Dr. Carl Hart challenges America’s war on drugs, exposing how politicians like Ted Cruz and Rudy Giuliani exploited the Capitol riot while scapegoating opioids—ignoring economic collapse (e.g., Rust Belt job losses) and fentanyl-tainted heroin. He debunks myths, citing his own heroin use to boost focus for TED Talks or interviews, and slams academia’s drug-centric bias over real-world struggles, like unemployment-driven addiction. Contrasting crack’s demonization with legalized alcohol, Hart advocates regulated access (e.g., Spain’s testing centers) to prevent crime and contamination, urging Rogan to explore substances firsthand in a proposed Guess What We’re On show. His blunt honesty forces accountability, proving responsible use isn’t inherently destructive—just politically convenient. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the COVID lockdowns affected everywhere, and I think it affected here less than it affected L.A., but I think the real thing is, you know, I mean, it's mental health, right?
That's the real reason most of those folks are out there.
Well, there was a bunch of different narratives, right?
And if Louis wasn't talking, you know, all Louis did was, like, release a statement.
But if you weren't talking to him, you didn't get his version of it.
Once I talked to him personally and got his version, I'm like, well, this is a very different version than what you're hearing from the public.
And from the people that are making the worst judgments on it, what it was mostly was he's kind of a pervert, and he asked if he could jerk off in front of them, and he had already been flirting with these girls, and he knew them, and they had made it seem like he was a monster.
He was cornering people and jerking off in front of them.
Yeah, between Switzerland and New York, it's just that we have to do a better job of treating people better.
I mean, caring for people.
People who are not our family, just other human beings.
Even if you're not taking care of them, you gotta at least care about people.
And it's okay to not care about people.
That's some fucked up shit.
And that's coming from the highest levels of government, and it's like I don't like that ethos, and so I don't want to be around it because I don't want it to infect or poison me.
You know, it makes me angry for people who like support Trump, for example.
They're all not racist, of course, and this sort of thing, but I don't understand How people can support a guy who's so mean-spirited and just attacks other people.
I don't understand it.
And so when my good friends, I have good friends who support Trump.
It's hard for me to talk to them.
Because I don't want to be rude or angry with them.
But I just don't understand how you support people who are just mean to other people.
Yeah, their take on it is just that he released the shackles that the military had to go and take down ISIS. And he released some of the restrictions that the military had under the previous administration as far as engaging with terrorists.
They've shut down ISIS in like less than a year from Trump being in office.
And when I talk to people that are active military, they said there was a night and day difference between the way the military was funded, the way...
I think that what Trump represented to a lot of people was like this deviation from this system that never supported them, that never served them.
They felt like politicians were all full of shit and finally this guy's gonna come in and you know even his ideas like clean up the swamp like this motto.
Like that, oh yeah, that's what we need.
That's what we need.
So they got behind it.
And then when they realized, whenever there's an us versus them situation, people oftentimes aren't thinking clearly.
I mean, this recent thing where those folks went to the Capitol and they were standing up on his behalf, and then he throws them under the Yeah, I threw them all under the bus after it was over.
I didn't want to get depressed and watch it, but today I said, let's get depressed.
And I watched a bunch of it.
I had no idea how bad it was in terms of the sheer number of people storming the gates and screaming and It's a small handful of cops that were supposed to protect it, and that one cop that got beaten, there's like a video of them hitting the cop with flags and shit.
It's really sad to me that that kind of thing happened, and then you have these fucking cowards, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Cruz, Josh Howley, all of these cowards, they're allowed to stand on their pulpit and say these things like they're tough, but they're nowhere around to support these folks in the first place, and they're sending them into the battle.
And now they will comfortably join the ranks of their members of Congress while these other people are going to go to jail and have these charges, which they should have, of course, but these leaders who manipulated them, there's no consequences to them.
It's interesting to see, you know, we've always known that there's a certain faction of this country that's fairly simple.
Not that sophisticated, not very smart, and they like thinking in like a real narrow box.
And this guy came along and was their guy.
You know, and then we realized like, oh, like the assholes of this country were unrepresented.
And now all of a sudden they got represented.
There was a lot of people.
A lot of those folks that stormed the castle, that stormed Capitol Hill.
If you see when they get arrested and you find out who they are, a guy living with his mom, believe in QAnon conspiracies, thinks the FBI is sending out pedophile codes, that kind of shit.
I'm telling you, man, I'm putting this square on those people in Washington.
Trump is one of them, of course.
But I'm talking about the Ted Cruz's and all of those people as well.
I mean, those people, they should face the criminal justice system for what they did.
Because these folks who are out here, we all have the potential to be assholes.
And then if you think that what you're doing Is holding up the liberty that we promise in this country, that you are being a real patriot and you really believe that you've been manipulated to do that by these leaders, they should pay the price.
And that's the thing that I'm really disturbed by.
It's like, yeah, we should get Trump.
Yep, absolutely.
But we should go after those other people as well.
I think that Ted Cruz and those folks were setting themselves up for a future presidential run or what have you and hoping that they get Trump, the kingmaker, to endorse them.
Even though...
Trump called his wife ugly.
I would have beat Trump's ass.
I mean, I'm telling you.
I mean, it's like, what kind of man allows that to happen?
You get deeply entrenched in that business and there's compromises that you make and a lot of weirdness I understand but you know like what kind of person want to be president?
I don't want to do that But I'm glad there are people that that do it and the thing is I think we should require them to be more honorable than we do we certainly should and and so like when when people are posturing politically when they know that That there's no chance that this election can be overturned because there's no fraud.
I think they should pay a price.
I think that is just too manipulative.
And I think their position requires that they be more honest.
And until we do, until we require this of them, Then I think that they will continue.
Look, I'm a big proponent of psychedelics use, and a lot of times people think that that's frivolous.
That's a silly thing.
It's an escape thing.
I don't really think it is.
I think it seems silly and frivolous for people that have never engaged in it.
But I think that...
One of the things that could be the savior of this civilization I really believe this is the legalization of psychedelic drugs because I think if we had more people taking psychedelic drugs responsibly and Especially under the direction of real professionals if we allowed there to be real professionals We would allow people to have these experiences that dissolve their ego and give them this feeling of community and compassion I think a lot
of those people that storm Capitol Hill, a lot of people like Ted Cruz, a lot of people that run for government and manipulate people, they have no experience in these things.
If you want to make MDMA, all you do is put another ring, a methylene-dioxy ring, and then that's MDMA. So MDMA is called methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
That's what it's called.
That's the name.
And certainly people know about MDMA's reputation in terms of increasing empathy.
And if you've been to places like Burning Man and those festivals, and so you see all of those people and they're caring, they're sharing, they're doing all of these kinds of things.
But some of those same people go out into the world after that experience and they misbehave and they act like assholes.
For this reason that you're talking about, helping people to be more magnanimous, empathetic, giving, understanding, and all of these things.
But I'm arguing that drugs like heroin should be included there, cocaine should be included there, along with the psychedelics.
And so I agree with you, but I also understand that it has a lot to do with context, like where the drugs are being used, with who you're using it with.
And it also has a lot to do with who's using the drugs.
So the book is called Drug Use for Grownups for a reason.
Yeah, you got to be a grown-up because if you end up being a grown-up It's a difficult thing as you know, you know I have kids and I have these responsibilities and I got I have to make sure that I'm a good model for them Treat people well trying to teach them to treat people well treat people well a lot of people are not grown-ups and so If you add a drug to the mix You're not going to all of a sudden have a grown-up.
And so if people are responsible and grown-ups and empathetic, oh, drugs can really enhance all of those things.
And so I just want to be clear that you give a drug to an asshole, no matter what drug you give, you're still going to have an asshole there.
You know, you remind me of a joke that Neil Brennan had, you know, like comedians.
That's who I listen to.
I mean, I don't read.
I listen to comedians, and that's how I get my knowledge, you know.
But Neil had a joke that said, like, Right.
joke.
But he basically was saying, "You feel so good, you don't hear these people going out saying that we should restrict abortion," or something of that nature, right?
And so there is something to that, right?
When you're euphoric, you don't want to go out and you don't want to cause trouble.
You don't want to be aggressive or get into a fight with many of these drugs.
I think there's a trend right now with people that are very ambitious to take amphetamines.
It's a current trend that's being accentuated by Adderall.
I know quite a few people that get Adderall legally and they get it because of, air quote, fatigue or, oh, I have ADHD or ADHD or whatever the fuck it is.
You just like speed.
You like being revved up all the time.
I get it.
And if you're on a controlled version of this where you're not taking too much, but you're taking just enough, they're remarkably productive.
And also, they can justify taking it because they've got a doctor who told them that it's okay.
Nothing wrong with that, but it's weird to me that those same people oftentimes would frown upon the use of anything that creates deep introspective thought, like mushrooms or LSD or...
What changed me was years of evidence of watching people giving drugs to people in a lab and watching them get high and seeing predominantly positive effects.
Now this is now, I'm well into my 30s, 40s, and now 54, but over that long period of time, That's where I changed, though.
I'm not like somebody who came to this from high school, always liked drugs and thought of drugs.
I was an athlete.
I thought I was going to play professional basketball.
So I'm like you.
I was just like you.
Like, nah, I don't want to be like those cats.
You know what I'm saying?
But then me actually giving drugs to people and studying their responses and then really checking out the history of why drugs are banned...
And just seeing how I was misled and manipulated and lied to.
And now that I use all these drugs and think how I'm a better person for it.
My life has been enhanced because of it.
My connection to my loved ones are a lot better.
But again, I'm a responsible grown-up, right?
I'm 54 years old and I know what I'm doing.
So when we think about something like cocaine, cocaine, not the bullshit that people sell on the street that's been stepped on.
So like when you go to places like Columbia and you go to the source and you get really good cocaine, Like, Colombia cocaine is about $7 a gram, whereas in New York it could be anywhere from $60 to $100 a gram.
And not as good as a product in Colombia.
So you go to the source countries and you get good stuff.
It could be a really good evening with you and your significant other, you know?
And all of these sort of stories of people being paranoid about the cops with cocaine, there are reasons to be paranoid if you're doing something wrong.
So since they banned alcohol in Atlanta, he had to come up with a new formulation.
And so what he did was tuck the alcohol out, added carbonated water and sugar.
Then you have Coca-Cola.
This is how Coca-Cola was made.
And he put it in these soda fountains, so he sold it at pharmacies, at these soda fountains.
And they were for whites only.
So cocaine was typically available only to white people at that time.
But then in, I guess, maybe 1899, early 1900s, Coca-Cola began bottling the products.
Now it's available to black people.
And now you start to get the connection between violence and cocaine use among black people.
And this sort of narrative grew and grew to the point where we banned cocaine effectively in 1914, largely because of its association with black people using the drug.
A similar thing happened with opium in the Chinese.
That's the real reason that those drugs are banned.
Not because of pharmacology.
You know what I'm saying?
Now that's not to say that people can't get in trouble with these drugs.
We got the technology to put on the streets where people can just submit small samples of their drug, 10 milligrams, which is nothing.
And then they get a readout of the chemical composition of their drug.
We have that technology if the public would put pressure on their officials to make sure that it's available to people where they can submit their drugs, small samples of their drugs, free and anonymously.
This is why, in the book, I admit my heroin use, my cocaine use, all of my drug use, so...
I'm trying to change that image because I have met people all around the world, some politicians and so forth, and got high with these people.
Of course, I won't say who they are, but the vast majority of people who use these drugs are people who are responsible for Take care of their families.
They care about their communities.
They do all this sort of stuff.
But Hollywood and the media and the mythology is so powerful in showing only this one image.
And I'm trying to really disrupt that because it's so harmful to so many people.
Portland is in the middle of an interesting experiment, right?
Portland has essentially decriminalized everything.
Basically, they've decided to treat people like grown-ups and say, we're not going to arrest you for anything.
And I'm very curious to see where that goes, because we know what happened in Portugal.
Portugal did that, and they had a drastic decrease in crimes, drastic decrease in addictions, and it really opened up a lot of people's eyes.
They were like, oh, Jesus Christ, maybe we're doing this the wrong way.
And demonizing these substances, and also infantilizing people.
That's the big one, is another grown adult telling you that you can't do something, that you can't handle it, you shouldn't be able to, but also making this distinction just with drugs, but not with Other things that are legal, like bull riding or BMX riding or MMA fighting or a lot of other dangerous things that people enjoy doing, including drinking.
The problem is our perception.
We have this ingrained perception of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and you will see people at a bar with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other say, I don't do drugs.
I mean, we have this really Looney Tunes version of what drugs are and what a person should and should not be doing with their life.
And if you see someone who's out there, hey, I'm going to go do coke.
You want to do coke?
Like, Mike is losing his mind.
I experienced that with pot.
The people will go, you smoke pot?
I thought you got your shit together and you're into being successful.
Well, Joe, that's why I'm glad you got me here, man, so we can try to change this shit.
Let's try to change this shit.
When we think about Portugal, you said Portugal, they decriminalized about 20 years ago, right?
Everything.
But we don't talk about Spain.
Spain never banned drugs, right?
And so Spain has always had a decriminalization policy.
And there are other countries like Colombia has decriminalization.
A number of countries that people just don't know.
Portugal was just really good at marketing.
And so the world knows about Portugal.
But really...
It's time to move on.
Portugal should legally regulate everything.
It should be legal in Portugal and around the world it should be legal.
Because even with decriminalization, the thing that I worry about with drugs more than anything...
Is the contaminants that people can put in the drugs, right?
They're far more dangerous, or they can potentially be more dangerous than the drugs themselves.
And decriminalization does nothing for that.
But if you regulate it, like we have done with alcohol, what we're doing with cannabis now in 15 states or so, you now at least have some quality control.
And that's where the problems come.
When you have tainted substances.
If we think about prohibition, the period between 1920 and 1933 in this country, we had a number of people dying and being maimed from tainted alcohol.
We legalized alcohol in 1933. At the end of 1933, those problems went away.
The quality control issues, they all went away.
And so that's where I'm hoping society goes.
Legally regulate these other things so we have this quality control.
So, like, when I go to the airports, like, when I'm in places outside of the United States, people fuck with you because you're a dread and you're traveling and so forth.
You know, they want you to go to customs and so forth.
So I wear these shirts.
And I tell people, you know, like I'm a doctor, and they say, oh, is that a chemical structure?
And then I lie.
And so you say, yeah, this is in your brain or your body.
And then I start explaining it in great detail.
And then they just be like, all right, just get the fuck out of here.
You've got to give me a little more than that, Joe, because I know far more people who haven't had problems with these pills, because you know they're a lot like you.
So if you're taking antidepressants and then you're going to come off of them, your physician will taper you off because antidepressant medications, you will experience withdrawal if you abruptly discontinue them.
And so people know this.
Withdrawal is not a big deal to deal with.
Now, if he was having other problems, like he just wanted to seek opioids, then maybe he liked the effects.
And if he was still meeting all of his obligations and they weren't disruptive, what's wrong with that?
You know, we've talked about this on the podcast before.
There's a really weird video from the early days of the Afghan war where Geraldo Rivera is on Fox News and he's showing US soldiers guarding poppy fields.
And that they're guarding the poppy fields so that the poppy growers will help them out and rat out the Taliban.
And we're watching this going, what the fuck are you talking about?
The United States Army is guarding poppy fields?
Where is that heroin going?
Who's selling it?
How's it getting out of there?
How's it getting to America?
Because it is getting to America.
And if the soldiers are guarding it, what else are they doing?
You know, but to think about opioids seriously, you know, because the country thinks that we're in an opioid crisis and all of this nonsense that's going on.
I get these emails from parents.
I don't know if you know ASAPs, the ASAP group, the ASAP Mob folks, ASAP Rocky.
Yeah, so the founder of the group, ASAP Yams, Steven Rodriguez is his name, he died.
And his death was attributed to an opioid overdose.
I met his mom as a result of this and I looked at his toxicology and we had great conversations.
I consider her a friend now.
And so I take this seriously about the opioids.
When I look at how and why he died, he most likely died from ignorance.
That is, he didn't realize that if you mix something like oxycodone, that's what he had, oxycodone.
He had promethazine, which is an antihistamine.
Alcohol, benzodiazepine, a number of things in his system.
And those things combine to increase the likelihood of respiratory depression.
That's what I think.
Now, if he was simply seeking an opioid high, He would have been fine if he would only have taken the oxycodone.
But people don't realize that they shouldn't mix the opioid with an antihistamine, with alcohol, with a benzodiazepine, because that increases the likelihood of you having respiratory depression.
So many of these deaths are Caused by this type of ignorance.
And in other cases, we don't know why people are dying.
Like, for example, two, three weeks ago, I get an email from another woman who lost her son.
And what they told her was that the son died from an opioid, cocaine-related death.
She sent me to toxicology.
I looked at the levels of the opioid in his system.
This particular guy had fentanyl in his system and he had cocaine in his system.
Fentanyl is an opioid which is far more potent than heroin.
And we worry about that when people take fentanyl and thinking that it's heroin because they may take too much and die.
And cocaine was in his system.
But both of these drugs, the levels that were in his system For example, the cocaine was five times lower than the cocaine levels that we typically see in the lab when we're giving the drug and people are having a good time.
And the fentanyl level in his system was also really low.
So this poor guy What do you think he died?
Some substance that they didn't test for, maybe, or something else?
This particular kid, I'm calling him a kid, but he's 30-some years old.
He had a history of using these drugs.
So he would have definitely had tolerance to both opioids and cocaine.
So I don't think it was some strange reaction because these were his drugs of choice.
But my point is, is that people who are doing death investigations Medical examiners and coroners are allowed to get away with saying that someone died from an opioid-related death simply because the drug is in the system.
But when you start to really look at these levels, it's like, this wouldn't have killed the person.
And then they don't have to do their job anymore.
And I asked her about an autopsy.
And she said they didn't do one.
And so that really worries me.
Now, I understand that people can get in trouble with tainted drugs like heroin tainted with fentanyl.
That's a concern.
We have to deal with that.
But I'm also concerned that we have bought into this story about the opioid crises, and we are letting people off the hook in terms of informing the public about what's really going on.
Now, when you say that you think it's nonsense, like the opioid crisis is nonsense, I mean, there's a lot of people out there that are addicted to opioids.
So let's think about the towns where we see these that's being ravaged by the opioid crisis.
West Virginia, Ohio, some parts of Michigan.
All of these places, what do they call them, Rust Belt, places where we had these factories, we had gainful employment, all of these people were doing fairly well.
Factories are all gone.
These people had been middle class.
They're no longer middle class and now they're being offered bullshit jobs with bullshit salaries.
They can't take care of their families.
And now they use opioids too, right?
I mean...
use.
We won't talk about all the rest of these other problems that they have, but opioids are an easy sort of scapegoat.
And politicians get currency from this because they say we're going to pump money into the opioid crises.
We're going to open up treatment centers.
It's like, the fuck?
You don't need treatment centers.
You need jobs.
You need people here to have gainful employment.
That's what you need.
I mean, and so as long as you're not talking about employing these people, as long as you're not talking about making sure that they're not getting tainted drugs...
Yeah, we have to change our attitudes about these drugs.
What do you think the best way, other than these kind of conversations and putting these conversations out in the public, what's the best way to get people to reconsider their preconceived notions?
One of them was Buffalo Bill, because he had this crazy mustache.
The other one was Water Dog, and he was this dude in Connecticut.
And he was a top-flight professional pool player.
And he would gamble for big money, but he had to do heroin first.
So I used to play at this place called Executive Billiards in White Plains, New York.
And it was an unusual place at the time where there was a lot of action.
I mean, a lot of guys came there from all over the country to gamble because they knew they'd get games there because there was a lot of gamblers in that particular pool hall.
And it was open until like 5, 6 o'clock in the morning.
But the people who worked there all encouraged gambling.
My friend Guy, Guy Azariti, he's no longer with us, but he actually owned the place.
And so he loved the whole gambling aspect of it.
Well, this guy would go to the bathroom, he would shoot up, and he would come out, and he would sit on a stool like this.
Just sit, like, motionless.
Like, his lids would be heavy, and his arms would be like T-Rex, just, like, hanging there.
And he would sit there for, like, 20, 30 minutes, and then he would get out of it, and then he wouldn't miss anything.
It was crazy.
It was crazy.
Because he would play this guy George the Greek.
And George the Greek was this real gruff New York character.
Talked like this all the time.
This motherfucker can't miss.
He gets his shit and he can't fucking miss.
He would be so angry.
Because you couldn't rattle him.
You couldn't get...
Like...
There's a misconception of the term pool shark.
They think it's a guy who comes in and is really good at pool.
Sharking someone means to distract them while they're playing.
That's what sharking means.
Like if a guy is going to make a shot and you move and you try to do something to take his eye out.
So would you do it, like say if you had some very important conversation on television or something like that, would you do heroin the day before purposely?
And then maybe they try to alleviate some pressure or alleviate some anxiety with drugs and they decide that they've gone too far and they're using it too much.
You think it's a psychological issue, though, more than a chemical substance issue?
So when a person is an alcoholic and they drink all the time, one thing that is true is that people, like alcohol is one of the interesting drugs in that it's commonly available and it's one of the rare ones.
Where getting off of it will kill you, right?
Like, if you are addicted to drugs, and they think that's what happened to Amy Winehouse, unfortunately.
Yeah, so that's why you want to tell people, go see a physician and slowly titrate, take something like a benzodiazepine, and then it will slowly bring the neurons back around.
So with heroin and all of these opioids, you get constipated because it slows down the motility.
So what the body does is try to counteract what's going on, because you have these compensatory mechanisms, these mechanisms that try to maintain homostasis.
Now, those forces are activated.
And when you've been taking these drugs for a long period of time, those forces are ramped up.
And now you just abruptly discontinue the use of these drugs.
Those forces are still ramped up.
And now the opioid is not there.
So you're going to get like this over effect, this super effect.
So you'll get this tremendous amount of diarrhea as a result because those forces are ramped up to get your stuff moving.
So it's basically your body's compensation for the opioids, and that opioids are removed, so the compensation exists, but there's nothing to battle against.
I would think that if it was legal and we had legitimate professional places where a person could get these things, where people had an understanding of it, because most people...
Most people don't necessarily have a good understanding of the physical response to the body, to these opiates.
But if you had a place where you could get it from and they could explain it to you, this is why you have to be careful getting off of this.
This is what's going on in your body and this is how you avoid.
This is how you mitigate these real problems that can be associated with just stopping cold turkey.
Yeah, I'd see that you raise a really good point here, man.
I'm glad you brings this point because when we talk about why we have this narrative about drugs, because there are a number of constituencies who are benefiting from this narrative.
And parents are a constituency that are benefiting from this narrative.
Because if you just say, you don't do drugs, that's one less thing that the parents have to actually teach about to their children.
Well, they don't do that celebrity rehab show anymore.
but I remember watching it thinking this has got to be the worst environment for psychological health where you're on a reality show showing the world all your problems.
Like if I wanted someone to be psychologically healthy, the last thing I would do is put them on a reality show and say, hey, definitely read the comments.
Definitely go on Twitter afterwards and see all the shit that people are saying about you because that's definitely going to fuck your head up and that's what's good for you.
I would say what you need is silence, you need some personal reflection, find out what your problem is, but you need also some productive things to distract yourself with.
Like maybe you should take up yoga, take up meditation, start exercising, do some Positive things for your health if you think your life is in a bad place and you're in a downward spiral, whether it's because of the drugs or because of behavior patterns you find yourself in or just because of the fact that you're avoiding something in your life that's disturbing you.
And it shows that you don't care about those people that you're supposedly treating.
And that's the thing that really, it really irritates me when we get these experts on TV with their patients on TV. That is not healthy for anybody involved.
I never saw the show, but I'm sure he probably was fine.
But they thought that it would increase the ratings.
You know how these things work.
Just a side story.
So when we were talking off camera, Anderson Cooper was asking a serious question of both of us, really me, about MDMA, considering using MDMA and was wanting to know like the real deal.
And I was trying to like help him understand, you know, all of the sort of...tried to give him a comprehensive understanding in a quick time period.
And this Dr. Drew idiot was chiming in and the way he was describing what MDMA does just let me know that he knew nothing about MDMA and that he was just an idiot.
Because, you know, if you don't know, when you're in the presence of an expert on something, most adults shut the fuck up because they might be able to learn something, right?
He didn't.
And then that really told me a lot about him as a person.
You know, like, if I'm in the presence, if...
If somebody's asking me about, how do I increase my subscriber base to my podcast, you know, and you're there or something, and then I would shut up.
I mean, or somebody asked me about being a comedian.
I mean, I would like to be funny, but I know I'm not a comedian.
I would shut up when I'm in the presence of an expert, of people who know.
Yeah, this is what I do, I study, and the literature that he's reading about how these things work is from the papers that I wrote, the papers that I, you know, so that's the difference.
And so, like, think of it like, in terms of, like, I'm producing, and he's the consumer.
So this is my product, and I know more about my product, and he's the consumer, and he's, And he's telling people as a marketing agent, if you will, about my product that I produced.
Has that ever been a problem with the university, that you have this unusual stance on drugs, although very educated, and obviously you know what you're talking about?
I haven't felt it as a problem, so I don't know what the university feels about that, but check it out.
This is my perspective.
If anybody knows anything about the Declaration of Independence, it's a beautiful document.
It guarantees all of us at least three birthrights.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But we talk about those things in this jingoistic way.
As opposed to really unpacking it, it's like, life, liberty...
That means that I can live my life however I see fit, as long as I don't stop others from doing the same.
And I can pursue happiness as I see fit.
The Declaration guarantees me that.
It doesn't guarantee me happiness.
It guarantees me the pursuit of happiness.
And I use drugs in my pursuit of happiness.
And so if I get pushback and that sort of thing, I'm willing to deal with it.
I'm willing to go to jail for using drugs.
And that's the thing I had to think about for myself.
If you really believe this, Are you willing to go to jail for it?
Absolutely.
I'm willing to risk these things.
Just like other people who reminded the country about its promise, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, And how the promise or the practice doesn't match the promise.
And so when I think of Rosa Parks sitting on that bus seat, she was doing that.
I think about all of these sort of people who we now revere.
Who I revere?
It's like, what kind of man am I if I can't live in the way that I know is right?
So when I think of the university and I think about pushback, what people say, I don't care.
As long as I am treating people well and I'm not abusing or mistreating people, I will worry if I'm mistreating people because that's not right.
But if I'm treating people well and people are bothering me about this issue, bring it on.
It's very confident and it's very admirable that you have that position because a lot of people, when faced with public scrutiny, there's a conventional idea of what drugs are and who drug users are, and they would immediately...
Most people are like, yeah, I feel differently, but I don't want the hassle.
No, I know those people and many of them hang out with me or used to hang out with me and I've decided that there are so many people catching hell for being identified as a drug user that it's not right for us who are privileged and we can be in the closet when other people can't because they've been identified or whatever.
So I think that it is dishonoring those people.
And so I don't want to hang out with people who want to use drugs and be in the closet and not think about those other people who are catching hell.
So I decided only recently, you know, in writing this book, it's like, Yeah.
are catching hell.
This is wrong.
I mean, it's just fucking wrong that we are putting people in jail for what they put in their bodies.
It's one of the weirder aspects of modern society that we do make these distinctions between different types of drugs that are acceptable and not acceptable.
And oftentimes the ones that are, like cannabis, far safer than the acceptable ones.
And one of the conversations that we had were about people that have had bad reactions to high doses of marijuana and they have these schizophrenic breaks.
But Alex is saying, presented like marijuana is causing schizophrenia.
And that's the problem.
And the evidence is not with him there.
Now that's not to say that like novice, you don't, you know, you're new to marijuana and then you're smoking large doses or you're taking large oral doses.
Yeah, you might have some paranoia and that shit might last for a day or two, you know.
But the thing that you have to remember, those people, is that the drug will eventually float away from the receptor and you'll come back to your normal self.
And so the best therapy for people is to have others just simply talk them down, make sure that they're chill, they understand that, don't worry, this is temporary.
Because if they think that, oh shit, I'm going to be fucked up forever...
And that causes them even more anxiety and they do something dangerous.
Yeah, you were talking to him about this difficult conversation and I wanted to see how he dealt with it, you know, and he kind of avoided it or tried to avoid it.
I wonder how people are going to feel about Trump after this is over.
Like, I wonder when the dust settles, what the perception is going to be.
You know, because perceptions change.
Like, when Bush was in office, initially, people hated him.
And then 9-11 came around, and people started to love him because he represented, like, he had a very high approval rating post-9-11 because it seemed like, Someone's going to take care of us and make us safe again.
And then towards the end of his administration, people hated him again.
They're like, you haven't done shit.
You've got to listen to these wars.
There was no weapons of mass destruction.
But now, as time has gone on, people go, well, I mean, that's one thing you could say about the difference between Bush and Trump, is that Bush, in hindsight, is a far more reasonable person.
And the way he looks at things is like...
Even the way he looks at people that have different opinions on things, the way he looks at Supreme Court rulings, the way he looked at all those things was much more presidential.
Do you remember when they found, there was a famous photograph of him sitting there with a taco bowl.
He's eating a taco bowl and it was like, right after he said something about Mexicans being rapists and shit, he's like, I love Hispanics, like eating a taco bowl.
Yeah, the up part is interesting because he's obviously not fit, and he's 74 years old.
And meanwhile, the guy got COVID, and then after COVID, he had all this energy, and he's talking all this craziness on Twitter and law and order and all this...
But that is like...
And that's stimulant type of chatter, right?
Like many, many, many posts and tweets.
He can go on the campaign trail and have all this energy.
I think the slur, it seemed to me more like he was coming down off of something or he was on some sort of sedative that he over-prescribed or over-overdosed.
You know, you've seen that where he's like struggling.
If you're really fucked up, though, if you take something and you're really kind of drowsy, but you're trying to keep it together for your speech, and God bless America, like you barely can get the words out because your mouth is failing you?
It was kind of a joke, but like called Ex-Presidents on Mushrooms, where you just get ex-presidents and you make them do like a mushroom ceremony, like a real like four to five gram dose.
That's great, man, because Rick, this is what Rick got to, you know, like his, I think his Undergraduate thesis was to get all these leaders, world leaders, on MDMA, though.
Unhealthy stuff and like what is this about this behavior pattern that I've sort of fallen into grips with No, I mean I know people who have done MDMA to stop using alcohol, you know and that sort of thing and it's like Yeah, it helps people to have a different perspective It helps them to see sometimes the inferiority of the compound that they've been abusing Yeah,
I think it's all good man See, that's what I wanted to get to you about with rehab centers, because for people that talk about drugs, most of the discussion is about people where the drugs get away from them, or they find themselves in a situation where they find themselves addicted to these drugs.
And it is rare that we discuss the real root cause, psychologically, of what's leading them into these self-destructive behavior patterns.
And Ibogaine seems to help that, but there's no Ibogaine rehab centers in America.
For example, we are not really trained to think about if somebody is smoking crack and they have a crack addiction.
So we focus a lot on crack.
As opposed to like, oh, this guy is from somewhere Ohio where they lost all of their jobs and his wife left him and his children no longer speaks to him.
So it's like crack is not the problem.
But...
We're getting paid because you have a crack use disorder.
And so it has to be the problem.
And my specialty is looking at crack, not looking at employment and what employment does to a male in modern American society who had been accustomed to being the number one breadwinner in his home.
None of that is in the training of these people who are providing therapy.
And so that's what I mean, they're not very well trained.
Well, just if I'm going to provide treatment in that context with that person, The first thing I'm trying to do is how the hell do we help this guy get a job that he can feel like he's a productive member of our society again?
I have a friend whose significant other had a substance abuse problem multiple times and she kept going into rehab and then getting out and cleaning up for a while and then going in again and eventually he couldn't take it anymore.
He had great things to say about her, she's a great girl, but she kept falling apart.
And he didn't know what to do.
He wasn't a guy who's had problems like that himself.
What do you say to a person like that who has a loved one who just keeps falling apart?
She would fall apart.
Apparently, I don't know her, but according to his description, she would fall apart and just start using like crazy and fuck up everything in her life.
Yeah, and some are more convincing than others and Being a human a decent human it's a complicated thing and the thing is is that we sometimes fail and Right.
Yeah, and that's but it's maybe a way that we can look at things more clearly is to say Look at all the people that use drugs and don't have a problem.
Yeah, yeah, you know like all of these successful people are in the closet and it allows this Caricature of drug users as being this irresponsible degenerate.
Because you're not looking at Barack Obama who used cocaine.
You're not looking at him as a cocaine user.
Instead, you're looking at some guy on the corner who's ruined his life.
And it's like, wait a second.
Drugs didn't ruin Barack Obama and he used cocaine.
When you write a book like this, how do you balance out these ideas, your perceptions, your thoughts on these ideas, versus the common narrative?
Are you trying to convince people?
Are you trying to just express yourself in a way that you know is going to be controversial, but let me just do my best to explain the way I think about things?
Are you actively trying to sort of persuade people?
I'm trying to persuade people, but this is one of the reasons, man, I have so much respect for comedians.
So you can tell people some really difficult shit.
If you have a punch line, then they're able to hear it.
So as a scientist, how can you do the same thing?
How can you tell narratives and stories and teach at the same time?
And that's what I'm trying to do.
And I learned that...
I only recently learned this, that...
You have to be an artist.
And that's what artists do.
And so I'm still learning how to do that.
So I'm trying to use other people's stories.
But in this book, I'm using my story.
I'm saying, this is what I do.
You know, I use heroin.
I also publish a lot of scientific articles, scientific papers in scientific journals.
I have more than 100 of those papers, and they're hard to publish.
I publish several books.
I lecture all around the world.
I do all of these kind of things, but I'm a drug user.
So I'm trying to use my own stories to show people that what you've been told about drugs is wrong and what you think of a drug user, the image of a drug user that you have is wrong.
The typical drug user looks like me, except they're white, but they look like me.
And so if I can do that with my book, I hope it goes a long way in changing people's views.
I don't know if you know it very well, but it's a weird place.
You know, I don't feel at home in Academe in some areas, but in other areas I do.
I mean, I love, like, getting high and reading, you know, or that's what I do, or going through the literature in 1897 to find out what they were saying about this.
This is what I... So, in terms of academe, I feel at home, because there are a lot of people like that in academe.
Certainly amphetamines, or if I want to do heroin too, I can do that.
Or just anything.
If I'm alone and I have all these ideas, racing.
And so I have to go back and read things that other people said.
To see if somebody else was saying, and typically somebody else was saying it, and it's not an original thought, but it's nice to know who said it and who published it.
So in academia, I feel very much at home there.
But being in my skin and being who I am out front about these things and being direct, I don't feel at home in academe.
But it's okay.
It's a nice living and I get access to smart kids who are enthusiastic, who want to change the world.
And I get to help them and they teach me shit all the time.
So it's a great place in that respect.
But the people, like my colleagues, that's not so great a lot of times.
Did you have colleges that are curious, like that maybe don't have a lot of experiences with drugs, but they see you like, how is this guy keeping it together?
Maybe I do have a misconceived idea about what drugs do to people.
Did you get them, like, dancing around the idea?
Like, Anderson Cooper's asking you about MBMA. Do you have other colleagues that are pulling you aside?
They're not that direct, but they are beating around the bush to try and figure out what's what.
um and then there are other ones who are using drugs and they're in the closet um and um but even those folks who are in the closet and using they're not really my people either um they're not very courageous that's another thing that marks academe there's a lot of sort of cowardly squirmy behavior stab you in the back behavior that happens that's That's disturbing about academia that you hear from people that are
professors, that there is a lot of stab-you-in-the-back behavior.
You would think that also with an occupation that has tenure, which is one of the weirdest things ever, weirdest positions ever, you can't get fired unless you do something horrible.
You would think, boy, that would encourage people to be courageous.
You have to think about the people who are attracted to academe.
A lot of these people were considered nerds.
I mean, not the sort of popular nerds where people put on a pair of glasses and say that they're a nerd.
These people were like really alone with their books and they weren't very popular and they got picked on.
And they learned how to fight in a different way.
They learn how to fight with their words or with some other sort of clever, indirect method that could not be identified with them, so their fingerprints are not on it.
You know, all of this, so it's what you would expect.
It's how they fight.
It's not like I'm accustomed to having grown up in the hood.
Like, if you have a beef, you deal with it straight on, you know?
You get in a fight, and then it's settled.
You lose sometimes, you win sometimes, but it's settled, and the beef is over.
Whereas in academe, you don't even know sometimes that people have a beef with you, and next thing you know, you're not getting this, or you're having this taken away, and you don't even know what happened.
That's one of the really unfortunate aspects about not being socially accepted when you're younger, is that for a lot of those guys, it kind of sticks in their craw.
And that's one of the things that I find most distasteful about social media.
I see some people that I know personally on social media, and I know that they...
Did not have a good social upbringing.
I know that they were picked on.
I know they were abused and Even comedians and then I see them being mean and shitty and piling on and acting like bullies Yeah, and just diving I'm saying the most ruthless shit about people and I know that they're doing it because someone did it to them and they still feel like they haven't they haven't balanced their account and As it were, you know, in terms of like what the world did to them versus what they want to do to the people that they think represent what the world did to them.
One of the things that happened to me as a result of traveling all over the world is that I met this schizophrenia researcher.
His name is Paul Fletcher.
He's at Cambridge.
And he wanted to experience schizophrenia.
He's treating these people and he wanted to really know because of this critique that you just laid out.
And he's the only person who I know in that area who's done this.
He did like ketamine to try and reproduce the experience because he heard that that was like reproducing the, would reproduce the experience.
Of course it doesn't, but this is what people have said.
Our animal models use ketamine for that reason, but it doesn't.
But he was curious enough to try to figure out what schizophrenia, people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, he tried to figure out what they were experiencing.
I don't know if he figured that out from this sort of experiential perspective.
But what I do know is that if I ever had a relative who had schizophrenia, I would send him to Paul Fletcher.
Because his perspective on it, it really respects the person who has this diagnosis.
And it offers them the greatest amount of hope that I have seen in that area.
And it would be good if other scientists in these areas, drugs, whatever it is, would also seek to try to figure out the experience that their patients are going through.
They have suggested large doses of amphetamines over periods of time with sleep deprivation, paranoid schizophrenia, but I don't know if it really does.
I mean, all of this stuff...
I am now questioning, so I don't know.
I mean, at one time, if you would ask me that question maybe five years ago, I would have said amphetamines, but I don't know now.
It's a lot of people, but I have a lot more hope about schizophrenia after having met Paul Fletcher, just in terms of...
I don't want to bastardize his sort of model of thinking about it, and so I may not have all the details right, but I would just say, simply try to explain about...
You and I, we go through the world, everybody, we have these theories about how the world works.
Like, you smile, I have a theory about what that means, right?
And so, oh, Joe likes me or he's happy today, whatever.
And then I'm right because you tell me that, whatever.
Somebody who's diagnosed with schizophrenia, they also have these models that they're testing out.
And so their model might be like, when you smile, they think that you're angry or whatever.
Yeah, so in terms of marijuana, particularly high doses of marijuana, particularly edible marijuana, could really seriously exacerbate someone who has...
Who's kind of hanging on barely anyway and then boom you eat an edible.
I mean, so when you look at the evidence where people have done all of these studies, folks who didn't have these predispositions, marijuana doesn't cause people to be schizophrenic or have a psychotic disorder.
So what I was going to get to was, do you think that maybe for people that have this predisposition towards schizophrenia, they should probably avoid psychoactive substances or avoid something that radically perturbs their version of reality?
So this really sort of highlights the need for not just like long-term study of drugs and drug use, but also a place where someone can go where they can get real expert advice.
And maybe even a real source, a pure source of these drugs.
And if that happened, do you think that the world would have just a totally different understanding of what drugs are and do and what their potentials are?
It's just that we have such a big microphone that we influence a lot of countries and their perspectives and their education of their physicians and psychiatrists.
But that's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to change it.
I'm trying to open up minds in my field and abroad.
So I have a friend who was a big time dealer back in the 70s and the 80s and So he talks a lot about how the dealers had this sort of pride in their products.
And then when the sort of real gangsters got in the field, they didn't really care about the quality of their product.
They just wanted to move weight like a Walmart.
They just like cheap products.
The quality doesn't really matter.
Just move product.
And so...
For me, that's the bigger concern, that when the big guys get involved in this sort of field, the quality goes down.
And that means that the consumer is being put at greater risk.
I don't mind people making money illegally.
That's fine.
I mean, you do what you do to take care of your family, especially if you're making people happy with your product.
If you have some pride in the quality, that's fine.
So I'm not upset, per se, that we have these cartels controlling the market.
I'm more upset that they don't care about the quality.
The problem with these cartels is not the violence and the murder and all the money and the fucking narco songs while they're holding gold-plated AK-47s.
The problem is they don't have any pride in their meth.
And how do you say Maria's last name from Trafficked, Jamie?
What's the correct pronunciation?
Van Zeller.
Van Zeller.
She's brilliant.
And she runs a show where she went to Colombia, went with the people that were making the cocaine, like literally saw them make it, asked them about it, walked with them when they carried it on their back, walked with them.
And she's trying to like...
Find out like how all these things are made and where all these things come from and when you you see it from the source and you see like the dangers these people have to go through in order to get this stuff to America and you realize like how everything is being made And that all of this is just because it's illegal in the United States.
All of it.
All of it.
And if it was legal in the United States, there would be a legitimate business running it.
They would have standards and unions.
It would be just like a Budweiser plant.
Remember Laverne and Shirley used to work at the...
And they're getting it in in weird, sneaky ways, and people putting their lives at risk.
And the people that are being victimized are the people that are so poor that they have to work as mules, and they have to put their lives in danger and try to sneak across the border with backpacks full of coke.
And so when we think about this sort of drug war, if you will, law enforcement benefits, we spend $40 billion a year on this kind of thing.
Most of the money goes to law enforcement benefits.
The prison industry, the businesses that have been built up around that, like phone companies, all of them, they make a lot of money from this.
Politicians, they look like they are really serving their population because they're bringing law enforcement jobs or whatever.
They're all benefiting.
And then the big players in the drug game, they're benefiting because the more regulation, the less likely their competition will be able to get in the game, so they keep the game locked down.
There are a number of people who are benefiting.
Parents don't have to educate their kids about drugs.
That's one less thing they have to do, so they feel like they're benefiting.
Me, as a scientist, I have to think about my own role.
I got multi-million dollar grants to study the drug problem.
I benefited from this whole thing.
So a lot of people are benefiting.
That's why we continue it.
And we oftentimes don't talk about all of us who have benefited from this.
I know, but I'm saying no one's proposed this way out.
No one's implementing this way out.
It's just, you know, if you were in law enforcement, if you work for the DEA, and you're looking at this, you're like, Jesus Christ, this is not going away.
One of the things she did was she found out that a lot of the guns that are coming in to Mexico from the United States were being supplied by Los Angeles Police Department.
There was a guy who worked for the Los Angeles Police Department, was selling guns to this guy who was trafficking them, bringing them across the border.
Because you can go to Mexico easily.
The show is fantastic.
It's called Trafficked.
It's on Science Channel.
You've got to pull up a page of it so we can see it.
They look into all sorts of things being trafficked, whether it's cocaine, steroids, guns, all these different things.
But the disturbing part of the guns thing was knowing how easy it is to bring something into Mexico, because there's no real border checks to go through.
The show is nuts, but Mariana going to Colombia, like literally going to the actual labs in the jungle where they make the cocaine, watching them make the cocaine...
Seeing them process it with all these chemicals, and then put it in backpacks, and then she hikes out with them.
You could be cynical and say she's doing it for her ratings.
And she certainly is but she's also doing it to tell a real story She's also she she exposed the Oxycontin business in Florida She had a show a long time ago called the Oxycontin Express where they show that they have these pain management centers that are connected to a pharmacy So there's a doctor in the pain management center that goes well, you know, you need Oxycontin Good thing for you.
There's an Oxycontin store right next door and And so they'd give them a prescription that's all they prescribed, and they would go right next door to the pain management center, and they would get their Oxys.
And what they have done, and they have made it difficult for people who are in legitimate pain to now get OxyContin or any other opioid-based pain medication, Based on the behavior, bad behavior of a few individuals.
And so, I mean, I get it.
I mean, I understand like, yep, those people were misbehaving.
My concern is that now they have ruined it for all of these people who are in legitimate pain.
Do you think it's just too radioactive politically in America right now?
Too many people have this preconceived notion of drugs being bad, addiction being a real problem, opiate scourge ruining the country that if you offer an alternative narrative, not enough people are going to buy it because too many people have already subscribed to what we just described.
And then they don't have to talk about the fact that all those factories that left Ohio, those factories that left Maine, those factories that left West Virginia, they don't have to talk about that.
One thing I think you are doing, though, is because you're so brave about this and you're upfront and so honest about it and also, obviously, you have a deep knowledge of the subject, is you're getting this narrative out there and then more people are going to hear this and they're going to say to their friends, you know, I was listening to Dr. Carl Hart and he has a different perspective.
You should listen to this.
You know what he's saying?
He does heroin sometimes.
I'm like, what?
He does heroin?
You know, like, these conversations are going to happen.
Whereas, like, that used to be the thing with pot.
Like, people would say, you smoke pot, what are you, a loser?
Like, no, just because some loser smoked pot doesn't mean pot makes you a loser.
Because this could go on forever without someone like you.
It really could.
I mean, the narrative that we all have bought into, including me, someone who hasn't done coke, hasn't done heroin, You get it in your head that everyone who uses it must be ruining their life.
And then you talk to you and you're like, no, it's wonderful.
And they're like, wait a minute.
And everybody who's listening to this right now is probably, a lot of people are like me.
When you first exposed me to these thoughts, I was like, hmm, okay, I have to rethink heroin use, which I never really thought I had to do before.
But I gotta tell you, man, I came away with a dramatically higher opinion of actors.
I mean, it's some difficult shit.
I wrote every word in there and it was really hard to get the feel and the mood because when I was writing, I always had music and that always gets me to the place or some psychoactive substance.
So it gets me to the place.
But reading, I was just reading.
And then a lot of the book, too, is emotional.
And then you're in the studio with somebody you don't know.
And I want to cry.
And I am crying because some of the material...
It's deeply personal.
And then you got this person in the studio who's like, okay, you did that one wrong, you know, and don't understand that this is like, you know, my dog died or this happened to my son, you know?