Dr. Carl Hart challenges U.S. drug policies, citing 1978–1980 data showing higher marijuana use than today despite population growth, and argues Nixon-era rates stemmed from distrust—not backlash—while users functioned normally. He praises Switzerland’s supervised heroin programs (up to 1,000mg daily) but criticizes U.S. opiate formulations like acetaminophen-laced pills as harmful, calling American drug education moralistic and evidence-ignoring. Globally, Hart exposes racial disparities—50% of Brazil’s Black population faces incarceration or poverty due to drug laws—while progressive models in Portugal and the Czech Republic succeed. He advocates decriminalizing all drugs first, then regulating them safely, dismissing "clean sport" myths (e.g., Lance Armstrong) and calling for systemic reform over misinformed fearmongering. [Automatically generated summary]
I was in Mexico City, and I'm in my hotel room, and there's only like two different channels that speak English, so I'm forced to watch Fox News.
And I saw you on the Bill O'Reilly show.
Those clusterfuck shows where they have...
One person, like Bill O'Reilly's the host, and then they have all these boxes with all these different people, and everybody's talking over everybody, and the whole thing only lasts like three minutes, and they're tackling these complex subjects.
You got maybe like a half a sentence out before you got interrupted.
I don't even remember what the topic was.
It must have had something to do with drugs and addiction.
And then the thing is, is that I was trying to make clear that the numbers of marijuana users today is considerably lower than what they were in 1978 or 1980. But they weren't aware of the information from 1978 or 1980. Is that like the numbers per capita?
No, it was the percentage of, in this case, the percentage of high school students who were reporting marijuana use in the past 30 days or the past year.
It was probably right after the Nixon administration.
That fucking idiot probably had everybody just doing drugs.
When you got a president that's that messed up, gets busted with Watergate and just all the foolishness involved in his administration, I bet he led people to drugs.
Like, when you say more people should be using drugs, here's the thing about, I hate the term, there's two terms that I have a real problem with.
I don't hate them, but I think they're weighted.
Addiction is one of them, and drugs is another one.
Because addiction is like, when you start talking about being addicted to texting, I have friends that are definitely, they definitely are inclined to check their phone way too much.
Like, they feel compelled when they're in traffic.
They feel like there's a red light, and they're like, oh, good, let me check my phone.
Like, I'm at a red light.
Like, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on?
But I think that's an impulse.
It's just a foolish pattern of thought.
To call that an addiction, and then to call, like, alcoholism the same thing, where you could literally die if you stopped drinking.
Yeah, well, you know, when we think about addiction, it's a simple sort of definition that we use in medicine, and the definition is that does it cause you a tremendous amount of distress, and is it disrupting your social occupation or your family's sort of functioning?
That's kind of it.
I mean, so people can indulge in a behavior every day, multiple times a day, but they're handling their responsibilities and they are not distressed about this behavior.
They wouldn't meet criteria for addiction, whereas somebody could like use alcohol or cocaine or some drug once a month or once a week or what have you, and then they have all of these disruptions surrounding that drug use.
And they may meet criteria for addiction, whereas I could be using cocaine every day, but handling my responsibilities, I'm not distressed by it.
I don't have these problems related to it.
I'm not an addict, even though I'm using it every day.
So addiction has to do with social disruptions and being distressed, not actual amount of use or how many times you engage in the behavior.
But this sort of definition is missed upon many of people in the general population.
Most people think that if you don't use it, you're...
Like, if you don't...
Say if you do something every day.
Like, I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and he worked with this guy that would shoot heroin every day at lunch.
And that always freaked me out, because the guy showed up for work every day on time.
He was a responsible guy.
He was married.
He had children.
And this guy would get heroin, he would cop every morning, he would go there, and he would sit in his truck, and he would shoot up and, you know, whatever, however long that lasts, you know, he gets an hour lunch break, and he would come back and go to work.
Well, you know, this past summer, the past three months or so, I was in Geneva.
I just got back in the States.
And I was working in a heroin clinic where they administer heroin every day, seven days a week, twice a day, to people who meet criteria for heroin addiction.
And when I say they administer heroin, I don't mean like small doses.
I mean doses that go up to like a gram a day, a thousand milligrams a day, a lot more than what people use here in the states typically.
And these people who are getting heroin every day, a large percentage of them also go to work.
A large percentage of them have families and they're taking care of their responsibilities.
This is their treatment and this is a treatment that works for them.
But their treatment includes two daily doses of intravenous heroin.
Seven days a week, you know, and and so like when I think about Well, one of the reasons I went there and I did this because of the way we think of heroin in this country We think of it as such as evil drug and that's just American mythology and that's just wrong and that's ignorance and but that's how many including drug experts in this country think of heroin,
but that's just We have all of this great technology, but we're so ignorant when it comes to many of these drugs So heroin administered intravenously on a daily basis, it's not devastating?
Yeah, and it's been this whole journey, man, since I saw you last time, I've been all over the world.
And this whole journey to see what people do with drugs or what drugs they're using and how they do it, it's been so eye-opening.
Even for me, someone who has spent their life studying drugs, and I'm learning so much more now.
But the Swiss experience, but the Dutch also do this.
There are some parts of Germany that does this.
They have small programs in the UK. They had small programs.
There are other countries, but the Swiss by far have the biggest program, and they've been the most successful.
They've been doing this for more than 20 years now.
And they started doing this in response to HIV concern.
People were worried about folks getting HIV, so they had to do something.
They had to have clean needles.
They had to make sure that The drugs were pure, so they were worried about death, HIV, all of those things, and this was the rational response where they put it in a medical community where people got treatment along with their heroin, and they have no plans of going back, nor should they, because it works.
And is it because of all the propaganda we've been fed?
Is it because just of misinformation?
I mean, you would say propaganda, but even me, someone who's a pro-drug for the most part person, I would say, God, heroin every day is probably going to fuck you up.
I mean, obviously, there are people who use this as part of propaganda, in part, but I don't think they're trying to use it as propaganda.
I think they're ignorant in their clothes, many people.
But then there are other people.
Just think about some of the films, Trainspotting.
You think of a number of these films.
All of those films now can't use that salacious story anymore to grip us.
It's not reality, but it makes great films.
It makes great sort of subjects for documentaries.
When we think about musical heroes and people who say, well, they were misunderstood, so they used heroin.
I mean, they use heroin because it's a rational sort of use of the drug when you think about its ability to decrease anxiety, its ability to make people or have people relaxed and just be in a space where they finally can get some peace.
When you think about all of the things that many of these sort of musical icons or these great artists have to deal with, It's rational.
It makes rational sense.
The thing that I'm trying to do is, how do we allow people to do these things and be safe?
How do we still keep them safe?
Because people are going to do it.
That's a fact.
I mean, we've been trying to get rid of heroin in our country for some times, but every year we have 100,000 to 200,000 new heroin users every year.
But please understand, the majority of people who use those pills use them responsibly, and they know what they're doing.
But there are people, like you said, who ruin their lives as a result.
But the thing that we have to think about is that if the majority of the users of these pills are fine, and then you have this subset, this smaller subset who are not, it tells you that it's not the pills.
But by that same token, there are still some issues I have with the way we have our pills, or the way we do our pills in this country, opiate pills.
We put acetaminophen in these pills.
And which I am not a fan of having acetomedicine in those pills because acetomedicine is the number one reason for liver toxicity.
And so sometimes if people really want to push a dose of their opiate, they have to get even more acetaminophen.
That's the more dangerous of the two in this situation.
It is stated that they put acetaminophen in the pill because it's an added pain reliever.
But I don't think that's the real reason.
I think the real reason that it's in the pill is, think of it this way, on the California Highway, I think the maximum speed limit is like 65 or 70. Now imagine if someone designed a car that had tires on it that blew out when you reached 75 miles per hour.
So it's like this safety valve.
So you blow out the tires or somebody exceed the speed limit.
I think acetaminophen is in the pills and opiate pills for that reason.
And I think that that's a problem because when you think about even other countries like Geneva or Switzerland, you don't see acetaminophen in these medications like they are here.
You certainly don't have people prescribing them like they do here with the acetaminophen.
You know, it's like you don't need that in there.
If you want somebody to take an additional pain reliever, you prescribe it or you tell them you recommend it, but you don't need The number one reason for liver toxicity with opiates, I think, is there to have people blow out their livers or to discourage people from taking more opiates.
Well, I think, like I said, the stated reason is that it provides an additional pain reliever.
And I'm saying it doesn't make any sense.
If you want to have that additional pain reliever, simply give somebody acetaminophen or ibuprofen or something else, but you don't need to put it in with each other.
So you think that some people just have that sort of compulsive behavior, and that behavior could manifest itself in drinking too much coffee, or it could manifest itself in taking those pills, or it's essentially the behavior that's an issue more than it is the actual substance or the medicine?
And the methadone is what we always heard of in America.
I think I told this story last time you were here, but I used to play pool at this place that was right next to a methadone clinic, and these people would go and they'd get their methadone.
Then they'd come over and play pool and they just looked like zombies.
We'd call them methadoneians.
That's what we used to call them.
But they would come over just zoned out and they were just fucking out of it.
And this guy that I work with was saying, he was like, you know, that methadone shit they give him is actually worse than the heroin.
Because if we can freely purchase alcohol and even more insidious in a way is the amount of sugar consumption that people In this country especially, our consumption of sugar, and this is something I've really been focusing on a lot lately because I've been educating my kids about how much sugar is in things.
It's really hilarious because my seven-year-old was talking to my five-year-old yesterday, and she's like, there's nine grams of sugar in that.
They're having this little conversation about this thing that she wants to drink that's supposed to be healthy.
She's like reading it.
There's nine grams of sugar.
To see a seven-year-old do that, I'm like, wow, this is kind of cool.
But sugar can fuck people's lives up, for sure.
And I know a lot of people that are addicted to sugar.
Not just compelled to eat it, but it actually changes their gut flora.
You know, the actual flora inside their body craves this to the point where these people, they get crazy for it.
People get really crazy for sugar.
And it just causes all sorts of health consequences.
But no one wants to say, hey, we should outlaw candy bars.
But we're very strange in what we allow and don't allow other adult human beings to do.
And that really sort of gets to the heart of all this.
And then we're also very squeamish about the idea of needles.
And when you say this program in Geneva is super successful and they're giving people intravenous heroin up to a thousand milligrams a day, I'm like, wow, needles?
Jesus.
You know, that's something, the actual administration of it, like the method of administration, makes people squeamish.
So intravenous heroin can in effect act in a lot of the ways that maybe some prescription drugs like Xanax or maybe some antidepressants do where they alleviate the anxiety that certain people have?
Yeah, we cannot divorce our drug education from our social control.
And so when we think about how drugs or drug policy has been used to go at the groups that we don't like, and if we're not a part of the out-group, we just kind of accept this information uncritically.
And we've been told that people who use heroin, they have those issues, and they're not like us.
They're those people.
And why should we question it?
We don't know them very well, and we see people putting a needle in their arm.
Something must be wrong with them.
And so you can tell all of these incredible stories.
Physicians believe these stories in this country.
Our medical experts or addiction experts believe this sort of stuff.
But it's not true.
It's not reality.
And so that's one of the reasons that I travel and I continue to travel and to learn.
And I'm learning so much about my biases that I held and that I'm trying to get rid of.
Well, given that we have such a big military, it's hard for us to be unique because other countries, with our military might and our money, we kind of tell them what to think, too.
Canada is one, but all of South America or a large portion of South America, even some places in Europe, Asia, you know, a number of places share our screwed-up views on drugs because they've been told to share our screwed-up views because they get some money for having these screwed-up views.
Like, we support various programs in Colombia about drugs, eradication of drugs, and all around the world.
So these countries share our views, but places like Geneva, that's really autonomous, and there are some other autonomous nations that actually look at the evidence and see what's best for their population, and not what's best for the people of the United States.
And they don't just accept the propaganda without thinking about their population.
Because there's a character in it that's a heroin addict.
This young son is a heroin addict.
And while he was in this...
Spoiler alert, everybody!
If you're a fan of the show and you haven't watched any of the...
I don't know.
Spoiler alert.
Here it comes.
Fast forward.
The kid's a junkie and he's in this drug den and he's shooting up and this chick he's friends with turns into a zombie and starts eating people's faces and shit.
He's a little sick at first, and then he seems fine, and then his withdrawals kick in, and his cravings kick in, like, fucking days later.
Like, days later, he can't take it anymore.
He's shaking, and he's throwing up all over himself, and he falls to the ground.
He has seizures and throws up on himself.
A day ago, the kid was fine.
A day ago, his face has all the color in it, looks normal, and I remember what you had said last time you were here, that withdrawal is a lot like getting the flu.
It's like getting sick, and then it goes away, and everything else is just sort of in your head.
I think the real issue is, like many people, the writers and the producers probably aren't heroin users.
So their idea is based on the popular mythology, the popular culture, the idea that we've all been sort of fed by Trainspotting and all these other films, they're sort of just repeating that.
But a lot of us have this idea, and I swear, before I met you, and I'm a person who's not averse to drugs, I thought of it all as, I thought heroin, like, oh yeah, man, you can get addicted.
You do it once, you're addicted, and then you're fucked.
It just, somehow or another, becomes a part of you.
That's why I've always had a problem when they start talking about marijuana addiction, like how many people get addicted to marijuana, because I don't understand what even the mechanism would be for you to get addicted to that.
Yeah, I mean, again, if we go back to the definition that I talked at the start of the week, when we think about social disruption, disruption of family function, work, and that sort of thing, and it's causing you distress, you can clearly see how somebody might be addicted to marijuana.
A low percentage of people become addicted to marijuana, but you certainly can see that, yeah, somebody might get distressed by their marijuana use.
Fine.
So they can meet criteria for addiction.
But when you compare marijuana addiction to alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, or any other drug, it's lower than all the rest of those drugs.
But certainly, it's possible that somebody has some distress and have...
So the disruptions and functioning is what really identifies someone as being an addict.
But if someone is a person who's using heroin on a daily basis but shows no disruption in their life, shows no problems with their social situation or their job functioning or anything like that, but then they get off of it.
Because if they get off of it, or they try to quit cold turkey, and then they get all fucked up because of that, well then you would have to kind of qualify them.
And most people would be wrong, and that's part of the problem here, right?
Because they are looking only at withdrawal.
Withdrawal is not a big deal.
It only becomes a big deal when we're talking about alcohol withdrawal from chronic alcohol use, or when we're talking about barbiturate withdrawal from chronic use, because the person can die.
Outside of those drugs, I mean, those are the only sort of more commonly used drugs that we worry about withdraw.
People constantly throw around the term addiction then, I guess, in an incorrect way, in a technically incorrect way, because I know a lot of people that I would say are addicted to coffee, where they need to have coffee in order to wake up and function.
You know, before we went on air, you and I was talking a little bit.
This past summer, I've been all over.
Since I saw you last, I've been all over the globe.
And one of the things that when I give these talks, when people say, I heard you on the Joe Rogan Show, you know, all over the world from Vancouver to Brazil to Geneva to the Philippines, all over, I know when they say that I heard you on the Joe Rogan Show, I know that they are thinking people.
I know that these are people who look for information outside of the normal sort of source of information.
And so those are the people who I'm trying to reach, the people who are actually grappling and struggling with these ideas and trying to evaluate the ideas for the merits, based on their merits, and that's it.
Whereas when you talk about the O'Reilly's and you talk about the politicians and you talk about these people, Those are the people who I like talking to least.
I mean, not necessarily O'Reilly himself, but some of the people who watch him.
And so I'm trying to reach the general public, the people who watch your show, the people who are into what you do, the common folk who are out there who are struggling and they're trying to learn.
And I think if we reach them, the politicians will follow them, not the opposite of way around.
And so my least favorite people to talk to are politicians.
I mean, it's as an adult, me and you, you like to talk to people who take you seriously, particularly when you're respecting them.
Politicians oftentimes don't give a shit about you.
They only care about their votes and how they can use you for those votes.
You know, it's insulting to me to talk to people in that way, and so I try to avoid them.
Coming here to this place, I know that there will be people out here who listen to you who will struggle with this, but they will evaluate it based on its merits.
And that's all you can ask, is that people evaluate your arguments based on the merits, and then you have conversations, discussions, and you go back and forth, and the best evidence wins.
And everybody understands those rules, and those are your listeners.
That's not the politicians.
That's not the talk show host.
Those are not those people.
And so they're not the people who I'm trying to reach.
And it helps to keep me sane because I can't deal with people who don't use evidence or don't play with evidence as part of the rules.
Yeah, that's a great quote that's on your website about, I make sure that I don't engage in conversations with people that don't abide by the rules of evidence.
That's a great quote.
And I agree with you about politicians, too, because essentially politicians just go where the wind of public opinion goes.
And so many of them, they have a team of people deciding what they're talking about.
And unfortunately, those people oftentimes, when these politicians, they'll get involved in debates or get involved in some sort of a public function where they're discussing something or giving a speech, and they can say things that are just absolutely inaccurate.
And those things, when people aren't really discerning or they don't have the time maybe to go over the evidence, these people take that as fact.
You know, this is why I continue to be out here, because when people make those kind of statements based on no evidence and they're just lies, they're just inaccurate, the consequences of those lies and inaccuracies are so great, and there are so many poor people who pay the price for it.
That's why I continue to stay out here, and I stay out here to call those people out on it and try to embarrass those people.
I mean, I'm a firm believer in embarrassing politicians when they tell these lies, when they make up this information, because they are ruining too many people's lives as a result.
I mean, it just simply means that people can't be arrested for drug possessions.
And drug possession is considered like a 10-day supply of drugs in Portugal, which is a good thing.
And then there are other places around the world that people are doing other innovative things, like in Sao Paulo, In Brazil, the mayor is paying drug addicts or drug users, paying them a salary, giving them housing, giving them food, three meals, and that sort of thing to make sure they show up for work.
And if they're coming to work, that means they're not getting into other activities.
And so he's trying to keep He has certain areas of his city safe doing that.
And then we talked about the Swiss.
And so there are a number of people thinking about innovative ways to deal with drugs and to treat people like adults and not children, like in our country.
We're still concerned about moralism, even though there have been some states that have said, as you well know, Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, they've said that we're going to legalize marijuana for adults.
And they have.
And I suspect California will vote in November 16 to see if they want to do the same thing.
Despite the sort of moralism, we still have some people out here pushing for progressive, rational, adult sort of drug laws.
Well, when I look at the current state of politics in America, and I look at What we call our leaders and the way they discuss drugs.
What I'm looking at is it's almost like they're trapped in an ancient way of thinking that doesn't work anymore because of the Internet.
Because of the Internet, we have so much access to information now.
We have a freedom to actually find the truth.
So like what you're talking about where people have these misconceptions and then you come on and you give the absolute truth fact-based evidence and you're forced to like examine like why do I have these assumptions in my head?
Why do I have and why do I? I mean I was forced to confront these when I talked to you the first time.
I was like why do I have these ideas in my head?
Have I really researched them?
Is this something that I've...
Am I out there in the field talking to people that are addicts, talking to people that are treating them?
Absolutely not.
No.
This is just train-spotting.
This is just, you know, popular culture, politicians giving speeches.
That's all I know of it.
And I think our base of understanding is expanding now.
So as we think about the politician, as we think about the politician, I think the last Republican debate, there were a couple politicians, I think, Bush and Christie, and they were saying how they would bring the federal government in to change what's going on in Colorado.
I think that if he actually got the nomination, that wouldn't happen.
I don't know if they have to say these kinds of things, but it would be nice if the American people really punished these idiots who say things like that.
Because on the one hand, we think about the folks of Colorado taking this vote and the whole issue of states' rights.
And this is what the Republicans say they really like.
Well, I don't mean to go after the Republicans because I think they're the same as Democrats, quite frankly.
So this is not a knock on them as a party.
But when people talk about states' rights, that's what this is.
The state have decided.
And so the public The American people should really slam idiots who say things like they're going to go after a state.
What about this issue of states' rights?
I mean, and so I think Republicans and Democrats should really go after these people for saying remarks like that.
It's a tough sell, but people think of coke as dudes who won't shut the fuck up at the parties, want to start businesses with you, want to tell you about some shit that they never really did.
And then, while I'm thinking that, I'm next to people that are drunk off their ass at this fucking bar at the improv.
I mean, these people are hammered, just sloshed, and they're probably doing way more damage to their body right there.
And I'm like, wow, those poor fucks on pills.
You know, I mean, it's interesting how we have these categorizations that, like, the pill, the Oxycontin pill, like, oh, this guy's, he's gotta be fucked up.
Meanwhile, to my left, there's a bar filled with people just throwing back this liquid poison and torturing their liver and their brain.
When it comes out, I'm going to have to come here.
But this is precisely what I'm trying to deal with.
I'm trying to show people how to use drugs to enhance human functioning experience and so forth.
Now, that means that as we get older, we may have to change our drug use from something like alcohol.
Alcohol might be a little too toxic on some of our livers as we get older.
Toxic in other ways for us as we get older and some other drug like oxycontin or something else might be more beneficial for you to achieve that goal that you're trying to achieve and that's what the new book is trying to trying to look at to help people change their drug use according to their age their maturity all of these things and how to keep them safe and also to help them to accomplish that goal that they seek to enhance human experiences when we go to parties We take drugs,
we take alcohol in order to, as a social lubricant, you know, but maybe that social lubricant isn't working for me as much these days.
Alcohol disrupts my sleep, you know, whereas an opiate is perfect.
You know, I can chill, I can relax, and I can get some great sleep, and I can be here to do your show and be bright and bushy-tailed and I'm ready to go.
As opposed to having that drink the night before, but have an Oxycontin or something else.
You know, I think also we're dealing with a reaction.
Like when you were talking about people in the 1970s that were doing the higher percentage of them were smoking marijuana and it could have been a reaction to the Nixon administration.
I think in a situation like that, you get that preacher's daughter sort of effect.
The suppression, where people just want to react to that suppression.
People don't like being told what to do.
And in the case of things like cocaine, there's that naughty factor.
There's the fact that it's forbidden.
There's this factor That what you're doing is something that's illegal, and that makes it more exciting.
I think that's one of the things that was highlighted by the decriminalization in Portugal and the subsequent effects, and even Colorado.
What they've shown in Colorado is the lowest instances of drunk driving in, I think, something like 15 years, lowest instances of violent crime that they've had in a long time, and no deaths.
You know, they're talking about, like, one guy jumped off of a building when he was high on pot edibles.
Listen, people make shitty choices all the time, whether on pot edibles, or they drink too much Dr. Pepper, or they have too many fucking Twinkies.
I mean, wasn't there a guy in San Francisco that killed somebody that used Twinkies as a defense?
Responsible adults being able to make choices based on evidence and based on reality and fact, that should be the foundation of our society, how we treat almost everything.
I absolutely agree with you, but I want to push you to think about heroin in the same way, cocaine in the same way, because what you just said about marijuana, you're absolutely right, but it also applies to these other psychoactive drugs.
We just need to make sure people know how to do these things safely.
I was always scared of Coke because when I grew up, I had a friend and his cousin got...
He became a mess.
He was selling it and all this dude did was do Coke and hang out in his house and watch TV and sell Coke and he lost a ton of weight and he looked like shit and it's just like...
He made some bad choices, but he could have made those bad choices doing a lot of different things.
Nah, a beta blocker might be helpful, but you might want to just take a low dose of amphetamine so you can be really alert and attentive and ready to go.
Very controversial character, very successful, but has these, like, controversial ideas about economics.
But I had him on the podcast, and I don't know how many podcasts he's done, but he started off the show like...
Because that's how they do it.
When you go on those talk shows, you've got to be able to fucking fire.
But this shows three hours of just chilling out and talking.
So about an hour and a half in, he starts to slow down.
I'm like, you want a drink?
He's like, yeah, I'll have a drink.
So we got him at Jack Daniels, on The Rocks.
And then he got casual about an hour and a half in, and it became an actual conversation.
I know virtually nothing about finances, so I wasn't challenging him.
I was just asking questions and I wanted to get him to illuminate certain perspectives.
But he was ready for someone to jump in.
He was ready to be that split-screen thing when you have one person on one side, one on the other, and they have opposing viewpoints and they're just talking over each other.
Yeah, it's just also a lot of just preaching to the choir nonsense, and they want the conflict of two people with opposing viewpoints yelling at each other and calling each other morons.
They were hired to go on these shows and talk about whether it was, initially, it was whether or not cigarettes and nicotine were bad for your health and addictive, and then it became about global warming.
The same people.
And they would go on all these different talk shows and just spout out this stuff very loudly and with confidence, and that was literally their job.
They were being hired to do this.
So they'd go on these talk shows, and they would just yap.
They would just talk real loud and real confidently and talk over people, and their function or their career was to try to change opinion with these short little bursts.
Yeah, you know, the thing is just so perplexing to me that you can be so irresponsible and have this stuff be on the airwaves and not get in trouble for it.
And then what they're doing on many of these shows, they're doing more harm to the American education than most people.
Yet, they're not in jail.
In fact, they're being rewarded handsomely for this sort of thing.
And then we're putting people in jail for these other minor infractions.
It is, and it seems like it's trapped in momentum that these shows have always existed the way they have, you know, with these seven-minute segments that go to ad break, you know, one host, loud, boisterous guy talks over everybody.
These shows have been around for so long like that that they're a comfortable model for us.
Yeah, for some people, they're not comfortable for me because I tell you, I've been really trying to, rethinking, like, where can I live in this world?
But, you know, the U.S., they're making it very hard for me to want to stay here.
But, you know, I have children that I have to raise here.
Yeah, I mean, Vancouver is a little different, but the rest of Canada is trying to be like the U.S., particularly when it comes to drugs and all of these issues.
It's on the DL. It's for research purposes, but they certainly have a program where they're giving heroin, and it's a research project at the University of British Columbia.
There's this place in Toronto and they have, I don't want to give them up because I don't think it's legal, but they do a comedy show there and they have, the front is like a bong shop and then the back they have a comedy club.
And they have no ventilation whatsoever.
You walk into the back room.
You are in a fucking cloud of marijuana smoke.
The candles are no longer burning on oxygen.
They're burning on marijuana smoke.
There's no oxygen in the room.
You're breathing pot only.
And you will get high as fuck.
Because I have a friend who doesn't even smoke pot.
And I took him to the show.
He's like straight edge.
He was high as fuck.
He was like, dude, I don't even know if I can walk.
What we need to do is take someone who's totally clean, like someone who doesn't do any marijuana whatsoever, and make them sit in that audience and watch an hour and a half comedy show and then get up.
This is a huge story in the world of sports because Nick Diaz, who is one of the most popular fighters in the UFC, and is a very outspoken marijuana enthusiast.
He's also extremely healthy.
I think he eats mostly vegan, except I believe he eats some fish.
He runs triathlons on a regular basis.
He swam back from Alcatraz twice.
He's known for being one of the most fit guys in the sport, but he loves marijuana, and he smokes it all the time.
The UFC has instituted, the Nevada State Athletic Commission has instituted a new drug policy in regards to marijuana where they've lowered the threshold considerably, like much, much lower.
So you literally would have to be high like the day of the fight in order to test positive.
He has administered tests from two different organizations.
One of them, the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA. And WADA is a blood test, which is much more accurate than what Nevada State Athletic Commission uses.
Nevada State Athletic Commission uses a urine test.
The blood tests, both before and after the fight, fined him to be under the threshold, so he passes.
But Nevada, using their urinalysis test, say that he fails.
They fine him $165,000, and then they ban him from the sport for five years.
I mean, really, marijuana shouldn't even be on any of these, even WADA. I know WADA increased their thresholds that's required to trigger the penalty, which is a good thing.
But it shouldn't even be on WADA's list because when we think about...
Drugs and performing enhancing drugs.
Clearly, people are not using marijuana to enhance performance.
That's not where they're using it for recreational purposes.
And maybe that was the day before or several days before.
But it certainly has nothing to do with their competition.
And so it should be off of those lists.
I mean, this is what people should...
Protest and argue about, demonstrate about the NFL, the NBA, all of these things.
Amphetamines can do a better job of that, but cocaine would be barely.
It really would be.
I mean, but if we start talking about drugs and sports, and then we're really being honest, we have to think about why are drugs banned from sports in the first place?
I mean, and so we start doing that, and then we can systematically go through the illogical sort of reasoning behind these bans.
People say, well, we care about the health of the athletes and drugs.
Okay.
Okay, regulate drug use in sports and make sure that they have a physician and so forth.
But if you really cared about the health of athletes in sports, you ban boxing, you ban all of these sorts of things.
You ban football.
You ban all these.
So that's like, that's bullshit.
That's not why you, that's not why we care about drugs in sports.
Not because of the health of the athletes.
That's just not true.
Well, we say that athletes are role models.
Why should athletes have an additional responsibility more so than anybody else?
I think they weaseled their way around the test so well that...
He never really tested positive, but he ultimately had to admit to using performance-enhancing drugs.
They strip him of his Tour de France titles.
Then on top of that, because he was sponsored by the post office, he gets hit with defrauding the government.
When you defraud the government, they are allowed to sue you for three times the amount that they gave you.
So if they gave him $30 million, they're suing him for $90 million or something crazy like that.
On top of that once you strip him if you're going to give that title to the next person who didn't test positive for that You got to go down to like 18th place.
Yeah, which is hilarious So like my friend Bill Burr hilarious comedian had a great bit that he did about this on the Conan O'Brien show he was like So basically, our steroided up guy beat your steroided up guy.
I mean, they're all steroided up.
The whole sport is predicated on it.
I mean, this sport.
And I've even heard it argued by doctors that doing the Tour de France without the drugs is arguably more dangerous for the athlete's body than doing it with the drugs.
I mean, particularly when I think about every four years when the Olympics come around and Americans get proud about all the medals we win when we fight.
Fucking win medals from a country like Switzerland that has seven million people.
New York City has more people in it than Switzerland, the entire country.
Of course we're gonna have more medals than Switzerland or some other small country.
Is that an unfair advantage?
Not yes, but hell yes, it is.
But do we talk about that?
There are some people who have resources and other people don't have resources.
From the outset, when you have these huge countries like the U.S. and competing with these other smaller countries who have limited resources, come on.
There's also there's people that have natural advantages like LeBron James again like that guy if you look at him that is a genetic freak of nature Well, you have very few people that are ever gonna have a body like his right I know but they're in the NBA Right.
But I'm saying, even amongst the NBA, he sort of stands, he's an outlier.
Obviously, he's incredibly disciplined.
Obviously, he's talented.
Obviously, his massive work ethic.
No question about it.
Obviously, he has basketball intelligence that surpasses 99.999% of the people in the game.
There's all these other things on top.
But then, on top of it, he has this fucking race car body, you know?
I mean, that, like...
Take someone who's less physically talented.
If they both do the same amount of work, they both try as hard, you're never going to be that guy.
In the UFC, in mixed martial arts, they used to allow testosterone replacement therapy.
And it was kind of abused.
And the way it was abused is...
The way the male endocrine system works, as it's been explained to me, obviously I'm not a doctor, when you take testosterone, your body stops producing it.
So what these people would do is they would take it and then they would get off of it and their body would have very low testosterone and then they would get a blood test.
And the doctor would say, hey, you have low testosterone, you need testosterone replacement therapy.
So we had guys that were in their 20s that were getting testosterone replacement therapy, which is kind of crazy.
They would take it, and then they would take large amounts of it and recover much better than other people would.
They would be able to work harder and train harder.
And we had some instances, and there's this one guy named Vitor Belfort, who was the poster boy for testosterone replacement therapy, because his career was kind of in a lull.
He got on testosterone placement therapy.
He's a guy who's been fighting in the UFC since 1997, okay?
And he's in his late 30s.
And then all of a sudden in his late 30s, he is fucking smashing people.
And he looks like a god.
I mean, his body's just chiseled.
He's got super confidence.
He's super aggressive attacking.
And he's just highlight reel knockout after highlight reel knockout in his late 30s.
Then...
They take away testosterone replacement therapy.
The Nevada State Athletic Commission says, you know what?
This is just, we don't believe in this anymore.
We think this is being abused.
Everyone's going to have to get off of it.
And one of the reasons why they did it is because they tested him out of competition, just randomly.
They grabbed him and he was off the charts, like non-human levels.
So they make him get off of it.
He then fights for the title after he gets off of it, and he looks like a shell of himself.
His body is soft.
His skin is loose.
He doesn't have endurance.
He got destroyed in the first round by the champion.
And everybody looks at it and goes, well, see, you know, this is what happens when you take a guy like that and you get him off the stuff.
But there's a certain amount of people that look at a guy like that and go, man, wouldn't you like to see him fight on it?
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Wouldn't you like to see what he could do if you kept him on it?
I'd like to see, you know, because if we're going to draw the conclusion that the steroids was the reason that he was fighting like that.
So now that we did the A portion or the AB portion, so now we need to go back to A, put him back on the steroids, and then I'll feel more confident that, yeah, it was a steroids.
The problem with that in mixed martial arts as opposed to any other sport is that giving someone testosterone or a steroid is going to allow them to administer damage to their opponent that they might not be able to do without it.
So their opponent is going to suffer because of it.
It's a different thing, like the ability to deliver a basketball into a net is one thing, but the ability to kick somebody in the head is a completely different thing.
And the idea being that if you give someone EPO, for instance, which expands your endurance threshold, you will be able to throw more strikes, you'll be able to attack more aggressively without worrying about conserving your gas tank, and that you could damage someone in a way that you would not have damaged them naturally.
I remember when Mike Tyson was knocking people out, when people walked in the ring with him, there was always that potential that you might get damaged in ways that you might.
That's right.
And so I don't see this as a problem.
We should let it into sports, and this is part of the risk of what you do.
It's as simple as that for me.
And then we should also monitor the athletes and make sure that They are.
They do have healthy levels and levels that are not going to cause toxicity to them.
See, you know, I have to tell you, I'm a bit outside of my expertise, so I don't really know these guys, but you certainly have piqued my interest, and I want to know more about it because...
You know, just to be logically consistent, I think that these things should be allowed in sports.
And if I'm going to have that position, I'd like to know more about, like, the things that you're saying.
Like, when he was on it, he could take a punch.
Then when he got off, he couldn't take a punch.
I don't know how many years between that and age, what role age plays and all of these sorts of things, but I'd like to know more.
I'm just at a disadvantage because I just don't know.
I don't know enough of the details about it.
But I would just challenge people to think about Hey, what if we allow drugs in sports?
But I do see the argument, and Ronda Rousey's made it pretty eloquently, that if someone is taking a steroid, if they're cheating, quote-unquote, that it's going to allow them to administer damage that they would not have been allowed to do or would not have been able to do with just hard work.
I'm pretty sure that's a correct position, though, that you would be able to administer more.
I think if you take very talented athletes that already have all those attributes, discipline, hard work, and then you add steroids, you're going to get a more efficient body.
And on top of that, I think also with fighting, a big one is confidence.
And there's something about those guys that are juiced to the tits.
They're confident as fuck because they're Barely human.
I mean, when you hit these super high, hyperhuman levels of testosterone, you get these incredibly aggressive, confident men that can do things that they might.
And then subsequently, when they get off that stuff, boy, their confidence erodes radically.
But isn't it fascinating also that we're still talking about drugs?
Like that term drugs is just such a weighted and loaded term.
The fact that that term could be used for a steroid as well as for aspirin or coffee.
It's really kind of unfortunate that we have this one blanket term that applies to psychedelics and as well it applies to testosterone and it applies to heroin.
One of the things that bothers me about the psychedelic kind of movement, and God bless them, people who enjoy this thing, but, you know, people separate their drug use, like the psychedelic use, like, I'm using this to go on a higher plane or for some other reason, as opposed to the person on the corner who's getting high.
It's like...
You can rationalize your drug use however you want, but you're using drugs, and it's all the same thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
We're all together in this.
I'm not better than you with my drug use, and you're not better than me with your drugs.
I mean, this notion like even the marijuana smokers, when they talk about marijuana and not talk about crack and not talk about heroin, what the fuck is that?
I mean, come on.
You're doing a drug just like I'm doing this drug.
And so it's hypocrisy.
It's the same elitism that is pervasive throughout our society.
Well, I think the idea is that when they're doing marijuana or something like that, they're being responsible.
They're taking something that makes you more socially aware and casual, whereas when you're doing some speed or some meth or something like that, you're stealing cars and fucking driving into pedestrians.
See, not to talk about Rick's situation specifically, but just in general, when people are reluctant to say these things, that's part of the problem.
Because we need to have people get out of the closet.
There are so many people who go to jail, who get in trouble, who lose their job for doing a behavior that well-respected people in our society engage in.
I've been all over the world, and I've been hanging out with some of the movers and shakers in a variety of society.
And I have seen them get high, and they are responsible people, and they are people who I would want my children to be like, in many cases, some of these folks.
Now, many of those people are closeted.
But them being in the closet allows this hypocrisy to go on, allows us to go at the poor people for doing a behavior, engaging in behavior in which many of us engage in.
Something's very wrong with that.
And that's very, for me, very hypocritical.
And I like to look in the mirror as a man, as an adult, and to say that I live my life as honestly as I can in that regard.
And so what kind of man would I be if I wasn't honest about this?
I mean, I'm the person who has given thousands of doses of these drugs to people and carefully studied their effects, written books on this stuff.
If I can't say this, Why are you here?
Why am I here?
I would be embarrassed as a person, and I would deserve to be embarrassed as a person, because I didn't take the opportunity to help my fellow citizens who are catching hell for doing the same thing that I and others do.
I think these conversations where a guy like you, who is so educated in the subject, can expand people's minds and say things in such an honest way, I think it's very critical because we are so hesitant to admit these things.
I run into situations with parents all the time.
I go to school, their kids go to school, and then they'll Google me.
They'll find out who you are.
All the fucking drug talk is the one that freaks them out the most.
Not the fact that I'm involved in cage fighting.
That seems fine.
They want to get tickets.
The drug stuff is the weird part, especially the psychedelics ones.
Psychedelics are the ones that seem to freak them out the most, more so even in the pot.
Like DMT. I've had more parents ask me about DMT. You know, with this curious, cross-armed, so what is this DMT stuff?
Well, it's also what you're doing is so critical at this juncture because I think we're in a transitionary stage in our culture.
I think our culture is opening its mind, and I think, as we said before, because of the internet, because we can have conversations like this where no one can step in and stop us.
It's already too late.
Everything you've said, it's all streamed.
People have recorded it.
People are listening to it right now.
There's no way around that.
People are getting it.
They're playing it in their car.
No one can stop it.
And once that information gets out, then they'll Google it.
A vast majority of the people that are curious about this will start looking into some of the things that you've said and go, wow, that's fucking true.
Wow, this is crazy.
And then they'll talk to people at work, they'll talk to people at the gym, they'll talk to people that they're friends with, and then it'll expand further and further and further.
So I think what you're doing is critical.
It's critical at this juncture.
So the fact that you approach it like it's so critical is why you're so important.
Well, thank you, man, because, you know, that's how I try and see it.
You know, it's like I think about, like, I don't want to let people down by me not working as hard as I can, particularly when it's so important, as you point out, for so many people, you know, because young people, older people, people are always going to get high.
They're always going to get high.
So one of the things we can do is we can help them do it more safely and more effectively.
We can actually do that, as opposed to saying, don't do that.
Come on.
If you're a thinking person, you want to know why.
It's more important that kids and people challenge me, challenge everyone.
And when they challenge us, they might actually go and engage in this behavior.
Okay, I have my own kids.
So that means my kids hear me talking about this, so my kids might think, well, drugs aren't that bad, because I heard what my dad said.
So I have to understand that there's a potential that my kids will use drugs, too.
Yeah, I know that.
But the thing that I try to do is make sure they're safe and they know what they're doing.
And also that they understand their role about educating their friends and keeping their friends safe and even educating their teachers.
Like I get my kids say, Dad, I had the drug talk in class and this is what this person said, this teacher said or this person said.
Said that the majority of people who use marijuana go on to use other drugs and become addicted to marijuana or some other drug.
So my kid, my young kid, has to raise his hand and be like, Mr. X. It's exactly the opposite of what you just said.
And then the teacher says, you know, like, what evidence do you have for this sort of thing?
Of course, my kids, they do.
And he's like, well, look at the last three presidents of the United States, you know.
And so he goes on and he educates the teachers in that sort of way.
But you know, that's a hard thing for a kid to do.
It is.
But he feels compelled to do it because he understands that that's part of his responsibility too.
And, you know, like, boy, there's a lot of things that could potentially cause your brain to not function at its best, and some abuse of drugs is certainly on that list.
But there's a lot of things that we do on a daily basis that are not good for you, like poor diet, like a lack of exercise, like being stuck in polluted cities, like breathing in brake dust and fucking exhaust fumes all day.
Yeah, but we really have to challenge the brain damage narrative.
I mean, one of the things that we do is that we don't challenge it.
I mean, one of the things, when we think about the brain damage narrative, it has gained more energy in recent years, in part because we have this technology of neural imaging, of brain imaging.
But what, in fact, what has happened with brain imaging is that brain imaging has become a projection test, basically.
Or workshop, these sort of psychological tests where you throw up some image and you ask the person, what do they see?
And then, you know, you get this sort of, they'll tell you their interpretation and then the psychologist has his or her subjective interpretation of what that means.
That's what brain imaging in drugs in the sort of drug field has become.
It's become a projection test.
So that means that the sort of what the examiner sees is what the test or the information becomes.
So it's a subjective sort of view, a subjective view of what the examiner thinks.
And so you can take brain imaging For example, you can take the data and give it to two different labs.
Just give the data to two different labs and you don't tell them who the participants are.
I would bet you, any amount of money, that the two labs would not come up with the same interpretation.
You know, so people think of this as like being hard science.
It's there and this is what we see and we know it.
It's not that way.
It's really, there's a lot of subjective...
It's the subjectivity that goes into these sorts of tests.
And so one of the things we have to do is just push back and ask people when they talk about these drugs causing brain damage, where?
What's the evidence?
These are the questions that people have to ask.
Please show me the evidence of the brain damage that you're talking about.
Because it's true.
Amphetamines can cause brain damage.
Nicotine is a lot more dangerous than amphetamine, heroin, and all the rest of these things in terms of potency and that sort of thing.
But we take nicotine in doses that we avoid any sort of damage or most of the damage associated with it.
We take all of these drugs in doses that causes euphoria, which is way below The doses that causes toxicity.
So when we start talking about brain damage, humans don't usually take drugs in the doses that will cause brain damage because if they did, the drug effects become unpleasant and humans won't take it because it's so unpleasant.
So the notion that these things cause brain damage, you need to really ask people to show you the evidence.
I have not seen the evidence in humans that any of these recreational drugs is causing some brain damage.
So when they have those scans, and they show the brain, and they show the effects, like when someone's on X amount of, you know, milligrams of this or of that, I always wondered that.
Like, what are you seeing when you see, like, highlighted portions of the brain?
So if we're talking, most of the studies have been done when people are not on drugs.
I mean, we can talk about when people are on drugs would do that.
And so what you do, you typically do, you have like a group of methamphetamine users in one group, and then you have people who've never used methamphetamine in another group.
And you image their brain.
You might do what this thing we call a pet image.
That was popular where you inject a radioactive compound in somebody's body, and this compound selectively binds to, let's say, dopamine cells in the brain.
And when it binds to the dopamine cells, since it's radioactive, it lights up.
And so you can see how many dopamine cells are in a person's brain or region, or you can get an idea of the dopamine cells and how many are there.
One of the things that has done, sort of a popular way that it's done, is that they say the methamphetamine users have less dopamine receptors than the non-methamphetamine users.
And so, that's interpreted as saying methamphetamine caused the methamphetamine users to lose dopamine cells, kill cells, basically.
Now, we don't know what was in the brains of the methamphetamine users before they used methamphetamine.
We only know from this one scan.
That's one problem.
Another problem is that we don't know what the normal range of dopamine receptors are in a person's brain.
So if you look at your brain versus my brain, we'll see differences.
What does that mean?
Or if you look at the brains of people who never use drugs or anything, you'll see differences.
What does it mean?
And so we have a wide range, just as humans, we have a wide range of dopamine cells in each person's brains versus somebody else.
So you can't say that methamphetamine caused these people to lose dopamine cells because we don't know if they lost dopamine cells in the first place.
And another thing is that you have this tremendous amount of overlap of dopamine cells in this case in the methamphetamine users compared to the controls.
So that means that some people in the methamphetamine group has more dopamine cells than people in the control and vice versa.
So what does it all mean?
It doesn't mean, what it typically means is, we don't know, but what we know it doesn't typically mean is that it caused some brain damage.
Because when you look at these people's functioning, cognitive functioning, other functioning, they look just like anybody else who didn't use methamphetamine.
So the only way to tell would be to take someone who is healthy and doesn't have a history of drug use and monitor them, get them hooked on methamphetamine, and then see what's happening to their dopamine receptors then?
So you just look in the general population and you say, all right, what is a dopamine-related illness?
You look at a dopamine-related illness.
One of them is Parkinson's disease.
You lose dopamine cells, you get Parkinson's disease.
Do you have higher rates of Parkinson's disease in methamphetamine users?
And, you know, the bottom line is that you don't generally see this.
You don't see higher rates of Parkinson's disease in methamphetamine use.
I mean, that's just one thing.
But you can just look throughout the society and you can see various illnesses, particularly neurological illnesses, and see, do you have greater rates of this illness in people who reported this type of drug use?
And you don't really see that.
And so, when I hear people talk about the brain damage thing, particularly when they show brain imaging, that's not evidence of brain damage.
You know, when you have animal studies, you can give animals amphetamines for every day for their life, and then you kill them at some point, and then you look at dopamine damage, for example.
You certainly can see damage.
When you give Amphetamine at doses 30, 40 times what humans take.
Yeah, you can see some toxicity.
It's clear.
But now when you give the doses that are comparable to what humans take over that same period of time, you don't see this.
This is the same thing that I worry about with steroid use.
This is why I want to make sure that we...
Actually regulate it, because we want to make sure people are not taking doses that are so large that they might actually be causing some damage.
And when you don't regulate it, yeah, you run that risk.
And so regulate it.
And if you really care about people, that's what you would do.
And then you make sure that you monitor them regularly to make sure that they don't exceed those levels, and you educate them about the potential consequences.
Well, a good example of that is probably the bodybuilding community, because if anybody takes steroids at hyperhuman and preposterous levels, it's bodybuilders.
And yet, very few of them wind up dying from it.
There are a few cases of guys that were really big in the 80s and 90s that are now Dead from heart attack.
But if you ever see what those fucking guys look like, you realize, like, these are not people that are taking normal levels.
These are not people that are even taking commensurate levels to their peers.
Like, a lot of them are taking just these insane, insane...
And some of them have come clean about their routines and what they would use.
I mean, they were just redlining.
They were just redlining their system on a regular basis.
They were trying to win, and they were trying to...
That's a sport where you have to take steroids.
You're not going to compete with a Lee Haney or a Dorian Yates.
You're not going to compete with them if you don't take steroids.
But that is a crazy sport when you think about it.
I mean, some people don't even consider it a sport, whatever, an activity, whatever you want to call it, you know, because it's not like you're doing anything other than standing there looking big.
Well, you know, it's like if you do a wide range of different types of studies, you know, because there's no perfect studies.
But if you have all of these different types of studies and then you have the evidence coming, pointing to the same way, the same direction, it increases your confidence that this is real.
And that's kind of what happened with alcohol.
There have been dozens of large studies with thousands of people that have looked at folks who don't drink alcohol, those people who drink moderate doses and those who drink excessive or larger doses.
And the moderate drinkers, time at the time, They are associated with all of these positive outcomes.
And so it's certainly starting to increase my confidence that it's something real going on where people should drink moderately.
People should take a little heroin, they should drink moderately, should do some steroids.
I'm obviously not really stating your position, but there's a thing in red wine, there's an antioxidant called resveratrol, isn't that something that they've associated with health as well?
Yep, and that's probably why he's so—well, and he also has a personality, and the other folks who are running for the Republicans don't have personalities.
And personality means a lot in this goofy country.
Anyway, if someone came along and said, listen, Dr. Hart, you're obviously very educated in this subject, much more so than the average person, what do you recommend we do in this country to handle drugs?
Yeah, so the first thing I do, you know, you'd be really hard-pressed to have me work in government, for once.
I just want to state that, because the thing that I love about being an academic is that I'm a free man.
And in government, these people talk about what they can't do because of some whatever reason.
I don't understand how you look in the mirror when you say you can't do things.
But If I had some influence on drug policy in this country, the first thing I would do was decriminalize all drugs.
That would be the first thing that would happen immediately.
Then I would change our educational sort of programming in this country surrounding drugs.
All of these things that vilify the drug and say that it's the drug that causes that that would be out.
People who are doing the sort of things that the government is paying for, their money would dry up if they didn't change the way that they're educating.
That's another thing.
Another thing I would do with police forces that I had control over, they would, when they confiscate drugs, their main mission is not to arrest people.
The main mission is to keep people safe.
Whenever they confiscated drugs, they would test them for adulterants and see what else is in that cocaine, what else is in that heroin.
And it would be published in the local papers.
It would be published in some local sort of form where everyone would know Avoid this type of drug or this packaging because it has this adulterant and that's not safe.
Whereas something else doesn't have that adulterant.
So the people would be informed immediately.
Then another thing I would do, I would work on legalizing or regulating all of these drugs.
Figuring out what would be the best regulated market for marijuana?
What would be the best regulated market for cocaine?
What would be the best regulated market for heroin?
How do we best regulate ecstasy?
How do we do this?
And that's where I would go.
And we would get rid of the people in jail who are there because of drug violation.
Our enforcement of drug laws has been racially discriminatory.
That's a fact.
But we certainly can come back to the racism piece.
But, I mean, so that sort of thing, we were expecting Obama to, his administration, to push for a one-to-one equating with crackwood powder.
It didn't happen.
And by the way, it's 18 to 1 now, and then when you look at the arrests of people who are being arrested, it's still 80% black.
It's still this racially discriminatory sort of effect.
So changing that law didn't have any impact on that.
That's one thing.
And then when we think about the people who are being, the sentences have been commuted.
You know, he has become the president who has commuted more sentences than any other president.
I think Johnson was ahead of him at one point, but now he's surpassed Johnson.
But we have to think about when Johnson was president, we might have had 200,000 people in jail.
You know, now we got 2.3 million or so.
So really, this is a drop in the bucket.
And this is disappointing to me.
I am so discouraged and...
It's heartbreaking, actually, because we thought we would see this president be more bold about these things, raise these issues.
And some of these sort of arrests are related to race, and racial discrimination is important.
But one of the things that happens in our country when we start having this discussion or these discussions about racial discrimination It's that we're in this frame where poor black people, poor other people, white people, all these other people in the country who are catching the same hell are not working together as a result of keeping this conversation tied to the racial discrimination.
Although racial discrimination is important in a lot of domains and we should not forget that.
But there are people, there are white poor people catching the same hell for the same or similar reasons.
The reason might not be conspicuously race, but it might be for other reasons.
Like I said, I've been traveling all over the world and I went to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and you got a lot of fans there.
Like the Catholics, although they're not really Catholics, many of these people are not really Catholics, but they're catching hell For similar reasons.
You know, they're being dominated by a British sort of occupation, if you will.
And they have similar problems as poor people have in this country.
And so one of the things I'm struggling with is that I'm trying to get people to see how poor black people's struggles in the U.S. is connected with poor white people's struggle in Belfast.
Their struggles are connected with poor peoples in Brazil.
All around the globe, these people have more things in common.
And then sometimes the conspicuous characteristic of race Kind of blinds us from our connection with other folks.
And so I'm struggling with how to communicate this in a way that everybody can see, hey, we're in this shit together.
And there are a few elitist sort of people who are benefiting from us going at each other's throat and not understanding.
So decriminalization, thinking about Portugal and the Czech Republic, you still have the illicit markets in those places.
And so people have to understand that decriminalization is not to go at the illicit markets.
Decriminalization, the major reason that you decriminalize is that you don't want to put your citizens in jail and you want to encourage them to get help if they need help.
So it's about the sort of user.
That's kind of what you're doing.
But if you're worried about illicit drug markets and you want to get rid of illicit drug markets, then regulation is a way to go, legal regulation.
And if you're worried about adulterants, legal regulation is a way to go because you get rid of the black market and you get rid of The potential dangerous compounds that people cut these drugs with.
That's my major concern.
That's why I kind of push for now regulating these markets because I'm more afraid of the adulterants.
I'm not afraid of heroin.
I know how to keep people safe with heroin.
I know how to keep people safe with cocaine.
But I don't know how to keep people safe with some of the cuts because I don't know what they are.
But there are others that will work, and I'm sure he has some good physicians.
I mean, look through our history.
The presidents have taken stimulants and sedatives, as well they should, because they have to be on these different coasts, and the time change, and they have to.
It just doesn't make...
I mean, people who have to be in the public eye, I assure you, They are taking drugs to enhance their human experience and function.
So, to go back to that, there's never been a time, it's not like an achievable goal, there's never been a time where we've gone a month, a week, a year, whatever, without anyone in this country doing drugs.
So we know that the drugs are always going to exist.
It would seem to me that this country that's obsessed with making money to the point where we have privatized prisons and we allow people to profit off of people being in jail, wouldn't it be a better source of income to instead tax legal sales of drugs?
To make everything legal, tax it, and then you get the benefit like you got in Colorado.
Colorado is the first state ever to get more taxes from marijuana than they do from alcohol, which is incredible.
They made more money this year from marijuana than they have from alcohol.
And alcohol's been around forever.
If we did that with cocaine and with heroin and with ecstasy and all these other drugs that we know people are already using, and we also know people are selling illegally and not paying taxes on it.
It's not only people are selling coke and going, you know what, I'm a coke dealer, but I'm a responsible American, so I like to pay taxes.
I made $100 million this year.
How'd you make that money?
Ah, fuckin' hustle.
You know, hustle and flow.
You know how I do.
No one's going to do that, so we're missing out on all that tax revenue as a country.
I mean, it's economically unsound to not legalize it and tax it.
If you know for a fact that people are going to do it, it seems economically irresponsible.
And then the idea of these public or private prisons.
Private prisons are a giant issue in this country because they also lobby.
And the prison unions, the prison guard unions, and police officers unions lobby to make sure the drug laws stay in place to make sure that they have work.
Yeah, private prisons now, the thing is that they're all those things you said.
But understand, they only make up 11% of all prison beds in the United States, right?
They're going to Brazil now and they're going to some other places.
And it's important that we are aware of what you just said.
But we also need to be aware of places like Louisiana.
I think they have the largest number of prisoners in the country.
They have local sheriffs who kind of operate like private prisons.
So they bid or they get these state prisoners to be housed in their jail and they receive a certain amount of money for having those prisoners in their local jail.
So this is a way for the local sheriffs to generate Income, revenue, by taking the prisoners from state prisoners into their local jails.
And so this technically is not private prison, but this is certainly unscrupulous.
And people should be aware of this going on throughout the country as well.
So private prisons are a concern, but also these local jails and local sheriffs, they're doing similar things.
Yeah, and there are people who are saying in terms of Colorado, they're saying that, yeah, Colorado is generating all of this tax revenue, but they're having to pay out a lot of it, too, because they have to enforce this new law.
And so people are kind of distorting this sort of story.
But I think over time, Colorado and other places is going to show that This is a huge benefit, and the benefits far outweigh the risk, I think.
And similar to what's going on in Portugal, where you see the decrease in violent crime, the decrease in addiction, the decrease in all sorts of different problems.
Yeah, see the thing about Portugal too, you have to understand, in places like Portugal, Switzerland, those kind of places where they kind of take care of their people, they are more of a homogenous society than we are.
And when you have a place like the United States where we're not as homogenous, like LA, you guys have every nationality, ethnic group, race, they're all here.
Not homogenous at all.
And so one of the things that the drug laws has done, it has allowed us to separate out those people we don't like and go after them.
So if we decriminalize, it makes it more difficult.
So you're taking away that tool.
Whereas Portugal, the Swiss, and those folks, they're such homogenous societies.
They kind of care about the people in their society because the people who are in power, they see that many of the people who might be subjected to these laws, they look like them.
They are them.
In our society, since it's not as homogenous, It's easy for us to think about these drug laws being used to go after those people who don't share our value.
That's what we say, but they really don't look like us, and they're really not us.
So this can't really happen to us, because we know that there are a number of people who look like folks who are in Washington, and they're using drugs.
They're using a lot of drugs, but they're not subjected to drug policy.
So I think overall, like as an overview, what we're looking at is we have a society that has a lot of ignorance when it comes to both the prevalence of drugs, the use of drugs, and the effect of drugs.
And that ignorance is part of the problem and it's shaped not just public opinion but also shaped policy, shaped how politicians address these issues like a guy like Chris Christie that is allowed to say ignorant stuff.
The reason why he's not booed off stage when he does it is for a lot of the people in the audience, they don't know that what he's saying is unbelievably ignorant.
You know, they kind of support these things because they're not happening to them.
And it's those other people who don't share their values is what they say.
But they really don't look like them.
They don't...
They don't dress like them.
They don't go to the same schools.
They don't do any of these things.
So Christie, when he says that, he's saying this because he's representing what many Americans think, and he's providing cover for that bigoted ignorance or that uninformed perspective.
Yeah, you know, I spoke at the World Health Organization this past summer, universities in Belfast and London, Geneva, of course, Brazil, just down there speaking.
I'll be in Canada next month.
So just doing all of these talks, I'm trying to Have these kind of conversations, trying to inform people, trying to let people know that they've been hoodwinked all around the world, and they've been hoodwinked, particularly countries that follow the U.S. drug policy, and try and expose why the countries are following this policy that is having detrimental impact on their citizens.
Yeah, you know, in Brazil, for example, they have followed the U.S. wholeheartedly and Brazil has 50 percent of their population is black, right?
Fifty percent.
They have like the greatest African population outside of Africa.
They, in their prisons, their jails are filled with black people.
And the poor people in the country are black.
And their drug policy is being used as a tool to further marginalize this group, basically.
And so when I go down there and speak, and I'm brought there by their government oftentimes, it's well received, even from the ruling class and the government.
And so it's a conundrum to me, quite frankly, that I'm so well received there by the ruling class.
But there are some people who are very interested in changing policy.
Geneva and those places, what I'm saying to them, those folks there, they're like, no shit.
We know that.
And their drug policy is reflected, or it's more rational.
Go to France, they're equally as ignorant as we are, and they use their drug policy just like we do, and they're equally arrogant as we are.
Belfast, they're trying.
I mean, their Catholic population, you know, they're on the siege, basically.
Vancouver, they feel the message, of course.
Norway, all of these people, they are responding because they know.
This is not...
I'm not...
I wish I was brilliant and bright and all those things.
I'm not.
You know, this is not anything that's earth-shattering.
These people know.
Many of the people around the world, Colombia, was in Colombia, those people, they're politicians, they know.
But they're getting a lot of money from the U.S. to continue this sort of war on drugs.
Mexico, they know.
But they're getting a lot of money from the U.S. to continue this war on drugs.
They decriminalize everything, but nobody talks about it.
Because, as I pointed out earlier, in Portugal, a person is allowed to have a 10-day supply of drugs before that triggers some sort of criminal prosecution.
So you can have a 10-day supply of methamphetamine, heroin, whatever.
In Mexico, you trigger a criminal offense when you have just a small amount of something.
So it's like, it's really not decriminalization.
You know, it's just they lowered the thresholds that trigger a criminal prosecution.
It doesn't really play out in the spirit of decriminalization.