Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEIBGALIw3w
the jurogan experience i wanted to have you on first of all because i really respected that you made this change of opinion publicly when you were first talking about marijuana you were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit and it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful is that a assessment that you agree with i i think it certainly didn't seem to have any medicinal benefits right yeah but then upon further examination you publicly changed your position and and you in in doing so you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed to for many people with diseases many people that are on chemotherapy many people with you know some serious ailments marijuana can be very beneficial and you talked about that and i really admired that because that takes a lot of courage because a lot of people when they uh have an idea and they proclaim it publicly they double down and they just they you know use confirmation bias and whatever you know echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm their initial position and you didn't do that and i i thought that's a real a real thinking person who is trying to [Music] honestly figure out what's going on instead of just working on being right well i look i i appreciate that and i have been very it was very illuminating for me because i think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society i think sometimes surprises people um i do think and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going on now but but the thing is that when you looked at the so if you were just to look at the bulk of evidence around cannabis at that and i'm talking i wrote this time magazine article back you know this is probably 12 13 years ago and i looked at the bulk of evidence and you say okay i'm going to look at the 400 most recent papers i'm going to read the abstracts i'm going to dig in deep on some of them
and 94 of them were basically the hypothesis was where's the harm here show me the harm right the hypothesis was not show me the benefit that was only true for about six percent so right away you're dealing with a sort of very biased sort of set of data and that's one stream up now if you're just looking at papers you're like well this one potentially long harm this one possible addiction this one gateway you know you're seeing all those individual studies but at a broader level one step upstream you realize that most of the studies that are getting funded are designed to look for harm right yeah so when i saw that that was the first time i thought why why are the studies that are getting out there why are they all designed to look for harm then i started looking in other countries and some really good research out of places like israel in particular a guy named raf mushulum who's 91 years old now he's the first guy to ever isolate thc and then synthesize it he's been doing this work forever he may get the nobel prize before he dies for for his work in this they were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments including refractory seizures in kids um and that one really that really got to me for a couple reasons one is that i think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain it's it's hard it's a subjective thing right and so you think is is how do you how do you really have conclusive proof that this is working the way that you think it is someone says their pain is better and that's important but how do you measure that a little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures is a much more specific sort of metric and it it seemed to work really well in in kids who did not respond to existing seizure drugs which was kind of amazing to me and i think i told you when we've spoken before that that to me in some ways that wasn't just a a medical issue at that point it was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids and they were thinking about even
compounding veterinary medications for them and these parents are like you know in their kitchen things stirring up you know cannabis trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put underneath the kid's tongue and and it was working and you know i did stories on these kids and they were emblematic of thousands of more kids these weren't just anecdotal stories and that's when i said you know there's something here but i gotta tell you um when i wrote the article saying i changed my mind on this you know you know you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and i work at a university i'm a i'm a practicing physician you know i live in that world and part of me did wonder like what is the response going to be i felt very comfortable with what i had written what i did not know was how it would be received yeah and that and that's that's always a challenge i think how was it received i think well i'm still employed so that that part of it was good you know i i didn't know if my chairman would say hey look you know uh i may agree or not agree with you that's beside the point you shouldn't have done this or whatever i i you know i had no idea how they were going to respond i think it was received well joe i think that um it added to the knowledge tree of how we advance as a society it's a sign of the times i think i think if you had done that a couple of decades ago maybe there have been a lot more pushback i think people are coming to much more of an understanding and and also the logical aspect of it like when when people look at all the things that human beings are allowed to consume including this uh that you gave me here this looks it's pretty spectacular i'm pretty proud of my gift that i've given you some serious bourbon here well thank you for that for the man who has everything this is um legal you know i mean we can enjoy the glass it's normal it's it's a normal thing and we all agree to that it's it's a you know it's a long-standing tradition for people to drink alcohol socially marijuana
for whatever reasons and we could go into that if you want but it's been demonized unfairly and people know that it's not like heroin or crack or things that you've seen people's lives fall apart on it on a regular basis and i think most people are aware of that now so in the era that you publish that it's people have come to an understanding that it's not it's not one of the hard drugs it's not the most dangerous thing in the world it's not good for kids it's not good for some people it's not good for some people maybe with uh possible schizophrenic tendencies i think there's a real concern there and uh no i i mean yeah i you know it's it you you raise a really important point you know one thing i tried to stay away from whenever i wrote about this was i felt like was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things like i think things should just stand on their own two feet you know well it's better than this right what you're saying is true i feel like alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain i really do if you think about the way alcohol affects the brain very different than the way cannabis affects the brain um and that that part of it is true but the idea that it could be a medicine in particular i mean you know i i think that that that is really quite striking and it's a plant you know and there's all these things and i listen like i said i listen to your podcast i listen to brett and i listen to others and i get the points that they're making about that in terms of can you look to the earth to heal and oftentimes you can you know we've been given a lot of things but i think that with with cannabis in particular the the the evidence i'm not the first to say this obviously people have been saying this for a long time maybe the timing was right but two decades ago people were saying this three decades ago people were saying this this was on the formulary in the united states in the 1940s post-river reefer madness which i think was like
1936 or something like that people were already saying hey wait a second this could be used to treat addiction this could be used to treat you know even parkinsonian-like symptoms there was all these things that they were putting out there and then it went through this cultural sort of assassination for a while which was which was wild to sort of reflect on historically watch the entire episode for free only on spotify