Dr. Carl Hart debunks myths like crack babies and instant heroin addiction, exposing 1986’s racially biased crack law (backed by 17/21 Congressional Black Caucus members) as propaganda masking systemic failures. He argues Schedule I classifications (e.g., heroin over morphine) are politically driven, not scientific, and severe alcohol withdrawal—unlike crack—can be fatal due to brain suppression. Rogan compares the drug war’s inefficiency to state-sanctioned slavery, with police resources wasted on raids instead of education, while Hart advocates for decriminalization and data-driven policy over fear-mongering, like Rush Limbaugh’s hypocrisy or "just say no" campaigns. Public pressure and evidence, not ideology, must reshape laws. [Automatically generated summary]
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Alright, Dr. Carl Hart is here.
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I've seen a bunch of your videos and read some of the interviews.
And I think it's incredibly important to have a guy like you out there.
It's incredibly important for a bunch of reasons.
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.
That's one of the coolest things about this whole Twitter, social media thing, is that I get to find out about people like you, and I get to be introduced by all these Twitter people that want to get us together.
Well, 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, 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 I thought that was really fascinating.
And one of the things was that you did a John Stossel interview where you were talking about how many people use meth and coke and don't fucking ruin their lives.
Yeah, you know, that's one of the biggest myths is that people think that 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 bills, handling their responsibilities.
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 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.
So it seems to me like 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 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 wrote my book recently, High Price, and that's one of the things I tried to...
Well, I told this story.
It's a memoir and a science book.
So I told the memoir portion...
Which is deeply personal, and it's not something that I'm so comfortable doing.
But I had to do that in order to kind of contextualize the whole drug war and what it all means.
And also, the science portion is there so people can understand what 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.
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 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, they have less drug use than we do in this country.
When you look at drug-related overdose death, they have less than we do in this country.
When you have 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 another direction 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...
Peddling for a number of years, but real drug education.
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 of experience of giving drugs to animals and humans in a lab and carefully trying to understand the effect of drugs.
That's one reason.
A number of people just simply don't know.
Another reason is that people, scientists, for example, are a 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 don't want to appear to be wrong.
And so, I mean, I respect that at some level.
And so I think 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.
So I was in, I tell this story in the book, and so I was in the Air Force back in the 80s, like you mentioned about crack cocaine.
So I was in the Air Force over in England, 86, 87, 88, 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 so things that were happening in my community that were not good, high unemployment, crime, all of these kinds of things, I blamed 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 to study drugs on the brains of animals and to try to figure out the neurobiological mechanisms that were responsible for addiction.
You might recall Richard Pryor back in the days when he burnt himself with smoking.
So he was freebasing.
So he was removing that hydrochloride portion of the salt off of the cocaine base so he could actually smoke it.
Now, he was using ether, which is highly flammable.
With crack cocaine, 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 needed and it's not as dangerous.
So that's one of the reasons that we have crack cocaine as a result of that.
And it also, it made it so you could sell them 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 simple for people to buy it who didn't have the kind of expendable income that was required before the mid-1980s.
I want to talk more about this, but I should just clarify that Richard Pryor changed his story as he got older and actually said that he tried to kill himself.
He lit himself on fire, apparently.
I'm a huge Richard Pryor fan, and I know that that was originally what he had said, that he got burnt doing freebies, but I think he changed his story later.
I actually 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 stand-up comedians go.
Well, let me clarify, because on the one hand, so when crack hit the market, it was first sort of talked about December 1984 in the LA Times, the first time we heard of crack.
But it didn't become more widely known or available until maybe the 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, there are a number of things that people attribute to crack in terms of crime and all of 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, 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 my community, but it happened before crack cocaine was ever on the market.
It 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 the Jewish community when they came over, the Eastern European Jews, when they came over in the country, The early 1900s, 1800s, and so forth.
What you see is that you had a similar sort of phenomenon going on in those kind of communities.
What's his name?
Irvin Howell, 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 in black people later.
They were there long before crack cocaine was there, but crack cocaine became the scapegoat.
Well, there are multiple sort of factors and players involved.
So when we think about the politicians, for example, politicians, if crack cocaine is the problem, Never mind the fact that unemployment rate was out of control before crack cocaine hit the market.
Unemployment was out of control.
A number of things were already 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 in controlling these 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 crack cocaine is that when we think about the law that punishes or punish crack cocaine a hundred times more harshly than powder cocaine and the vast majority of people who got punished under these laws were black eighty eighty five percent 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 Congressional Black Caucus,
17 of the 21 members, voted for these laws, for these laws that punish crack cocaine 100 times more harshly.
But the point is that everyone bought into it.
Parents bought into it.
Because 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.
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.
So you have all of these sort of constituencies from society benefiting from the vilification or the scapegoating of crack cocaine.
All of those things 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.
I've talked to quite a few people about when it comes to issues like real complex issues like drug addiction and violence and poverty, is that once you feed it with any organism, whether 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 think education is probably more important to avoid future law enforcement.
I think the more education we have, the more nuanced our ability to raise children is, the more we understand 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 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 one wants to look at it like this, but it's a form of slavery.
Yeah, it's exactly what it is, and it doesn't seem like anybody's willing to address it.
No one's willing to change it.
There's that very famous speech where Eisenhower gets out of office, and as he's leaving, he addresses the nation, and he warns 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 can clue you into this.
Like, be aware of this thing.
This is the same with law enforcement.
It's the same with private prisons.
They become organisms.
They become individual things that are filled with people that are all working for the greater good of the great corporation.
And people need to understand the conflict of interest that these folks have.
And oftentimes when we have these types of discussions, one of the sort of impulses of the media or folks who have these discussions is that they want to invite law enforcement personnel.
It's like, what expertise do they have to talk about drugs, really?
I had a conversation today about actors with a friend, and we were talking about actors 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 an actor is.
They're really good at bullshitting.
Like, they pretend they're really sad because someone they know just died.
Nobody fucking died.
There's cameras all around you.
There's lights on you.
You're wearing makeup.
But you're so good at bullshitting that I'm willing to pay money to see you bullshit.
Yeah, you know, 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 given a drug in order so they can continue to perform even though they are hurt, that's my concern, that we run further risk of having people being injured.
But in terms of training and that sort of thing, I don't have so much of an issue with that whole issue of using performance-enhancing drugs, as long as we're doing it in a safe manner in which people understand what's happening.
So when we think about 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?
We think about wealthier people whose kids can have access to prep tests before taking the SAT, before taking the MCAT or some other exam, whereas less wealthy people Absolutely not.
When it comes to combat sports and athletics, though, obviously I have a vested interest 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, identical amount of experience in martial arts, and one guy's taking a drug and the other guy isn't.
Whatever the rules are now, we must adhere 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 person also should have access.
So what you're saying is you think that the rules should be based on scientific evidence of efficacy and of health benefits and risks and all that and have it laid out.
It enhances your body's ability to produce testosterone.
But it's legal.
I mean...
There is a bunch of stuff, like creatine.
Creatine's legal.
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.
So, like, kids who are trying to learn how to think critically, when people present them with things like drug-free, they should really question that sort of thing.
They should be taught that this is part of critical thinking.
Drug-free society just doesn't exist, so please don't feed me propaganda.
Because 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.
If I was pulling up in a Ferrari and I said that, maybe then they'd be like, hmm, I was driving a Volkswagen Corrado at the time.
It was shocking how mean people could be because of that.
We have, 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, a lot of people take it on a regular basis, you're going to encounter a bunch of know-it-alls, right?
It becomes a real problem when they're really smart about something else.
I had a conversation with Michio Kaku once, and we were talking about panspermia.
It was on the Opie and Anthony show.
We were talking about the concept of building blocks of life coming in from asteroids, and that might be where a lot of things came from.
And one of the things that we were discussing was psychedelic mushrooms, because Terence McKenna had this theory about psychedelic mushrooms coming, spores coming from another planet.
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 planets on Earth.
And I was asking him if he ever did mushrooms.
This is my sneaky way of asking Michio Kaku if he did mushrooms.
But he started going off about it, giving you brain damage and becoming addictive, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
It's so unfortunate 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 like a blind man describing a kaleidoscope.
And 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 building blocks of matter, and he's so smart, and he's so definitive with his definitions and descriptions of these things, but then he tells you something that you absolutely know to be incorrect, and you go, well, come on.
This is...
You're fucking awesome.
Why are 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 amazing and scientifically provable.
And a lot of really smart people don't ever want to admit that.
There's a lot of really smart people that are really smart about one thing, so you question them about things that they're not really smart about, where they don't really have as much information about, they'll bullshit sometimes.
Yeah, you know, on the one hand, it's like we should be allowed the latitude 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.
And so it's a two-way street.
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 something really fascinating or good.
And so they should be able to make a mistake, but they have to also be able to say, I screwed up.
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.
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 certainly right when it comes to, like, you can learn, you can change your opinion.
I certainly learned in my life, and even I've recently changed my opinions on things, but I think they're just concerned with bullshit politicians that are just completely playing the breeze.
So you have that issue where people are, like you said, they are 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.
No, I get that.
But then there are politicians, too, who actually learn new information to change their mind.
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 area.
I think 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 on 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 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.
If 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, I'm a scientist.
I've been doing this for some years.
I am on 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.
So I think the economy, the fact that we don't have the kind of money that we once had, particularly in the mid and 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 Open 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 things, the economy, Colorado, some information, the fact that we don't want to be an immoral people, all of those kind of things are coming together to help people to rethink 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, at the very least, you would have to say, well, there's an incompetency in engineering their culture.
If it's not racist, if they're not victimizing a certain percentage of the population that can't defend itself as effectively and taking advantage of them, at the very least, it's a very poor engineering of the civilization.
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 we're just about 50 years removed from the March on Washington and the famous Martin Luther King 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.
And 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.
But I think many people were just simply ignorant to it.
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 social issues.
And that's a big one.
The way that the Obama administration sort of said that they were going to treat marijuana.
And then the way they did treat it.
Which is very different.
It was very...
Bush-like.
It wasn't much different.
I mean, 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 involved in the court system.
I know people, personally, that have been busted.
And they were doing everything according to state law.
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 on drugs and all these things were going to reverse.
Then it turns out Bill Clinton, under his administration, more people were arrested than any other administration for these sort of violations.
Until that time.
And so I think 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 go in a different direction for fear of being considered soft on drugs, on crime.
Now, I will say this.
This administration...
As of late, it's the only administration that said that they were going to change the way that the justice system, for example, 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 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.
So there have been some horrible things like the busting of these medical marijuana dispensaries.
Absolutely.
Is that just a part of what we were talking about earlier, that just the machine needs to be fed?
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 desert and some dude comes out with a machine gun.
You go into one of those medical marijuana, you get a nice clean bust, you bring in a lot of cash, and if people don't know the racket, it's kind of hilarious.
Here's what they do.
They go.
They arrest you.
They come in jackbooted with fucking 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.
I'm not 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 a 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 work?
No one's been charged with anything yet.
You got arrested, they took all your shit, 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've got to find new employees.
College kids don't like getting boots put to their face and a gun in their back for weed.
No, I mean, these kinds of things, 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 horrified at those kind of events, but people need to know.
I mean, this has been going on in this country for decades.
Yeah, it seems like there's got to be a way to balance it out.
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.
Well, you know, first of all, we have to have the conversation that it has to be a shift, like you're saying.
People are not even having that conversation.
People aren't having the conversation to say, well, what do we do with this machine that we built up over the past several decades?
I mean, I can think of a number of ways that we can use police officers 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 laced 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 contained?
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 something is in the compound, they say that, oh, it's cut with something.
Why not tell the public who is more likely to be susceptible to obtaining that type of heroin?
I mean, 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 on the evening news and 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 fucked.
I think we're in a new moment, man, particularly 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...
I'm deeply encouraged.
And so when I speak on this issue, as you pointed out how frustrating it might be to deal with certain people, I'm not really dealing with those people.
Yeah, and it's got to be really hard for the cops 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.
The amount of money that those folks are projected to make in terms of taxpayers' money.
I assure you, you're going to have former DEA agents involved in the marijuana industry, police officers involved in that industry, relatively quickly.
So when you say it's going to take a long time, no, it won't take a long time.
All you have to do is just 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 mean, 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 either drug use or even selling drugs.
It's unbelievably hypocritical when you have drugs everywhere you look.
But at least I'm encouraged that I see this shift in the young people.
Yeah, you know, so when you say what's been the biggest hurdle to overcome, I'm not sure if you mean professional 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.
Yeah, so the resistance to the research, the biggest sort of resistance has been primarily from law enforcement community and treatment providers, those two communities, in part because, I mean, I understand that I'm messing with their money at some level.
But that's okay.
I expected that sort of thing.
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.
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 illegality 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 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 Narcotics, headed up at the time by 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 driving of making marijuana illegal.
But in terms of the Hearst family, that whole storyline, I know it slightly, but I don't know it as well as I know the Harry Anslinger story.
Apparently, it was originally financed by a church group under the title Tell Your Children.
And the film was intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale, attempting to teach them.
This is 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 film circuit.
Beginning in 1938, 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 could make some money scaring the shit out of people and sell tickets to this movie.
Well, you know, it's one of these things that you hope people behave in a moral fashion, you know, despite the fact that we have these sort of interests, these monetary interests.
But if people are hearing for the first time that it's about the money, well, they are kind of late to the game.
It's a great show about the pathway, the highways between Florida and the rest of the country, that Florida's drug use and the OxyContin prescriptions were so high.
I think Florida had some insane amount, like more than the entire country combined by a long shot of OxyContin 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 the podcast and I got a lot of tweets from people with new information.
It was pretty cool.
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 hundred different prescriptions for OxyContin.
I'm happy that people are concerned about the overuse of any drug, for example.
But the thing that concerns me about that sort of thing is that when you make these documentaries, they...
Invariably, they do poor jobs.
One of the reasons that they do poor jobs is because they highlight these sort of aberrations, the worst-case scenario.
And then so me, the viewer, we get outraged because we see this abhorrent 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 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 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 OxyContin, I would much prefer them use OxyContin than that they use street heroin.
In part because OxyContin, we know it's 100% pharmaceutical grade and the adulterants, there are no adulterants in that OxyContin versus heroin where there are Adulterance in the street-level heroin.
So on the one hand, you have to think about, we have to weigh all of these sort of potential risks and benefits.
Yeah, that is one of the issues of another article that I was reading on Bloomberg about these pain victims that were trapped in this prescription crackdown.
And that the amount of OxyContin prescriptions has dropped dramatically.
Dropped by 97% after a joint U.S. state task force made 2,150 arrests for offenses ranging from improper sales to over-prescription by doctors.
There are far more good doctors out there who are trying to be responsible than the wayward ones that you describe.
And the ones who are trying to be responsible, they say, I'm not prescribing these pain meds because I know there's too much potential for risk or harm there.
Not so much 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, how we crack down too severely.
That's a great example of it because, I mean, who better?
A guy who's anti-drugs, who happened to be on drugs, and a guy who's a mouthpiece for the right-wing machine, which has always been anti- quote-unquote drugs.
And here's a guy who's taken...
Fucking elephant-sized doses of this shit every day.
He's got his nanny out there running around, or whoever it was, his housekeeper, 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.
But one of the things about heroin or just any other opiate like Oxycontin 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 anywhere from 25 milligrams of that drug to 500 milligrams.
That's a why and be fine.
And so it all depends on the user's history of using the drug.
So I'm not surprised if he's been using a drug for a while that he was using large doses.
That doesn't surprise me.
And that doesn't even concern me 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 tolerance for it?
See, one of the things that people don't talk enough about in terms of drugs is the sort of protective effects of tolerance.
So when people develop tolerance to any drug, 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.
One of the things that we reported 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.
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.
So if you develop dependence on alcohol, you should probably be admitted to a hospital in order to receive benzodiazepines, something like diazepam or Valium, which acts in a similar way as alcohol, but it's longer lasting.
So the body has a chance to detoxify.
The benzodiazepine slowly leaves the body, whereas alcohol abruptly leaves the body And then that's what causes the seizure activity and those sorts of things.
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 half-life, the time at which half of the drug leaves the body, is only about an hour.
It's really quick.
So the half-life is so short, once the alcohol has left the body and it's been depressing the central nervous system, the brain activity, now all of a sudden those cells fire wildly, uncontrollably, and that's what causes the seizure activity.
It certainly depresses certain neurons, a number of neurons.
So like when you think about it, when you are anxious, if you're anxious and And you have some alcohol, if you have a benzodiazepine, 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 you're so anxious where you can't, 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's just sort of generalized bad effect on your behavior or the brain.
But 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, 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, incredibly 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 fucked up on booze.
There's Mikey's bar, and you walk on in, give me a double and a beer, and then boom, 20 minutes later, you're drunk.
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.
Yeah, that's a good point when you consider like if you were going to open up like a mushroom store and everybody would come in and sell mushrooms, you'd give them the mushrooms and be like, come back and hang out in an hour and 20 minutes because for the next hour, you know, nothing really is going to happen.
You're just going to start sweating.
But alcohol, one shot, two shot, you're feeling it in 15, 20 minutes.
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 in your lungs into the brain.
And so it's kind of protective in that way.
And so those pharmacology properties, I can't think of another drug that has such good properties.
You have to actually smoke it, but there are better methods now.
You've got vaporizers and that sort of thing, so you can smoke marijuana more discreetly, and as these sort of methods are developed, 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 succession.
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 at once.
And once you do that, you can help people be safe.
But alcohol, don't have so much worry about it.
The thing that we try and prevent people from doing has been shrinking because of Having large amounts in such a rapid amount of time.
And then we also have those roadside tests and those kinds of things.
It's the best that we can do.
And I think we're doing a really good job at sort of alcohol-related drinking, 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.
So I think we're going about that quite well and appropriate.
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 test too high, but his tolerance might be so that he would be fine.
You want to see how behaviorally impaired the person is.
Because if you have that in combination with the blood levels, then 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 a sobriety test, Then you're less confident in what that blood level means.
Is there any other variables as far as a person's ability to pass a hand-eye coordination test when they're drunk?
I mean, athletic ability, things along those lines.
Because some people, they could barely bend down to touch their shoes, whereas other people are yoga masters.
If you've got a yoga master fucked up, he might be able to just put his foot over his head while he's hammered, and the cops would be like, this guy's sober.
Cocaine Cowboys and Cocaine Cowboys 2. Shout out to my friend Billy Corbin who made those movies.
I met that dude.
Very nice guy.
And really, really fascinating documentaries that cover the whole cocaine 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 pervasiveness of drugs in that state.
You know, I haven't lived in Miami or Florida since 1984. Florida is a bizarre state in general, you know, so I have to say that I'm outside of the scope of my expertise when it comes to trying to 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 era, you know, the late 70s and early 80s, and the Scarface era, you know, 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.
And so, yeah, I know that era, and I know that cocaine was a big deal in Miami.
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've got to figure out a way to get it to people that can't afford to buy a brick.
But that person is brilliant, whereas whoever rigged the laws in Florida to allow OxyContin to come in and we look at that and we go, well, this person, this is corruption.
Now, when you start to do these studies and you're in the 1990s and you're finding things that are contradictory to what we normally consider to be culturally accepted ideas about these drugs, what happens?
Do you get resistance from people in universities?
You know, how science works is that you publish these stories.
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 other people can replicate it, you can extend the findings.
Now you feel more confident in what you're finding.
And so that's kind of what happened.
Over the years, 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 in the scientific literature...
Five people read your paper, if you're lucky.
You know, there's not many people who read the literature, 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.
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 What's groundbreaking is that it's being said in a public forum, because it's never been said in a public forum.
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.
You're just saying, look, 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.
As long as discussion is at that level, and now we can engage in this Exchange of ignorance.
And that's what we've had.
So in this case, 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.
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 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 police departments can't depend upon for their budgets.
And that money shouldn't be allowed to be used to support police budgets.
I mean, I am not completely opposed to legalization.
My concern here is that 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.
So people cannot be susceptible to being hoodwinked like that.
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.
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 it, you know, to go against it.
Yeah, so I'm thinking about, well, I'm not saying that it would 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 data won't support that conclusion, but that's what people are going to be drawing from those data.
And so this is my prediction right now.
As a result of people's ignorance about marijuana, And that's marijuana, a drug that we have a lot more experience than with heroin.
But mark my words, you'll see those studies come out.
Yeah, so to be clear, heroin is a Schedule I drug, not a Schedule II. What is Schedule II? Methamphetamine is Schedule II. Schedule II is methamphetamine.
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 earlier, It has less to do with the drug's biological activity or pharmacology and more to do with the social conditions that were surrounding the legality of the drug, more so than pharmacology.
Yeah, so 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 our logic, and you don't even study this.
You just are just 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.
I had my nose fixed, and they threw some lidocaine up there, and they had the packing up there, and then they sprayed lidocaine, and I was fucked up all day, man.
I mean, it was a weird feeling.
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 lidocaine shit.
I was like, I think I would rather have just felt the pain than to have all this weird stuff in my system, you know?
Now, how difficult would it be to get these drugs that have these insane LD50 rates and have a wealth of medicinal benefits like marijuana and get them out of Schedule I? I think marijuana, there's a lot of movement now for marijuana to be moved away from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. I think if the public continues its pressure, I think it'll happen.
Now, when you have something like marijuana that doesn't hurt people, that doesn't kill people, and then you hear, like you'll hear on TV, people come on and start talking about withdrawal symptoms and people that have withdrawals from marijuana.
Yeah, I think I've published maybe, along with my colleagues, maybe 10 papers on marijuana withdrawal.
So we have actually shown and 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, in 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, they have sleep disruptions, they have eating disruptions, they are more moody.
These are more psychological sort of issues.
Certainly not life-threatening, but it's unpleasant.
You know, if you can think about having withdrawal from tobacco, you probably have a good idea of marijuana withdrawal.
Now, when we think about, again, I want to emphasize, when we think about marijuana withdrawal, it's only seen in the heaviest users, and it's not seen in even...
All of the heavy users.
And so it's something that you 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 shit for a little while?
I mean, with marijuana, one of the nice things about marijuana is that it stays in the body relatively long, so the half-life of marijuana can be as much as 24 hours.
Now, that allows the body to slowly detoxify, whereas with alcohol, it's gone within an hour, and it's like this abrupt shut-off.
You're shut off, and now all of these compensatory mechanisms are hyperactive.
Whereas with marijuana, these compensatory mechanisms are active, but they have an opportunity to slowly adjust.
One of the things that heroin is really good at, and it's used medically for this reason, it had been used medically for this reason, is that it stops diarrhea.
So people who have diarrhea that can cause death, for example, you give them heroin, it makes you constipated.
That's a compensatory mechanism of heroin, right?
So that's a compensatory mechanism of the body having it.
I'm sorry.
The compensatory mechanism of the body is that it tries to counteract the sort of constipation that heroin causes.
So it has to get 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 diarrhea 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.
Now when you do heroin for long periods of time, like how long does it take for these compensatory mechanisms to really set in to the point where you hit a withdrawal syndrome?
So if you only are using the drug intermittently, you don't have to 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 administration of the drug, constant levels of the drug in the body that the body compensatory mechanism become hyperactive.
It was all the guy who was talking about the 500-plus different chemicals that the government allows them to put in cigarettes that are all directly related to addictive.
The additional chemicals that the cigarette companies put in, which is what this scientist was highlighting, the guy who Russell Crowe played, what's going on there?
Like, how were they able to do that?
Like...
When they're adding these things to cigarettes that make it so that you become more addicted more quickly, how are they doing that?
For example, there are chemicals that I understand that they were trying to add to tobacco to make It more readily released the nicotine.
There are chemicals being added to tobacco for flavoring, they say.
There are a variety of sort of things, but I don't know exactly what you're getting at in terms of Why they add the compounds in terms of addicting people?
Yeah, 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 nicotine strain tobacco somewhere in South America.
And so that was one of those sort of issues related to this.
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 rapid, efficient way to hit the lung and to the brain.
And I think the argument was that tobacco had figured out how to release the nicotine more rapidly.
And then one of the major theories 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 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 in terms of what the tobacco company did and what scientists say.
If anybody out there have taken Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin, All of those drugs, you've taken those drugs for pain or whatever reason and then 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 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 fucking a total junkie.
He was responsible, he had a family, got divorced, wound up being this crazy liar, pill popper dude.
Yeah, those are the toughest questions that people ask me, right?
Because on the one hand, it's like, it's not the drug, I assure 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 can be a variety of reasons.
A lot of times people become addicted on these drugs because they have co-occurring psychiatric disorders, because they have lack of better options, because they have other issues that's going on.
I don't know, but I have to understand this guy's complete situation.
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.
I mean, that's one of the things that frustrates me in this sort of mission to educate the public is that People blame drugs for some of their shortcomings and some of the things that are not their shortcomings.
It's not their fault.
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 in 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.
My friend who I told you about that had a problem with heroin, who came over to my house to detox, his family was crazy.
When I got to know him better and I sort of understood his family's medical history, I understood what was going on.
He was self-medicating.
There was a psychiatric issue in his family.
And it was not just one person.
So this guy was self-medicating.
And I think that's often the case.
And I think that's one of the great tragedies of what happened during the Reagan administration when they started releasing people out of the streets, homeless people that were interned 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.
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 forward.
Well, I think it all really comes down to people like you.
And if it wasn't guys like you providing the data and doing the hard work and sticking your neck out there and doing all these shows and doing Bill O'Reilly and...
You know, disseminating the actual facts and the data and doing so confidently, and I think it's awesome, man.
I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you coming on the show, too.
Yeah, I love Chris Ryan, and we do a podcast once a month together.
We don't have a name for it yet, but what we do is, for folks who've listened to the ones with Duncan and Chris Ryan and me, we do my podcast, next is Duncan's, next is Chris's, and we just keep doing it, so we do one a month together.