Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5jMC8j7ElI
good googly moogly this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is supported by Squarespace the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website now that's what you're supposed to say that's their thing uh what I say is it's the easiest way to make a website without learning Dream Weaver didn't can you me learn Dreamweaver did they use that [ __ ] recomend without learning HTML without actually trying to figure out the ins and outs of coding what you need to do is just go to Squarespace and make your own website with an easy drag and drop interface it's super easy to do I could do it you could do it if you can do the normal functions of attaching a photograph to email and clicking on links you can figure it out it's not hard and it's beautiful designs they have 247 support and they've also launched a logo creator so you can create your own clean and simple logo design for yourself in minutes you can set up an online store very easy to do easy to set up an online store easy to sell music if you're a musician you can sell digital downloads Squarespace has a a whole eCommerce section dedicated to showing you how to figure this all out they have a self-help website that'll better deliver the customer experience and for a free trial and 10% off your first purchases go to squarespace.com and enter the code word Joe one of the other things that I really like about Squarespace is you don't have to use your credit card to try it out you they'll let you sign up try it out build a website and then you go oh this is pretty badass then you enter your credit card so I like that so you can test it try it out squarespace.com enter the code word Joe get 10% off we're also brought to you by stamps.com which is another very easy and convenient way to deal with things that you used to have to go somewhere for you used to have to go to the post office and get someone to weigh out your [ __ ] and put different labels on each one of them with stamps.com you can print up US Postal from your own home computer very easy to do you can print it you weigh it all out in the digital scare that they provide they give you a free digital scale $55 worth of free uh Postage and you put this digital scale on it it tells you exactly what the
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your mental Clarity and get your [ __ ] together go to on it.com o n niit t use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements all right Dr Carl har is here cue the music and let's get cracking Joe podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day hey man up thank you very much for being here I I really really appreciate this I've admired your work online I've seen a bunch of your videos and read some of the interviews and uh I think it's it's incredibly important to have a guy like you out there it's incredibly it's incredibly important for a bunch of reasons one because it's important to spread the truth about drugs and to have someone who's actually intelligent and a real Professor who really understands what they're talking about and two you look like us thank you man you look like a normal you don't look like some weird stuffy dude you got dreadlocks you look cool as [ __ ] like I can hang with this guy guaranteed any dude who has dread you can't be uptight look at your hair it's impossible you know I think it's it's very important I appreciate it man thank you for having me man people have been telling me that I got to come check you out so thank you well I'm glad they connected us you know that's one of the coolest things about this whole Twitter uh social media thing is that you know I get to find out about people like you and I get to be introduced by uh all these uh Twitter people that want to get us together so it's pretty badass right on right on I'm happy to be here man well I'm I'm again I say I'm happy that there's a guy like you out there because I've learned a lot from what you're doing and I've learned a lot from some of the interviews that you've had where you know you've had to kind of confront a lot of the ignorance that people have and it even kind of exposed a lot of my own ignorance and uh I thought that was really fascinating and one of the things was you did a John stasel interview where you talking about how many people use meth and Coke and don't [ __ ] ruin their lives they they figure out how to keep it together like yeah you know that's one of the biggest mythes is that people think that uh individuals who use drugs like crack cocaine methamphetamine heroin they think that the majority of the people who use those drugs are
addicted and their life goes spiraling out of control they think that because it makes great TV drama for example and so we reinforce it in our sort of pop culture and also we can always think of somebody who screwed their life up as a result of drugs but the people who don't screw their life up they don't talk about it they just go about paying taxes paying their s handling their responsibilities yeah that's interesting do you get pressure to not say that ever because people say well hey you're going to encourage people and what if they go out and they do become addicted to drugs like are you giving them false hope well you know that's uh I'm an educator first and so when we think about hiding information or not telling people the truth because we're afraid that they can't handle the truth it just that's illogical and I can't live my life like that I have children and I have thank you for saying that yeah no I mean I have to teach my kids about sex I have to teach them about other potentially dangerous activities like driving their automobile too fast drugs is just one of those sort of activities and I'd be irresponsible if I didn't tell them the best information that I know that's so important that's such an important thing to say and um I've had that discussion with people before where you know they would talk about any any sort of drug that I don't want to let people know I don't want to talk about it I want because then I'll encourage them to do it like a friend was telling me that about heroin he was saying you know heroin really is not that bad for you if you don't take too much it's really not that bad that sounds like sex I mean it sounds like a number of things you know it's like we all know this I mean it's just logical anything that you overindulge in you can get in trouble heroin is not different but there's a few that we have like these unfair assumptions about like crack was the one for me I always heard dude you smoke crack once you're hooked but I met a few people that have smoked crack and I'm like wait a minute you just smoked it once and like yeah so if anybody ever tells you anything about I did it once and I was hooked for life or I'm hooked that's a license to stop listening cuz nothing in life you do once and you're hooked that's just
nothing nothing what's the quickest to addict to like is there there are certainly physical addictions like people do get alcoholism where they it actually makes them sick if they stop so like physical addiction certainly that's a part of addiction but that's not the sort of main point of addiction addiction the main thing of addiction is like this disruption of Psychosocial functioning you you don't pay your taxes you don't meet your obligations those kinds of things but you can get physically addicted to something like tobacco although it's not life-threatening but it's irritating but the thing that we see that's more um that we think is excruciating pain is heroin addiction for example we think that if someone is going through heroin withdrawal they are in such agonizing pain that they are on the verge of death they're not if you've ever had the flu you've had heroin withdrawal and but the only one of the major drugs that we use today it that can actually kill us from withdrawal it's alcohol and most of the people who use alcohol don't come near experiencing alcohol withdrawal to the extent that it would kill you you certainly can't die from heroin withdrawal wow that's fascinating um I've seen a guy going through heroin withdrawal I had a friend who was hooked on Heroin and and came out from New York to stay with me in California in the 9s and I didn't know it at the time but his idea was that was how he was going to kick it so it came out to visit me and he was like like he had the flu for a week he just just laid around in bed and and then 7 eight days later he was fine yeah it's not fine but it's the flu basically you know so if you've had the flu you've had heroin withdrawal it's not pleasant and I don't recommend that someone go out and get the flu or heroin withdraw but the point is is that it's not going to kill you and it's not as excruciating as is often portrayed in films and so those kinds of things they just do a horrible job of educating the public or miseducative be bad if let's just say you do this sort of character characterization and it didn't have consequences the consequences is that we always have these repressive policies that follow and then uh people pay the price not So Much from the drugs but from the
repressive policies and that's a real concern that I have so the repressive policies lead to more prison sentences lead to more private prisons lead to essentially people becoming it's like a form of slavery that state certainly we have that and it also the major thing that it leads to is this sort of dependency on that economy like law enforcement there are also treatment agencies there are a number of people who depend on this sort of Industry now or they depend on this approach and it's hard to get out of this approach because right now in the country we're talking about uh liberalizing drug laws you can't liberalize drug laws unless you give police officers something else to do you can't liberalize drug laws unless you give the treatment industry something else to do and that's one of the things we haven't really talked about in this whole conversation because those people are going to fight to keep their money and they sort of are now I mean that is an issue now prison guard unions Lobby to keep certain drug laws in place absolutely they are they are uh they are intense so it seems to me like it needs to be there's a multi-point strategy that has to be hit in order to make a transition between the prohibition that we're experiencing right now and you know not having all these people completely fighting against it because of their jobs like there has to be some sort of a strategy for taking the resources that are being applied right now to this unsuccessful drug war and doing something healthy for communities yeah you know that's one of the things I I've wrote my book recently high price and that's one of the things I tried to uh well I told this story it's a memoir and a science book so I told a memoir portion which is deeply personal and it's not something that I'm so comfortable doing but had to do that in order to kind of contextualize the whole Drug War and what it all mean what it all means and also um the science portion uh is there so people can understand what these these drugs actually do and what they don't do and if you have that sort of contextualization and an understanding of the science now you can probably make some reasonable logical decisions some choices about how we should deal with drugs in the country now when you see
something like the country of Portugal which decriminalized drugs less than a decade ago right more than a decade ago more thanc 2001 and their results have been pretty extraordinary yeah you know when you like Portugal let's just be clear so the audience understands what decriminalization means decriminalization is not legalization legalization is what we do with alcohol and tobacco decriminalization would be like treating drug violations like we treat um uh traffic violations you can't go to jail or get a felony charge but you may be subjected to a fine or so that's how they deal with drugs in Portugal all drugs from heroin to marijuana to methamphetamine to cocaine now when you look at the major indicators for example drug use um they have less drug use than we do in this country when you look at drug rated overdose dep they have less than we do in this country when you have um the amount of money that they pump into their prison systems and so forth of course they're pumping less than we do and so they're doing better than us on all of these major indicators and they have no sort of plans to go in another directions because they're happy with their current approach and so that's one of the things I argue for in high price the book I argue that we should decriminalize all drugs in this country but in order to decriminalize drugs one of the things we have to also do is we have to increase the amount of realistic drug education not that just say no stuff that we've been pedalling for a number of years but real drug education it's pretty ridiculous to think that you can educate anyone to the dangers or lack of dangers in drugs in a 30 second commercial right yeah you you know but that's not the goal that's that's one of the things that people have to understand is that those folks who came up with those 302 spots their goal was not drug education their drug their goal was more prop propaganda and fear based sort of U um uh education if so if that's what we want to call it but that the goal was not really teaching people about drugs or what drugs really do I had a joke in one of my old comedy specials about the partnership for drug-free America because it was funded by alcohol and tobacco companies and I just like alcohol and tobacco companies
going after marijuana is like hookers going after strippers that's I mean that's really what it's like with the idea of alcohol and tobacco companies spending money to try to make marijuana illegal is is unbelievably stupid I tell you bro if you uh studied this issue you'll have a hell of a lot more material for your comedy routine I tell you because there are so many ironies that you wouldn't believe that's a brutal one though yeah part then they call us a partnership for a drug-free America sponsored by drugs yeah a gang war of drugs the the name a partnership for drug-free America first of all there has never been a drug-free Society ever ever nor will there ever be and nor do you want to live in a society that is drug-free and so this whole notion of drug-free it's ridiculous yeah drugs Encompass everything from coffee to to alcohol to cigarettes to it just goes on to assai berries no absolutely you know it's it's all of these things are drugs and and and so when people try to make the distinction like heroin versus something like caffeine the body doesn't distinguish something based on the fact that it's illegal one's illegal and one's not legal it has biological actions and consequences both of those things why is it that this is something that's controversial to say like what what you're saying right now on on this podcast you know a guy who's a distinguished academic saying these things is very controversial why is that if they are true and you are an educator and you have that philosophy which I admire greatly why is that rare uh you know for one thing there are few people in the country who actually know what drugs really do and what they don't do so when you think about you know I have 24 years years of experience of giving drugs to animals and humans in a lab and carefully trying understanding the effect of drugs that's one reason a number of people just simply don't know another reason is that uh uh people scientists for example are conservative lot and they are reluctant to speak to the media in part because they don't want to get their words twisted or they want don't want to be appear to be wrong and so I I mean I respect that at some level U and so I think that's that contributes on the one hand and on the
other hand we've had in this country for a number of years people who were in control of the narrative were people who had an addiction parents law enforcement none of those people are uniquely qualified to speak to this issue but they have dominated the conversation now how did you get involved in this you started you said 24 years ago doing drug research on animals how did what what was what led LED you to want to go down this road so I was in I I tell this story in the book and so I was in the air force uh back in the 80s like you mentioned about crack cocaine so I was in the air force over in England um ' 86 87 888 um and crack cocaine was a big deal in the United States as you point out and I grew up in the hood in Miami and Miami was a cocaine capital in the United States and and so things that were happening in my community that were not good uh high unemployment crime all of these kinds of things I blame crack cocaine for that and so I thought that if I go to school and get a degree in order to study drugs the effects of drugs on the brain I could solve the problems that faced my community or the problems that I thought were in the community particularly those related to drugs and so I began studying drugs as an undergraduate and then went on to graduate school uh to study drugs on the brains of animals and to try to figure out the neurobiological mechanisms that were responsible for addiction so you just got fascinated by this idea of fixing this this issue that you saw in your community and then you just fell into a rabbit hole yeah so when I started along my journey my path I actually got an education and you know so uh as James Baldwin said you know the the the the Paradox of education is precisely this as one begins to become educated and conscious one begins to question the society in which he's being educated and that's what happened with me and so along the way I discovered things like H the majority of people who use these drugs are not addicted that was one thing I discovered I discovered that many of the things that we said about crack about crack cocaine were just simply not true like the whole crack baby myth and people said that when that our generation be should be prepared to have uh an army of kids who couldn't
learn because of being exposed to crack cocaine that just simp wasn't true when all the data came out beginning in the mid 1990s we realized that that simply wasn't true uh other things that I I learned that just simply wasn't true uh uh things like uh one hit of crack cocaine you're addicted not true that crack cocaine was different from Powder cocaine not true all of these things I discovered along way that they wer they weren't true and not only that I discovered that this wasn't new I went back to the early 1900s and saw the same sort of Hysteria mainly race-based hysteria surrounding drugs occurred even then and so I thought what's what's going on and then that helped me to be more critical about my issue is there a difference in the the effect of crack cocaine the physical effect and and and cocaine and heroin so let's let's think about crack cocaine I mean not not Heron rather yeah let's think about crack cocaine and powder cocaine let's just think about the chemical structure the only difference between cck cocaine and powder cocaine is that the powder cocaine has this thing called the hydrochloride salt attached to it that salt prevents it from being smoked now you can dissolve the PO of cocaine and and water and then shoot it in your arm and so you have the effects of cocaine uh onset of the effects within seconds the same is true with with with C cocaine the effects are onset of a effects are within seconds now the biological activity of cocaine is at the base not that that so that hydrochloride portion on the on the cocaine powder on the powder cocaine has no biological activity whereas so so that means that crack and powder are the same drug they are exactly the same drug the same effects same drug wow so it's IND indistinguishable to the user indistinguishable now why is it that they prepare it that way like what's the benefit of preparing it just so it delivers quicker great question so one of the things that you you might recall Richard prow back in the days when he got he burnt he burnt himself with with smoking so he was free basing so he was removing that hydrochloride portion of the salt off of off of the cocaine base so he could actually smoke it now he was using ether which is highly flammable
with crack cocaine you don't now you no longer need the ether you just mix it up with baking soda and water and the cocaine and you mix it up and you get rid of that salt so ether is no longer need it and it's not as dangerous so that's one of the reasons that we have cracked cocaine as a result of that and it also it made it so you could sell them in in unit doses to make the drug appear to be cheaper because you also might recall in the early 1980s 1970s you had to buy cocaine powder in bulk and that made it more expensive crack cocaine made it a lot more simpler simple for people to buy it who didn't have uh the kind of uh uh Expendable income that uh was required before the mid 1980s so essentially they just brought it down to bite-sized portions that's right exactly rather than selling this whole six-pack or 12pack now you can sell one item one can or one bottle I want to talk more about this but I should just clarify that Richard PRI changed his story as he got older and actually said that he tried to kill himself he lit himself on fire apparently um I'm a huge Richard PRI fan and I know that that was originally what he had said that he got burnt doing freebat but I think he changed his story later um I I actually uh worked with him a bunch of times right before he died it was a real honor he's a real special dude as far as uh standup comedians go yeah I'm with you but that that um uh style of uh like free base was a thing that we'd always associated with people that were really really [ __ ] up yeah like the guy's doing coke oh well you know he's probably going to mess up his life he's free basing oh [ __ ] he's gone man he's basing he's a base head right Bas head was the thing before crackers bads AB absolutely I describ a couple of people in the book from my neighborhood who got into free basing and exactly the same way you just talked about right absolutely um now everybody has this idea in their head that crime and that everything escalated in the world changed when crack was introduced is that a myth as well yeah it's a myth what well let me clarify because on on the one hand so when crack hit the market it was first sort of uh talked about December 1984 in the LA Times the first time we heard a crack
but it didn't become um more widely known or available until maybe the mid 19 mid 1985 now once crack cocaine hit the markets what happened was that people were fighting over various new markets Whenever there are new illicit markets yeah you're going to get some violent activity until the market settles down that happened with any illicit market and that certainly happened with crack cocaine now one of the things that people there are a number of things that people attribute to to crack in terms of crime and all of the the sort of downfall of certain communities unemployment they said that unemployment really Rose as a result of crack cocaine being around now 1982 the unemployment rate in this country was about 11% for white folks and it was double that for black people that was before crack at least two three years before crack even hit the market now during the whole crack era unemployment has never been as high as 1982 that's number one people said things like uh people from my community crack cocaine was responsible for these mothers these grandmothers now raising new generations of kids because their daughters were strung out on crack and so now they have to take care of these kids that simply wasn't true it certainly happened in in my community but it happened before CRA cocaine was ever on the market certainly happened in my family long before crack cocaine ever hit the market when we look at other communities like particularly immigrant communities if you look at uh the Jewish Community when they came over the Eastern European Jews when they came over in the country the early 1900 or 1800s and so forth uh what you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomena going on in those kind of communities what's his name irvan how uh his great book land of our fathers or Home of Our Fathers he kind of described all of these pathological behaviors that happened in that Community many of those same behaviors were attributed to crack cocaine and black people later but it's not it it they were there long before crack cocaine was there but crack cocaine became the scapegoat that's a fascinating scapegoat because I bought into it hookline and sinker I really thought that there was a difference
between the 1980s and the 1990s as far as like when crack was introduced boom it took off it was sort of something that was just always discussed as like common fact yeah I know I bought into it too and that's what drove me to to pursue my education in the way I did but as a result of pursuing that education I discovered that it was not true so are these cultural myths the result of uh politician like political campaigns where they're trying to clean up the streets and they attributed to certain issues or is it is it something more widespread is it the media just running with a narrative what what is it how did it get started well there were multiple sort of factors in players involved so when we think about the politicians for example politicians if if crack cocaine is the problem never mind the fact that unemployment rates was out of control before crack cocaine hit the mar hit the market unemployment was out of control a number of things were already uh uh problematic now you have crack cocaine if you blame crack cocaine it's really easy to Simply say we'll put more law enforcement we'll hire more cops we'll put more efforts and controlling this drugs a lot easier to say we'll lock people up for selling these drugs for using these drugs in the process what you do is you create jobs for a select group of people and then you don't have to deal with the real issues the real issues of unemployment of deprivation all of these things you don't have to deal with they're far more complicated and so politicians are happy to buy in now one of the things about C cocaine is that we think about the law that punishes or punish C cocaine 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine and the vast majority of people who got punished under these laws were black 80 85% of the people even though they don't make up the majority of the users so people say things like well were those laws racist and the laws themselves weren't racist because the black Congressional Black Caucus 17 of the 21 members voted to uh for these laws for these laws that punish cck cocaine 100 times more harshly but the point is is that everyone bought into it parents bought into it because the parents for the parents what this meant is that you don't actually have to educate your kids about this you just say that they're bad
and stay away from it no education required um even scientists and treatment providers they all bought into it because you got a problem we're going to solve your problem so we are needed and we are valued all so you had all of these sort of constituencies from society benefiting from the vilification or the scapegoating of crack cocaine all of those things think came together nicely and then we think about the rappers they all came into the game too because it's like I'm conscious I'm going to say that this is a problem in my community and I care about my community and this is the way that I can show it so everybody had a stake in this sort of thing wow that is absolutely fascinating you know one of the things that I've I've talked to quite a few people about when it comes to uh issues like real complex issues like drug addiction and and violence and and poverty is that once you feed it with any organism whether it's that organism is law enforcement or that organism is education whichever one you feed is the one that's going to grow and once you feed the law enforcement one and you look at this really complex situation I think law enforcement is important but I I think education is probably more important to avoid future law enforcement like the more I think the more education we have the the the more nuanced our ability to raise children is the more we understand you know that we're all in this together the less you're going to need law enforcement but when law enforcement becomes this machine that lobbies against the legalization of certain drugs which when you start looking at the data there's only one reason to do that and the only reason is that you're trying to stay alive you're trying to grow you're an organism you're trying you're trying to eat the sugar you're trying to keep going so you're creating more jobs by putting people in jail it's essentially no wants to look at it like this but it's a form of slavery uh I think we um in the house I live in the film Eugene Dre's film I think that's the kind of analogy he was trying to draw in that film absolutely so I I I think we get it I think a number of people get that that's exactly what it is yeah it's exactly what it is and it doesn't seem like anybody's willing to address it no
one no one's willing to change it there's that very famous speech where Eisenhower gets out of office and uh as he's leaving he addresses the nation and he warn of the dangers of the military industrial complex and it's a weird speech because this is a sitting president and he's leaving and he's letting people know like there's a machine out here that's growing and I'm I'm letting I can clue you into this like be aware of this thing this the same with law enforcement it's the same with private prisons it's a they become organisms they become individual things that are filled with people that are all working for the greater good of the individ of the of the great Corporation absolutely absolutely and people need to understand the conflict of interest that these folks have and often times when we have these type types of discussions one of the sort of impulses of the media or uh folks who have these discussions that they want to invite law enforcement Personnel it's like what expertise do they have to talk about drugs really none none well you remember Ronald Reagan when he was on TV maramana may very well be one of the most dangerous drugs we've ever discovered you you remember that or whatever the exact quote was no no I I know you know I try to forget Ronald Reagan but um I I hear you it's I had a conversation today uh about actors with a friend we were talking about actors um being in politics like how crazy it is that you let someone who's a professional liar try to tell people the truth I mean that's what a an actor is they're really good at bullshitting like they pretend they're really sad cuz someone they know just died nobody [ __ ] died there's cameras all around you there's lights on you you're wearing makeup but you're so good at both bullshitting that I'm willing to pay money to see you [ __ ] well I mean let's think about what we consider news in the country and we think about the people who are delivering news they are the same they're worse they're they're too stupid to be actors right most of them are you know and here's Bob with the weather wow what a day what a day what a day the wind's coming in from the Northeast and I do these radio tours and I'm sure you do them as well when you uh you promote your books but you'll hear the same
voice over over and over and over again like somehow and other these guys have plugged into what they think is a radio guy and they're being they're playing the role of a radio guy and it's very strange yeah there's a lot of strange things that has happened on this book tour so yeah yeah so that's the people that we have disseminating information and in some cases uh running the government you know the Arnold Schwarz and everything was so crazy you know we're running around telling everybody the [ __ ] Terminator is the governor of the country that's ridiculous you know it's a yeah there's so much to say about aror Schwarzenegger as it relates to drugs too when we think particularly we think about performance enhancing drugs and those kinds of things you know we know about his use and and then you think about the hypocrisy of it all and that's the thing that's just disturbing if people just call it like it is and say what it is you actually help people understand what these things do and what they don't do and then you don't have people have all of this cognitive dissonance about uh it's like how can I get to that level how can I do this level um when you when you know that those folks um did performance enhancing drugs so now they're saying that you shouldn't do performance enhancing drugs yeah that's an interesting situation um I I think there's a real issue with that in sports and there's a bunch of different groups that are trying to clean it up and recently the UFC has uh made uh big steps to try to limit the amount of performance-enhancing drugs but unless you're watching guys all day every day it's really hard to tell without testing them well you know I don't know how I feel about the performance-enhancing drugs thing the thing that I like to know first of all is that we get better information on it you know and I don't want to have this sort of just say no attitude towards this stuff without really good information and I don't know if we're there yet I agree with you 100% I think the issue that people will have though is the the term natural you know natural is an interesting term because is it still natural if you're taking multivitamins what if you got creatines is it still natural if you drink coffee coffeee is a drug you're kind of drug
using is it still natural if you use you know certain types of water that's treated certain ways to make your body process oxygen better I mean whatever new thing that comes out is that still natural you it gets it gets real weird it's like should you be should people not be allowed to take any supplements so they just only have food like this is what you give them just plants and animal protein and water and then we monitor what your diet is then we let you fight yeah I I you know there are there are a number of issues going on I mean the whole notion of like natural I think people need to grow up I don't even know what that means natural that's not my concern my concern is that if you have performance enhancing drugs and then people are giving given a drug in order so they can continue to perform even though they are hurt that's my concern that they that we run further uh risk of having people being injured but in terms of training and that sort of thing I don't have so much an issue with that whole issue uh of using performance enhancing drugs as long as we're doing it in a safe manner in which people understand what's happening I think the uh the question is fairness that's the question you know fairness that's Americans are um they they annoy me with fairness I mean fairness really come on well they're worried that someone is going to cheat and they're going to win when they're taking an illegal drug that's the I mean it's pretty simple that's the fairness AR that's the fairness argument so like when think about U our ability in this country to train better than some of our opponents in the Olympics because we are a wealthier country is that fair no definitely not yeah so I mean just hope and then we think about wealthier people who whose kids can have uh access to uh prep tests before taking the SAT before taking the MCAT or some other exam whereas uh less wealthy people can't afford those tests is that fair absolutely not so there's so issue of fairness is come on right when it comes to Combat Sports and Athletics though obviously I have a vested interest in um in this idea and this debate but I think there is an issue of two guys have very similar almost identical economic situations identical training environments uh identical amount of
experience in martial arts and one guy's taking a drug and the other guy isn't that guy has an unfair Advantage sure certainly can be but you know the thing and and that's fine whatever the rules are now we must to them all I'm saying is that I think that we need to make sure that we study the issue really well so that if one person has access to anything the other persons also should have access but right now the rules are that you can't that's fine right so I I totally understand so what you're saying is you think that the rule should be based on scientific evidence of efficacy and of health benefits and risks and all that and have it laid out absolutely it's not absolutely yeah really is it is kind of a weird thing like you can sell test like on it we sell a t+ enhancer it enhances your body's ability to produce testosterone but it's legal I mean there is a bunch of stuff that like creatine creatine's legal you they can't stop you from taking creatine there's a bunch of stuff that you know caffeine they'll let you take a certain amount but if you get above like 200 milligrams in your system they go oh no you don't like too much it's real weird natural is a weird word yeah no I know you know it's a difficult one for me I don't know the performance enhancing world uh as well as I like to but you know maybe that's an issue for another book well you know that's the term natural I got a a conversation with a friend of mine we were talking about pollution and all these different things that people do and and we were saying what's really kind of weird is we always think of uh things that humans make as unnatural but they're all made out of stuff on Earth it's not like we're taking [ __ ] From Another Dimension and creating artificial things yeah just it's like the marijuana smokers they say well weed is natural so all drugs are natural you know it's like heroin comes from the Opium poppy right methamphetamine from edra based plant you know cocaine from the Coca uh uh plant as well so it's like all of these things are natural if that's what your definition of natural is even the synthetic versions are created by Earth grown components absolutely the synthetic versions might be better I mean like aspirin uh comes from the the willow bark I believe it's like but we have made it Sy synthetic so we can uh
harness the the the component that we need U so that's that's a good thing and that's a drug yes yeah so Drug Free America would mean no aspirin no aspirin that's right it is pretty silly no no Coca-Cola either y That's a drug that's right we're filled with it that's right are cultures filled with it and that's such a great point that you made earlier every single culture absolutely so like kids who were trying to learn how to think critically when people present them with things like drug free they should really question that sort of thing um um that they should be taught that this is part of critical thinking drug-free societies just doesn't exist so please don't um feed me propaganda so that really does exacerbate our issue right because uh it it with all that ignorance out there it makes it very difficult to have a real debate about it because people come into everything with preconceived notions like I don't I don't know very much at all about Chess I don't know who's the best I don't know what the strategies are I kind of know how the things move that makes two of us right but if you know what I'm saying but if I came into chess going oh no no no you guys don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about like the way to do chess is you got to just move faster than the other guy I had all this crazy oh I've [ __ ] been watching on TV and you're a chess master you'd be like [ __ ] what are you saying that it's not how you play chess the [ __ ] you talking about crack babies man the crack economy you tell me CRA crack didn't ruin our economy bro shut the [ __ ] up it's like people already have this in their head like they're already coming to the table with a bunch of [ __ ] right on I could just send it better man it's got to be really frustrating I mean when you go to cocktail parties and if I had a cocktail party I invite you like a cool cool guy uh if you go to cocktail parties and people say well Carl what do you do and you go well you know I'm i' say I'm a Sho say I'm a shoe salesman man that's a good way to get out of it I used to tell chicks that I work for my father's insurance company because working for an insurance company is so unglamorous but working for your father's insurance company means you're such a [ __ ] you can't even get your own
job in an insurance company he just some Nar do well that lives in his parents basement and they would be so mean to me it was so crazy this what I was on television I thought they'd be like yo you're going to inherit the company so I should probably push up nope no there was none of that going on I wasn't flashy enough I didn't have enough [ __ ] if if I was like pulling up in a Ferrari and I said that maybe then they would be like but I was driving a Volkswagen Cado at the time I just it was shocking how mean people could be because of that we have uh you know certain things that we accept and certain things we don't accept and when it comes to you know things that people talk about at cocktail parties and what have you and if someone comes along and says heroin's not that addictive cocaine doesn't ruin L A lot of people take it on a regular basis you're going to encounter a bunch of know-it-alls right don't you you must of course I do you know um so I mean uh so that means that I have to make sure that I I don't engageing conversations with people who uh don't play by the rules of evidence and so if I engage if I engag in those kind of conversations I'm too old for that man and and so I try to limit my exposure to people who are who are um uh mainly faith-based in their sort of belief systems it becomes a real problem when they're really smart about something else like I had a conversation with meio Kaku once and uh we were talking about um panspermia it was on the opian anthy show we're talking about the concept of the building blocks of Life coming in from asteroids and that that might be where a lot of things came uh from and uh one of the things that we were discussing was was psychedelic mushrooms cuz Terence McKenna had this theory about psychedelic mushrooms coming spores coming from another planet that it's very possible that asteroid impacts that carried all the other building blocks for life also carried psychedelic spores which is why they're so uniquely different from any other plants on Earth and I was asking him if he ever did mushrooms this my sneaky way of asking meio Kaku if he did mushrooms but he started going off about it giving you brain damage and becoming addictive and like what the [ __ ] are you talking about it's so unfortunate like that he was
talking about it ruining your mind like I'm trying to improve my mind I'm like Oh Come sir please you're you're you're like a blind man describing a kaleidoscope and it unfortunately it makes you question all the things that that guy's an expert in because if you know something to be untrue and here's This brilliant guy who's telling you about the universe itself and the the building blocks of matter and he's so smart and he's so definitive with his his his definitions and descriptions of the things but then he tells you something that you absolutely know to be incorrect and you go well come on where's this is you're [ __ ] awesome why you saying this like you're the one who's telling me about the cosmos you're telling me about all these other cool things that I know are are amazing and scientifically provable but now you're saying some dumb [ __ ] as well I'm with you man I mean um that's one of the things that we all try to guard against because uh we all have a limited sort of knowledge base we all do I mean we can only be experts in so many areas I mean it's just requires so much work to be an expert in anything and so we have to have the humility to say you know I don't know that as well but uh I'm willing to keep an open mind and learn um so you're right uh I hope that I don't overreach like that on any subject matter because I know drugs very well other things I know less well that's such an important thing and a lot of really smart people don't ever want to admit that you know there's a lot of really smart people that are really smart about one thing so that you question about things that they're not really smart about where they don't really have as much information about they'll [ __ ] sometimes that's [ __ ] dangerous I'm with you man and I'm so glad that you you Expos that kind of thing and you uh highlight the the the concern related to that but you know that's uh we have to be able to say I don't know yeah it's it's it's it's an important factor like in distributing information we have to know that these sources that we reach whether it's you or any other academic is 100% honest and there's no ego or [ __ ] involved and when these guys show a little bit of ego where they don't want to show humility about their ignorance you they ruin the
whole thing the whole discussion gets it's it's very difficult to take them as seriously absolutely and it it Waters down all the things that they say that you know are true as well it's like yeah you know on the one hand it's like we should be allowed the latitude to be to have been wrong but as a result we should also be able to say oh you know I was wrong and I got this new information that made me see the light um and so so it's a two-way streak you know it's like people are going to make mistakes and we want them to be able to make the mistakes because in the process of trying to understand something they might discover some really fascinating or good um and so they should be able to make a mistake but they have to also be able to say I screwed up yeah it's really unique isn't it when people are running for president we don't want none of that we want no flip-flopping if you're a flip-flopper we don't want to think that anybody learned from their mistakes and changed their opinion or had some new information come in they reconsidered their ideas uhuh well the people who say that this guy flip-flopped or this and that they don't speak for me and I hope they don't speak for the rest of the country although they may have the microphone but I hope people see through that nonsense they do but there are I think what they're trying to get at for the most part I mean I think we're we're we're certainly right when it comes to like you learn you can change your opinion I certainly have learned in my life and even recently changed my opinions on things but I think they're just concerned with [ __ ] politicians that are just they're just completely playing the breeze like where is it going I'm going this way I'm Pro abortion oh no no no no no no that's right so you have that issue where people are uh like you said they are uh trying to make sure they have all the bases covered and they say one message to one group and a completely different message to another group I no I get that but then there are po Ians too who actually learn new information and change their mind and then they get called the flip-flopper and that's bad now when did you first when did you do your first research your first uh like research on drug effects I I think the first study I published was
in 1992 and what was the climate like then in comparison to climate in 2014 because we were talking about pre- internet yeah damn that's Prett internet Al Gore had he didn't discovered internet in 92 probably already had it probably already had a cell phone with it on right um I think well I got on in '94 and I think it's generally considered like 93 was like when I say pre- internet like I think it all started around that area92 93 but the attitudes hadn't really changed yet no I mean the attitudes the attitudes around drugs they haven't really they I mean only until the past year or two have they really started to people year or two yeah people are like starting to open their mind to these issues like maybe we've been Hoodwink maybe we've been bamboozled but for a long time I mean we think about from Reagan to uh Bush one to Clinton to Bush two uh even Obama the beginning of his his first term um attitudes about drugs they hadn't changed that much I mean the bottom line was that drugs were bad and as a politici what you say is that you're going to be tough on drug drug users and people who sell drugs and that's that was popular until recently now people are starting to say wait wait a second maybe we have uh maybe we've been doing this wrong and but that's a recent phenomenon do you what do you attribute the changing of that tie to is it just the overwhelming information I think uh uh there are a few things I I think um Michelle Alexander wrote an important book called the new Jim Crow to help people to understand the fact that we now have 2.3 million people in our prisons and largely because of the war and drugs you know so it's like we have 5% of the world's population 25% of the world's prison population and then we start looking at looking at the racial sort of discrimination in terms of who's in prison black men make up 5% of the population or 6% of the population 35% of the prison population you start to look at all of these numbers I think Americans are like well we are fair we are fair people in general and so I think they are disturbed by that I think that helped and I think the fact that my book uh I'm a scientist I've been doing this for some years um I am on a a number of boards respected scientific boards I
have played the game mainstream game and then I'm saying I've done the studies and I'm telling you you've been misled so that has helped my book has helped and I think that so I think uh the economy the fact that um um we don't have the kind of money that we had we once had particularly in the mid late 1990s where we could build prisons and we could put all this money in law enforcement I think all of those things have helped people to understand that maybe we're doing something wrong and now with Colorado one of the things Colorado and Washington those two states have legalized marijuana and one of the things that's being really talked about is the amount of tax revenues that the marijuana in Colorado is going to generate in this country ultimately money remains King and so that has opened people's mind you know I like to think that empirical evidence helps to really shape the way people think but money is really King and I think that all of these kinds of think the economy Colorado some information the fact that we don't want to be an immoral people uh all of those kind of things are coming together to help people to rethink to what we're doing with drugs and if you looked at our culture if you looked at our civilization scientifically and saw those statistics those unbalanced statistics the the at the very least you would have to say well there's an incompetency in engineering their culture if it's not racist if it's not if it's if they're not victimizing a certain population of the certain percentage of the population that can't defend itself as effectively and and taking advantage of them at the very least it's a very poor engineering of the civilization I agree man you know the thing is is that this is one of the things one of the things I did I actually believed many of the American sort of Mythology that we were a fair people that you know equal rights for everyone and so I think a lot of us believe that and so I think as a result of us believing that sort of Mythology and then actually looking at the data I think people are Disturbed I think that people are understanding that uh we are just about 50 years removed from the March on Washington and the famous Martin Luther King's speech I Have a Dream and that sort of thing 50 years
removed from that now and then we were all upset about the social injustice that happened during that era now I think people are understanding that we have our own social injustice happening right before our eyes and then so the question becomes well where will history say you were on the issue and I think people are getting it I think but I think many people would just simply ignorant to it but I think the message is getting out now so it's just this combination of factors that are overwhelming the internet providing all this information Colorado and Washington State providing alternatives to the economic situation all the above all of it it is an issue it's one of the big issues when it comes to the difference between a Democratic leader and a Republican leader is the way they treat some so social issues and uh that's a big one that the the way that the Obama Administration sort of said that they were going to treat marijuana and then the way they did treat it with which is very different it was very bush-like it was it wasn't much different I mean ER they they've started recently saying that they wouldn't go after these states but there was a lot of people that went to jail a lot of people did time A lot of people are still in involved in the court system I know people personally that have been busted and they were doing everything according to state law fact so what what's that about that's a good one man um you know I think about when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and I remember the excitement that the country had because we thought that the war and drugs and all these things were going to reverse um then turns out Bill Clinton under his administration more people were arrested than any other Administration for these sort of violations and um at until that time uh and so I think this a similar thing kind of happened under the Obama Administration it's hard for the Democratic sort of leadership or the Democratic candidate or president to uh go in a different direction for fear of being considered soft on drugs on crime now I will say this this Administration um uh as of late is the only Administration that said that they were going to change the way that the justice system for example uh enforced mandatory
minimum drug laws they said they wouldn't be enforcing those laws anymore they said that sort of thing this Administration said that they would leave Colorado and Washington alone those states that have legalized marijuana because under federal law marijuana remains illegal so technically the federal government can come in and stop that but they have said they're going to allow it to happen they said it's an important sort of experiment and so on the one hand I'm certainly I I I I certainly wish they would do more the current Administration but when we look at what previous administrations have done they have done more than any other Administration when it comes to drugs when it comes to drugs so there have been some horrible things like the busting of these medical marijuana dispensaries but is that just a part of what we were talking about earlier that just the machine needs to be fed and they it's way easier to do that than to knock on some trailer that's got smoke coming out of it in the middle of the the desert and some dude comes out with a machine gun and you know you go into one of those medical marijuana you going a nice clean bust you bring in a lot of cash and if people don't know the racket it's it's kind of hilarious here's what they do they go they they arrest you they come in Jack booted with [ __ ] bulletproof vests on and machine guns they hold people down they step on your neck when you're on the ground there's videos of all this and I'm making this up they take all the weed and they take all the money and then they say that they'll be in touch with you they say that they'll review your case that charges will be pending they decide when they're going to press charges when they're going to put your thing into system so then these people have to decide whether or not they go back to work do they decide whether or not they go back to no one's been charged with anything yet you got arrested they took all your [ __ ] and then they let you go and so you're sitting there terrified and broke trying to figure out is this worth doing more of and the people that work there often quit you got to find new employees college kids don't like getting boots Put to their face and you know gun in their back for weed and so they this money just evaporates and it's
been millions of dollars worth the money it just sort of goes away and you can't get it you can't get it back it's not yours the weed it's ours now it just goes away no I mean these kinds of things needed to be they need to be highlighted and people need to really publicize these things because I mean as you just described obviously most of us are uh horrified at those kind of events but people need to know I mean this has been going on in this country um for decades yeah it seems like there's got to be a way to balance it out to there's got to be a way to take all these industries that are profiting off of it being illegal and locking people up and making sure there's you know law enforcement officers that are being paid there's got to be a way to shift that into something else and until they do it's A Hard Road well you know first of all we have to have the conversation that right it has to be a shift like you're saying people are not even having that conversation people aren't having the conversation say well what do we do with this machine that we built up over the seever past several decades I mean I can think of a number of ways that we can uh uh use police officers uh in different roles than what they've been used currently I mean I can think about the educational sort of thing sometimes let's think about heroin people have been talking a lot about heroin overdose deaths and those sorts of things saying that heroin is cut or Lac with some sort of other compound we can use our police forces for example whenever they confiscate something like heroin why not do the chemical analysis and make sure it's posted in those local regions so people understand what the drug actually contain I mean we can have police Outreach doing this sort of thing okay you want to avoid this because this compound is dangerous we can do those kinds of things we never do they never tell the public what's actually in the compound if if something is in the compound they say that oh it's cut with something or why not tell the public who is more likely to be susceptible to obtaining that type of heroin completely agree but if you were on the Bill O'Reilly show he'd be like you're just going to encourage those kids now they know what they can take and what not to
take you're going to you're going to do the testing for them who's going to pay for that testing our tax dollars are going to go to give them the exact recipe of their heroin that they like so Bill o Ry you know he was generous enough to have me on his show and so um so Props to him for that but the thing about the Bill O'Reilly show is that people should not get twisted that is not news that is entertainment and the goal of what he's dism ating is not public education and not necessarily for the public good so if you want to be entertained he's outstanding but if you actually want information you're in the wrong place wait a minute man you didn't watch the thing about him talking about God making the tide go in and the tide go out and no one can explain it you didn't see that I watched that and I was like okay he's [ __ ] trolling he's trolling he knows about gravity this [ __ ] saying we can't explain whether the tie goes in the tie goes out he knows they can explain that he's [ __ ] with you well well I mean think about the guy had the number one news show quote unquote news in the United States for about 15 16 17 years and that's the formula that he's used why should he change right so for him it's like he might as well be like Steven coar he's playing a role absolutely just his role is not funny his role is just designed to scare the [ __ ] out of you and get you want to build bigger borders well the thing about it is that you and I understand that he's playing a role and he understands he's playing a role but all of these networks like that they're all playing a role but the the thing is we just don't caricature them like we do him but they're all playing a role right they bring in so-called experts but they think that they're the expert and so all of these guys are playing a role It's Entertainment it's not news and that's one thing that the public has to understand that's not news you can't really they give you news while they're giving you entertainment but you're absolutely right It's Entertainment first yeah that's why they're wearing skirts that barely cover their vaginas I mean those women are on Fox News those are some of the hottest legs you can see on television and they're giving you the news and they're crossing their legs back and forth when
they're on the couch hypnotizing you you don't know what the [ __ ] they're talking about Syria or Ukraine who knows look at her legs why is her her legs are naked like imagine if guys wore skirts in interviews it would be the most ridiculous [ __ ] ever but somehow or another you're allowed to see most of This Woman's you know sexually attractive legs you should actually go to the network and tell them that or be actually go no I would would I'd get Tongue Tied wouldn't be able to talk yeah it's it's hilarious I mean it's it's a it's a propaganda Factory it really is I mean they're just trying to trying to dance for you and get you to keep tuning in so they could sell shampoo I mean oh I know exactly but that's all we have I mean if it's if you don't go out and get your news on your own if you're one of those people that you get home from work and you turn a clock you turn on the Evening News you sit in front of the dinner table and you watch the evening news if that's the only way you get your information like wow we're [ __ ] yeah that's right that's why I'm a college professor to help yeah I mean I guess it but that is the the future like guys like you teaching young people so that they grow up in a I mean I think they're growing up in a different environment anyway I think so I think we're in a new moment man particularly as it comes to when as it relates to drugs this is something that we haven't seen before and the young people today I mean you see it on Twitter I see it on Twitter some of the comments and the statements that people tweet at me I mean they are a lot more critical about this issue than my generation was and so I am deeply encouraged and so when I speak on this issue as you pointed out how frustrating it might might be to deal with certain people I'm not really dealing with those people I'm really dealing with the future I'm speaking for history and that's really the only way you can change things is to change the minds of the young people that are coming up the people that are setting their ways they already have their mortgages that they have to protect and that's yeah they they can also justify that it's okay what they're doing because they've always done it other
people are doing it and it's legal that's right so they don't think they're doing any wrong I had a friend who was a cop who I did Jiu-Jitsu with who was always telling me if I don't give a [ __ ] if they got a medical marijuana license if I catch him with weed I'm busting them I'm like dude do you [ __ ] listen to yourself you're a good guy like why you talking like that that's ridiculous you would take me aren't we friends You' take me and you throw me in jail for no reason do you know how stupid that is for what but your friend right you talking to your friend I'm sure he respects you so he probably re-evaluate what he just said I hope so I don't think so though he's [ __ ] crazy that dude but he's a cop and you know he he just he thinks of it as US versus them you know he's got that mentality US versus them and that when there's a law it allows that other person to be the them you know if it's written down oh that's the them that's right I mean that also I mean that's one of the things that happens when people are involved in legal cases divorces you know disputes with their company it's us and them and we go into us versus them mode and cops are in US versus them mode when it comes to drugs they've lived their whole lives as police officers under the thinking that someone who's got drugs is a per and then they can get that guy and then that's something that they they win they win the guy's in jail and they win that's right they dehumanize the person and so forth and that person isn't really a person and that's a problem that's a major problem I mean and and so you want to make sure that people we want to encourage people not to behave like that yeah and it's got to be really hard for the as well if this is what they've done always their entire career and then all of a sudden the laws change and they have to adjust well so I was in the military you know we hav't talked about that and so I was a a cop in the military for a short period of times and one of the things about cops that they're really good at they're really good at taking orders so they will adjust if it comes down from the top but it has the pressure has to be put on the top to make sure that uh the the sort of rank and foul officers followed uh follow the these orders but they they they're really good at following
orders they are I I'm I'm sure they are I just would be concerned that it would take a long time to turn that Battleship of of intent around change the way they look at it look at Colorado look at Washington right the amount of money that those folks are projected to make taxpayers money I assure you you're going to have former de agents involved in the marijuana industry police officers involved in that industry Rel relatively quickly so when you say it's going to take a long time no it it won't take a long time all you have to do is just change the change the orders or the contingency the contingency in this case money so you can actually do it if you have a commitment to doing it I I don't think it'll take a long time that's very optimistic when you look at Colorado and you look at Washington state do you think that's the genie out of the bottle and it's just going to spread now the genie is out of the bottle and it will depend whether the genie stays out of the bottle depends on how much tax revenue is generated that's number one if Colorado continues to generate the revenue that they've been reporting recently the Genies out of the bottle for a while especially in this economy it's kind of a perfect storm right this screwed up economy when everything's all that's right especially in this economy but in the United States if you're making money that trumps everything right what a freak [ __ ] group of humans we are it's really strange but it's exciting I mean I I hate the fact that the situation exists as is I hate the fact that just this giant percentage of our population is imprisoned for nonviolent crimes and involve personal choice and Drug either drug use or even selling drugs it's it's unbelievably hypocritical when you have drugs everywhere you look but but at least I'm encouraged that I see this shift in the young people yeah me too I'm very encouraged man and that's the thing that keeps me going that's the thing that keeps me on the road with this book talking to people about this issue trying to educate people I mean um because I think that they're going to do it better than we did it and if I could play any role and helping them do it better let's do it what's been the
biggest resistance out of all these years of uh studying drugs and studying the reactions of drugs what what do you feel has been the the the biggest resistance the biggest hurdle that you've had to over come CU I'm sure it must have been pretty difficult to to get this going especially in the 9s yeah I you know so when you say what's been the biggest hurdle to overcome I'm not sure if you mean professional H hurdle or personal hurdle because you know in the book it's personal and professional and so it all kind of combines it all so I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this well either one either or but I what I meant is the resistance uh to your research yeah so the resistance to the research uh the biggest sort of resistance has been primarily from law enforcement community and treatment providers that those type of those two communities in part because um I mean I understand that I'm I'm messing with their money at some level um but that's okay I expected that sort of thing and my major thing is that if I can just get people to focus on the evidence the real evidence and not the hysteria not anecdotes although anecdotes can be important if I can get people to focus on evidence I think I'll win them over yeah I when I tell people how marijuana was initially made illegal they they they look at me like I'm crazy like I'm making things up and I give the William Randol her story and how they uh use this term marijuana that was a wild Mexican tobacco like it wasn't and that the people that were making marijuana illegal didn't even know they were making hemp illegal that's right which had been used for thousands of years that's right there was a product called decorticator that was invented and when the decorticator was invented it was a more effective way to process the hemp fiber and they were talking about hemp being a billion dollar crop it was on the cover of Popular Science and everybody was like well this is it you know every hemp is going to make a new comeback because now there's a machine that allows people to process it easy and they shut that [ __ ] down so quick and that was the original reason why marijuana was illegal it had nothing to do with even the psychoactive form of it well you just kind of talked about my book you know that's the sort of theme
of the book is that when we talk about these drugs when we look from marijuana to heroin what we find is that the illegal legality of these drugs have less to do with the pharmacology and more to do with these social and economic reasons that you just laid out that's precisely it what really interesting that there are laws in two states in uh Colorado and Washington making marijuana legal but even though hemp has been non- psychoactive and used in this country legally since I mean you could buy it from Canada like we do at on it and we bring it over and it's totally legal to possess but you can't grow it right like they won't let you grow it which is just unbelievable it's it's kind of hilarious and that's the real reason why marijuana is still illegal to this day it was all done just to keep hemp out which is incredible yeah so um there were um and also one of the things that we have to understand too is that there's always this sort of um the time when we made marijuana illegal um it was a time when the country didn't really want to have federal laws and so you had to have uh Fuel and the fuel that we used was related to the Mexicans and black people using the drugs so there were a number of people who genuinely genuinely believed that marijuana made these folks misbehave and engage in heinous crimes and so people thought that the drug was so awful that we we would that any responsible society would ban the drug so that component of of of of banning drugs existed before marijuana that's why heroin or opioids opiates were banned that's why cocaine was banned earlier so um yeah this this year um this song has been played over and over um who financed reer Madness do you know um who financed reer Madness that's a tough question because I don't know all of the history related to it one of the things that I do know is that the Bureau of of Narcotics headed up at the time by uh Harry anslinger his bureau got more money as a result of going at the marijuana or vilifying marijuana and so I know that played a big role in the the the um driving of of making marijuana illegal but in terms of the hearse family that whole story line I know it slightly but I don't know it as well as I know the Harry anslinger story it was apparently it was originally financed by
a church group under the title tell your children and uh the film was intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale attempting to teach them this from Wikipedia teach them about the dangers of cannabis use however soon after the film was shot it was purchased by producer Dwayne esper who recut the film for distribution on the exploitation exploitation film circuit beginning in 38 1939 and through the 40s and 50s the film was rediscovered in the early '70s and gained New Life as a satire among Advocates of cannabis policy reform so again it became about money it became a guy who realized he can make some money scaring the [ __ ] out of people and sell tickets to this movie yeah but also understand now by this time when the film really became big 38 so the drug was already illegal the drug became illegal in 37 and so U maybe the film was just capitalizing on the sort of mood at the time too of the country right the people were scared that's uh that's kind of interesting though that it was originally from a church group and then some dude who made money exploiting these fears then he started it's it's really kind of goes along with what we've been saying the whole time it's all about the money follow the money follow follow the money I mean in many of these cases follow the money it's like we all have our price follow the money that's so disturbing though that's disturbing to hear for some people that it's all the our our entire societies be engineered by money well um you know it it's one of these things that you hope people behave in a moral fashion You know despite the fact that we have uh these sort of interests these monetary interests but uh if people are hearing for the first time that it's about the money well they are kind of late to the game so yeah it's sort of a duh duh what do you think about um I don't know if You' ever watched the Vanguard show uh the oxycotton Express did you ever see that episode no how about you tell me about it I got a lot to say about oxycotton but tell me about I don't know the show uh it's a great show um about the uh pathway the the highways between Florida in the rest of the country that Florida's drug use in the oxycoton prescriptions were so high I think Florida had some insane amount like more than the entire country
combined by a long shot of oxy conton prescriptions and people were going down to these pain management centers and they documented the whole process apparently Florida since this documentary has been forced to clean their act up because we talked about it on uh the podcast and I got a lot of tweets from people with new information it was pretty cool uh but they had these pain management centers that were built in they had a doctor and a pharmacy right there hey my back hurts here you go take this paper go right next door and get your heroin and then people would do it under like 15 different names they had no database so you could go to one doctor and get a prescription then you go down the street and go to another doctor and they weren't able to exchange information and find out that this guy this Joe Rogan character has a 100 different prescriptions for oxycoton he's just driving around all day with a back ache you know no no you know um like that sort of thing um I'm I'm I'm happy that people are concerned about the overuse of any drug for example but the thing that concerns me about the whole that sort of thing is that when you make these documentaries they they invariably they do poor jobs one of the reasons that they do poor jobs is because they highlight these sort of aberations the the worst case scenario and then so me the viewer or we get outraged because we see this abhorent Behavior that's going on and then what happens is that you get this Crackdown so severe that people who are in pain who actually need the medication find it difficult to get the medication so it'd be nice if we just just had like our routine sort of policing of all of these activities when we find that people are abusing the system we deal with it but not get EX don't don't exaggerate our sort of punishment to the extent that we're doing more harm so on the one hand folks if they are using oxycotton I would much prefer them use oxycotton than that they use Street heroin in part because Oxycontin we know it's 100% pharmaceutical grade and the adulterant there are no adulterant in that oxycon versus heroin where there are adulterant in the street level heroin so on the one hand you have to think about we have to wait all of these sort of potential risks and benefits and often times it's
a one side of story and that that bothers me well what one of the things they were talking about in the documentary was how uh Florida was providing the rest of the country for with oxycon and that's why it was a big issue sure I like like I said I know that Florida had these issues and that's that's fine and and the authorities should take care of it they should do what's appropriate but uh I hope they don't exaggerate it because typically that's what we do we go overboard yeah that is one of the issues of uh another article that I was reading on Bloomberg about these uh pain victims that were trapped in this prescription Crackdown and that the amount of oxycoton prescriptions has dropped dramatically dropped by 97% after a joint US state task force made ,150 arrests for offenses ranging from improper sales to overprescription by doctors yeah docs are afraid you know I mean there are far more good doctors out there who are trying to be responsible than the Wayward ones that you describe uh and the ones who are trying to be responsible they say I'm not prescribing these pain meds because I know there's potential for too much potential for risk or harm there uh not so much from for the patient but for myself in terms of losing my license somebody may think that I'm doing this intentionally and so I worry about that uh how we uh crack down too severely yeah this that's uh the the whole point of this uh one article uh on Bloomberg and if anybody wants to check it out that's the name of it uh Florida pain victims trapped by prescription Crackdown it's under their health section in 2010 Florida had 90 of the nation's top 100 pharmacies buying oxycodone wow well isn't that where Rush limbo was getting his yeah he was popping some insane number too that fat [ __ ] he was throwing down like a 100 a day he's got a lot of bulk he's throwing uh throwing heroin through you know on the one hand it's like it's um there's there's so much there number one he was on essentially heroin that's what oxycotton is basically but yet he was going to work he was paying his taxes and he was handling his responsibilities right yeah yeah nobody was nobody pointed this out and so when we think about drug users that's your typical
drug user yeah that's a great example of it because I mean who better a guy who's anti-drugs who happen to be UND drugs and a guy who's a a mouthpiece for the right-wing machine which has always been anti- quote unquote drugs and here's a guy who's taken [ __ ] elephant siiz doses of this [ __ ] every day he's got his Nanny out there running around or whoever it was is how keeper running around out there buying more heroin for him and she got popped it's hilarious that that guy was like an anti-drug guy I mean it's he's he's performing you know that's that's a show you know this yeah but it's fascinating that that those guys exist that the Bill O'Reilly the rush limbel type characters the people that really are putting on an act and you know Steven coar everybody thinks of him as you know this you know character caricature but they're all caricatures absolutely that's how they make their money and you look at rush limbo's house it's [ __ ] giant it's huge people like what he does it's out there golfing every day with a hearing aid now because he he apparently did so much oxycon he [ __ ] up his hearing you know what don't blame that on oxycon please Alex Jones told me well don't blame that on oxy Alex Jones explained it to me in some pseudo medal terms and I just will par it right back at you oh I mean you know when you when you say the kind of Venom that that guy says you know somebody probably hit him upside the head I you know I but don't blame that on oxycon is it possible to take so much oxycon that you go deaf I I am not aware of that I am I am just not aware of that I yeah I would have to do the research here can you take no I mean I have been studying this is issue for a while and I just never ever heard of that so I only heard it because of Alex Jones I it's not the best uh he's it's not wikip he's not even Wikipedia he's great guy you go deaf let's let's see if it's true let's punch that [ __ ] at we we live in strange times you know yeah but all right uh really quickly uh he acknowledged he had gone almost completely deaf no he he's not admitting it who knows what how much oxycon like what's the ld50 for folks who don't know um ld50 is lethal dose 50% so if you uh some drugs it's very high some drugs it's very low marijuana it's insane I
don't know what the ld50 for Oxycontin is but one of the things about about heroin or just any other Opia like oyan is that if you've been using it for a while that means you can really increase your dose of the drug so you know I've seen heroin users take uh anywhere from 25 milligrams of that drug to 500 milligram that's a why and be fine uh and so it all depends on the the user's history of using the drug so he could uh I'm not surprised if he's been using the drug for a while that he was using large doses that doesn't surprise me and that doesn't even concern me um if he was using large doses if he had developed tolerance so if you develop tolerance and you're taking say 50 pills a day or whatever he was taking that's no more dangerous than taking one or two pills a day if you don't have the for see one of the things that people don't talk enough about in terms of drugs is the sort of prot Ive effects of tolerance so when people develop tolerance to any drugs whether it be marijuana alcohol heroin it protects you from some of the toxic effects so you can really push the dose without having harmful effects let me just give you an example from an animal study just one of the things that we reported uh that was reported in the literature with laboratory animals and methamphetamine is that you give them a whopping dose of that drug you can cause neurotoxic effects brain cells die right now if you allow that animal to develop tolerance by giving escalating doses over several days and then you give them that whopping dose you block the sort of neurotoxic or brain cell death as a result of them developing tolerance so tolerance is important to protect the animal from some of the toxic effects of the drug that's fascinating so the ld50 rate will absolutely change with those who are tolerant to it from continued use yeah so that the lethal do dose will look different based upon the user's history okay so when they say like lethal dose 50% or 50% of the population being you know like if you have 100 people and then you give them a certain amount of heroin 50% of them die as soon as they start taking that heroin that number changes that's right that number you know it's hard to predict when when we start talking about people who have tolerance I mean so when we think about the ld50 we're typically talking about
folks who doesn't do don't have experience with the drug and we we do physically addict in some form to a lot of drugs like you were talking about alcohol being one of the few that if you physically addict to it and you quit didn't that isn't that what happened with Amy win housee didn't they show that her system had nothing other than alcohol in it had nothing but alcohol but I'm not sure how she died I I don't want to get this wrong some folks do die that way though right they oh yeah you can die from alcohol withdrawal you die typically from seizures that's caused as a result of the alcohol withdrawal so if someone out there is addicted to alcohol How do they kick alcohol do they have to do it very slowly yeah so if you develop dependence on alcohol you should probably be admitted to a hospital in order to receive Bodines uh something like diazapam of value um which acts in a similar way as alcohol but it's longer lasting so the body has a chance to detoxify the benzo alapine slowly leaves the body whereas alcohol abruptly leaves the body and then that's what causes the seizure activity and those sorts of things what is the physiological effect of the alcohol leaving the body and then the seizure like what what causes it to causes the body to just so when um you have you ever had a hangover yes that's alcohol withdrawal so what happen yeah that's alcohol withdrawal I thought it was dehydration it's partly it's part of alcohol withdrawal dehydration is is part of it as well but that's that's like the mild symptoms of alcohol withdrawal so but when you think about the severe sort of alcohol withdrawal that you're asking about what happens what the seizure so the IDE a is that alcohol what it does is that it suppresses much of the brain activity much of the brain activity you're telling me man it is just suppressed and then for long-term use of alcohol it really suppresses a number of brain cells and then all of a sudden because alcohol's halflife the time in which half of the drug leaves the body is only about an hour it's really quick so the halflife is so short once the alcohol is left the body and it's been depressing the central nervous system the brain activity now all of a sudden those those those cells fire wildly uncontrollably
and that's what causes the seizure activity that's unbelievably fascinating so it's also unbelievably fascinating that it's been proven that alcohol actually suppresses the use of the mind that the mind can't work as well well I don't want I don't want to say that strongly it certainly depresses certain neurons a number of neurons so like when you when you think about it when you are uh anxious if you're anxious and um and you have some alcohol if you have a benzo daip it's suppressing certain type of activity and so that's a good thing and you might actually function better because if you think about going to a party or having some event and then you're so anxious where you can't uh perform as well and you maybe have a drink and now you're calm and you might actually be more social and you might actually perform more better in that situation so I don't want to say that it that it's just sort of generalized bad effect on your behavior or the brain so at certain low doses it can be beneficial High dosages it does shut down certain functions of the brain like there's very few people that would score as well on their SATs after five shots of Jack Daniels yeah I think that um that's one of the thing we've been really good at public education most people know that they shouldn't do shots before taking the SATs for that reason right do you imagine it made you smarter um yeah I mean I can't imagine anything that makes you smarter besides studying and working harder good for you that's a very good way to say that that's so true but um it it it's interesting though when you think about the idea that this is one of the most popular if not the most popular recreational drug in the world uh and one of the most popular the only big- time sanctioned one in America where you don't have to have a sickness almost every drug that we have that it's a prescription drug whether it's good for you or bad for you dangerous you know incredibly uh potent whatever it is you have to get a prescription there has to be a reason for it you don't need a reason to get [ __ ] up on booze you just there's Mikey's bar and you walk on in give me a double and and a beer and then boom 20 minutes later you're drunk you know and we don't need any no reasons no doctor Nobody Has To Hold Your Hand you don't have to write
anything down you don't have to give the guy your name and phone number so I'm trying to figure out are you you saying that's a bad thing or a good thing I'm fascinated by it I me I'm neither I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing I if I had to say should it be legal or illegal I would say absolutely we I I've enjoyed alcohol many times in my life I don't have a problem with alcohol but it is very uh telling and fascinating that that is the one drug that we chose well it is for a number of reasons I I mean when you think about it how we do alcohol we we take it orally and so it's the only drug that we take orally that you can feel the effects almost immediately and so when you're at a party you don't have to wait for the onset of the effects to happen it happens almost immediately and you control the intoxication simply by taking more or less of the drug can't do that with other drugs orally and so the you and that's one reason that that's that that's the case is because alcohol essentially has no barrier blood brain barrier like those other drugs they they have the cross the BL blood brain barrier with alcohol there essentially no barrier for alcohol so you can the pharmacokinetics or the pharmacology properties of the drugs makes it very convenient for a recreational drug that's that's another important reason that it's legal yeah that's a good point when you consider like if you were going to open up like a mushroom store and everybody come in sell mushrooms you give them the mushrooms they be like come back and hang out in an hour and 20 minutes cuz for the next next hour you know nothing really is going to happen you're just going to start sweating you know um but alcohol One Shot Two Shot you're feeling it in 15 20 minutes you're doing it through the oral route so when you take a drug orally some of it will be broken down before it reaches the brain which is a good thing because that means that you don't have such large doses being shot into your vein or smoked and your lungs into the brain and so it's kind of protective in that way and so those pH pharmacology properties just uh I can't think of another drug that have such good properties yeah I couldn't think of another drug either if you if you were doing marijuana the issue would be that you would get people
around you high as well through secondhand intoxication well it's not only that you have to actually smoke it but we there better methods now you got vaporizers and that sort of thing so you can smoke marijuana more discreetly and as these sort of methods uh are developed you it might become a more social drug but we still have the issue of getting large amounts into the bloodstream therefore into the brain in such a rapid success and and that's the thing that worries Us in terms of safety and so people need to be able need to be educated on how to make sure that they don't take too much of a large dose um at once and once you do that um you can help people be safe but alcohol don't have to so much worry about it the thing that we try and prevent people from doing is been shrinking because of having large amounts in such a rapid amount of time that it just your body can't process it quickly enough yeah it's just well you know toxicity occurs primarily because of the large amounts at a rapid sensation a uh a rapid sort of uh in Rapid order but what about I mean the other big issue with alcohol as opposed to marijuana is coordination uh drastically affects coordination drastically affects uh your ability to move correctly your response times yeah it all depends dose again you know so it all depends how much people are taking you know like all of these drugs one of the things I try and point out the most important thing about drugs is dose you know is you increase the dose you increase the likelihood of toxicity because there are doses in which you can take all of these drugs safely and accomplish whatever task you're trying to accomplish but it's all about dose so when we say General statements about what alcohol does or what cocaine does we have to be cognizant of dose what about um drinking and driving though what is the uh the when you see the um the limits I don't remember what what are what are the current national limits you know they they've vared a little bit and I actually think they've loan them lowered them in certain places do you think that their Fair where they're at right now do you think they should be adjusted what what are your thoughts on that no I think they're Fair uh I mean they're the best we can do and then we we also have those roadside tests and
those kinds of things it's the best that we can do and I I think we're doing a really good job at sort of uh alcohol rated drinking uh I mean driving problems when we look at what issues we had in 1960s compared to what we have now the number of accidents and deaths related to driving have dramatically decreased all those sorts of things in part because of our education because of what we're doing um so I think we're we're we're going about that uh quite well and appropriate what about tolerance Y in relates to that because for a person who doesn't drink at all if they have a point whatever and then you get some dude who's just hitting it hard every night and he's only had one or two beers but if he gets pulled over he's going to he's going to test too high but his tolerance might be so that he would be fine you're absolutely right and that's one thing that these sort of um criteria don't account for is tolerance but um a good lawyer who has to defend someone should probably bring in tolerance particularly if their client is tolerant to the alcohol effects but good luck that's a tough one because people think that they have this def definite measure and it tells them something and it it really doesn't without understanding tolerance but you're absolutely right that's a great question so a universal number like that is inherently unscientific knowing the understanding a universal number like that is not it does not apply to everyone it does not consider tolerance that's right but it's the best that we have currently other yeah the hand ey coordination drills that's right yeah those are that's the thing it's the behavioral tests that are important you want to see how impaired behaviorally impaired the person is um because if you have that in with the blood levels then you you have an increased confidence of what you're seeing but if you have for example somebody testing over the limit based on their blood but their hand coordination they pass the ciety test then you're less confident in what that blood level means right that makes sense is it is there any other variables as far as like a person's ability to pass a hand eye coordination test when they're drunk I mean athletic ability things along those lines cuz some people they could barely
bend down to touch their shoes whereas other people are yoga Masters if you got a yoga Master [ __ ] up and you know yeah he might be able to just put his foot over his head while he's hammered and the cops be like this guy's sober well that's right you know if people have practiced with the test and they know how to do it really well um then maybe they they're not impaired driving as well I don't know but yeah but all of those issues that you bring up man you are those are complex issues and those are issues that the society has to struggle with but they want to struggle with it because it's too complicated and it's just nicer to have a number now how does a state like Florida become this weird aberration how does a state like Florida have so many like they said 90% of all the oxycodone pharmacies the phies that are making it and selling it h how does that happen how does one state just go Haywire you know I don't know the Florida law but I'm sure is related to the P peris I'm sorry the S the permissiveness of their law I think think that that's the thing that contributed to this I mean they they probably were allowed to set up pain clinics in a way that you didn't require uh much sort of oversight and then um so uh whenever those kind of things happen you know there's a there's a potential for abuse and so I I Would S I would probably guess that's what happened I was also wondering if maybe it might be some of the remnants of the the cocaine era of Miami about how did you ever see Cocaine Cowboys you ever see that documentary yeah yeah I'm from Miami so okay Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys uh to uh shout out to my friend Billy Corbin who made those movies I met that dude very nice guy and uh really really fascinating documentaries that cover the whole cocaine um era of Miami where one year the graduating class of the police academy every single member either wound up dead from murder or in jail for corruption like they were just crazy and making money off of Coke and Coke is moving in and out and I had always wondered if maybe that had something to do with like sort of The Echoes of this uh pervasiveness of drugs in that state wow man you know I haven't lived in Miami of Florida since 1984 ah Florida is a bizarre state in general you know
so I I have to Def I have to say that I'm I'm I'm outside of the scope of my expertise when it comes to trying to understand Florida I I don't I don't understand Florida well they said that there's more Banks per capita in Miami than any other city in the country and that is directly related to their ability to process money that was coke money yeah I mean I grew up in that area you know the the late 70s and early 80s and the Scarface era you know um 1980 was a peak murder rate in this country you know one of the highest murder rates was in 1980 in part because of the cocaine sort of thing mind you long before crack but nobody's really talking about that um and so yeah I I know that era um and I know that cocaine was a big deal in Miami but my friend Steve did his residency in Miami and uh it was during that era and he just got just crazy stories of violence of of just people coming in just all [ __ ] up and it was a lot of it was drug wars yeah what how did that all of a sudden happen do do you know the history new drug markets you know how did it how did these drug markets open up I mean what took so long that it took the 1980s for them to get over here well I think well well the story that I've heard um and I haven't researched this to the best of my ability so this is only what I've read superficially is that uh there was a Crackdown on marijuana a big Crackdown in the 70s on marijuana and then so the drug cartels brought in cocaine because it was smaller way and you can make more money and then so that was about the time when cocaine started to flood to us markets um that's what I've read as far as that goes but like I said it's a superficial read of my understanding of it so really all crack cocaine was was like the second wave of cocaine It's Like Cocaine came when they figured out there's an opening because of marijuana crackdowns and then they said well we got to figure out a way to get it to people that can't afford to buy a brick yeah no absolutely some industrious um dealer figured out how to uh cook co and produce Mass produce it in ways that people could smoke it at cheap unit doses I mean that's that's brilliant quite frankly um yeah it is when you think about it that way you know but that person is brilliant whereas whoever rigged the
laws in Florida to allow oxyc continents to come in and you know you know we look at that and we go well this person this is corruption you know this is uh this is what they've done is terrible well you know uh I don't know the law so it's hard for me to speak on the specifics of that but um and so um I I don't know I don't know the person could have had a a great idea and probably meant well I I I don't know but it certainly doesn't seem to be playing out as well as we would have liked now when you start to do these studies and uh you know you're in the 1990s and you're you're finding things that are contradictory to what we normally consider to be you know cultur accepted ideas about these drugs um what what happens do you get resistance from uh people in in universities do you get resistance from your peers no um you know uh how science works is that you publish these stories one one study doesn't mean as much as multiple studies and so you publish one study and it's like that's a great finding cool let's see if you can replicate it let's see if you can extend it let's see if other people can replicate it and if if other people can replicate it you can extend the findings now you feel more confident in what you're finding and so that that's kind of what happened over the years I build on I built on my findings and then it increased my confidence so much so that I thought that I should write a book in order to make sure the public understands what's happening because when you publish into scientific literature five people read your paper if you're lucky you know people there there's not many people who read the literature U besides those few people who are interested in your area and so as I increased my confidence in the findings I thought I wanted to publicize it because I thought what we were doing with drugs was inconsistent in terms of policy and the way we educate and treat drugs was inconsistent with the science and the way that you communicate with the people was to write a book a trade book now H how's this book been received is there any like if you have a debate about it has anybody ever said I challenge you on your ideas these are not correct this is not true have you ever had to like sit down with an cter or anything along lines well I don't think she's qualified
to be challenging me quite frankly about drugs um but she would do it anyway yeah I know um she might embarrass herself if she did I assure you um but um uh there have been I don't know that's possible there have been people who um uh who may say that they have some trouble with the conclusions that I draw but the scientific community and the General Public have been welcoming and it's been a breath of fresh air for most people because people already know this the things that I'm saying about drugs like the fact that the vast majority of people who use drugs are not drug addicts that's not really that groundbreaking to people who actually know drugs and people who are critical that's not groundbreaking um what's what's groundbreaking is that it's being said in a public form because it's never been said in a public form it's always been the exact opposite it's always been the propaganda and what's really refreshing about what you're doing is the fact that you're pushing fact first regardless of how it's going to be accepted that you're just saying look this is I'm a scientist this is what's going on and we have to really accept that in order to figure out what we're dealing with yeah man you know science actually saved me I mean the data the focus on what do the data say save my life you know without science I'm not here and all I can do I mean there are people are smarter than me there are people who are more articulate than me there are people who are more wealthy than I am but the the great equalizer are the data whatever the data says is the position that I take and as long as I do that I'm okay I can do I can say anything publicly I can be in public I don't nothing intimidates me as long as I am on the side of the data yeah that's that is so important and that's not what's been thrown around it's been what ideology do you prescribe to what you know what what is what are your thoughts on Free Will what are your thoughts on a person's uh ability to handle certain things and other people can't that's what the discussion's always been more almost more philosophical yeah I know as as long as discussion is at that level and and now we can engage in this exchange of ignorance and that's what we've had you
know so in this case what we what I'm trying to do is make sure we avoid the exchanges of ignorance and making sure that if people engage in this conversation that they have some expertise some skills some knowledge and not just some emotion now in a perfect world would drugs be decriminalized or would they be legalized yeah so in high price in the book I argue that all drugs should be decriminalized um I say they should be decriminalized and then we should have this corresponding increase in realistic education now when things are decriminalized then that means that people can be fined that's right they they may be subjected to fines you don't necessarily have to be fined but just like a traffic violation you might get a fine or you may not get a fine um but the one thing that's important here is that they don't they don't go to jail and they don't ruin their lives as a result of having a felony conviction because when we think about the last three presidents Barack Obama George Bush Bill Clinton all three of those guys used illegal drugs um um Clinton marijuana Bush marijuana he's widely suspected using cocaine Obama used marijuana and cocaine all I'm saying is that let's make sure that the society has everybody in the society has the same opportunity as those guys now um in a decriminalized situation as opposed to a legal situation how do we decide where the revenue comes from as far as like tickets isn't that an issue when because then it becomes a money thing again if you can charge people a ticket for having marijuana marijuana's decriminalized and all a sudden we're getting tickets left and right for weed it's like a speeding thing like it's like putting a 25 mph speed limit on the highway when you know everyone's going to break it yes no no that that's exactly right and so that's where we have to be smart as a society in terms of thinking about the administrative fees or the fines that we would charge people well we set limits to make sure that we don't become excessive for example the the the greatest amount of fine that you can give someone let's just say it's $25 or some amount that is not prohibitive and an amount that they that police departments can't depend upon for their budgets and that money
shouldn't be allowed to be used to support police budgets that's an interesting way of uh doing it are you completely opposed to legalization no no no I mean I am not completely opposed to legalization my concern here is that uh the country we're too ignorant right now for legalization not that people will go out and do some dangerous things related to drugs but if you legalize drugs now what will happen is that you will have the detractors say things like any ills in the society is going to be blamed on the drugs and we're so ignorant we're susceptible to believing that so before legalization I'm arguing that we have this increase in education about what drugs do and don't do do so people cannot be susceptible to being Hood wi like that I'm I'm arguing that the education provides an inoculation if you will so you're saying we can't handle the truth essentially what you're saying is that we need this decriminalization step before we get to a legalization that it's it's we couldn't just jump right into legalization it would be too much change pandemonium people would go crazy fear people would use propaganda to set people against the you know to go against it yeah so I'm thinking about well I'm not saying that it'll be pandemonium we have Washington and Colorado right now mark my words there will be studies coming out of Washington and Colorado showing that young people in those states do more poorly on whatever measure you want to have as a result of marijuana the studies the data won't support that conclusion but that's what people are going to be drawing from those data and so I'm this is my prediction right now as a result of people's ignorance about marijuana and that's that's marijuana a drug that we have a lot more experienc than with heroin and but Mark marw you'll see those studies come out now isn't it problematic that marijuana is legal in two states medically legal more like 18 or something now something crazy about 17 or 18 yeah but still a schedule one substance which means that it has no medicinal value whereas for folks who don't know heroin and cocaine are both schedule two um which is kind of silly schedule one also includes all of the non-lethal Psychedelic variants like psilocybin which the LD 50 rated is something [ __ ] crazy marijuana it's
like 1,500 lb inside of 15 minutes like yeah so to be clear heroin is a schedule one drug not a schedule two what is what is schedule two methamphetamine is schedule two schedule two is methampetamine cocaine schedule two cocaine schedule two morphine is schedule two so how do they get oxycotton in then if schedule two those are schedule two but it's heroin yeah it's an opiate and they act at the same brain receptor right so you're you're you're uh your P your puzzled look just kind of explains or it it it it typifies American Drug education because you you're right when you said but it's it's heroin exactly but a better analogy is that morphine and heroin are essentially the same drug like I explained the difference between crack and powder that's morphine and heroin well that's why I was I'm sorry yeah so morphine heroin is just morphine with an acid group attached to it they're the same drug and so the fact that drugs are legal you and I talked about this early earlier has less to do with the drugs biological activity of pharmacology and more to do with the social conditions um that were surrounding um uh the the the legality of the drug more so than pharmacology that's interesting so uh cocaine which is a schedule two yes is crack a schedule one crack is a schedule one yes oh get squirely doesn't it that's right that's very squirely so heroin crack bad oxycotton and you know all the other variants yeah the thing people have to understand is that these schedules are largely based on politics they're more political than pharmacology although we say that they're largely based on pharmacology but some of this stuff as you're pointing out the inconsistencies in in our logic and you don't even study this you just are pointing this out and you can see the flaws in our thinking and you're absolutely right so the scheduling thing is largely social political cultural that's fascinating I had always assumed that heroin was scheduled too just because I knew that oxycottons were prescribed I didn't know and then the crack that the whole thing totally makes sense what what is the medicinal the medicinal use of cocaine because there's medicinal cocaine yeah so let's think about it if you've ever
gone to a dentist right you might have had novacaine put on your gums m without cocaine you don't have novocaine because cocaine was the first local anesthetic right that's one but cocaine today is used primarily in minor surgeries in order to restrict the blood flow so people can operate in that environment that's what it's mainly use for ah so uh lidocaine also related to cocaine lidocaine is related to cocaine that's right I had my nose fixed and they uh threw some lidocaine up there and they you know they had the packing up there and then they spray lidocaine and I was [ __ ] up all day man I mean I it was a weird feeling like I wasn't High you know it wasn't like a cocaine high but I was like wow I don't feel good and I knew it was that lioc cane [ __ ] I was like I I think I would rather have just felt the pain than to have all this weird stuff in my system you know yeah but yeah without without cocaine you don't have the local anesthetic properties of Lidocaine because it's a modification of the cocaine structure now how difficult would it be to get these drugs that have these insane LD 50 rates and have a wealth of medicinal benefits like marijuana and get them out of schedule one I think marijuana there is a lot of movement now for marijuana to be moved away from schedule one to schedule two um I think if if the public continues its pressure I think it'll happen but the public has to be vigilant and they have to continue its uh activity and intensity otherwise it won't be it it won't happen you know like um we sometimes think that these things are based mainly on medicine and the medical community scientific Community the public has an important role to play here so uh public opinion and public the the the the tide which way the tide is going is very important yes now when when you have something like uh like like marijuana that doesn't hurt people that doesn't kill people then you hear like you'll hear on TV people come on and start talking about withdrawal symptoms and and people that have withdrawals from marijuana are there physical withdrawals from marijuana is it possible yeah I think I published maybe along with my colleagues maybe 10 papers on marijuana withdrawal so we have actually shown a demonstrated marijuana withdrawal now I should say in
order to see marijuana withdrawal you have to have people who smoke the drug every day damn near every day and multiple joints per day and then you abruptly stop them now you don't see marijuana withdrawal in everyone but you certainly can see some marijuana withdrawal in some people and when I say marijuana withdrawal it's about like nicotine withdrawal you know people uh they have sleep disruptions they have eating disruptions they are more Moody these are more psychological sort of issues um certainly not not life-threatening um but uh it's unpleasant you know if you can think about having withdrawal from tobacco you probably have uh you have a good idea of marijuana withdrawal so it would be as strong tobacco withdrawal because tobacco withdrawal is a huge one like often times it's it's connected to being as bad as as heroin well that's that's an exaggeration yeah godamn cigarette smokers wh pites yeah yeah that's an exaggeration and now when we think about again when I I want to emphasize when we think about marijuana withdrawal it's only seen in the heaviest users right and is not seen in even all of the heavy users and so it's something that that you C certainly can observe but it's not common and so when you talk about these absolutely extreme versions of people that are smoking multiple joints a day every day and then they stopped abruptly then they just feel like [ __ ] for a little while that's it that's right that's it that's right no danger no I mean you're you're you'll be fine there's you're not in any physical danger is part of it your brain just scrambling because all of a sudden it's not high anymore and you're like what are we doing what the [ __ ] is going on here like maybe that's the better way to put it you know I was just trying to think of some scientific way of saying but I I think that that might be a better way of just saying you know um well think about it this way whenever you engage in some activity heavily for some extended period of time and then you abruptly stop you know your body particularly when you think take in some substance your body adjusts to that substance being there and now that substance is abruptly remove and now all the compensatory mechanisms in your body and your brain are overactive and so
that's part of the reason that you have the withdrawal symptom but eventually the body resets and goes back to his homostasis it's normal sort of balance except in extreme examples like alcohol where your body desire you have to you have to do something to alcohol it's too too traumatic I mean with with marijuana one of the nice things about marijuana is that it stays in the body relatively long so the halflife of marijuana can be as much as 24 hours now now that's a that allows the body to slowly detoxify whereas with alcohol it's gone within an hour and it's like this abup shut off you're shut off and now all of these compensatory Mech mechanisms are hyperactive and U whereas with marijuana these compensatory mechanisms are active but they have an opportunity to slowly adjust that's fascinating so that's such a that's such a unique piece of information uh that The Hangover effect is a withdrawal from alcohol effect y I had always thought that it was just dehydration but IID always wonder like why is it so strong like you got to get really [ __ ] dehydrated to get the kind of feeling that you get when you have a hangover yep particularly you know just think about you putting pumping all this alcohol in your system people who have hangovers all this alcohol and as you get older you don't need to pump that much in pumping all this alcohol in your system then all of a sudden it's gone it stopped and then your body was just adjusting to the drug being there so compensatory mechanisms are really that's the that's the mechanisms behind addiction that you're trying to reintroduce the drug to keep those compensatory mechanisms satisfied no let me try and let me how can I think of it think about heroin that's an easier one for me we think about heroin one of the things that heroin is really good at and it's used medically for this uh reason it had been used medically for this reason is that it stops diarrhea so people who have uh diarrhea that can cause death for example you give them heroin it makes you constipated that's a compensatory mechanism of of of of heroin right so that's a that's a compensatory mechanism of the body having it well I'm sorry the compensatory mechanism of the body is that it tries to counteract the sort of
uh U constipation that heroin causes so it has to get the uh the juices flowing again if you would the body tries to do that when the heroin abruptly leaves these overactive mechanisms now causes someone to have diara because it was trying to get the system going so the body is just trying to correct itself to be where you need to be because you need to go to the bathroom and the body is trying to make sure that happens because heroin is blocking that ability to do that that's absolutely fascinating now when you do heroin for long periods of time like how long does it take for these compensatory mechanisms to really set in the point where you hit a withdrawal syndrome um for heroin for examp heroin um it all depends so like if you only are using the drug in intermittently uh you don't have to S worry about the body becoming the compensatory mechanism becoming so active that you have to worry about withdrawal symptoms it's only when it's a constant sort of uh uh administration of the drug constant uh uh levels of the drug in the body that the body compensatory mechanism become hyperactive is that the case with cigarettes as well because you ever see that movie The Insider with Russell Crow where I did it was funny it was a com no no no no no was a com about the guy who worked at the cigarette company was a scientist no I know which one you're talking about it was one they did a it was based on the 60-minute interviews and all that sort of thing right the 60 Minutes did yes yes yes yes I do know it yes it was all the guy who was talking about 500 plus different chemicals that the uh the government allows them to put in cigarettes that are all directly related to addictive yeah I mean well tobacco has about 4,000 chemicals in it Jesus yeah um well to Natural Tobacco or natural tobacco okay so Natural Tobacco it's 4,000 natural chemicals in about 4,000 yeah the additional chemicals that the uh cigarette companies put in which is what this uh scientist was highlighting the the guy who Russell Crow played um what what's going on there like how are they able to do that like when they're they're adding these things to cigarettes that make it so that you become more addicted more
quickly how are they doing that what are they doing you know there have been so much said uh for example there are chemicals that I understand that they were trying to add to Tobacco to make it more readly released to more readily release the nicotine um um there um there are chemicals being added to tobacco for flavoring they say um there are a variety of sort of things um but I don't know uh exactly what you're getting at in terms of um uh why they add the the com the compounds in terms of Addicting people well this is just from what I got from that movie the the movie Russell Crow plays this scientist who's testifying about how they had designed cigarettes to be much more addictive yeah um so one of the things that I think it was illegal to manipulate the nicotine content in the tobacco cigarettes because the tobacco company said that tobacco is a natural product you know so they don't do any manipulations that was one of the things but then it was found out that they had they had been growing this High th this High nicotine strain uh tobacco and somewhere in South America and so that was one of those sort of issues uh related to this um The Tobacco Company understands pharmacology or they understood pharmacology in terms of Designing the cigarette and the goal one of the major goals is that if you want to get someone addicted to a drug like tobacco or nicotine is that you want to make sure you can release the nicotine in a more in a rapid efficient way to hit the lung into the brain and I think the argument was that tobacco had figured out how to release the nicotine more rapidly um and then one of the major theories in in addiction work is that the more rapidly a drug hits the brain the more addictive the drug is and so I don't know if if all of that has been demonstrated but I know a lot of this has been said but I don't know what has actually been demonstrated um in terms of what the tobacco company did and what what what uh scientists say what is so it's it's all in dose and frequency and that's how the compensatory mechanisms get set off and so even heroin which we've all thought that you can't do once you you'll go man they'll get you you can and you could probably do it twice but you can't do it every week yeah I mean can't do it like
every day for a couple weeks if anybody out there have taken vicadin perco set oxycoton all of those drugs you've taken those drugs for pain or whatever reason and then you your pain is over and you go back to your life and you do your thing you have essentially taken a low dose of heroin and so the notion that someone can't take heroin more than once without becoming addicted that's just Voodoo that's silly that's 1937 but what about people that do take pills and I have a relative and he hurt his back he was a construction worker hurt his back started taking pain pills and became [ __ ] a dunk a total junkie yeah he was responsible he had a family got divorced W up being this crazy liar Pill Popper dude like what's that yeah um those are the toughest questions that people ask me right because on the one hand it's like it's not the drug I show you that so when you talk about him becoming a liar and becoming all these kinds of things I don't know the guy but the fact is is that we know that people do become dependent on these drugs for whatever reason I don't know whatever the reason was for him but there could be a variety of reasons a lot of times people become addicted on these drugs because they have cooccurring co-occurring psychiatric disorders because they have lack of other op better options because they have other issues that's going on I don't know but I have to like understand this guy's complete situation um but it's a fact that people do become addicted some people but the vast majority don't so we can't blame the drug what we need to do is more systematically understand what's going on with that person and then we can figure out what's going on yeah that's so important what you just said because it's always uh I mean what I just did I gave you this anecdotal story about this guy well I know a guy ruined his life and then well maybe he would have ruined his life anyway and he would have he was a [ __ ] idiot I know the guy just so you're dead right your observation is correct he uh was always looking for an excuse his whole life you know if he had to run seven laps he would run six and pull his ankle I got to sit down he's just that guy and then you know does he listen to the show he does tough [ __ ] [ __ ] you know who you are he is who he
is you know it's not good for everybody else if you try to you know baby [ __ ] him you got to do what you got to do that that guy you know was always that guy and so when he got hooked on pills and you know blames his whole life on pills yeah I mean that's the thing that's that's one of the things that frustrates me in this sort of Mission to educate the public is that people blame drugs for their uh for some of their shortcomings and some of the things that are not their shortcomings it's not their fault um but we don't get to figure out what's really going on when you simply blame the drug so there are two crimes that are committed in that case we don't get to figure out what's going on your situation and then you're restricting access to the drug for other people who may do it and need it responsibly and also it's an incredibly complex discussion and we're breaking it down to these very simple terms that may or may not apply uh my friend who I told you about that had a problem with Heroin who uh came over to my house to detox his family was crazy he he was he was I when I you know got to know him better and I sort of understood his medical history I understood what was going on he was self-medicating he there was a psychiatric issue in in his family and it was not just one person so he this guy was self-medicating and I think that's often the case and I think that's one of the great tragedies of uh what happened during the Reagan Administration when they started releasing people out at the streets homeless people that were intered before that they were in mental institutions and they changed what defines a person as mentally incompetent like look you wipe your own ass can you feed yourself get out of here and they just kicked them out in the street and you have a bunch of people walking around talking to themselves that used to be in hospitals being cared for yeah no absolutely you you rais all of these complex issues and I just hope that the public as a result of this show your show and other things that are going on I just hope that they ask these tough questions and that they are critical in their own sort of views about these things because we can all learn as we go for well I think it all it really comes down to uh people like you and if there
wasn't guys like you providing the data and doing the hard work and and sticking your neck out there and doing all these shows and doing Bill O'Reilly and and you know disting the actual facts and the data and doing so so confidently and uh I think it's awesome man I really appreciate it and I appreciate you coming on the show to thank man very very important so folks please support go go buy his book it's called high price um you can get it at high price is it high price the book High pricethe book.com um I'm sure you can get it on Amazon right do do you have a audible version of it as well audible version did you read it no damn it they always do that man they [ __ ] Steve Rell my friend wrote a book and they they did it to him too they had some [ __ ] actor to read his book no I know man that's whack it's your book I'm going make sure I tell my editor that next time tell that editor shut your mouth I want to hear the guy who wrote the book read the book I want to hear the woman who wrote the book read her book man I don't want someone else reading your book for that's stupid right on you got enough juice so this will happen next time it's got to happen whoever it is out there making those audio books get your [ __ ] together Dr Carl Hart doesn't need anybody reading his book silly freaks all right um go by the book and follow him on Twitter it's Dr Carl Hart on Twitter that's h t on Twitter and uh thank you man that was awesome man it's a pleasure meeting you my my friend good friend Chris Ryan told me I had to come hang out with you so thank you man yeah I love Chris Ryan and we do a podcast uh once a month together uh we don't have a name for it yet but what we do is for folks who've listened to the ones with Duncan Chris Ryan and me we do my podcast next is Duncan next is Chris's and we just keep doing so we do one a month together we have no name for it we need a new name but he speaks very highly of you as well I really appreciate you being on it was awesome Dr Carl har ladies and gentlemen uh thanks to our sponsors thank you to squarespace.com for uh for sponsoring our podcast uh I should know that [ __ ] URL by now but of course I don't sponsor copy um squarespace.com uh use the code word Joe that's uh for 10% off your
first purchase go to squarespace.com and use the code word Joe squar space an all-in-one platform an easy way for you to design your own website and do so in in a really impressive F manner uh thanks also to stamps.com go to stamps.com click on the microphone and enter in the code word JRE for our special offer no risk trial plus 110 $10 bonus offer which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage that's stamps.com and use the code word Jr e we're also brought to you by on it.com that's o n niit t makers of alphab brain use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements all right we will be back tomorrow with Amber Lion who's going to tell us a fascinating tale of uh her uh her entrance into the world of psychedelic trips and Matt the terror sah former UFC welterweight champion will join us tomorrow at 300 p.m. as well so much love to everybody thank you everybody who came out in Dallas we had a great time it was so cool and uh we'll see you soon much love [Music] [Laughter] [Music]