David Nutt - The Truth About Drugs
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per minute
185.52058
Harmful content
Misogyny
6
sentences flagged
Toxicity
27
sentences flagged
Hate speech
15
sentences flagged
Summary
Dr David Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist and was dismissed from his role advising the government on drug policy back under the Blair government in the late 1980s. He has worked with over 80 types of drugs, including LSD, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and has been involved in research into the effects of these drugs on the brain. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Mail, and was one of the first people to join us on the show when we started the show three years ago.
Transcript
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We've had this phrase obviously used in the last year in particular, which is following the science, right?
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When it comes to other things. Have we been following the science on drugs?
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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We have a brilliant guest for you today. He's a neuropsychopharmacologist and he was dismissed
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from his role advising the government on drug policy back under the Blair government, I believe.
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Dr. David Nutt, welcome to Trignometry. Good to be here, thank you.
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Did we get your introduction right? You did, it was the Brown government.
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It was the Brown government, even worse. So it's good to have you on. Listen, we started the show
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three years ago and you were literally one of the names at the very top of our list. We didn't
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manage to make it happen until now so you can tell I'm very excited to have you on the show
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tell everybody before we get into it a little bit about who are you how are you where you are what
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has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us so I am a
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doctor trained as a psychiatrist but as you said I am a neuropsychopharmacologist and that is
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someone that studies the effects of pharmacology on the brain. Why do I do that? Because the brain
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is a chemical organ. Your brain communicates, all the neurons in your brain communicate with each
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other by chemicals, 80 different chemicals in the brain. And in order to understand the brain,
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you have to understand the chemicals. And to understand the chemicals, you have to use drugs
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to manipulate them. So as part of my work and my research, I think I've achieved something
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it's rather special I think I have administered more different kinds of drugs to human beings
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in anyone alive pretty much every class of drug that has ever been given to someone to change the
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brain I've given and so I know quite a lot about drugs in the brain and that's why the government
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20 years ago asked me to join them to advise them on drug policy because I was an expert on drugs
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but after 10 years of doing research on the harms of drugs I came to the conclusion which wasn't
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surprising i suppose that current drug policy and the current drug laws weren't based on evidence
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and then i started saying that publicly and they didn't like that so they sacked me
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that is so funny but look what a lot of people don't know the the the actual scientific evidence
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i suppose there'll be things i don't lots of us don't know can you talk to us about
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which drugs are actually harmful including the legal and illegal ones and which drugs are less
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harmful another so we can kind of get a picture of if everything was allowed to be taken which
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drugs would be doing the most damage and which would be the safest sure well we did a very very
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systematic analysis there are 16 ways in which drugs can harm you well there are nine harms to
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the user and they range from killing you as soon as you take it like fentanyl or you know making
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you go slightly crazy perhaps like uh like a psychedelic uh and then there are seven harms to
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society so if you if all drugs were legal and they were equally used the most dangerous drugs
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which would harm the most number of people would be drugs like heroin fentanyl crack cocaine crystal
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meth but then quite soon after you'd come to alcohol alcohol is about the fifth or sixth most
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harmful drug to the user and the thing i got really angry with about with the government was
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that the drugs which are relatively less harmful drugs like ecstasy like lsd like magic mushrooms
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they're the ones that attract the highest penalties even though they're much less harmful
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than drugs like even alcohol you say that I'm I'm going to ask you this question and I've wanted to
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ask it to you for a very long time so when I started in comedy I was a fan of Bill Hicks
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the comedian and when he used to have this routine about have you ever noticed it's the drugs that do
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the least for you that are legal the ones that get you to question to push back to think for
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yourselves are made illegal do you agree with that totally he's a genius he was a genius absolutely
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completely on track the drugs that make you question this the establishment question your
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governments drugs like psychedelics they were banned lsd was banned because people were questioning
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the war in vietnam and because at that time as is still the case today the only response of western
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governments to drugs is to ban them they got banned it didn't affect people using them but it
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absolutely hammered people like me who want to research them and want to use them as therapies
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and why is it that we just can't have a very simple rational discussion about this
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without it invoking people you know people getting very angry upset you know blanket
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bans which have been proven time and time again not to work yeah that's a really interesting
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question why can't we have a rational discussion it's it's because i think now it's been so long
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that we've been lying about the harms of drugs that people even people who kind of know
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intellectually that they are these the relative harms of lie you know the the drugs that are
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banned because of lies they even the people that know the truth kind of feel uncomfortable about
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telling the truth and i think obviously a lot of people do believe the lies and they do believe
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that drugs like lsd are more harmful than alcohol which is of course completely wrong
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And we've had this phrase obviously used in the last year in particular,
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which is following the science, right, when it comes to other things.
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The Opium Act was brought in kind of at the behest of pharmaceutical companies.
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They wanted people to use the pure extract of opium,
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which is called morphine, which they had patented.
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And in fact, they patented other extracts like codeine and heroin.
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So there was an antipathy to using plant products then.
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It was a sort of gaining control of the markets by big pharma,
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you couldn't just ban it because it was competing with pharma.
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what they had to do was create the fear of opium and that was very easy you just created a fear of
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Chinese you know and in London was you know the east end of London where we are now you know this
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was you know basically Chinese people living here were smoking opium and they would create you know
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hysteria was created about them being evil people and they were corrupting them you know particularly
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young women getting them smoking opium and so that the fear you know that this it was generated
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And that was driven by very puritanical individuals,
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about the damage that alcohol was doing to families.
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So rather than have a rational policy to alcohol,
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which would be through taxation and limiting access,
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they banned it. And it wasn't just America, Sweden, Norway, Finland also banned alcohol.
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We nearly did in this country. People don't realise in, I think it was in the 1923 election,
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Winston Churchill stood in Dundee against the temperance candidate. And the temperance
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candidate beat Churchill by, I think, about 15,000 votes. So there's a huge international
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pressure to ban alcohol. Anyway, the Americans succumbed, alcohol got banned. What happened?
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or hell let loose organized crime rose because people like alcohol and people weren't ready to
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give it up just to protect but possibly protect you know the families that were being damaged
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anyway what's that got to do with modern drugs well what happened was in 1932 i think or 33
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the prohibition act got repealed but at that point because prohibition was so corrupting of the
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every policeman in america was on the take from speakeasies because every street corner had a
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speakeasy you're underground you get your booze so the police were all corrupt so the American
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government created a special army which we now call the Drug Enforcement Agency to fight the
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mafia and just try to stop people using alcohol and that ended up being about 35,000 people
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run by a man called Harry Anslinger and suddenly one day he knew that alcohol was going to be
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legal so he couldn't be fighting alcohol anymore he'd lose his job and all his men would lose his
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job so what did he do he created a new monster which was cannabis and he changed the name from
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cannabis to marijuana because it's Mexican and then he started the classic process that all
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governments do when they want to ban a drug they associate it with some other group in this case
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the Mexicans and then the same stories the stories we had about the Chinese corrupting
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white people became the Mexicans were corrupting white people and the Mexicans were coming into
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america and selling cannabis and young men were going crazy and they were killing their mothers
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etc so he created a hysteria about cannabis but worse than that he persuaded the rest of the world
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to be hysterical about cannabis and in 1934 the league of nations which america wasn't even part
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of banned cannabis effectively worldwide and that really started the whole chain you know chain
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reaction of just keep banning any drug you don't like until we've got to the 1968 war on drugs with
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Nixon, where, you know, he just went right over the top in order to get elected.
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And we're talking about it now, but it does seem that we're starting to have a more balanced
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approach, starting. For example, New York have, I think they've legalised cannabis,
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have they not? Do you think that's part of a wider trend, David, that we're seeing now?
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Yeah, well, the debates happened. I think, to be honest, my sacking made a contribution
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in this country to the debate, because people said, well, why has it been sacked? And they
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because he's saying that alcohol is more harmful than LSD
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sacking me, saying I was wrong on the harms of cannabis.
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Including the people who make the laws against them.
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What defines us as different from other primates?
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Well, we have language, we have art, and we take drugs.
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and we understand that there's a lot of capacity in the brain
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and generally it's for pleasure or to reduce pain.
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I mean, mostly they take drugs like tea or coffee.
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people take drugs to relax them to take away some of the stress of life and in some cases to
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actually expand their understanding of life and that's where drugs like psychedelics and maybe
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mdma come in and we've always taken these drugs and it just seems bizarre that we live in a society
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which has banned them because yes magic mushrooms were banned when i think it was 2005 correct and
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And what was the government's, what was their justification for banning it?
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So David Cameron had come in to become the leader of the Tory party.
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And he said before he became leader that one of his ambitions
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was to reduce the classification of MDMA, which is a Class A drug.
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or people were getting longer prison sentences for MDMA than for heroin or crack.
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They don't admit that, of course, but that just happens.
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Okay, so Cameron said, I'm going to reduce MDMA from class A to class B.
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I think largely because he was associated with a lot of people that were taking it.
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She went to raise, you know, it was a popular drug.
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It was a drug which was changing particularly people's attitude to the police.
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The police would go to a rave, and for the first time in their life,
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Anyway, so there was a strong move that MDMA was going to be more openly available.
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Cameron became the head of the Tory party the next day.
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I mean, I monitored this, obviously, because I was a government advisor at the time.
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One day, you know, I'm going to review the drug laws.
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The drug laws, you know, we're going to stick with the current classification.
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A couple of shops started, hedge shops started selling dried mushrooms.
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The technology for freeze-drying magic mushrooms came along.
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The Daily Mail has always had hysteria against drugs.
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and they goaded Cameron to do something about these two shops selling magic mushrooms.
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So Cameron then goaded Blair and said, look, you know, you're soft on drugs. We've got a drug here
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because the active ingredient of magic mushrooms is psilocybin, which is illegal if it was pure,
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but the mushrooms were legal in this country. And Blair, because he was like many left-wing-ish
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governments, more liberal governments, are terrified of being seen as soft on drugs.
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i mean the classic example of course is clinton in america clinton brought in the most restrictive
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regulations he's the guy that brought in the third strike and you're in prison forever yeah
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because he was told he had to be harder than the republicans otherwise he wouldn't get elected
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the same here blair's decided he had to be harder on drugs in cameron and instead of coming to the
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expert group i.e the acmd which i was a part of instead of asking us for advice which he should
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done by law he set up his own committee we don't know well I mean it's alleged because of course
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it was none of this documented but this was a classic Blair the kitchen cabinet you know the
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I think they call it the sofa cabinet he got in he got in the police he got in he got in the army
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and they sat around and they decided what are they going to do about magic mushrooms I mean
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it's kind of completely bizarre and and we as the experts and the government's formal advisors heard
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that they were having these meetings and we said to them you cannot change the law of magic
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mushrooms without consulting the acmd because that is what the law says the mischief of drugs act
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says you cannot change the law without consulting the experts and they went quiet for a couple of
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weeks and and then we got a note saying they were going to have a vote in in in the commons next
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week on rescheduling uh and reclassifying magic mushrooms and we and they said what do you think
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and we said that's an insult you've kind of you've reached the law and you can't put us on that spot
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We can't give us three days, effectively, to make a proper harm assessment
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And then they voted to ban magic mushrooms and make magic mushrooms a class A drug.
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And that was actually the beginning of the end for me.
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Because you're sitting here saying, magic mushrooms,
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a million people are using them each year in Britain and no harm.
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And then suddenly they're alongside crack cocaine.
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And at that point I began to rebel and start saying,
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you know come on guys you know this you can't have decisions just made by by essentially by
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the prime minister and a couple of coronies and we're talking about magic mushrooms you've been
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heavily involved in the field of psychedelics yes do you think that this is the next phase
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for medicine you know as a way to treat things like anxiety depression etc etc absolutely i mean
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it's like in the 1950s and 60s particularly lsd was being heralded as a revolution it was the
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really the first medicine we had for the mind and it was being widely used so there were a thousand
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research papers published in the 1950s and 60s on lsd showing powerful effective treatments for
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everything from anxiety depression addiction and then he got banned he got banned because of the
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vietnam war because you know people thought the anti-war protest would go away if it's banned lsd
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i mean it is the you know it is a classic adage isn't it you know if you're a hammer everything's
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a nail you know if you're a drug policy person everything's a ban anyway so that ban had destroyed
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research it's the worst censorship of research in the history of world of all research because
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i think 227 countries in the world signed up to that ban in no country in the world
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has lsd subsequently been studied as a treatment except a tiny study in switzerland where it was
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invented and when you look back at the evidence and you know the fact the lsd treatment for
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alcoholism is the most powerful treatment it's twice as powerful as the best modern treatment
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and yet you can't use it because it's illegal and that's why I started and my team you know
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10-15 years ago and I started fighting back because it it makes no sense it's not as if
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the ban has stopped use all it's done is stop research and clinical clinical attempts and so
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I'm going to wear a tinfoil hat and I'm going to ask you a tinfoil hat question and feel free to
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pushback do you think part of the reason that we have been so wary with this particular aspect
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with things like psychedelics and treating mental health is because of big pharma who've got their
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own particular treatments and don't want them to be encroached upon yeah there's several answers
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to that question it's more it's not simple that they i think it's possible i don't have any
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evidence but it's possible in the 90 towards the end of the 1950s other treatments for psychiatry
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were coming along non-psychedelic treatments and i think one of the justifications that governments
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used to get rid of lsd was well we got the alternatives yeah we've got antidepressants
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uh so i think i think i don't think pharma was trying to get rid of lsd but but i think maybe
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they were i don't know we don't we haven't got any data on that but certainly governments could
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say well we don't need it because we've got alternatives and that's essentially when you
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put a drug in schedule one which they did in this country in the UN conventions that says that you
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don't need it because it's very dangerous and because there are alternatives now more recently
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I don't I actually think that in a strange way I think the pharmaceutical industry is pleased
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with what we're doing because they have given up on developing brain treatments as one of the
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vice presidents of GSK said 10 years ago he said any drug company that works in on the brain needs
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their head red because it's too difficult and that's so that most of them have now well in fact
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almost no drug companies work on new treatments of the brain they almost all work in cancer and
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heart disease and really is that really true yeah that's incredible i mean we bang on about mental
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health more than ever and rightly so you could argue certainly for some people the treatment is
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needed but they're not they're not looking to to deal with that market they're not looking to find
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solutions for they think it's too difficult really and so i think they're quite grateful that we're
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finding the solutions but the problem is the solutions are still illegal and until we change
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the law we can't roll it out to the millions of people who need it and so you were saying about
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you know and push back if i'm wrong that this is that the psychedelics are more effective
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than the synthetics and the antidepressants can you explain to us why and yes because they work
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in a very different way and this is really the the nub of my research i mean just just to be
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just explaining a little bit more when i started researching psychedelics because it was the last
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class of drug I hadn't studied I studied everything else stimulants opiates you know you name it I've
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given it to humans but we hadn't done psychedelics why because it was just too difficult and they
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were illegal and then I thought well you know I'm 60 now if we don't start soon I won't ever get it
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done so we started and then we found these weird things you know we found that you know although
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they open up your mind they actually switch off your brain so the brain goes brain activity goes
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down as your mind expands and and in fact what's remarkable about that because that's exactly what
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Ardus actually predicted. In 1953, when he took mescaline, he wrote about it in The Doors of
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Perception. He said, my mind has been expanded by this drug. What does that mean? Oh, it means that
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something's constraining my mind. What's constraining my mind? It must be my brain. And he came up with
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this wonderful phrase, the brain is an instrument for focusing the mind. And we showed exactly that
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because when we switch the brain off, the mind expands. So that was the first thing that, you
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know we completely turned everything on our head we no one expected that these drugs would switch
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off the brain except tuxley because he was dead but then we showed that it switches off the parts
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of the brain which drive conditions like anxiety and depression so then we thought well maybe they'll
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maybe it'll work in these conditions and then that and then i started reading what people knew about
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them in the 50s and 60s and i realized what it was obvious you know but we had the brain science now
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we could actually go to ethics committees and say we can switch off the part of the brain that
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cause depression can we do a study and they said well it took us two years to get permission but
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in the end we got permission and it was it was psilocybin is the most powerful treatment a single
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dose of psilocybin can lift depression in the vast majority of people with severe depression
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people who've been untreatable for 20 years can get better a day after a trip really and by a by
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better what what do you mean david well some are cured some of the people we treated in the night
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And some, about 20% of the people in that first trial
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often many people start having depression in childhood
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And we can suppress that, but it kind of creeps back.
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So, but it is still the most powerful treatment,
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single treatment of depression has ever been shown.
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David, let me ask you, Francis normally is the one wearing the tinfoil hat,
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He mentioned Bill Hicks and this idea that the drugs we are allowed to take
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And if you look at them, you know, tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, whatever,
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these tend to be drugs that facilitate us being in the world as it is.
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Being obedient workers, going into the factory, going into the office,
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sitting there, taking another shot of coffee to be able to stay at the computer.
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whereas as you say drugs that can be blamed for opening people's minds getting them to question
00:23:08.040
authority reject whatever they're being told that they're supposed to support invasions of
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other countries whatever they are the ones that tend to be illegal is that a connection you see
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as relevant or is that just a totally totally yeah politicians are absolutely terrified of
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mind-opening drugs because it changes the way people vote that you know that was kind of the
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basis of the war on drugs, Nixon's war on drugs, they, you know, they were really determined to try
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to portray people, the anti-war people, as crazy drug users. They wanted to frame rebellion and
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protest with drug use. And they succeeded. And we bought into that. You know, basically,
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our Misuse of Drugs Act in 20, sorry, in 1971, was essentially written by the Americans.
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I mean, basically, they told us, you write this.
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Basically, your drugs act has got to mirror ours.
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We're not going to put nuclear submarines in somewhere.
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Anyway, we had up to that point kind of resisted
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So there's two other things I want to focus on.
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Because we're having a very positive conversation about drugs,
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which some people may feel gives not enough attention to the negatives.
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So let's talk about addiction and the fears that people have
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about legalising or decriminalising drugs, the impact of that.
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Because as you said yourself, there's 16 ways that drugs can harm people,
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So if we were to decriminalise or legalise drugs, or most drugs,
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Would that not have a huge negative impact in terms of, you know, people just getting addicted, being stuck in negative cycles, whatever?
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That is the fear that politicians can spout all the time.
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If we change the law, it will expand use and expand harms.
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Well, better than arguments, there's loads of evidence against that.
00:25:19.100
So the first thing is that the law doesn't work. So we have illegal cannabis in this country, you know, recreational cannabis is illegal. Yet we have a greater proportion of young people using cannabis than they have in countries where it's legal. Why is that? Well, and that's kind of been well known since the 1950s, really. Illegal markets create demand. And they create demand by getting people to use drugs and then selling drugs.
00:25:46.500
So once you criminalise people for drug use, they don't have much option.
00:25:50.700
As we've got a million young people, a lot of them black and minority ethnic,
00:25:58.840
They can't get jobs in the police or teaching or the civil service.
00:26:03.820
It's even quite difficult to get into the army with a criminal record for cannabis.
00:26:08.160
What do you do then if you can't work in conventional work?
00:26:13.280
And perhaps the worst example of that was heroin.
00:26:16.980
So in 1971, and this is one of the really terrible examples
00:26:24.800
we were prescribing heroin to heroin addicts until 1971
00:26:34.200
and they effectively said, you've got to stop doing that.
00:26:38.680
Now, you take a heroin addict who's getting a prescription
00:26:42.760
and you say, sorry, you can't have your heroin anymore.
00:26:58.940
And who do you go to to get heroin in four hours?
00:27:10.000
someone will give you the heroin and then they say yeah they want 100 quid you know back in those
00:27:14.120
days back in 97 was a lot of money and then how do you get the money well you either steal from
00:27:18.220
your parents or your you know your partners or you prostitute yourself or then you become a drug
0.54
00:27:24.380
dealer and that's what happened the majority of heroin users from 70 to 80 to 90 became heroin
00:27:31.420
dealers in order to pay for their habits so we went from a thousand addicts to 300 000 addicts
00:28:07.000
Nobel-winning, prize-winning economists have said this is what happens.
00:28:11.600
We've known this forever, but people don't, governments don't want to believe it
00:28:15.860
because it confronts their moral sensitivities about being rational about drugs.
00:28:21.440
And then just to finally answer your question completely,
00:28:23.440
there's brilliant evidence, it's called Portugal.
00:28:26.720
So Portugal decriminalised personal possession of all drugs about 17 years ago now.
00:29:02.780
because we don't treat them in Portugal someone gets arrested for possessing a heroin they don't
00:29:08.560
get put in prison they get treated and that means they stop creating other addicts and they can be
00:29:15.920
they stop dying because they get treatment so the Portuguese experiment has absolutely shown us
00:29:21.580
how you can have a rational policy that works and saves huge amounts of money because they
00:29:26.780
empty their prisons. In Britain, we have doubled our prison population in the last 30 years. And
00:29:33.560
all of that is drug related crime. And the Dutch and the Portuguese with more sensible drug laws
00:29:40.380
have actually managed to reduce their prison population. This is what I wish people would
00:29:43.620
understand. We talk about all sorts of issues on the show, whether that's, you know, racial
00:29:48.720
inequality, the policing, racism, immigration in America, all of these things that are driving the
00:29:55.040
political landscape in very powerful ways. Actually, I mean, how many of the people coming
00:29:59.160
through the southern border from Latin America are escaping drug cartel-operated countries?
00:30:06.340
How many people are in prison because they're there, because of, you know, things that shouldn't
00:30:12.380
be illegal, in my opinion, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, when you create a narco state,
1.00
00:30:17.300
which is what Mexico is, to some extent, you know, even some of the West African countries
00:30:22.020
now, Guinea-Bissaua, you actually completely destabilize the state, you destabilize the
00:30:27.920
economy, you make it, you essentially create, you know, the state is run by drug dealers
00:30:32.520
and they're generally not very good people and they're generally not that concerned about
00:30:38.820
So, you know, we've created that monster, particularly in South America and Latin America,
1.00
00:30:43.480
which is actually fueling this enormous, you know, desire to get out of there and get somewhere
00:30:49.580
hey francis do you think it's cool that the same company that controls 50 of online retail
00:30:56.620
also passively eavesdrops on every conversation you have in your home what what about the idea
00:31:02.240
that a single company controls 90 of internet searches and gets to track everything you do
00:31:08.660
on your smartphone i'm so screwed you are trigonometry is now going to be a solo project
0.85
00:31:15.180
big tech is more powerful than most countries are and they profit by exploiting your personal data
00:31:20.940
it is time to put a layer of protection between your online activity and these tech juggernauts
00:31:26.380
that is why i use expressvpn unfortunately so sadly every site you visit every video you watch
00:31:36.860
every message you send gets tracked and data mined but when you run expressvpn on your device
00:31:45.060
something big tech can use to personally identify you.
00:31:47.800
So ExpressVPN makes your activity harder to trace
00:32:10.600
Go to expressvpn.com slash trigger and get three extra months for free.
00:32:17.780
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash trigger to learn more.
00:32:34.240
If you were in charge of the drug policy now, what laws and changes would you implement?
00:32:38.120
so if i was running everything yeah i would um i would actually have a i would decriminalize
00:32:46.600
personal possession of all drugs so that people go into treatment rather than prison because i
00:32:52.360
mean putting people in prison for drugs is just stupid because they actually end up taking more
0.52
00:32:55.500
drugs in prison when you say treatment just to interject briefly tell people a little bit about
0.98
00:33:01.360
what you mean by that well if you are addicted to a drug if you're if you're caught in possession
00:33:07.080
of a drug and you're because you're addicted to it then i would say you're mentally ill because
00:33:11.240
that's what an addiction is so you should be treated as someone who is ill rather than someone
00:33:17.200
who is bad but putting drug addicted people into prison is both extremely wasteful of money because
00:33:24.400
it costs a lot of money to put people in prison and it just perpetuates the cycle because they
00:33:28.560
don't get treated in prison i mean drug use in prison is greater than outside of prison
00:33:33.240
for various reasons, not least of which prison's a horrible place
00:33:36.500
and drugs can't help people deal with the misery.
00:33:39.600
And also, you know, a significant proportion of prison officers
00:33:43.140
are now drug dealers because it's a lucrative trade.
00:33:45.300
So criminalising people for drug use is always counterproductive.
00:33:51.200
If you find people with drugs in their possession,
00:33:55.480
and that's a combination of, like, psychological and medical
00:34:04.200
then this is the weakness of the decriminalization approach.
00:34:07.680
Well, in Portugal, what they do is they have civil sanctions.
00:34:10.500
They basically say, okay, well, you've got to clean the streets
00:34:21.560
Now, my own personal view is I would go further than that.
00:34:24.940
My view is that if for drugs which are less harmful to the user
00:34:29.720
than alcohol then they should be available because i think for two reasons first is a moral reason
00:34:37.180
you know why would you want people to take a more harmful drug if they could take a less
00:34:41.640
harmful drug well the only reason for that is because the drinks industry want you to
00:34:45.800
and then the second reason is a pragmatic reason if people use less harmful drugs there's less harm
00:34:51.280
and this myth that people politicians are oh well they'll they'll be taking alcohol and they'll be
00:34:57.560
getting stoned on top and there'll be I mean that's just rubbish you know about a third of
00:35:01.620
people in Britain if cannabis was legal would reduce their drinking they'd switch to cannabis
00:35:06.000
I wouldn't have another drop of alcohol ever again personally so so there will be almost certainly
00:35:11.560
overall health benefits for making a mark but I'd have this I'd have these drugs available in what
00:35:17.200
we in what we call you know licensed premises like pharmacies you know where we get their drugs
00:35:21.440
And just reflect on the fact that until 1974, we used to just sell alcohol in licensed premises, which were called bars or off licenses.
00:35:31.080
And then one of the worst things that any government did, and this was John Major's government, was to allow supermarkets to sell booze.
00:35:37.860
And the massive increase in alcohol harm, which we've seen, has been driven by, I think it was about 94 that he opened up essentially the licensing laws.
00:35:51.100
as a result of allowing people to buy it in supermarkets.
00:35:54.300
All the increase in alcohol consumption since the mid-90s
00:36:03.780
because the relationship between alcohol consumption and harm
00:36:14.020
and what do you do for people who are dealing drugs like crystal meth etc etc would you legalize
00:36:21.500
something like that or would you still make it illegal so i think drugs they're more harmful
00:36:25.480
than alcohol so i would keep that i would keep so the dealers would still be criminal in the same
00:36:30.760
way as people who are bringing in illegal alcohol are you know they're criminals well you know if
00:36:35.380
you've got if you've got a regulated market then you have to protect it so if if people are
00:36:40.060
deliberately flouting the law by bringing in drugs
00:36:42.440
which are more harmful than the ones people could buy,
00:36:45.200
then, yes, I think you have to criminalise them.
00:36:47.100
But the hope would be that their market would dwindle.
00:36:51.860
Can any of you remember Methadrone, MCAT, Meow Meow?
00:36:57.180
So this was an amazing example of how rational drug use
00:37:03.780
So in 2007, Methadrone began to come into Britain.
00:37:15.000
You could take a gram of methadrone and you wouldn't die.
00:37:17.640
Whereas if you took a gram of cocaine, there's a good chance you'll die.
00:37:20.320
And if you took a gram of MDMA, there really is good chance.
00:37:22.820
So people started to switch, particularly from cocaine and amphetamines to methadrone,
00:37:37.480
So the cocaine deaths halved, and amphetamine deaths reduced by about 40%.
00:37:43.140
When people had access to something, that was not killing them,
00:37:46.700
but not equally acceptable, but preferable because it was legal.
00:37:57.680
The sun determined it was going to ban methadrone.
00:38:00.360
And it set out to create scare stories about methadrone.
00:38:05.420
And it was the government, it was the 2010 election.
00:38:08.360
Brown was getting anxious about being seen as weak on drugs.
00:38:11.320
So they decided to ban methadrone just before the election.
00:38:19.660
We now have the highest number of cocaine deaths we've ever had.
00:38:22.440
Methadrone deaths, there were never really any methadone deaths.
00:38:29.600
If you give them a safer legal alternative, they will use it, and that will save lives.
00:38:36.800
So that's the model on which I'm making the argument that we should have a regulated market for some drugs.
00:38:45.800
And I'm interested in whether we could have a regulated market.
00:38:48.940
Now, the organisation called Transform has actually just written a paper
00:38:52.720
because they're trying to see if you can get a regulated cocaine market in Mexico
00:38:57.440
because that could dramatically undermine the power of the cartels.
00:39:12.880
but it's so much more harmful that there might be benefits
00:39:17.620
in having a regulated market in the sense you get rid of organised crime.
00:39:22.220
So I think that's the most difficult one at present.
00:39:29.280
because I think you talk about the political reluctance
00:39:39.740
that those political decisions are killing people.
00:39:47.320
based on their perception of the public perception of drugs.
00:39:55.460
well, I don't want my child, I don't want this, I don't want that.
00:39:59.940
And we do see people, and even with drugs that are not in and of themselves
00:40:04.700
massively harmful like heroin, but people have problems with alcohol,
00:40:09.860
people have problems with cannabis, people have problems with all sorts of drugs, right?
00:40:17.500
There are three main drivers to get addicted to drugs.
00:40:23.620
heroin cocaine are very addictive alcohol is pretty addictive tobacco is pretty addictive
00:40:28.900
and some drugs are not addictive mdma lsd other psychedelics they're not they're anti-addictive
00:40:35.440
they're not addictive so that's the first thing the drug varies the second thing is the nature
00:40:39.200
of the drug varies and the way you take it so if you're shooting up crack cocaine or smoking crack
00:40:46.480
cocaine you know you it gets in the brain so fast that it is more addictive than for instance if you
00:40:51.300
snort cocaine and that's one of the reasons actually we encourage people to smoke heroin
00:40:56.180
rather than inject heroin because again it's not just safer in terms of infection but it's also a
00:41:00.720
bit less addictive so the speed at which the drug gets in it has quite a huge impact on on
00:41:05.780
addictiveness and we can easily and we can use that to actually develop treatments but that's
00:41:09.600
another story and then the really the third thing is why are people using the drug so if you're
00:41:15.800
using the drug to dampen pain you know then you're less likely to get addicted if you're using the
00:41:22.260
drug to get high because getting high eventually for most drugs they're getting high the effect
00:41:26.380
the high gets less and less so people keep chasing the high if you're using say alcohol
00:41:30.620
though to deal with pain or misery in your life then you can get because you get tolerance to
00:41:34.540
alcohol then you've got to keep more and more so so it's you need to look carefully as to why people
00:41:39.600
are using drugs and if it's for self-medication that's generally not a good thing that is you
00:41:45.320
And then the final point, and this is particularly relevant to cannabis.
00:41:49.840
They didn't used to get addicted to cannabis very much
00:41:51.500
when I was an undergraduate and people were using cannabis.
00:41:56.020
because our policy has changed the cannabis market.
00:42:00.480
Back in the 70s and 80s, cannabis was resin or hash.
00:42:04.420
It was a mixture of a bit of THC, maybe five milligrams of THC in a spliff,
00:42:08.900
but also a substance called cannabidiol, which is a kind of antidote.
00:42:13.660
And a balanced mixture of traditional cannabis isn't very addictive.
00:42:18.040
But because we're hysterical about stopping the importation of, you know, Moroccan or Lebanese plants, you know, we've got homegrown cannabis.
00:42:28.100
And people then now are going hydroponically under permanent light.
00:42:36.020
So 95% of the stuff you buy in Britain called cannabis is skunk and it's up to 15 to 20% THC.
00:42:43.660
which is more addictive because it's stronger than the old stuff,
00:42:49.160
So our policies have driven, absolutely driven,
00:42:58.700
We're the only country in the world that has really got a big problem
00:43:02.820
with spice, synthetic cannabinoids, and we've caused that.
00:43:06.040
We have created the spice monster because we have tried
00:43:20.080
it was an experiment just to see what drugs prisoners were using.
00:43:23.980
I'm trying to know if prisoners were using a lot of cannabis.
00:43:30.020
And basically, if you tested positive for cannabis,
00:43:33.680
so you could stay in prison for two more years.
0.99
00:43:41.940
because heroin disappears in a day so then we had a rise in heroin use in prisons because people
00:43:47.220
i mean isn't that the most ridiculous a policy which drives people from cannabis to heroin
00:43:53.000
you know you think hang on perhaps we should stop doing this perhaps we should stop testing no no
00:43:57.200
we just carry on rolling out testing because we want to stop people using heroin and then they
00:44:00.460
switched to ghb and gabapentins and then someone realized that you could actually have these
00:44:05.060
synthetic cannabinoids which aren't detectable and so now we have in prisons we've had 70 deaths
00:44:11.120
last year from synthetic cannabinoids these are extremely toxic compounds that prisoners are using
00:44:16.780
to avoid detection for using cannabis every prison in britain now has to have a special
00:44:21.880
platoon of big male paramedics to deal with the people who go crazy and who have heart attacks
00:44:28.080
and have fits from synthetic cannabinoids no other country in the world has this problem but
00:44:33.440
because we're so obsessed with punishing people even when they're in prison by testing them don't
00:44:38.780
testing and we've created this monster and can we put it back in the bottle you know when we've
00:44:42.800
seen it on the streets you know the streets of manchester a couple of years ago it's cheaper to
00:44:45.880
get stoned on synthetic cannabinoids than it is on alcohol so people switch and they're you know
00:44:51.000
they're so much more toxic it just seems that we seem that we're just making the same mistake
00:44:57.800
again and again totally and again are we ever going to actually wake up and deal with this
00:45:15.260
In fact, the Lib Dems now have a policy of legal cannabis.
00:45:25.680
there was a Lib Dem minister for drugs, Norman Baker.
00:45:36.880
and he got evidence of better policies around the world.
00:45:51.700
and Theresa May has been the biggest problem
0.98
00:46:02.080
She brought in the Psychoactive Substances Act,
1.00
00:46:04.420
which is a completely stupid piece of legislation.
0.99
00:46:07.880
There was almost no harm from other psychoactive substances.
1.00
00:46:16.540
The Puritans, they got alcohol banned in America in 1923.
00:46:20.900
You know, there are still people that want to ban all drugs,
00:46:27.720
to ban things and and as i've said banning things almost always leads to the rise of more toxic
00:46:33.600
substances you know it's interesting because we we are you know we talk to people from all over
00:46:38.560
the political spectrum and one of the things that i always find uh kind of more troubling about some
00:46:45.060
of the excesses of the left is they tend not to think about things in a practical way but rather
00:46:49.160
in a very utopian way but this is an issue on which the right is completely mental when it comes
00:46:54.120
of this thing because their approach is very much that it's we can you know we can get people not to
00:46:59.820
ever use drugs again and just seems to be countered to the human experience well of course it is it's
0.99
00:47:04.460
stupid but i don't the left are no better really well blair and brown blair and brown these million
0.99
00:47:12.280
young people with criminal records that was driven by blair incentivizing the police making
1.00
00:47:17.960
making cannabis possession an offence that was part of the police target was the i mean the
00:47:26.040
police is the easiest crime in the world police would literally do this they start on a shift at
00:47:31.480
six o'clock in london they'd walk into a park stop a black guy filling his pockets find some cannabis
00:47:37.000
that's done i've met my criteria of arrest for the day off to the pub i mean it was absolutely
0.50
00:47:43.440
ridiculous and and that's one of the reasons we had the riots because hogan how decided he was
0.96
00:47:50.040
going to really impose this when he came into power i mean you know arresting young black people
1.00
00:47:54.640
for possessing cannabis by police who the black people know are using a more toxic drug called
0.98
00:47:59.960
alcohol is is not it's it's immoral it's racist the whole thing was just so corrupt and now you
0.97
00:48:08.300
know there's there's a group in the labor party that i've been lecturing to and talking with who
00:48:13.100
want reformed drug policy. But Keir Starmer, perhaps not surprisingly, given that he was a
00:48:18.300
man that locked up a lot of people for drug use, says, no, no, the Labour Party are terrified of
00:48:24.080
being seen as soft on drugs. So they won't change because they're scared. In fact, I think it's going
00:48:29.680
to be the Tories that are going to change sooner because the economic value, for instance, of
00:48:33.540
having a regulated cannabis market is enormous. It's going to bring billions of pounds into the
00:48:38.340
exchequer and and actually we've saw just recently and i spent a lot of time advising
00:48:44.360
norwegian experts norwegian government on drug policy and actually they funded some research by
00:48:50.380
us to to look at the right policies and and we they had a vote in norway just recently about
00:48:56.320
decriminalizing drug use who blocked it the socialists and i think the problem is this
00:49:02.800
there's still this sort of stalinistic view that you can control people you know and you can stop
00:49:07.760
people using drugs not alcohol but you can do some other drugs and it's so the left are just
00:49:14.020
as bad as the right i think that's really interesting on the politics of it the one thing
00:49:18.080
i think really pisses me off and it really does piss me off is look at our current prime minister
00:49:24.200
boris johnson he's admitted to using all sorts of illegal drugs and yet the people who are enforcing
00:49:29.780
and passing the laws against this stuff uh you know we had a whole wave of revelations from the
00:49:36.980
home secretary jackie smith i think uh all the way through to other members of front benches on both
00:49:41.880
sides of the house of commons admitting to taking drugs and yet these are the people who are passing
00:49:47.240
laws to criminalize other people for doing the thing they did and got away with yeah well of
00:49:54.040
course dishonest politicians it's not news anymore is it i mean you know i mean i think the public
00:49:59.400
think what do you expect yes that's all they do they just lie and lie i mean it's i just find it
0.93
00:50:04.120
I mean, it is absolutely disgusting, isn't it?
0.96
00:50:09.280
Michael Gove can say, yes, if I was caught, I'd have gone to prison.
0.67
00:50:11.840
Well, he wouldn't have gone to prison because he's white and rich
00:50:19.160
You've got, I think, five times more likelihood of being prosecuted
0.98
00:50:25.180
But he should have been, if the law was applied to him
00:50:31.540
you know everyone knew about alleged cocaine sorry i don't think he denied it did he not i
00:50:40.240
don't think he ever denied it i think he admitted he'd taken any admitted you know he had misused
00:50:44.600
drugs in the past and he could i think he actually said he could have he could have gone to prison
00:50:48.300
maybe he said he should have done but the reality is it's it i don't he needs to be asked the
00:50:54.980
question why are you still opposing a rational policy maybe he'd say well maybe if cocaine was
00:51:00.680
legal i'd have taken more it's a bit hard to imagine how you could have done but you know i
00:51:05.100
mean it's i don't i don't know what they think i actually don't think they just lie they just know
00:51:09.700
that as long as the daily mail and the sun are kept happy they'll stay in power and that's all
00:51:13.880
they're just appeasing the newspaper editors who who for some reason have this well i don't know
00:51:19.820
i don't actually know if they care about drugs i think they just find drugs are a very easy way of
00:51:23.400
stirring up interest in the newspapers it's amazing isn't it how it's become this political
00:51:27.880
football and we talk about drugs and the legalization of drugs do you think gambling is a
00:51:33.580
drug no but gambling does make use of the same brain circuits that drugs do to get you addicted
00:51:42.360
so gambling is clearly addictive and we're using that fact to try to understand brain circuits of
00:51:49.820
addiction because what we've done a lot of work on alcoholism and on heroin and cocaine addiction
00:51:54.700
and people say yeah you can show me these circuits in the brain that are altered in these people
00:51:58.800
but how do you know that's not just due to the drug and we say well actually we can't be sure
00:52:03.560
it could just be that if you use drugs enough and we say well people who people who aren't
00:52:07.340
addicted to use drugs don't have the same changes but they say well yeah but maybe it's just these
00:52:11.100
people were vulnerable to start with but if you study gambling most most gamblers can't afford
00:52:17.020
drugs so so they don't use you know they're not dependent on drugs so then you can actually look
00:52:21.460
at the core processes which underpin addiction and that we hope that that will give us insights
00:52:26.280
into new treatments. That's what I was going to ask you actually because there are people with
00:52:31.060
alcohol it's a very well-known thing there are people who can drink alcohol and never become
00:52:35.320
addicted and there are people who just cannot drink alcohol without becoming alcoholics. Do we
00:52:41.980
have any idea on what the difference is between those two people two friends sitting next to each
00:52:47.180
other and they have completely different outcomes from the same pint yes we do we can't predict but
00:52:53.240
we can explain and there are several things we've discovered that predispose you to becoming an
00:52:58.360
alcoholic and the first one is having an alcoholic father so there's clearly genetics but we can go
00:53:04.540
further than that now and in fact we know that that vulnerability is in part due to brain chemistry
00:53:10.000
and it's kind of paradoxical but people who who are start off being resistant to alcohol
00:53:18.080
the people that can stay sober or stay stay standing after their first binge when all their
00:53:24.460
friends are on the floor they're often they've got alcoholic fathers and and so they're like
00:53:30.240
pre-tolerant now they're a super you know everyone thinks oh he's an amazing guy look how much you
00:53:34.800
can drink but the problem is they end up drinking more and become eventually become dependent
00:53:39.860
so that's the first thing and then the other thing is that um we've shown that there so there's the
00:53:46.100
people who drink all the time and who like drinking all the time and want to drink all the time because
00:53:50.180
they can but then there are the others and this is in some ways a more common group and we all know
00:53:53.920
them the people that that actually don't want to drink all the time but can't stop when they start
00:53:58.000
the binges and we've shown that the binges they have probably some deficit of the endorphin you
00:54:04.380
You know, the brain's endorphin system, the sort of natural high system.
00:54:11.020
And we think what happens is that when they start,
00:54:13.580
they go to the pub absolutely, totally intended,
00:54:16.480
I'm going to have two pints and I'm going home to her wife.
1.00
00:54:19.560
And then after the second pint, the endorphin system has been turned on
00:54:27.000
And then, you know, it's 15 pints later and they're getting divorced.
00:54:30.620
So there are at least two separate chemical pathways
00:54:33.200
which control different forms of alcohol addiction.
00:54:35.820
What about abuse and trauma, which you mentioned earlier?
00:54:41.180
I don't know if you're familiar with his work or what you think about it.
00:54:56.120
and that has damaged the way that they experience the world
00:55:00.640
and they need something to help them deal with that.
00:55:05.400
And in fact, well, it's not just childhood trauma.
00:55:24.140
or even to some extent, less just car accidents,
00:55:27.520
people who cannot deal with PTSD turn to alcohol.
00:55:30.520
It doesn't cure the PTSD, it just numbs the pain.
00:55:33.860
And there's huge problems with alcohol in people with PTSD,
00:55:38.140
which is actually why we have just done a very interesting study.
00:55:40.960
So some of you may know that over the last 10 years,
00:55:45.460
there's been interest in using MDMA, the sort of pure ecstasy, to treat PTSD.
00:55:50.420
And it helps people essentially overcome the emotional memories of the trauma.
00:55:55.300
And a couple of years ago, me and my colleague Ben Susser in Bristol,
00:55:58.180
we thought, well, a lot of people who are drinking alcohol excessively
00:56:04.740
So we did a study which we just published last month
00:56:16.980
80% of that group were able to stop drinking for six months,
00:56:24.820
because our normal treatment, which is just talking therapy,
00:56:31.060
so this is really exciting that we can actually target the cause of the drinking the trauma
00:56:35.420
or the trauma memories and help people then not need to drink
00:56:38.440
wow that is i mean that's revolutionary well i think so too but the problem is of course mdma
00:56:46.260
is illegal so actually we can't treat people so we now you know we've got i think we have
00:56:50.780
we've got about a hundred emails at least of people saying can i go into treatment with you
00:56:56.220
and we say no because it's illegal and if we give it to you they'll lock me up and i'll tell you the
00:57:03.180
So we have to change the law so that people can at least,
00:57:09.780
Why would a doctor not be allowed to use a drug like MDMA
00:57:12.300
when he can use a drug like fentanyl, which is way more toxic?
00:57:21.580
It's like I have to get marijuana for my mum
0.99
00:57:24.520
because my mum has chronic osteoarthritis, is in pain.
0.91
00:57:27.880
But the synthetic drugs that she gets prescribed
00:57:30.840
are highly toxic you know they could you read it though the long-term use causes dementia
00:57:35.600
stomach problems can lead to you know ulcers cancers all that but i can't give her marijuana
1.00
00:57:40.680
to help her with her pain but you know we have drug science has been making progress here so
00:57:45.600
she can now get proper pharmaceutical grade medical marijuana through the drug science
0.99
00:57:52.220
2021 initiative yeah we've and she's got it at a good price because we've negotiated with about
00:57:58.640
five different producers to keep the prescription price down to 150 pounds a month so your mother
0.68
00:58:04.980
can log into the drug science website and get assessed for um medical marijuana for her
00:58:11.160
arthritic pain through 2021 really do try that is okay it'll it'll make life so much easier for
00:58:17.600
everyone you her but also you can absolutely guarantee what you're getting it's going to be
00:58:21.840
it's made to pharmaceutical standard well there's a happy ending turn into it david listen we've run
00:58:27.220
out of time uh we there's so much more we could talk about perhaps we'll do it another time uh
00:58:32.540
but thank you for coming on the show it's been a pleasure uh before first of all we're going to ask
00:58:37.640
you our last question then we'll do some questions for our local supporters uh but uh before we we do
00:58:43.460
go to our last question tell everybody a little bit about your podcast and the other stuff that
00:58:47.660
you were doing that they can check out and follow and where they can find you online etc
00:58:50.900
So when I was sacked by Alan Johnson and Gordon Brown in 2009, I was pretty angry and pretty upset.
00:59:02.660
The next day, a guy called Toby Jackson, who'd made some money developing computerized trading on the London Stock Exchange,
00:59:10.680
he emailed me and said, what they've done is outrageous.
00:59:13.240
If I gave you the same amount of money as the government spends on drug policy in the ACMD, would you set up a parallel organization?
00:59:20.900
i said sure would and and we set up in those days it was called the iscd independent scientific
00:59:27.540
committee on drugs now it's called drug science all the scientists who resigned from the acnd
00:59:33.740
when i was sacked have joined it so we so now we have the drug science is now the premier
00:59:38.020
scientific think tank on drugs in the world there's no you know absolutely no you know no
00:59:44.360
competitors at all and over the 10 years we've done a lot of interesting things like we've done
00:59:48.680
these detailed assessments of comparative harms of drugs we've set up a journal to publish sensible
00:59:54.440
data on on drugs and tell the truth about drugs and we've held conferences we've set up 2021 to
01:00:02.200
allow access we've now got a thousand thousands patient has gone into 2021 just last week so we've
01:00:07.740
got a facility in britain where people can access medical cannabis even though they can't get it on
01:00:13.100
the NHS and I've also set up a podcast and do listen to my podcast I think we've now got about
01:00:20.300
25 and there are very interesting people they range from from therapists like Gabor Mate who's
01:00:26.340
a sort of pioneer of childhood stress and the use of psychedelics to deal with adults with that
01:00:32.040
problem through to people like Rick Doblin who's developing MDMA he's campaigned for 25 years to
01:00:36.900
make mdma a medicine you know and then we've got some therapists and we've got scientists uh people
01:00:43.120
that have discovered interesting things about psychedelics and ketamine and cannabis etc so uh
01:00:48.100
yeah do listen what's the podcast called for people well it's just called the drug science
01:00:52.620
podcast and it's on our website the drug science.org.uk fantastic i mean that's and please please
01:01:00.460
to everyone watching go and give it a go and give it a follow go give it a listen because it's very
01:01:04.940
very important work and David the one question we always finish all our interviews with is always
01:01:10.120
the same it's what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society but we really should
01:01:14.620
be we should talk be talking about the lives lost over the last 50 years by this irrational
01:01:26.080
war on drugs 300 000 deaths in mexico alone but when you look at the other side of the coin
01:01:37.720
when you look at the lives lost because people haven't had access to treatments
01:01:43.480
it's way more than 300 000 so i've estimated just for alcoholism alone not heroin addiction
01:01:50.040
other addictions. In the 50 years since LSD and psilocybin were banned, there have been over
01:01:59.200
100 million premature deaths from alcohol. There have been actually about 300 million premature
01:02:11.920
deaths from tobacco. These are disorders which are treatable with psychedelics. And even if only
01:02:18.020
10% of those people who were addicted to alcohol and tobacco were cured by psychedelics. That would
01:02:25.560
be tens of millions of lives saved. And that's why I say the banning of these drugs for research
01:02:32.440
and treatment is the worst censorship of research and treatment in the history of the world.
01:02:37.680
More people have died as a result of those bans than as a result of any other health policy ever.
01:02:50.660
we'll be back with another brilliant interview like this one
01:02:58.060
we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview
01:03:04.940
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01:03:12.480
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