ICE agent involved in the shooting of an immigrant woman in Minneapolis is involved in a similar incident in which he was involved in another incident involving a similar suspect in June of 2019. This is the second time in less than a year that an ICE agent has been involved in such an incident.
00:02:12.080There is a stunning development that just happened in this story that we, I believe exclusively, just confirmed.
00:02:19.340DHS Secretary Kristi Noem mentioned in media interviews yesterday that the ICE agent who shot the driver in Minneapolis was involved.
00:02:27.760He was involved in a prior incident last June that was very similar to what happened yesterday.
00:02:33.260Well, we now have the video of that incident, and we've confirmed with the government that this is the relevant video that Kristi Noem was referencing.
00:02:43.980This is video of the incident she was referencing involving this same officer.
00:02:49.820He was dragged during an ICE arrest just this past June and got seriously injured.
00:04:38.720It's a shot of him in his hospital bed where you can't see his head, but you can see his arms and his legs.
00:04:44.520And that arm clearly shows the damage of what he had just been through.
00:04:48.200Okay, this is incredibly relevant to what this guy's perception of the danger was.
00:04:56.080Now, we'll get into the legal standard, which is more of whether it was objectively reasonable for him to think this woman was going to run over him.
00:05:02.800But that incident will play into whether it was objectively reasonable.
00:05:06.540Other ICE agents and other cops have been watching this happen time after time.
00:05:11.820It's happened over 100 times that ICE agents have been charged, rammed or dragged by so-called watchers.
00:07:45.920If anything, this woman had a reason to lie to make the woman driving the car, Renee Good, sound better.
00:07:51.600But there she is on camera saying very clearly that this woman who was ultimately shot was leading the protests and impeding the traffic across this Portland Avenue,
00:08:05.560that she was parked perpendicular to the traffic.
00:08:08.640Now, that'll get you arrested pretty much 10 times out of 10.
00:08:11.900So this is not a fan of ICE, and clearly her eyewitness testimonial is not favorable to Ms. Good.
00:08:20.480In this still image, you see a federal agent who we believe is the agent who eventually fires at Ms. Good.
00:08:27.380The agent is being followed closely by a female protester.
00:08:30.800She has identified herself as Renee Good's wife.
00:08:34.960She has her phone up, likely recording him.
00:08:37.560The agent also has a phone in his hand, likely recording her.
00:08:41.900Did the agent have a negative interaction with these women that caused him to begin recording, too?
00:09:45.880We believe that's her wife yelling no and recording.
00:09:50.060Right as Good reverses her car, you're about to see the agent who fired the shot move in front of the vehicle near the driver's side headlight.
00:11:13.320That's where he took the initial shot to stop her from running him over.
00:11:18.740The agent, again, who we understand was the one to fire the shot, did walk down toward the crashed SUV before walking back up and telling others to call 911.
00:11:30.200There was another angle of the shooting that we brought to you yesterday, which I mentioned, which is key.
00:11:35.180This video was obtained by the local ABC affiliate.
00:11:38.520We've circled the agent and we've slowed down the video.
00:12:56.780There's also another video taken by another eyewitness that shows agents telling a man who says he's a doctor that he can't go near the victim to help her.
00:13:47.200So now they're ripping on the cops because they didn't let some rando who claimed to be a physician they had no idea whether he was have access to the crime scene and the woman who was behind the wheel of the car apparently already dead.
00:14:15.760And there's no obligation to let yourself be run over by a dangerous instrumentality, which is what a car is, certainly an SUV.
00:14:25.980But any car that you are being fed so many lies by the mainstream media right now, not to mention the Democrat officials in Minnesota, you really do have to pay attention to understand the law and what's real.
00:14:39.000And that's why we have the panel we do today.
00:14:41.980We've got Dave Ehrenberg, Phil Holloway and Ashley Merchant.
00:14:44.980They are all lawyers, really great lawyers and hosts of the MK True Crime show on the MK Media Podcast Network.
00:14:52.020If you just Google MK True Crime or search it on the podcast app, you will see their podcast.
00:16:11.020I want to start with you, Phil, because you're a former law enforcement officer,
00:16:15.280and the demands that are being put on this ICE agent by the local authorities, by the Democrats, by the protesters in the streets,
00:16:26.080that, like, in that split second, he should have assessed that she didn't really want to run him over,
00:16:32.180that possibly he wasn't in mortal danger, that really there was no need to fire,
00:16:38.100because maybe it was just going to be a gentle run over something, maybe just a foot and not his entire body.
00:16:45.880Especially now that we know this same guy got dragged 100 yards six months ago at a different ICE stop and was seriously injured.
00:16:56.500Like, it's completely irrational, and it's not consistent with the legal standard that's going to get applied to this case.
00:17:03.700No, and I want to talk about that legal standard, because what we have seen, once again, as we typically do in law enforcement shootings,
00:17:10.940is we see the left and those on social media looking at this through the 2020 hindsight
00:17:17.820versus the objective analysis that's supposed to apply.
00:17:22.140And look, we see this breathless hysteria also setting in, rather than this calm, thoughtful, legal analysis.
00:17:30.060And I might say, before I tell you that legal analysis, I want to point out, Jacob Fry, the mayor there,
00:17:35.360I wonder if he's, like, certifiably insane in light of his abhorrent comments that were clearly designed to fan the flames of this hysteria.
00:17:44.760The Supreme Court told us in a number of cases, but really the seminal case involving use of force is Graham v. Connor from 1989.
00:17:51.520And they clearly said, specifically in their ruling, that all police use of force must be reasonable,
00:17:59.140and that reasonableness must be judged, listen to this, from the perspective of the officer on the scene,
00:18:05.200from the officer you just showed in those videos in front of that car, hearing that revving of that engine,
00:18:11.240seeing those tires spinning, and having been through this before and hospitalized and damn near killed,
00:18:16.580we're supposed to look at it from his perspective, not the 2020 lens of hindsight.
00:18:21.700Because these officers, as the court tells us correctly, because I've been there,
00:18:26.520these are split-second judgments. These are tense, uncertain, they are rapidly evolving circumstances,
00:18:32.380and lots of factors have to be considered, such as, what is the suspected crime?
00:18:36.620Whether the suspect poses an immediate threat of safety to not only the officer's safety, but others in the area.
00:18:42.340And we saw other officers there, we saw civilians there.
00:18:45.860There's no telling what this woman might do if she's allowed to just gun it
00:18:50.240and start tearing out of there, whether a foot jammed to the floor or the accelerator.
00:18:55.700And so all of those things have to be taken into consideration,
00:18:59.240and that's what we call objective reasonableness.
00:19:02.360Not the 2020 hindsight that we see coming from all of the breathless hysteria on the left,
00:21:29.420Really, what we're looking at, and everyone's talking about when this goes to court, if this goes to court, there's two different ways it could go to court.
00:21:35.280I think it's important to sort of distinguish the two different ways.
00:21:38.700One is a civil case if the family of the deceased filed a civil lawsuit.
00:21:42.340The other is a criminal case if this officer was charged.
00:21:45.060And I don't think either of those are likely to be successful.
00:21:47.520And the reason is that, you know, the standard that Phil talked about, this reasonableness standard, that's a civil standard.
00:21:53.420So the 11th Amendment says you cannot sue the government unless the government says you can sue them.
00:21:59.100And one of those is for excessive use of force.
00:22:02.000And that's what you were just asking about, this de-escalation.
00:22:04.560You know, did they have to actually use de-escalation techniques, or was this authorized?
00:22:09.300And what the law also says is that you can take into account all of this officer's experience.
00:22:14.860And Justice Kagan said that in a very recent opinion, that you can take into account that this officer had been a victim of another brutal car, crash, car running down, you know, something like that.
00:22:28.700You know, what's reasonable in his mind?
00:22:30.540The other instance is if he was charged criminally.
00:22:32.880And when I see the mayor, all I'm thinking about is they're going to try and do some type of criminal charges.
00:22:37.380You know, that's immediately what I'm thinking because we've got this significant tension between state authorities, you know, local authorities, and the federal government.
00:22:45.380And all we're hearing from everybody local is we want you out, we want to prosecute.
00:22:49.900So I'm thinking their probably next step is going to be to try to use some type of a criminal case, you know, something against this officer.
00:22:56.100And he's going to be in a position where he's got to defend himself and use self-defense as a theory.
00:23:00.260So he's had to defend himself in person.
00:23:01.980Now he's going to have to defend himself in court.
00:23:04.900I mean, this was clearly self-defense is would a reasonable officer have thought that he was in fear for his safety, his safety, or other people's safety.
00:23:14.080And I want to point out, you know, you were talking about something about how the mainstream media has sort of portrayed this.
00:23:19.420I like to sort of play a game with myself where I look at the mainstream media articles, and then I go and I actually try to find the videos.
00:23:25.800And I try to compare what I think happened to what I think after I actually look at all the videos.
00:23:37.820I don't make a firm opinion when I see just the reports.
00:23:40.340But my opinion changed significantly because everybody was shown a very, very edited clip.
00:23:45.960And it wasn't the whole – it wasn't all the clips.
00:23:47.900Yeah, and the clips that you showed a few minutes ago tells a very different story.
00:23:51.720When you see the other side of what happened, it is a whole different ballgame for me.
00:23:55.920And I think it's a whole different ballgame for everybody.
00:23:57.560Yeah, and I wonder if the mayor has actually seen all of those things, you know, and if he knows about what this officer had suffered from before.
00:24:03.960And I'll tell you, that's coming from someone who – we file civil rights cases against officers when they are in the wrong.
00:24:08.800So, you know, like we are regularly in this office evaluating this standard and talking about it.
00:24:25.780But that doesn't mean that it's illegal, doesn't mean that it's a crime, doesn't mean that it's something that rises to a case for a civil lawsuit either.
00:24:33.400Dave Ehrenberg, you're a recovering prosecutor.
00:24:36.520And, you know, my understanding is that this is not going to be a state case at all because of the supremacy clause.
00:24:45.940Because you have a federal officer performing a federal duty and that if the state tried to indict him, the feds would assert jurisdiction over this and then would probably dismiss the case.
00:24:58.380And ultimately, Trump might pardon him on federal charges.
00:25:01.460But we heard just today, this morning, that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension just revealed that federal officials have reversed course because originally, I guess, they were sitting back and letting the state handle things.
00:25:13.080And the investigation into the investigation into the killing of this woman will be conducted by the FBI without the assistance of the local state authorities.
00:25:22.100And this relates, I'm told, back to 1890 Supreme Court case in Renegle, which established that states generally lack jurisdiction to prosecute a federal officer for actions taken within the scope of their official federal duties, a principle derived from the supremacy clause.
00:25:36.840So your thoughts on whether the locals, as angry as they may be, will have a shot at this officer.
00:25:44.720Megan Goodby with you and my colleagues, Ashley and Phil, you mentioned a key phrase, within the scope of their official duties.
00:25:50.680That gets the local authorities the ability to prosecute if they say that he was not acting within the scope of this official duties.
00:26:00.860And they could move ahead and prosecute.
00:26:02.700The feds would perhaps try to assert jurisdiction and take over the case, but the state does have the right to move forward with it, and then it would go into state court.
00:26:12.920What would happen, because he's a federal official, it would get removed to federal court, so you'd have a federal judge and you'd have a jury pool that would be from the entire state of Minnesota, not just from that one area.
00:26:23.740And so there are advantages to going into federal court.
00:26:26.880The judge would not be a local elected judge.
00:26:29.340It'd be a federal appointed judge for life.
00:26:32.100So, no, the state is not out of this entirely.
00:26:35.080In fact, state law makes it easier to prosecute a law enforcement officer after George Floyd than federal law does.
00:26:42.500So I do think that the state is going to be involved.
00:26:44.920I mean, but that exception, Dave, is for a cop who is not acting within the official scope of his duty.
00:26:51.800So you're talking about somebody who's like driving to the movie theater and behaves like a moron or decides to make some citizen, some arrest in his off-duty time and he handles it poorly and he it's an ex-girlfriend and he behaves inappropriately.
00:27:07.440He wasn't acting within the scope of his official duties and we can go for him.
00:27:10.180There's no question this guy was acting within the scope of his official duties here.
00:27:13.960The state's not going to win that argument.
00:27:15.460This, if at all, will be a federal case, which is very good for him.
00:27:18.540Well, it's up to the judge to decide whether or not the state can make its case that this was so outside any reasonable test that he is not acting within his scope and he could have easily just walked aside.
00:27:33.740You know, it's interesting how different people seeing this video.
00:27:36.160It's like a Rorschach test to see how they interpret it.
00:27:39.580The law does allow, and I've done a lot of these cases, Megan, as state attorney, because I have to review these cases at the local level.
00:27:47.100We had about 100 of them, and I would say, based on what I saw, that there's enough here to at least take it to a grand jury and let them make a decision.
00:27:54.760I don't think it's as clear cut as Kristi Noem or you guys have been saying.
00:27:58.980By the way, just if I can go back to Kristi Noem, I agree with Phil and with Ashley that I wish that our elected officials would have handled this differently.
00:28:07.180We need someone to take down the temperature, and they're just ratcheting it up.
00:28:10.600And that includes Secretary Noem, to be fair to me.
00:28:12.660She said that she instantly started blaming Biden and the locals, and she said that Ms. Good weaponized her vehicle and intentionally attempted to run a law enforcement officer over and rammed them.
00:28:24.340I think that's a little premature to say that.
00:28:47.360Well, apparently there are eyewitnesses, and you can hear on the video where one of them says, yeah, get out of the effing car.
00:28:52.920The other one, though, says get out of here.
00:28:56.140And so perhaps she was trying to look like she was trying to get out of here.
00:28:58.800I know that all eyewitnesses said that, but I have to tell you, it's very annoying watching these eyewitnesses appear all over CNN right now because, you know, here's what happened.
00:31:37.480But this – look, the common denominator here in all these cases, and we see it here.
00:31:42.280And to Ashley's point, if they just would have complied, if they would have just, you know, not stuck their nose in a place where it didn't belong, such as, you know, law enforcement activity and progress,
00:31:53.480you can't just barge in and start taking over what law enforcement is doing.
00:31:57.520And when you're told to stop, you're supposed to comply because this is the common denominator.
00:32:32.380And that's exactly why 99% of women in that circumstance would never, ever have put themselves in that position because we're all, that's why I believe, I can attest to this personally,
00:32:46.880as a mother, you are more scared when the airplane hits turbulence, even if you're the only family member of yours on it.
00:32:54.480You are more scared when you have a near miss in a vehicle when you have children.
00:32:58.520It's all about, oh, my God, I can't deprive my children of their mother, and I also want to be there for the rest of their lives.
00:33:04.960And especially if you were a single mom.
00:33:07.020She had no business doing this, Ashley.
00:37:12.360As the Jeep continued to advance, Officer Caprio got off one shot.
00:37:17.140WJZ won't show the rest, but a somber jury saw and heard Amy Caprio dying from massive crushing injuries.
00:37:23.920In about two seconds, that guy took her life, not by some massive acceleration, not by some dramatic movie-like ramming, just by a quick acceleration right into her.
00:37:39.700You can see she's got the weapon drawn.
00:37:46.920She should have shot him in the face the same way this cop did.
00:37:51.840And I just think the average juror is going to understand that these cops put their lives on the line to protect the communities every day.
00:37:59.080And that unlike us, they're not in their air-conditioned studios, you know, completely safe with their cup of coffee, making these judgments.
00:38:08.360They have a split second to decide whether their life is in danger or not.
00:38:14.500Megan, that is such a tragic case you bring up.
00:38:17.980And courts look at what's called the totality of the circumstances, including the events leading up to the shot.
00:38:23.440In the Caprio case you mentioned, there's a difference here.
00:38:26.560The officer there was in a cul-de-sac.
00:38:28.840She did not have the ability to easily get out of the way.
00:38:31.780She was cornered, had limited mobility.
00:38:33.880The argument for the prosecutors, and I agree with Phil and Ashley, that state prosecutors could pursue this case.
00:38:39.180And even if it does go to federal court, it's still state prosecutors, that there's a created danger factor here.
00:38:44.580So what they'll argue is that for the ICE agent to intentionally shoot someone like that because he was in threat of a reasonable fear of his life, you have to show that he didn't have a clear out.
00:39:06.240And if you look at the manual from the – well, but if you look at the – here's the problem.
00:39:11.080There's another problem with that, Megan, is that there was an updated manual for the Department of Homeland Security that said that you can't create the risk.
00:39:18.960You can't actually stand in front of a car and create a risk.
00:39:24.100In this case, the argument is going to be that the ICE agent intentionally stepped in front of a moving car to justify the shooting, and that would be a problem.
00:39:41.800I know in this theoretical land where she's driving down the road, he's not allowed to put himself in front of the car and then say, okay, I shot her to protect myself.
00:40:54.660This does come from a civil case, but it is applied also in criminal cases throughout the United States.
00:41:00.120It's objective reasonableness from the standard of the officer.
00:41:03.420Is your life reasonably – are you reasonably in fear for your life or the safety of others nearby?
00:41:09.520And, you know, specific things like that where you're picking it apart with the 20-20 lens, perfect lens of hindsight, is not the appropriate analysis.
00:41:18.660And so, Megan, you're absolutely correct.
00:41:20.960Once lethal force is authorized, you're – you know, you can use lethal force no matter what that looks like.
00:41:26.640You don't get a demerit for firing more rounds than you needed to because anybody who's ever gone to the firing range, particularly a law enforcement training firing range, and you're doing, you know, some type of shooting under excited circumstances, you don't have – you don't know which of your rounds may have hit where they're supposed to hit.
00:41:59.420First of all, you don't get unlimited shots.
00:42:01.160The first shot, like I said, I'm not saying it's justified or not.
00:42:04.380I'm just saying that is a better argument.
00:42:06.320I still think that since he could have stepped away, since the wheels of the car were turning away, it wasn't a high-speed moving vehicle, I think he could have avoided the car.
00:42:15.520There were a lesser means than to shoot her dead.
00:42:17.440So, I think that this is the kind of case that can go to a grand jury.
00:43:58.360What you're hearing now is, you know, a lot of anger that's being directed toward the Minneapolis Police Department.
00:44:04.900Okay, Phil, by the way, this is the same woman who decided to cross-examine Nick Shirley on his report on the Minneapolis fraudsters running the daycares.
00:44:40.820Yeah, so once again, let's just talk about eyewitnesses.
00:44:44.500I mean, we've talked about on our MK True Crime show, we've talked about eyewitnesses and the inherent unreliability when they're simply trying to give a recollection of what they saw factually when something occurred in their presence.
00:44:58.900And it's just oftentimes not reliable.
00:45:00.940But when these people go so far as to then give the legal analysis in conjunction with it when they have no training or no knowledge or anything about what the law actually says, then it just becomes theater of the absurd.
00:45:14.600And the fact that you have left-wing media going out and giving these people a voice and allowing them to say this on their air is just more of the echo chamber.
00:45:25.440And the only thing that that does is it serves to continue to pour gasoline on the flames that are already starting to rise up of civil unrest.
00:45:37.220And I guess what they want in Minneapolis is I guess they want more George Floyd 2.0 kinds of riots to hit the streets.
00:45:45.500I think that the politicians there think that that somehow helps their cause, if you will.
00:45:52.100But I think history will tell us that that's very short-sighted.
00:45:55.100If you wanted riots, would you behave differently than Mayor Frye is behaving?
00:46:01.600No, if I wanted riots, I would do exactly what he did.
00:46:04.040And that's the only conclusion that I can draw from watching him and the governor out there walls as well is that they seem to want and thrive in this type of civil unrest.
00:46:15.900I think it's irrational for any mayor to want that for their community.
00:46:19.500What they should say, and a rational person would say, even a Democrat, if they were rational, I'm sure that Dave, if he were the governor there, he would say, look, let's just come back.
01:15:09.460I mean, I think the book is its own best evidence.
01:15:12.800It's, you know, it's an accumulation of studies that were done really over the last 30 years and talking to psychiatrists and talking to people with mental illness and their families about, you know, that cannabis, marijuana, which, you know, a lot of people just use pure THC now.
01:15:30.840They use vapes, that certainly if you use that over time and if you use a lot of it, and unfortunately, if you start when you're in your teens, your early teens especially, you're at higher risk for developing severe mental illness.
01:15:44.940Now, there's a lot of other issues around cannabis, but that was the one that I focused on in the book, because to me, that's the one that you, you know, you can't really fix, right?
01:15:55.440And a permanent psychotic disorder, schizophrenia in particular, that's not something I would wish on anybody.
01:16:09.360So when people talk, well, you know, marijuana, maybe it makes people fat or it makes them lazy or it kind of, you know, ruins their motivation.
01:16:17.740All those things are pretty clearly true, too.
01:16:20.640But to me, the problem that has the greatest societal impact is this issue of psychosis.
01:16:26.240And it's also very, very clear, and I don't think anybody would disagree with this, that psychosis is a risk factor in violence, okay?
01:16:34.640And it's a risk factor in two particularly bad kinds of violence.
01:16:39.360The first kind is violence against essentially innocent family members.
01:16:43.500So people, you know, the crimes where the cops say, we don't understand why this happened, or the neighbors say, we don't understand why this happened.
01:16:50.620You know, this 18-year-old kid slaughtered his family in their sleep, and we just don't get it.
01:16:57.260That's almost always psychosis-driven.
01:16:59.440And when I say almost always, I mean almost always.
01:17:05.300And then the other kind is the kind that you were mentioning at the beginning, which is crimes against strangers.
01:17:11.880And those can be – they can be stabbings, they can be shootings, but crimes where, once again, it doesn't seem like there's any, like, sense to it.
01:17:19.820And the reason is there is no sense to it.
01:17:21.560It's being driven by something inside this person, voices, a feeling that they almost cannot control, even if they know it's wrong.
01:17:30.380And so there – you know, then there will be a big legal fight afterwards about should this person go to a, you know, a psychiatric forensic hospital for the rest of their lives?
01:17:43.340So that's what I wrote about in Tell Your Children.
01:17:45.800And I will say that in the last seven years – and the book came out basically seven years ago to the day – the evidence has only mounted.
01:17:53.380And I would say even people on the left – and, you know, they probably still think that cannabis should be legal, that THC should be legal.
01:17:59.980They don't really dispute this anymore.
01:18:01.420And that's why I'm sort of so upset by what the president did last month because I think there's just so much evidence that this is a mistake societally.
01:18:11.900And I think, you know, look, this is not his issue.
01:18:14.660He's got tons of other things to worry about.
01:18:17.300And he's got some people giving him a lot of money and whispering in his ear, hey, this is not a bad thing.
01:18:22.300And, you know, it's just not – I doubt that he is up on the ins and outs of this, and it's unfortunate.
01:18:28.800Yeah, President Trump has never smoked a joint in his life.
01:18:51.400Well, so unfortunately, when you actually look at cannabis and THC in clinical trials, for example, as everybody knows, we've had a terrible opioid epidemic in the United States the last 20 or 25 years.
01:19:05.680And, you know, people thought, hey, if we legalize cannabis, it will lead to less opioid use.
01:19:12.700Unfortunately, when you actually study this, you don't see very good substitution.
01:19:17.500What you see is that people who use cannabis often continue to use opioids.
01:19:23.260They don't really say that their pain levels have gone down.
01:19:27.860It turns out that, you know, unfortunately, in general, and this is true of cannabis, it's true of opioids, it's true of other painkillers, getting lasting pain relief from any drug is really difficult to do.
01:19:41.040Over time, your body adapts to it, and you ultimately oftentimes have just as much pain as you did before, plus you have whatever the negative side effects of the drug use were.
01:19:51.720And, look, if somebody has cancer and they're a few months from death, if somebody, you know, is terminally ill in some other way, they have ALS, whatever it is they might have, and a little bit of, whether it's cannabis or opioids or something else, is going to relieve their pain, I don't think any of us would deny them that.
01:20:06.960That is not what the industry is selling to.
01:20:21.940And, you know, one thing, the proof of this, by the way, is that, so the industry, if you look at the stocks, because these are, some of these are publicly traded companies, they went up before the president signed this order telling the DEA to deschedule cannabis, to reschedule it from one to three, as you said.
01:20:38.900Since then, the stocks have actually gone down.
01:20:41.080And the reason is that the order actually is crafted in a way the industry doesn't like, because it's so focused on medical marijuana, and people have realized, hey, you know what, because so much of our sales are just recreational, this doesn't actually help us that much.
01:20:56.060So the medical marijuana thing, it is, I take your point that it's really maybe, it may not be helping people as much as they represent to us.
01:21:05.600But I did see something interesting about young people recently, and it seems directly linked to this.
01:21:09.860The alcohol sales, present day, especially for young people, but across the board, are way down.
01:21:19.100They're lower than they've been in decades.
01:21:32.720But the cannabis sales may be replacing that.
01:21:35.980I didn't see a, like, corresponding chart, but the concern is that a lot of those young people in particular are instead turning to, like, gummies.
01:25:12.180And so as a society, when we think about drug use, we have to think about discouraging drug use across the board.
01:25:20.600And when we legalize cannabis, we're doing exactly the opposite of that.
01:25:24.940And I don't think it's a coincidence that the U.S. and Canada, which are, again, the two countries where this movement has gone the furthest, are the two countries that have the worst problem with opioids.
01:25:33.700I think there's a bigger issue here that I would like to write another book about, and I'm searching to find the time to do that, which is just about sort of the U.S. attitude in general towards drug use and drug abuse.
01:25:45.560And I think we are on a horrible path.
01:25:49.060Can you talk about the amount of THC that's in your average joint now versus in 1975?
01:26:41.160So that's basically just ingesting a chemical, either inhaling it, eating it in a brownie, possibly literally putting a little tincture on your tongue.
01:27:03.540And it's, in some cases, actually, it's chemically altered in the extraction.
01:27:09.540So the idea that this is a natural substance is not true either.
01:27:14.020So I want to graduate to psychosis in a minute, but let's start first with it just turns you into an utter loser, which is not articulately put, but you've been making this case for a while.
01:27:25.800I mean, I have, and look, I don't know if you have anybody in your life.
01:27:30.340I have people in my life, okay, who went to college, who graduated, who lives seem to be on a path of getting a job, getting married, having kids.
01:27:42.080Some of those people, essentially, their lives ended in their mid-20s, right?
01:28:07.100And pot, you know, has been the focus of their lives for decades.
01:28:11.700And even if they're not psychotic, they're difficult to deal with because basically they're sort of oddly oriented towards the world at this point.
01:28:20.960And their lives don't seem to have gone anywhere.
01:28:24.000And it's actually very depressing and distressing to see.
01:28:27.320And so, I mean, again, I can think of not one.
01:28:29.960I can think of several people who I know who went this path.
01:29:26.360I do drink alcohol, and I realize this is a drug.
01:29:28.960But my mother just did a very good job of really stigmatizing anything beyond alcohol for me, which was a gift.
01:29:35.620But I do recall in my late 20s going on a ski trip with a good friend of mine and a couple girls I knew from college, and one of their boyfriends—this is out in, like, Vail—was such a pothead.
01:29:47.400I couldn't believe how addicted he was to it.
01:29:51.480I mean, he couldn't go a half an hour without having another hit, and it was so disruptive to his life.
01:29:58.420And as a result to our whole trip out there, like, you'd get into the gondola, he'd have to light something up.
01:30:03.600You'd get to the bottom of the ski run, he'd have to have another—it was like, I had no idea until that moment how addictive it could be.
01:30:18.100Yeah, and when you're in your 20s, it's kind of like there's not a big stigma with that.
01:30:21.820You know, everybody's kind of like, yeah, whatever.
01:30:23.380You haven't read Alex's book, and you think it's harmless, and it's not, which leads me to the second point, and that's the psychosis.
01:30:30.700A couple of years ago, I had on this wonderful man named Roland Griffiths, and Roland created the clinic at Johns Hopkins University testing, like, psychedelics, you know, mushrooms.
01:30:44.100And MDNA—I always screw up the letters—but, you know, the actual, like, shrooms that people are taking now for these trips.
01:30:51.800And they're doing it there in a controlled setting, in a way to treat depression, to help cancer patients who are just, like, terminal, to feel better about what's next, you know, on the other side.
01:31:02.820And it's really—they were having wonderful results.
01:31:04.700And then it was very sad because Roland himself got colon cancer and died.
01:31:08.680And I had him on when he knew that was going to happen.
01:31:12.380Anyway, my point in telling you this is he said they screen so carefully for anybody who wants to join the program for any history at any level of schizophrenia in your family.
01:31:21.460Because if it's—if you have it back three generations, just like one grandma, you have a much higher likelihood of having a psychotic break during the doctor-controlled segment from which you never return.
01:31:37.580I—like, that's the part that never—I never forgot.
01:31:52.760The psychedelics, obviously, they're designed to produce a psychosis-like experience.
01:31:57.780Cannabis isn't exactly designed to do that.
01:32:00.960But in many people, and particularly with this higher strength, you know, higher in THC, more potent cannabis that we were just talking about, it can do this.
01:32:13.440If you have any, you know, sort of preexisting psychiatric illness, if you have any psychiatric illness, certainly if you have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in your family, if you use in your early teens, in your mid-teens, and if you use heavily.
01:32:29.820If you're in those categories and if they overlap, you are at surprisingly high risk, certainly to have intermittent psychotic episodes as a result of using cannabis.
01:32:42.940And, again, psychosis is a break from reality.
01:32:45.400So, it could be you're hearing voices shouting at you.
01:32:48.060It could be you're hallucinating and visualizing, you know, stuff that's not there.
01:32:53.240That's more rare for cannabis than it is for the psychedelics, but it can happen.
01:32:56.940It could just be, and this is actually the most dangerous, both for the person and the people around him, that you're having these very, very negative thoughts of, oh, you know, my mother is not actually my mother anymore.
01:33:13.840Or my friend is actually a covert police officer.
01:33:23.540Anything like that is extremely dangerous.
01:33:26.940So, those thoughts are what THC use can produce in people.
01:33:36.480And if you ever have that happen to you, even once, you should never use again.
01:33:41.480But the problem is the industry, and this was part of their strategy to get cannabis legalized, promotes cannabis as medicine.
01:33:49.880So, who are they selling it to a lot of times?
01:33:51.460They're selling to people with sleep disorders or people with anxiety or people with depression, the exact people who should not be using this stuff.
01:33:59.560My position on cannabis is if we want to legalize it, I'm not in favor of legalizing it, but let's legalize it like alcohol.
01:34:06.340Where it is something that we're going to use recreationally to get high, to have a good time.
01:34:15.140You know, I mean, it's not a very good social lubricant, but let's use it that way.
01:34:19.700Instead, the industry sells it as a medicine, and that encourages exactly the wrong people to use it.
01:34:26.460And some of those people will get psychotic.
01:34:29.040And if they continue to use, they have what epidemiologists call very high rate ratios.
01:34:36.700But what that means is your risk of becoming permanently psychotically ill, of developing schizophrenia, is really high.
01:34:44.820Okay, so that leads me to Nick Reiner, which is the man we discussed right before you came on with our legal panel.
01:34:52.540Here he is in 2018 on the Dopey podcast, Smoking Weed.
01:36:18.940So we have this guy who is a drug addict who would say he's an addict, who would acknowledge that he can't use opioids and that methamphetamine has been a big problem for him in the past, too, is telling this group casually, oh, I use amphetamines.
01:36:35.420I use cannabis, and somehow that's okay.
01:36:39.060I've exempted those in my own mind, and they're actually good for me.
01:36:43.080This is denial on an individual level, and it's the same denial that we have on a societal level.
01:36:49.960And we really have to, you know, whether it's you, whether it's me, but parents have to and schools have to.
01:36:58.940And, you know, the president, obviously, again, this issue is not top of mind for him.
01:37:02.240We have to, as a society, say this is not a good way to do business.
01:37:38.680The other case, and we could be here all day talking about the cases of violence where we later found out that the young man, in virtually all cases, was a huge fan of cannabis.
01:37:50.680But the one that comes to mind is the shooter in the Minneapolis school shooting that happened just this past year where he shot the children in the church connected to the school.
01:38:03.040And then his videos, this is a man pretending to be a woman.
01:38:58.000The cannabis-Adderall combination is a nasty combination because both those drugs can produce psychosis individually.
01:39:05.140And they're pretty additive because, you know, pot, the one good thing about it from a violence point of view is it tends to knock people down a little bit.
01:39:12.900It makes you, you know, sleepy and lazy.
01:39:14.880But, of course, amphetamines have the opposite effect.
01:39:20.780But it seems clear from what has come out with him that, you know, his lawyer, who's now left the case because I think he, you know, I think the family does not want to pay millions of dollars for a defense lawyer when they're pretty angry, obviously, at Nick Reiner and what he allegedly did.
01:39:38.280But the lawyer appeared to be setting up a drug, I'm sorry, a mental illness defense.
01:39:45.260And so one of the things that I think actually got us talking about this, you and me, was this idea that that defense, then the prosecution has to openly say, hey, this is not organic mental illness.
01:39:58.740This was caused by the drugs Nick Reiner was taking.
01:40:02.380And if the trial does go that way, I think a lot of Americans for the first time are going to be presented with a cannabis psychosis violence connection for the first time.
01:40:13.680But, yes, there are many, many of these cases.
01:40:17.280And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of them are very hard to read about because, again, often the violence is against, you know, it's against somebody's parents.
01:40:26.960Or worse, the worst of all is when it's against children.
01:40:29.460And so I think our tendency as a society is just to turn away and say, well, this person was just crazy or this person was just evil and not to realize that we have opened up, you know, sort of the gates on this by encouraging cannabis use by vulnerable people.
01:40:46.300And, you know, what else, because we scratch our heads and we say, why, why, why do we see so many school shootings now, so many mass shootings now?
01:40:53.760And, you know, without even knowing who did the shooting in in ninety five percent of the cases, you can tell it's going to be a young man between the ages of 18 and 25 who probably didn't have too terrible childhood, but had some sort of a psychotic break.
01:41:08.500I mean, you can kind of take it to the bank.
01:41:10.540And no one's talking about this, Alex.
01:41:12.760Nobody's saying like maybe they're a little older.
01:41:15.000Or, you know, I can tell you this, when whenever there's a woman and it is very rare that it's a woman, I don't mean a trans woman, I mean, you know, an actual woman.
01:41:23.640It's even more likely because women, as a rule, don't commit that kind of violence.
01:41:28.020So there's almost always psychosis involved.
01:41:31.180No one's talking about the fact that what else has happened during this time that we've seen these school shootings and these mass shootings rise, that the increase of THC in in marijuana and the increased use of cannabis in gummies and in cigarettes.
01:41:46.960And on top of it, the Adderall is interesting because we've seen ADHD or at least, you know, diagnoses of it skyrocket, which almost always comes with a possible prescription for Adderall.
01:41:58.380And I'll bet you most parents have no idea that if they put their kid on Adderall, they need to be really careful about making sure he does not or she does not also get into pot.
01:42:08.880I mean, I think I think unfortunately most parents or a lot of parents, too many parents who turn to Adderall or Vyvanse or any of the ADHD, the stimulant drugs, don't realize that what they're giving their kids is amphetamine.
01:42:21.620And, you know, it's either amphetamine or something so chemically close that it might as well be amphetamine.
01:42:27.320And I just I mean, other countries don't do this, Megan.
01:42:30.440In France, the prescription rate of amphetamine is about one thirtieth of what it is in the U.S.
01:42:38.080And again, it's not because these aren't rich countries, not because they don't have access to health care.
01:42:42.160They just don't have a societal compulsion to give people amphetamine, to give kids amphetamine.
01:42:49.480And I'll tell you something else about this.
01:42:50.980There's a great book called Dope Sick.
01:42:53.380And, you know, we've not really talked about opioids, which is the other terrible crisis in this country.
01:42:58.520But Dope Sick is about the opioid epidemic in, you know, in southwestern Virginia and West Virginia.
01:43:05.020You know, it's about 10 years old, but still a very good book.
01:43:08.320And one of the things as you read Dope Sick is the woman who wrote it says, well, this child started with, you know, an ADHD diagnosis.
01:43:31.260It may give you a little more energy, but it'll also give you more focus.
01:43:33.480What you're telling that child is the answer to your problems comes in a pill.
01:43:39.260And so what do you think that child's going to do five years later when they're at some party and some friend of theirs is like, hey, I've got some, you know, I've got some Xanax or I've got some Vicodin.
01:43:49.220Yeah, and they're feeling maybe socially awkward.