy.

02:04:31.000 But the fact is, is that we know that people do become dependent on these drugs for whatever reason.

02:04:39.000 I don't know whatever the reason was for him.

02:04:42.000 But there can be a variety of reasons.

02:04:44.000 A 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.

02:04:57.000 I don't know, but I have to understand this guy's complete situation.

02:05:02.000 But it's a fact that people do become addicted, some people, but the vast majority don't.

02:05:06.000 So we can't blame the drug.

02:05:08.000 What we need to do is more systematically understand what's going on with that person.

02:05:12.000 And then we can figure out what's going on.

02:05:14.000 Yeah, that's so important, what you just said, because it's always, I mean, what I just did.

02:05:18.000 I gave you this anecdotal story about this guy.

02:05:20.000 Well, I know a guy who ruined his life.

02:05:22.000 And then, well, maybe he would have ruined his life anyway.

02:05:25.000 And he would have. 1.00

02:05:26.000 He was a fucking idiot. 1.00

02:05:27.000 I know the guy. 1.00

02:05:28.000 Just so you're dead right.

02:05:30.000 Your observation is correct.

02:05:32.000 He was always looking for excuse his whole life.

02:05:35.000 If he had to run seven laps, he would run six and pull his ankle.

02:05:38.000 I've got to sit down.

02:05:38.000 He's just that guy.

02:05:40.000 Does he listen to the show?

02:05:42.000 He does. 1.00

02:05:42.000 Tough shit, bitch. 1.00

02:05:43.000 You know who you are. 1.00

02:05:45.000 He is who he is. 1.00

02:05:46.000 It's not good for everybody else if you try to babyfuck them. 0.99

02:05:49.000 You've got to do what you've got to do. 0.99

02:05:50.000 That guy was always that guy, and so when he got hooked on pills, he blames his whole life on pills.

02:05:56.000 Yeah.

02:05:57.000 I 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.

02:06:12.000 It's not their fault.

02:06:14.000 But we don't get to figure out what's really going on when you simply blame the drug.

02:06:20.000 So there are two crimes that are committed in that case.

02:06:23.000 We 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.

02:06:32.000 And also, it's an incredibly complex discussion and we're breaking it down to these very simple terms that may or may not apply.

02:06:40.000 My friend who I told you about that had a problem with heroin, who came over to my house to detox, his family was crazy.

02:06:47.000 When I got to know him better and I sort of understood his family's medical history, I understood what was going on.

02:06:53.000 He was self-medicating.

02:06:55.000 There was a psychiatric issue in his family.

02:06:58.000 And it was not just one person.

02:06:59.000 So this guy was self-medicating.

02:07:02.000 And I think that's often the case.

02:07:05.000 And 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.

02:07:14.000 They were in mental institutions.

02:07:16.000 And they changed what defines a person as mentally incompetent. 1.00

02:07:19.000 Like, look, you wipe your own ass. 1.00

02:07:21.000 Can you feed yourself? 1.00

02:07:22.000 Get out of here.

02:07:23.000 And they just kicked them out in the street. 0.78

02:07:24.000 And you have a bunch of people walking around talking to themselves that used to be in hospitals being cared for.

02:07:29.000 Yeah.

02:07:29.000 No, absolutely.

02:07:30.000 You raise all of these complex issues.

02:07:32.000 And I just hope that the public...

02:07:34.000 As 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.

02:07:45.000 Well, I think it all really comes down to people like you.

02:07:49.000 And 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...

02:07:58.000 You know, disseminating the actual facts and the data and doing so confidently, and I think it's awesome, man.

02:08:04.000 I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you coming on the show, too.

02:08:06.000 Thank you, man.

02:08:07.000 I enjoy it.

02:08:07.000 Very, very important.

02:08:08.000 So, folks, please support.

02:08:09.000 Go buy his book.

02:08:10.000 It's called High Price.

02:08:12.000 You can get it at High Price.

02:08:14.000 Is it High Price the Book?

02:08:15.000 HighPriceTheBook.com.

02:08:17.000 I'm sure you can get it on Amazon, right?

02:08:18.000 Do you have an Audible version of it as well?

02:08:20.000 Audible version.

02:08:21.000 Did you read it?

02:08:22.000 No. 1.00

02:08:23.000 Damn it, they always do that, man. 0.99

02:08:26.000 Steve Rinello, my friend, wrote a book, and they did it to him, too. 1.00

02:08:29.000 They hired some fucking actor to read his book. 0.99

02:08:31.000 No, I know, man. 1.00

02:08:31.000 That's whack. 1.00

02:08:32.000 It's your book!

02:08:34.000 I'm going to make sure I tell my editor that. 0.99

02:08:36.000 Next time, tell that editor, shut your mouth. 0.99

02:08:38.000 I want to hear... 0.87

02:08:40.000 The guy who wrote the book, read the book.

02:08:42.000 I want to hear the woman who wrote the book, read her book.

02:08:44.000 Man, I don't want someone else reading your book for you. 1.00

02:08:46.000 That's stupid. 1.00

02:08:46.000 Right on. 1.00

02:08:46.000 You got enough juice, so this will happen next time. 1.00

02:08:48.000 It's gotta happen. 0.99

02:08:49.000 Whoever it is out there making those audiobooks, get your shit together. 0.99

02:08:53.000 Dr. Carl Hart doesn't need anybody reading his book. 1.00

02:08:56.000 Silly freaks. 0.98

02:08:57.000 Alright, go buy the book and follow him on Twitter. 0.98

02:09:00.000 It's Dr. Carl Hart on Twitter.

02:09:02.000 That's H-A-R-T. On Twitter, and thank you, man. 1.00

02:09:05.000 That was awesome.

02:09:06.000 Thank you, man.

02:09:07.000 It was a pleasure meeting you.

02:09:08.000 My friend, good friend Chris Ryan, told me I had to come hang out with you, so thank you, man.

02:09:13.000 Yeah, I love Chris Ryan, and we do a podcast once a month together.

02:09:16.000 We 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.

02:09:28.000 We have no name for it.

02:09:30.000 We need a new name.

02:09:31.000 But he speaks very highly of you as well.

02:09:32.000 I really appreciate you being on.

02:09:34.000 Thank you.

02:09:34.000 It was awesome.

02:09:35.000 Dr. Carl Hart, ladies and gentlemen, thanks to our sponsors.

02:09:37.000 Thank you to Squarespace.com for sponsoring our podcast. 0.92

02:09:43.000 I should know that fucking URL by now, but of course I don't. 0.59

02:09:48.000 Sponsor copy. 0.98

02:09:51.000 Squarespace.com.

02:09:53.000 Use the code word Joe.

02:09:55.000 That's for 10% off your first purchase.

02:09:57.000 Go to squarespace.com and use the code word Joe.

02:10:01.000 Squarespace, an all-in-one platform, an easy way for you to design your own website and do so in a really impressive manner.

02:10:11.000 Thanks also to Stamps.com.

02:10:13.000 Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone, and enter in the code word J-R-E for our special offer.

02:10:19.000 No risk trial plus a $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale, and up to $55 of free postage.

02:10:26.000 That's Stamps.com and use the code word J-R-E. We're also brought to you by Onnit.com. 0.95

02:10:32.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Makers of Alpha Brain. 1.00

02:10:35.000 Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements.

02:10:40.000 Alright, we will be back tomorrow with Amber Lyon.

02:10:43.000 She's going to tell us a fascinating tale of her entrance into the world of psychedelic trips.

02:10:51.000 And Matt the Terrorist Sarah, former UFC welterweight champion, will join us tomorrow at 3pm as well.

02:10:58.000 So, Much love to everybody.

02:10:59.000 Thank you, everybody who came out in Dallas.

02:11:01.000 We had a great time.

02:11:02.000 It was so cool.

02:11:03.000 And we'll see you soon.

02:11:04.000 Much love.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 17, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #469 - Dr. Carl Hart

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