High on Denial? America’s Weed Problem & a 2026 Wake-Up Call
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, champions early marriage and activism over college, framing it as a moral duty against "evil," while Alex Berenson exposes the New York Times’ reversal on marijuana’s risks—psychosis, schizophrenia, and industry-driven THC potency spikes—contrasting its 2019 book with decades of ignored data. Tom Bevin argues Trump’s economic messaging must focus on tangible cost relief like healthcare and tuition amid partisan perception gaps, despite wage growth outpacing inflation. James Vander Beek’s tragic death at 40, leaving six children, underscores the hosts’ warning: legalized cannabis fuels addiction, derails lives, and strains taxpayers, proving that unchecked "liberty" often undermines fulfillment through responsibility. [Automatically generated summary]
I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
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All right, welcome back.
Hour two, the Charlie Kirk Show is underway.
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We have Alex Berenson joining us.
Check out his sub stack and his book, by the way, called Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.
Alex, welcome back to the show.
You are sort of our resident expert on marijuana.
You and Charlie saw very much eye to eye on this topic, and it is now back in the news.
And I hope your book is selling like hot cakes because it's so important.
Hope you're getting a fresh infusion of that because the New York Times has admitted that we've been right all along.
452 is the image.
It's time for America to admit it has a marijuana problem.
Big, big admission from the New York Times, your former employer, by the way.
Almost like maybe you still have friends back there that are listening to you, Alex.
Tell us what the New York Times admitted and why now.
Sure.
So, I mean, by the way, it's interesting you mentioned about the book because even before the Times put this out, it seemed to me that there was something in the ether happening with people becoming aware, increasingly aware of the problems with cannabis and THC.
I think principally because so many, you know, so many young people are using and using very high potency vapes, what's called dabbing, which is essentially smoking chunks of THC, which is the active chemical in cannabis.
And when you use that way in particular, you can really knock yourself out and become psychotic very quickly.
And so I do think that this is unfortunately just something that's happening to people that their friends are seeing, that their family members are seeing, that their parents are seeing.
And, you know, for whatever reason, the book was starting to sell a little bit more even before the Times thing.
And now all of a sudden, it actually has sort of taken off again in terms of sales, which is pretty amazing because it came out sell your children seven years ago.
And I promise you, I will tell you the Times, my view on the Times, which I think it's very important that they did this, but I want to tell you something even more important that happened in the last 48 hours, which is that a conservative commentator, a young woman named Brett Cooper, who you may know, posted.
We actually have this post.
Let's throw it up, guys.
494.
Yes.
Here, I'll read it out.
My mom and I have been told that my brother's psychosis, now full-blown, diagnosed schizophrenia, is most likely drug-induced from his years of smoking weed.
This drug isn't harmless, no matter what our culture and screaming people in comment sections tried to tell us.
Yes.
So, so it's so important, right?
Because in the end, you know, the Times can write what it writes and I can write about statistics and journal articles and stuff, but people react to individual stories.
They react to the stories of people.
And, you know, especially when it's personal, right?
When it's, this is my brother and look what happened to him.
And that's been viewed almost 5 million times on X right now.
And so unfortunately, that is what's happening out there is that people are seeing, you know, family members or friends or friends of friends who've had real problems.
And they say, well, you know, this person wasn't using cocaine or methamphetamine or, you know, or mushrooms.
They were using, they were using THC.
They were using these vapes and suddenly they wound up in the ER and or maybe they have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and their lives are really wrecked by this and their families are getting messed up by it too.
And I need to figure out, I need to learn about this drug.
So what the Times wrote was sort of the broader, you know, the bigger picture question, which is this is happening against the background of the legalization of cannabis.
Charlie knew, right?
Charlie knew.
And so legalization, you know, many states have legalized in the last 10 to 15 years.
There's been a very aggressive, very pushy, very effective, you know, for lack of a better word, propaganda campaign selling cannabis and THC as medicine.
It's not medicine.
If we're going to legalize it on any basis, it's got to be as a recreational intoxicant that's got downsides and that needs to be regulated carefully.
But that's not how the industry got people to legalize.
They got people to legalize by telling them, hey, this is medicine.
And if you have seizures, it's good for you.
And if you're, you know, if you have cancer, it's good for you.
And it's going to keep people away from opioids, all this stuff, most of which has essentially no basis in science.
There's a couple of things where there's some evidence that cannabis and THC might be valuable, but mostly it doesn't.
Yeah, I was just thinking.
I remember being online kind of in that 2002, 2008, you know, that early internet window.
And it felt like weed was coming up all the time online.
There was this huge consensus among young people, except for me, where they were saying, oh, marijuana is basically harmless.
It was like a whole spiel.
It was only ever banned because racist lawmakers in the 20s had like a moral panic about Mexicans bringing this drug over the border.
And yeah, as you said, it was medicine.
It would cure cancer.
It basically was like a super drug, if anything.
And yeah, and the New York Times, it says in this article here, you know, in our editorials, we described marijuana addiction as relatively minor problems.
Many went further and claimed marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits.
And we said that legalization might not lead to greater use.
And the number they have here is insane.
It went from about 1 million daily users in 1992 to more than 18 million daily users today.
So the thing about cannabis, it's actually more addictive than alcohol, considerably more.
If you look at the number of people who use compared to the total number of the number of people who use daily, let's say, compared to the total number of users.
Okay, there's about 100 million adults in the U.S. who use alcohol on a regular basis, about half the population, a little bit more than half, okay?
So maybe a little bit more than 100 million.
Of those people, fewer than 20 million drink every day, okay, based on the studies.
And most of those people aren't drinking all day, every day.
If they do, we call them alcoholics.
We know they have a problem.
They know they have a problem.
When it comes to cannabis, there are more people using every day than use alcohol every day, even though the total number of cannabis users are much smaller than the total number of alcohol users.
And those people, those cannabis users, when they're using every day, they are waking and baking for the most part.
They are not doing this.
I'm going to have like one hit.
I mean, there are some people who do, but I'm going to have one hit at night and I'm going to go to sleep.
No, this is, this is, this is a major part of my life.
I wake up to this.
I schedule my life around my, you know, my vape breaks.
I may, you know, maybe I don't have a girlfriend anymore because I decided I liked cannabis more than having a girlfriend.
You know, maybe I just hang out playing video games and getting high all the time.
That is not, you know, your viewers, your viewers know that's a typical pattern.
Yeah.
Well, and Alex, you're kind of zeroing in on the young male cohort when you're talking about video games, vaping.
And this actually tends from what I'm gathering online, this young male, super high dose of THC, developing brains, leading to schizophrenia.
This actually, to me, is one of the more terrifying aspects of increased pot usage and us normalizing it and us sort of deifying the drug as like the only drug in the universe that doesn't have any side effects.
Young men seem to be particularly vulnerable to schizophrenia.
Let's go ahead and play this cut.
We actually have a cut here from Brett Cooper talking about it 495.
My mom and I have been told that my brother's psychosis, now full-blown diagnosed schizophrenia, is most likely drug-induced from his years of smoking weed.
This drug isn't harmless, no matter what our culture and screaming people in comment sections tried to tell us.
The story is that my brother Reed, who is 12 years older than me, became a pothead, I would say, late in high school.
Prior to this, he never showed any signs of mental illness.
He never showed any signs of psychosis.
But for the last decade, my brother Reed has been in and out of psychiatric facilities.
He has been on and off the streets in states like California and Idaho and Tennessee.
He's been all over the country.
This is what my family has been dealing with for a decade.
My brother Reed is now a diagnosed schizophrenic and he is mute.
As it stands right now, currently, he is unable to participate in society unless he is medicated.
So listen, men have a higher rate of schizophrenia than women.
They're more prone to severe mental illness than women.
And as we all know, as Charlie talked about all the time, young men are having a hard time in society today.
And it's understandable that some of them turn to this drug, but it doesn't make their problems better.
It makes them worse.
And I just hope that they know they're being sold a bill of goods here by the drug legalizers, by the cannabis industry.
They really should try not to use this.
It's not a good drug for them.
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I guess, Alex, some perspective I'd like on this is just how the New York Times kind of acts like they were, you know, they made an error of judgment, but it strikes me, I just feel like so much of these outcomes were obvious that there has to be this element where a lot of people realize they could make a lot of money off of this, that they could, like, they were creating something they knew would be super addictive and there would be a huge market for this.
And now a ton of people are getting rich off of these 18 million people a day who are using marijuana every single day.
Like it's kind of like tobacco.
Tobacco companies knew exactly how addictive their product was and they knew how deadly it was.
And I can't imagine that anyone was under any illusions who was in the know with marijuana.
There's two issues there, okay?
And they're both very interesting.
People in the industry.
Yeah, they know, they know how addictive this stuff is.
And they've been working for 30 years to make cannabis more potent, to make the, you know, what's called flower cannabis, what's in the joints, stronger, but also to produce these vapes, which are essentially pure THC.
And they know exactly what they've been doing.
And those, a lot of those people want to get rich.
If you look at the times, you know, unfortunately, it's the same kind of sort of useful idiocy that these people played when they called for schools to be locked down during COVID, when they went crazy with the Russian collusion hoax.
You know, there is a groupthink on the left in elite journalism that blinds people to facts that should be obvious.
Okay.
And you, the data on this, what I'm going to tell your children, it was 2019.
And I was able to draw on 20 years of data showing the sort of the harmful links between cannabis and severe mental illness.
And that's even counting the links between cannabis and, let's say, sort of bad life outcomes because you just don't achieve very much because you're smoking every day and you're not working very hard and your life is just sort of passing you by.
I'm talking about the really severe mental illness outcomes and frankly, the downstream violence from that, which is an issue we don't even have to begin to talk about.
We have so much else to talk about.
But people at the Times, people at the Washington Post, people at the Atlantic, all these places that think they're so smart, they didn't look at the data and they just told themselves over and over again, well, this is just being used to put black men in prison.
I mean, it was nonsense, okay?
It was nonsense in 2019.
It was nonsense even in 2009.
It hadn't been true for a really long time.
Let me tell you one quick thing that I discovered when I was writing Tell Your Children, which was people, as I think Andrew said, you know, they always say, well, we got banned in 19 in the 1920s and 30s because there was perception that it was a Mexican drug, that it was a drug that was being brought up from Mexico.
There is some truth in that.
What people don't tell you, what they didn't ever know, all these supposedly smart people, is that Mexico actually banned cannabis first because Mexicans saw what it was doing to their culture and country and they didn't like it.
So whenever this drug has become widely used, whether it's in India, whether it's in Mexico, whether it's in African or in North African countries, eventually there's a backlash to what it does to people.
And the fact that we thought we could rewrite the rules on this, that a bunch of nice liberals who basically had smoked pot a few times in college thought they could totally rewrite history and human biology and legalize this and there'd be no consequences just tells you once again what a bubble the left is living in and now by the way you know some of these people what's happened is they've seen their kids get completely screwed Screwed up on high potency cannabis and THC or their friends, and now they realize the truth.
Nationally Downtrend In Cannabis Use00:02:42
I think here, here, let's do like a little rapid fire question and answer here.
Is weed a gateway drug?
Yes.
Yes.
Evidence is clear.
Does it?
Yes.
What is the rate of schizophrenia?
Do we know, especially in young men that are high drug users?
So the base rate is about 1%.
So one reason this has been able to happen is that let's say heavy cannabis use triples the base rate.
Okay.
Even not every young man is using.
So even if let's say 30% of young men are using in a dangerous way, that would not result in such a huge number that it would be immediately obvious, even though this is a really severe illness.
It becomes obvious over time.
But what I, what I say, and I say this with confidence now, is that there are probably hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly men, but some women in the United States and Canada who become severely mentally ill as a result of cannabis use, who wouldn't have been.
Hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, hundreds of thousands of families, because what you heard with Brett is this destroys families, right?
It doesn't just destroy one person.
When you're the family member, the brother or sister, I mean, God forbid you're the child, but brother, sister, parent of somebody with really severe mental illness, your life is misery.
I have a couple, Alex.
So even if you don't get psychosis, if you're using weed nearly daily from age 16, how bad of an impact is that going to have on your cognitive baseline?
How many IQ points are you going to lose?
It's a really good question.
I don't think there's a simple number.
It's bad for memory.
It's bad for motivation.
It's bad for intelligence, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying, you know, 10 points, 20 points.
I mean, clearly, most people who use or many, many people who use heavily find their lives disrupted by this.
In the same way, if you're an alcoholic, your life is going to be disrupted.
I've got another question.
Where weed has been legalized, have the outcomes been, has there been, you touched on violence.
Have we seen rises in violence, crime, criminality?
30 seconds out.
So why didn't they tell your children there was evidence that in the states that had legalized early, there was a rise in sort of in violence, basically, essentially in severe violence.
Now, nationally, we've been on a downtrend in terms of violence.
Obviously, cannabis psychosis is only one component of violence, right?
There are many, many different components of what make people violent, whether, you know, how we treat people who are, you know, who do we incarcerate people for a long time?
Obviously, that gets them off the streets.
Are the cops getting better at solving gun crimes because they, you know, they have more surveillance?
There's many things.
But there was evidence in 2019 of that.
Economic Perceptions and Events00:11:13
Alex Berenson, check him out.
Thank you, my friend.
We'll talk to you soon.
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I want to get to our next guest, and that is Tom Bevin.
To hang out with him last night at celebrating freedom of speech with real clear politics.
Tom, welcome back to the show, my friend.
It's good to have you.
It's good to be back, and it was good to be with you last night.
That was a lot of fun.
Yeah, and thank you for honoring Charlie and his work celebrating free speech.
And I thought you guys did a great job of honoring him and honoring his legacy.
So, and you had liberals on stage.
I mean, you guys really run the gamut.
We had some spirited debates about trans and about it was, it was, it was good.
It was really good.
Don Lemon and was he a journalist or an activist?
It was a really good collision of ideas.
All right, Tom, I'm going to, I'm going to read something verbatim from a very prominent left-wing journalist that I was texting with.
And this is, everybody would know the name if I said it, but I'm going to leave it anonymous just for the sake of the relationship.
It says, there's absolutely no proof of any significant illegal voting.
He's talking about the Save Act.
You ran a campaign based on fear, demagogue, and exaggeration of them.
It worked until now.
Now, not only do you have a majority of the country against the way you're enforcing laws, but affordability has been revealed to not be because of legal entrance.
And you guys have a real problem heading into the midterm.
So unless you do something about health care costs, you're screwed, basically.
And Trump RX ain't it.
Agree or disagree?
I agree with some parts of it, disagree with others.
I mean, first of all, the Save Act, the majority of the country is in favor of that.
You know, across the board, even I think a majority of Democrats are in favor of it, but certainly African-American voters, Hispanics, Republicans, Independents think it's kind of common sense that you should have voter ID laws.
So is affordability a big issue?
Yes, it is a big issue.
Is Trump, you know, he's got some work to do.
Republicans do have some work to do on this issue.
So Trump is at 42.1% in our overall road clear politics average.
On the economy, he's at 40%.
On inflation, he's at 36%.
So to the extent that those continue to be issues that are of primary concern to voters, and most polls suggest that they are, I think the administration and the Republican Party has some work to do.
Do I think Trump RX is an answer?
It could be.
I think the saving accounts could be.
My take on the economy, as far as Trump is concerned, is that he's got a story to tell.
There are plenty of good numbers when you talk about the Dow and all that.
The problem that he has is a perception problem because people think the economy sucks, even though there are aspects of the economy that are really good.
But when Trump goes out there and says this is the best economy in the world and voters don't think that, then he looks like he's gaslighting and there is this discrepancy between what their perception is and what Trump is telling them the reality is.
And so that's really an issue for him to go out and prove to the American people that he is focused on this issue.
It's more of an almost an empathy type question to say, instead of saying affordability is a hoax or instead of focusing on taking over Greenland, for example, which occupied like seven days of the media landscape and all the oxygen, right?
For him to be doing these events, if you remember back to his first term, he was doing events at the White House with like truckers and welders and, you know, he had CEOs.
He had everybody in there.
It was all about the economy.
And he's not doing that kind of thing yet.
He'll do an event.
He did one speech on the economy at the end of last year in Detroit.
And that kind of got overshadowed by the fact that he flipped some guy off and had this thing with this factory floor worker.
He did another event recently in Iowa, which was supposed to be focused all on the economy, and then went out like two hours afterwards and tweeted that he's got the fleet steaming toward Iran.
And that became the headline.
They've got to do a better job, in my opinion.
The administration has to do a better job of having events and focusing on the economy and then sort of letting the you know staying out of their own way so that the people, the perception out there changes on how the economy is doing.
Yeah, Tom, that's what I find myself thinking and asking on the affordability issue, on the economy issue.
I, I, there's sometimes people have this debate: are we in a vibe session where the idea is people have gotten used to the idea that they just say affordability is their go-to acceptable expression for things just don't always feel awesome.
And I guess the part that goes with that is: does Trump doing events meaningfully help on this question?
How do you actually imprint the idea, oh, actually, the economy is doing well, or at least this administration is improving things?
I guess I don't see the obvious link between him doing an event at the White House and better poll numbers necessarily.
It's more of a question is, you know, he's also trailing on this question when pollsters ask: does the president care about people like me?
Right?
Does he have, is he focused on my concerns?
And that, that's more than anything.
It's like, it's not about the policy in particular.
Like these Trump savings accounts, right?
Is that going to have any short-term impact on the midterms?
Is that really going to change people?
No.
But it was an event where I think, you know, the focus was on, hey, this is how we help the younger generation, the next generation, actually, you know, invest and save and get ahead of the game.
I mean, he's fighting the problem that he's fighting right now is, you know, he can say, well, inflation's down.
Okay, it's down, but we just went through five years where we had, you know, mid to high single digit inflation, which compounded.
And so people, you know, things are 30 or 40% more than they used to be.
And we're talking about healthcare and, you know, college tuition and groceries and all those things.
And while Trump can point in the sort of short term, well, you know, the price of eggs are down, people are still not feeling, that's why they feel the economy sucks is because they've been battered for four or five years with inflation that has eroded their buying power.
And so I think one of the things that he needs to focus on from a policy perspective that would help him is to tell people and impress upon people that wages are rising faster than inflation.
It is all about wages.
If inflation's at 2% or 4%, but wages are growing at 4% or 8%, people are going to feel like they are getting some buying power back.
They are doing better in this economy.
And his policies have helped wage growth.
And so I think that's another area.
But again, it comes down to people looking at their TV screens and, oh, Trump's talking about the price of this or the price of that.
Trump is focused on the economy.
He's focused on the things that I care about, that we care about and my family and that we're talking about on the kitchen table.
He's not off, you know, focused on stuff going on overseas or Venezuela or even building a new wing on the White House.
I mean, those kind of things are just, they're catnipped for the media and they help shift the issue away from where I think the public wants it to be and where Trump needs it to be.
Tom, so I'm struggling, especially on this economic question here.
So throw up 456.
This is a question asked: are you better off today than you were four years ago?
48% say yes, 44% say no.
But that yes number is about 20 points, 20, 25 points higher than it was in November, I believe, of 2024.
So it's going in the right direction.
There's another image here, 502.
This is from Marquette.
It says family financial situation, living comfortably is at 40%, just getting by 45%, but that's up nine points from November of 2025.
So you see, it's almost like you're getting two sets of data.
It's like if you ask the question one way, people are positive.
If you ask it another way, it's almost like the Biden-year hangover and maybe this cognitive dissonance with what Trump is saying, they just can't get, they can't connect with it.
But what's true here?
Because I'm seeing positives, I'm seeing negatives.
Yeah, and this is, you know, people can make the data say sort of whatever it wants.
You could find this stuff.
I think the economy is getting better.
I think people are feeling a little bit better about the way things are going.
But Trump has about, you know, the Republicans have until about June.
And basically, by that point, if anything that happens after that won't accrue to their benefit probably in the midterms.
The other thing about these polls too, Andrew, is, you know, you really do need to go in and look at the sort of partisan splits here because, you know, there's this question, if you go back and look, how's the economy doing?
Well, when Joe Biden was in office, you know, Democrats, 75% of Democrats said the economy was great and 5% of Republicans said it was great.
You know, Republicans thought the economy sucked.
And the minute Trump gets into office, that number flips, right?
It's just a partisan sort of lizard brain thing.
And so Democrats are, even if they feel the economy is getting better, they're certainly not giving Trump or the Republicans credit for it.
And Republicans probably feel the economy is pretty good and they like and support Trump.
But focus on independence.
Like they're the ones, and again, it's a 15 or 20% part of the electorate, but they're the ones who truly do move back and forth based on what they see in their daily lives.
And they're going to be an important part of the midterms in November as well.
Tom Bevin, co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics.
Again, so great to see you last night and to be a part of that great event.
Thanks for having me and for honoring Charlie.
So God bless you guys.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
By the way, I check your homepage every day.
Every day.
Love it.
Because if I need to see what the left is thinking, you put it all there for me right there.
And even if I hate it, you guys put it up.
So it's a really powerful resource.
Tom Bevin, thank you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Protecting What Matters00:09:05
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Blake, you called this the Millennial 9-11.
You said it in jest, but it was funny because, but it is a sad story.
And I wanted to get to it because James Vander Beek left us with some really, really good clips.
He was a father of six children, so he leaves behind a wife and six children.
I think his GoFundMe to support his family is over a million dollars.
I encourage people to please support that because six children, that's a lot of mouths to feed.
Beautiful, beautiful family.
He had some great, just some really, really amazing clips.
He lost his battle with cancer.
He was so young, just in his 40s, which just blows me away.
Let's go ahead and play Cup 430.
Before cancer, God was something I tried to fit into my life as much as possible.
After cancer, I feel like a connection to God, whatever that is, is kind of the whole point of this exercise on this planet.
So beautifully said.
485 this was his final message was faced with the question if i am just a a too skinny weak guy alone in an apartment with cancer what am i and i meditated and the answer came through i I am worthy of God's love.
Simply because I exist.
And if I'm worthy of God's love, shouldn't I also be worthy of my own?
And the same is true for you.
You know, I want to flag, by the way, because I think this would interest some of our people.
So this might surprise you.
He was an actor.
We associate them with being spectacularly wealthy, but a lot of them are not as much as you might think.
And so they actually, unfortunately, his battle with cancer did exhaust the family's funds, we're told.
So they do have a GoFundMe for that family, for his wife, his six children.
It has already raised $1.6 million, which is very generous.
But if you feel inclined to support them, you can find that on GoFundMe.
I just wanted to shout that out there.
Yeah, it's remarkable.
There aren't enough people like him in Hollywood or in show business generally, but it is good to be reminded that those people do exist.
Yeah, he was a he was a just seems like a genuine guy.
Yeah, it's at 1.593 million.
And it seems like just a really nice guy.
And yeah, if you're a millennial, what was it?
I'm going to get the Dawson's Creek and then what was the other one?
Friday Night Lights?
Was it something like that?
Varsity Blues.
Thank you.
There was those two dueling high school football pieces of content.
Blake's version of himself in Don't Trust the Bee in Apartment 23.
I have not watched any of these programs, but a lot of people greatly did enjoy them.
Yeah, there's his GoFundMe.
And you know what?
Please support him.
God bless him.
Six kids.
It's just tragic.
I feel terrible for all those kids without their father.
So Blake, you got some emails for us.
Yeah, well, we got a great deal.
We got a very big response, obviously, to the video from that disturbed man, the disturbed shooter in Canada.
More, I'd say five or six people send us the identical take that that man, they believe, was demon-possessed in some way.
He certainly gave off that vibe.
And it's very understandable, you know, whether he literally was or not, why that's a useful way to look at it.
That when you allow certain mind viruses, certain brainworms into yourself, and if you indulge them endlessly, that can really take over you as a person.
That's why addiction is so dangerous.
It's why Charlie would talk about this, why he would try to listen to music that elevates the spirit, holy music, why you avoid certain things, because we are so heavily influenced by what we choose to marinate in and what we choose to be around.
It's why the friends you have matter.
You become like what you are around all of the time.
And if you're around poisons all the time, those take you over and they destroy what was once a full person.
You just become a parody of yourself.
We have a lot of responses on marijuana.
We got another email, I believe she'd contacted us before from one.
I don't want to say the name, but she has a brother who he's basically been in and out of homelessness due to marijuana use that shattered his mental health.
And we have another one, Gary, who says, these are all legal because people are making money off of it.
And I think Alex definitely drove that home for us.
Yeah, we got one from Clarence saying, be honest, and I'm not trying to be stupid here, but marijuana kept me from drinking because I knew what drinking was about and it wasn't good for me.
I would say to you, Clarence, that just because it kept you up drinking, being, you know, smoking a lot of pots, probably not good for you either.
Right?
In the scriptures, it says that you will be mastered by nothing, no addiction.
And so everybody struggles with what they struggle with, but that's the goal.
That's the North Star.
So just something to keep in mind.
I would say the numbers reflect, if you look at it, when you are hooked on one thing, the pattern is that it makes it easier for you to be hooked on other things, which is one reason making marijuana so widely available was such a mistake.
Like for the people at the bottom of society, it was like throwing one more problem onto another.
So it's not that we have 20 million people who use weed and then 20 million people who drink too much and then another 20 million who gamble too much.
It's often the same people doing all these things.
They do too much weed and they drink and they gamble away their money and they're hooked on, they play too many video games and they also are abusing prescription drugs.
And that's one reason the health of a lot of the American underclass is just totally disintegrated.
They're dying of the business.
Which we pay for in taxes.
Yeah, and they're dying of 10 different addictions.
And it'd be bad enough.
It would be bad enough if we just had people with drinking problems, for example.
But if you have a drinking problem and you're abusing your pills and you're taking a bunch of weed, it's very bad for you.
And we have to conquer these one at a time.
But the easiest way to not fall into this trap is to just make sure you never set down that path in the first place.
And that's why Charlie was such a great example.
Well, you know what's interesting, though, just looking at our emails, there's a lot of you that are a little skeptical about our weed take still.
It's interesting.
Gary says, will cigarettes and alcohol kill you?
Yes.
Cannabis does not.
This guy is a useful idiot.
So that's interesting.
Donald says, hey, folks, love you.
The three things listed above are legal.
Marijuana, alcohol, tobacco.
Use at your own risk.
They are all bad for you and they are only legal because they make someone money.
Drinking is bad, SIGs are bad, marijuana is bad, all legal.
Blake, final few moments here to you.
What do you say about the libertarian argument of the conservative movement?
You know, I understand the appeal, but we have to recognize like no one is an island.
None of us is, you know, homo economicus, like, you know, this pure Randian superhero against the world.
It's like I said, we're all shaped by what's around us.
And also, we are defined not just, as Charlie would say, we're not just defined by our independence.
We're defined by our burdens, our obligations, our duties.
We should seek out duties.
That's why Charlie would advocate marriage, children.
You become a stronger person when you actually have responsibilities and duties to fulfill.
And all these addictions we push everywhere, they are encouraging people to abdicate their duties towards others, which are part of what make us fully human beings.