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Oct. 27, 2023 - Epoch Times
36:50
The Dark Side of California's Legalization of Marijuana | Heidi Swan
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My guest today is Heidi Swan.
She's an author and advocate.
She's here to talk to us about why the state needs to have more transparency on legalized cannabis.
I'm Siamak Karami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Heidi, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Siamak.
We want to talk to you about an important topic that hasn't been really discussed.
You know, when we talk about homelessness and we always think...
Some people have come on the show and told us there's a lot of drug addictions and mental illness.
You have personal stories and you've been studying this for many years.
One part that's completely ignored or haven't really talked about is the marijuana side of things.
Can you tell us what you've discovered?
Well, we've had marijuana that's been legal in our state and that's been federally legal since the 1980s.
You can get a prescription from your doctor if you have cancer and we legalized that in the 80s and then also in the 1990s for people with AIDS. It's THC and THC is the ingredient that gets people high.
It's what people love about marijuana.
And so the FDA studied it and there's a package insert And the amount that a person can get is 2.5 milligrams, 5 milligrams, 10 milligrams, but no more than 30 milligrams in a day.
And in the package insert that you get from your pharmacist, it warns about things like paranoia and hallucinations.
And nausea.
And this is very low dose THC. And so back in the 90s, our legal THC was, I'm sorry, I'm repeating myself there, but the drug that was available in the 1990s, the illegal marijuana that people would get, was like about 5% THC. But today it's gone up to 99%.
99%.
Does it have to do anything with the legalization with Prop 64?
Oh, it's 100% about legalization because these products that are so much stronger were really not in existence before big business got involved.
And so the stronger the psychoactive product is, the more addictive it is.
And then the more you have customers needing to use it, and so they come back again and again.
And this is most especially the case when you have a teenager or a brain under the age of 25.
They're most susceptible to marijuana addiction or addiction of any kind.
So they need to addict a young brain to guarantee a customer for life.
Up to 99% THC? Yes, and that's totally legal.
In our state, and the industry has fought any kind of a potency cap on this, and so they can make pretty much whatever they want at whatever potency and call it medicine, and people can legally purchase it.
And so when the FDA says that it's safe to have up to 30 milligrams a day, the legal marijuana market in California will allow a user, a medical marijuana patient, to get 2,000 times that dose.
Wow.
Every day.
Every day.
And so, what do we think happens with that excess product?
Nobody could use that much in a day.
And so, where does it go?
This is one way that completely legal marijuana is making its way into the illicit market.
And then, if you think about an 18-year-old can get a medical marijuana card without their parents' permission, And so this is oftentimes a high school student can say, oh, I have a headache and I want to get a medical marijuana card or I have a backache from a sports injury and they can get a medical card and they can get as much as they want and then they can resell the extra product that they have out of their locker at school.
So the medical one is allowing up to that much, right?
So these dispensaries that are out there, how do they work?
Can you just go in and buy it without really having a medical card?
If you're 21 and up, you can go in and you can buy marijuana, and then there's a limit to how much you can get.
But if you have a medical card, You can be 18.
With parent permission, you can be younger than 18.
And then you can get pretty much as much as you want, because that's what it says.
The law says that they can get eight ounces of marijuana every day, or if the doctor recommends more, they can get more.
And so that is far more than the FDA says is safe to use.
And remember, this causes hallucinations and paranoia, and that's as per the FDA. And a lot of people refuse to acknowledge that.
So you have had your own personal experience with this, but before we go into that, with your family members, before we go into that, do most people know that, because most of the parents and people that voted for this proposition, Proposition 64, did they think that marijuana that is legalized is gonna be very different from the one that it was supposedly natural and it had some health benefits?
Right.
Well, so I think it does have health benefits, and like I mentioned, you know, our FDA approved it, and I used to volunteer for people with AIDS back in the 90s, and so I would see people getting medical marijuana at the dose that the doctor said was safe, and I would see that they were being helped by this.
And so when Prop 64 came around, and I was actually writing a book about the mental health harms of marijuana, And there were all these promises that were made with Prop 64, and I was like, well, it makes so much sense.
If people are going to use it anyway, let's go ahead and legalize it and regulate it and get rid of the black market.
It all just sounded so common sense.
And I thought that they were talking about the marijuana that I used back in the 1980s, you know, like 3 or 4 or 5 percent THC. I had no idea.
How marijuana has changed.
And the vast majority of people that I've spoken to don't have any idea now.
And so when I try to tell them, they oftentimes think that I'm exaggerating or I have ulterior motives for doing so.
But no, it's true.
The potency of marijuana in the plant, what you would call The natural plant has been genetically engineered so that it's four times stronger than what it was in the 1990s.
Now that's the green crackly stuff that most of us think of when we think of legal marijuana.
But then there are the high potency products.
They're called dabs, wax, shatter.
It's what the kids are vaping.
And we've all heard about vaping.
And so these are really high potency products and they range So if the 1990s was like 5% THC, the concentrates, what they're vaping, dabbing, is like 50 to 100% THC. And they're so deceptive because they have fruity flavors.
They smell like bubble gum.
And they're really easy to conceal.
And kids are vaping them at school.
On a regular basis in the classroom because they don't have an odor.
They're doing it in the restrooms and this is harming them.
And this is why I speak out because these high potency products are especially, especially damaging to a developing brain.
And our Surgeon General actually warned about this in 2019.
And he issued the first warning on marijuana in 30 years.
This is Dr.
Jerome Adams, our former Surgeon General, and he said these new high-potency products are increasing the risk for psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and they increase the risk to suicide by five times.
And developing brains are more at risk than adult brains.
And here we are.
These kids are being marketed to.
Some of these kids don't even know what it's like to live without marijuana being marketed to them on their phones, on billboards.
And nobody is telling them that there are risks to it.
Now, it doesn't happen to everyone.
Not everyone will get a mental illness from their use of marijuana, but some of them will.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
So we have legalized it here in California.
I don't hear much.
Is the state of California doing anything about it?
No, they are not.
And this is one of the other reasons that I reached out to you and I'm so grateful to you for letting me come in and speak to you.
I volunteered to work on a bill last year called SB 1097.
And it was to add mental health risks to warning labels on THC products.
THC products are carcinogen, excuse me.
And that's known.
And it also causes birth defects.
That's known also.
And those are on the warning labels.
But they say nothing about the mental health problems.
And so I volunteered with that bill and I was the go-between between the victims and Dr.
Lynn Silver who is a pediatrician and from the Public Health Initiative and my job was to tell The victims, okay, need to get ready to testify for the bill in this committee or send your emails to this committee.
You know, I was doing that.
So I am very familiar with the stories of the people who are victims.
And when I say victims, I'm not talking about the users themselves.
I'm talking about the families.
Who are surviving from these kids because a lot of the victims are victims of suicide because, like our Surgeon General said, it increases the risk for suicide by five times.
Some of them, their child is homeless.
Now and they can't they can't function at all and it all started with their use of marijuana that made them completely psychotic and and then one of them I'll I'll speak to specifically I remember in your interview with Zach who is the wonderful yes and he says and when he talks about the homeless he was so such a kind person and he said you've got to look to the heart what is the reason We're
in California and sharing their family stories, these are good families.
These are educated families.
These are families that went to church, that provided everything for their kids.
These aren't the sad stories that Zach was talking about, but these are the parents of children who believed the promises of the industry.
It's healthy.
It's a wellness product.
It's good for you.
And so they used it.
So my friend Lori Robinson from Ventura County, she started an organization called MomStrong, and it was one of the first websites to speak about the mental health harms of marijuana because her son, who was in his 20s, he had...
Some kind of a sports injury, and he hurt his knee.
And he couldn't deal with opioids.
They were making him sick.
And so he went on to medical marijuana.
And in a short amount of time, he became psychotic.
And this is a young man who was married.
He had a job.
He had a great family.
Everything was going well.
So he wasn't using marijuana because he wanted to escape his troubles.
He was using it.
To deal with his pain and he believed that it was safer than pharmaceuticals.
So one night he became completely psychotic and his parents were called and they were driving him to a psychiatric hospital and they were driving on the 101 freeway going 60 miles an hour.
And their 24-year-old son was looking out the window going, look at these buildings!
They're being bombed!
They're bombed!
I've got to get out!
I've got to save Barack Obama!
And he tried to jump out of the car when it was going 60 miles an hour.
So this is what psychosis looks like when somebody completely loses touch with reality.
And then when you think of the FDA, and they provided warnings about paranoia and hallucinations at 10 milligrams of THC, and yet people have access to 50, 60, 70, 80 milligrams of THC, it's not hard to see how this could happen.
So now, the state didn't even want to have the warning label?
I mean, that's such a small thing, right?
Like, to just have a warning label on a product.
Yeah.
Yeah, it made it, it went almost all the way through the whole legislature.
So everybody, everybody in the Senate heard, almost everybody in the Assembly heard.
And then by the time it was almost at the finish line, the industry pressured so hard and the bill was so watered down and they took out all the mental health warnings out of it.
So it was just pointless to have the bill at all.
And so the bill was pulled.
It seems like Prop 64, we've had people here on the show to explain to us what illegal growers are doing.
It seems like the illegal growers, the business boomed after Prop 64.
Did you vote for Prop 64?
Yes, I did.
I did.
I believed all the promises that they were making, that they would get rid of the illegal market, that these would be safe and regulated, and they keep it away from kids, and none of these things have happened.
And the products that they're selling on the market, I didn't vote for.
I didn't vote for these potency products that are like 99% THC. I didn't vote for candies and cookies that would be marketed towards kids.
I didn't vote for fruity vapes.
No.
I thought that I was voting for the low-potency THC marijuana, like 3% marijuana, that people with cancer and people with AIDS would want to use.
People with cancer who want to treat their nausea, because this is not a treatment for cancer.
Let me just be clear about that.
But people use it for nausea.
And so that's what I thought I was voting for.
This feels like a bait-and-switch, what we have now, these products.
They don't even look like marijuana.
So for people to say, oh, you voted for it, I didn't vote for that.
So you think most Californians that voted for this, they didn't really know what they were voting for?
Yeah, I think it was a lack of imagination that the industry knew about, and they were ready for this.
And they just said, okay, you voted for it, and now, you know, and there were no controls on potency or products or anything.
And so they're allowed to make really high, high potency addictive products.
That are not natural in any way.
And even if they were natural, they should still be telling people what the risks are with the low-potency products.
So when I had psychosis, that was very low, low-potency THC. And so I can only imagine someone with my genetic Vulnerability to THC taking a hit off of a fruity vape at a party.
What would have happened to me?
I would be one of those people in the emergency room.
I have no doubt about that.
And so I am passionate about protecting our youth, about telling them the truth.
About not leaving out this very important side effect.
Again, it doesn't happen to everyone, but it only needs to happen to a few people to make a huge difference.
I mean, what's the percentage of people who are allergic to peanuts?
It's like less than 3%.
Yet we all know what has nuts in it.
And here we have this product that's being marketed as a wellness product, as a health product, and we're not telling people that it can make some people very, very sick.
And a long-term mental illness, It's not only cruel to other human beings, but it's harming California.
And one of the ways is that it makes some people, like I described my friend Lori, her son, who was trying to jump out of the car because he was convinced he had to save Barack Obama.
But there are several mass shooters who are marijuana users.
There is one from Ventura, California.
His name was Ian David Long.
And he served our country and he was well decorated and he used marijuana to deal with his PTSD. And he went on to the Borderline Bar and Grill and he killed 12 people.
Now, the data shows that THC use may provide temporary relief for people with PTSD, but in the long term, it can worsen symptoms.
Now, his toxicology report came out two years after the shooting and when he was murdered, or when he was killed, and it showed that he had coffee, nicotine, and THC in his system, and that's it.
Now, had he known that there were long-term problems with marijuana use, maybe he wouldn't have chosen to use it to treat his PTSD. Additionally, there was another young woman also in Thousand Oaks, and she was on a date with a guy who was a regular marijuana user, and she didn't use hardly at all.
And so they decided that they would get high and he got her really high and all of a sudden she started hallucinating and she thought that she was dead and there were voices telling her that she had to, the only way that she could survive is if she fought for herself.
And so she grabbed some knives and she stabbed her date to death.
And then she started stabbing her dog.
And then the voices told her she had to stab herself.
And she was stabbing herself when the police came in and stopped the whole thing.
And the only drug in her system was marijuana.
Now, if she knew, if there was some kind of a warning somewhere that marijuana can cause hallucinations and paranoia in some people, maybe she would have said, you know what, maybe I don't really want to try it.
So it's causing violence in other people.
There was a gentleman, 24 years old, flying from Seattle to China.
And he'd flown like 150 times in his life because his mother worked for the airlines.
And so he decided, I'm going to buy some THC because I want to sleep on the plane.
And he bought some gummies.
And while they were in the air, he started hallucinating and he became really aggressive and paranoid and he punched the stewardess and he punched other people.
And he said that he was completely psychotic and that this was not him at all.
Never happened to him before, never happened to him since.
And he said, but what did I do wrong?
I thought it was legal here in Washington state.
And he was right.
And did they have any warnings about it?
I mean, maybe if he knew that it could make people aggressive and violent and paranoid and delusional, maybe he wouldn't have tried it.
Maybe he wouldn't have taken it before he got on the plane.
And so we've had over in the dozens of reportings of FAA incidents of marijuana users on our planes.
And we have got to be honest with people about what can happen.
And they talk about unruly passengers.
We need to test.
We need to test them for what is in their system.
And usually what you hear is, we're not allowing people to drink before they get on the flight or have any alcohol while they're on the flight.
But what about other drugs?
We should be testing for everything.
We should have mandatory toxicology reports on all violent crime.
From unruly passengers on an airplane, from mass shootings, to car crashes, to suicides, to murders.
We should have a full toxicology panel and make it public immediately so that the public understands what these drugs are doing to people's brains.
And, you know, we have mass shootings and people say we're looking for a motive.
What if part of the motive was they're delusional from their use of drugs?
They're hallucinating because of their use of drugs.
That should be included as a motive, and THC has got to be included on that list, because to not talk about it is to endanger the rest of the people in California, because then people think that it's safe, and then people think it's okay to use it.
It's not a dangerous drug, and that is absolutely not the case for some people.
It is very dangerous for some people, and I'm one of them.
Heidi, you have your own personal story.
Can you tell us how did you get involved with this?
Having volunteered for that bill and seeing that our legislature did not pass it, they're not protecting kids, I recently spoke for a group of high school and college kids from LA County.
And I showed them the warning labels from the FDA, what our Surgeon General said, from Colorado, Connecticut, from Canada, and then also about the Psychosis Clinic in the United Kingdom, Cannabis Psychosis Clinic.
There's also the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, and they have cannabisandpsychosis.ca.
That's like a government site.
Okay, so they acknowledge what's going on.
And so I told these kids...
And I said, and where's your protection here in California?
And they said, it makes them feel like people don't care about them as human beings, that our policy makers don't care about them, that they wouldn't even warn them.
And then they said that at their schools, that some of them are getting federal funding and the administrators and the professors or teachers are saying, we're afraid of losing federal funding, so we're just not going to say anything at all.
And to that I say, they should lose federal funding if they don't say anything.
Because this is how dire it is to a developing brain.
This is how, and they're being marketed to and nobody is telling them about the risks.
When I was a teenager, I grew up in Washington State and marijuana was Just everywhere and nobody really thought anything about it.
We didn't know if it was good, if it was bad, whatever.
And so one time I was getting high with a friend and all of a sudden I had an experience where I didn't know where I was.
And I didn't know who I was with.
And it was so scary.
And then I'd remember.
And then I'd forget.
And then I'd remember.
And then I'd forget.
And it was just back and forth like this for quite some time.
And I was in the laundry room of my family home with my best friend.
Oh, wow.
And I didn't know where I was.
It was so scary.
And it wasn't until just a few years ago that I found out there's a name for it, and that's called cannabis-induced psychosis.
That's where a person loses touch with reality from their use of marijuana.
Now, my friend was fine, but I was not.
And that really illustrates how it is with marijuana.
Some people can use it, and they can be perfectly fine.
But there are some of us who cannot, and we cannot even have a small amount.
And for us, for me and my brother, we're genetically predisposed to serious mental illness.
And so anyone who has mental illness in their family should stay away from marijuana because it can trigger a psychotic experience that would not have happened otherwise.
So that's what happened to me.
It never happened before and it never happened again.
I didn't like it at all, so I stayed away from marijuana.
But my brother, he liked that feeling.
He liked it a lot.
He said it was like being in the funhouse.
And so he did it pretty much every day through Middle school, high school, college, graduate school, and he was fully addicted.
And this is low, low potency in marijuana.
And then when he got out of graduate school, that's when things really started to show.
He wasn't just an addict.
He wasn't able to, his brain wasn't working so well, he wasn't able to pass his exams, and then he was introduced to cocaine, and he thought, oh well, everything went so well with marijuana, why not try cocaine?
And then he was introduced to crack.
And then he loved crack and all of a sudden he was homeless and addicted, living on the streets.
And he was suffering delusions.
He thought that the CIA was following him.
He thought he was John the Baptist.
And he didn't want help from anybody.
But he had gotten in trouble so many times with the law.
He was in jail 18 times.
And finally it got to three strikes and you're out.
And so he did not want to go to prison.
That was no, no.
So he chose treatment.
And so he is a really good example of someone who was forced into getting treatment even though he didn't really want to.
He would have continued to live what he calls the party life.
And I don't know how anyone can describe living outside In the streets of Seattle, Washington, has the party life.
What a horrible, horrible experience.
But he wanted to stay that way.
And so I'm really grateful that he was forced into treatment because it saved him.
Now, Heidi, why do you keep talking about this?
It seems like there is a challenge that you guys are facing.
The state is not paying enough attention to it.
Yeah.
Why are you being vocal, despite the challenges you're facing?
Well, because like I described with the youth, they don't know.
They've never heard this before.
And this is something that I hear often, is that I'm the first person they've heard say this.
And that's just wrong.
I mean, we've known about the mental health harms of marijuana since the 1980s, since the 1990s with that FDA packet.
And so it should be out on the billboards.
By the way, this can cause anxiety, depression, increase your risk for suicide, cause hallucinations, and paranoia.
Now, paranoia is one of the side effects that people readily understand.
They say, oh no, I get paranoid on pot.
But what people don't understand is that paranoia is often times one of the first symptoms of psychosis and so if a person feels paranoid on pot that's an indication that your brain is sensitive to it and you need to stop immediately.
Now there is a large marijuana company And I looked at their website and on their frequently asked questions page, there was a question that said, I sometimes get paranoid.
Am I doing something wrong?
And the official answer from the company was, maybe you chose the wrong string.
What you should do is go back to a pot shop and talk to one of our bud tenders and they'll find a different product for you to use.
And I think that is just so cruel, to tell someone who is suffering from paranoia, someone who, if they continue to use, because if you continue to have psychotic experiences on marijuana, like paranoia, because paranoia, if you think about it, somebody is convinced something is happening when it isn't.
And so you can see how that could lead to a complete disconnect from reality.
So if a person is feeling paranoid...
So it seems like the state has legalized these products and we have now, we have a very high potency that's kind of Past the natural zone by multiples.
The state didn't want to have, the leaders didn't want to have the label, the warning label, which seems like a very small thing.
How do you keep going if we couldn't even get this passed?
I don't have a choice.
I mean, it's just in my heart.
I can't bear the thought of seeing someone wind up with a mental illness like my brother or to have other people be victimized like my friends who testified for the bill.
Many people think that it's their medicine and they don't know that there are any side effects at all because no one is telling them.
And it's just so cruel.
And not only is it cruel to the individuals, but it's harming the rest of California.
Because if we have people using a substance that they think is safe, but increases their risk for schizophrenia, what's going to happen to our homeless population?
It's just going to keep growing.
And if we don't understand what marijuana is doing to the mental health of our residents, what's going to happen?
We've got magic mushrooms.
They're talking about legalizing that now.
And so our mental health problems are just going to get worse in our state.
And it's just, it's too painful for me to see.
And I don't want to see anyone become mentally ill like my brother.
I mean, thank heavens.
I'm so grateful to say that he is sober today.
But he will never work.
He will never drive a car.
He will never have a family.
And we are paying for him as taxpayers because he's mentally disabled.
And could this disability been avoided by not using marijuana, by not using the one substance that converts the most often to schizophrenia?
So there's a few substances that can cause hallucinations and other psychosis, and that's marijuana, methamphetamine, the hallucinogens, but marijuana converts to schizophrenia at the highest rate, at 47%.
And so we've got to do everything we can to prevent mental illness in our state, if we can.
And we can prevent some mental illness by preventing schizophrenia.
Any substance-induced psychosis we can prevent by telling people that there are some substances that can damage your brain and can damage your mental health in the short term and in the long term.
And we have to be honest with them about that so that they can make their own decisions.
Now, in terms of the things that the state leaders can do, it seems like this bill came along and they got pressured from the industry and this industry too, the people that got into this industry to build a business.
What can they do together so that we can avoid some of this damage that you're mentioning is happening?
Well, there's a new bill in the Senate, SB 540, I believe, and this is to put warning labels on THC products.
And this one is industry-led.
And it has nothing about mental health risks on it.
Absolutely nothing.
And so that bill should not go through.
Because if a bill comes through that leaves the mental health warnings off, it'll be a long time before we'll get any adjustments to a warning label at all.
Additionally, we have a bill, AB 1207, and this is one to put protections on the THC candies that we've seen because we've had children, toddlers eating these candies that are psychoactive THC candies,
and we've also had seniors going to emergency rooms because of overdosing on marijuana products, having hallucinations and paranoia and vomiting, and the emergency room visits went up Over 900% in California since legalization, and so California is paying for this.
Just many people don't attribute what they see to marijuana, or they go, oh, it's just marijuana, and it's not a big deal.
Mental health is a very big deal.
It's a very expensive deal.
Addiction is a big problem, and yes, THC is addictive, especially at the high-potency products.
Now, Heidi, do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
Yes, so one of the first symptoms of marijuana, one of the things that people should be aware of is that some people get paranoid on pot.
And paranoia, a lot of people don't understand, is one of the first symptoms of psychosis.
And if a person continues to use marijuana when they have things like psychosis, then they are more at risk for getting schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Both of those are long-term mental illnesses.
And so everybody needs to know that if you ever hear anybody having a paranoid reaction, tell that person to stop immediately.
And there was one marijuana company who had on their website something about paranoia where in their frequently asked questions, a customer said, I sometimes feel paranoid on pot.
Am I doing something wrong?
And their official answer was, well, you don't know where you got the marijuana.
You don't know what the potency was.
And maybe what you should do is just go back to our pot shop and you can talk to a bud tender and they'll find the pot that's right for you.
And that is 100% the wrong answer.
The right answer is stop using immediately.
And I think that this should be something that everybody should be aware of.
Paranoia is an indication to stay away from marijuana.
Heidi Swan, author and advocate for mental health in California.
It was great to have you.
Thank you, Siamak.
Thank you so much.
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