He’s the man who knows no limits. From being one of the most iconic daytime TV hosts to becoming one of the highest profile trailblazers in the advocacy for medical marijuana, Montel Williams has always been ahead of the times on the topics that matter most.In this interview, he’s opening up about a health scare that almost changed his life forever, and what’s next in his mission to empower people to take control of their own health. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I'm emotional about it now, but I mean, I stopped crying every day on my show.
I stopped crying every day in the middle of the day because I was finally starting to get some relief.
And I will tell you unequivocally for everybody listening, I have not gone one day since 2001 without putting a cannabinoid in my body.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's the man who knows no limits, from being one of the most iconic daytime TV hosts to becoming one of the highest profile trailblazers in the advocacy for medical marijuana.
Montel Williams has always been ahead of the times on topics that matter most.
Today, he's here opening up about a health scare that almost changed his life forever and what's next in his mission to empower people to take control of their own health.
I'm gonna get to this health crisis in a second, but you're in the news all over the news these days over medical marijuana.
Huge article, congratulations, about your beating off the barbarians at the gates of what you've tried to do, building a brand for yourself.
And just to disclose, Mantell has a medical marijuana brand.
But his passion and love of helping people learn about marijuana predates that.
And I actually met you when I was still doing the Oprah show.
You, at the time, had multiple sclerosis.
You still have.
But that was really debilitating you.
I remember seeing the pain that you experienced when you tried to do things without medical marijuana.
And at the time, you weren't even talking that much about it.
So let's start back then.
What was that like?
And what got you to realize that marijuana could play a role?
But then I got to ask, why take the personal risk?
You're Montel Williams.
You could have hidden, not told anybody, lived your life.
People would have been amazed that you got better.
Sure.
But there was more to it.
Crazy.
Remember, you know, we talked about it in one of your shows.
Back in, I was really officially diagnosed in 2000. And when diagnosed, you know, my biggest symptom and first symptom was extreme neuropathic pain in my feet and in my shins.
And it was so bad that at one point in time, back in 2000, I was taking probably nine Vicodin a day.
Nine?
Nine.
Oh.
It was a time when you remember a drug called Talwin, right?
Yes.
I mean, I had a doctor put me on Talwin, and I was taking three of those sometimes at a time.
And I woke up literally a couple times feeling like I was just drooling in a corner.
And my doctor, who was one of, I think, one of the best doctors in the country, literally was at Harvard.
I went to see him and he said, dude, I know about you.
I know what you're doing.
And I'm done.
I'm not writing you any more scripts.
I said, what?
He goes, I know you've been running around.
I went, you know, come on, I'm Montel.
So I could call any friend of mine who got doctor behind the name and say, dude, can you write me a script for, you know, 30, 40 bike it in?
And of course they would write me a script for 30, 40 bike it in.
I'd pull into a city.
People had already knew.
I came forward with the fact that, You know, I've been diagnosed with MS, and I suffer from pain, so I could call a doctor in a hotel.
They would drop me off 30 back in a heartbeat.
And homeboy was eating them.
So, my doctor said, I'm done.
I'm not writing you any more scripts and I'm going to reach out to every single one of the people that I know that have written you a script so far and tell them to stop.
And he said to me, I heard his exact words.
I heard that some people with MS like you have gotten some relief from this marijuana stuff.
I'm never going to say that I told you this.
I'm never going to tell anybody that I recommend it to you, but you need to figure this out and learn it for yourself.
I don't have a lot of research on it, but go get some research and you'll figure it out.
And back in 2001, I started researching cannabis back then.
By the middle of 2001, I recognized looking at the research from NIDA. Looking at the research that had been published by Dr. Mashulam out of Israel, that there was this chemical in marijuana, something called CBD, and there's several more that we don't talk about.
Unfortunately, just because one TV special talked about CBD, the whole world jumped on it, but nobody's talking about CBN, CBG, THCA, CBDV. There's so many.
There's over 400 chemicals in the marijuana plant that, in an entourage effect, can...
Be responsible for the relief I was getting.
But back in 2001, before anybody ever said the word CBD, I was seeking out CBD strong brands or breeds of cannabinoids, especially in Northern California.
And I was able to find a couple.
I shifted over from actually using flower marijuana back in 2002 And was only consuming keef, which is really kind of like the pollen, but the trichomes, which is the most, you know, medicinally-laden chemicals of the plant.
And from that point forth, maybe it didn't come overnight.
I mean, let me tell you, when I first started using it, I was like, this isn't going to work because my pain just came right through.
But then after about 20 days of use of cannabis back in 2001, It was almost an epiphany.
It changed my life.
I mean, I stopped.
I'm emotional about it now, but I mean, I stopped crying every day on my show.
I stopped crying every day in the middle of the day.
Because I was finally starting to get some relief.
And I will tell you unequivocally for everybody listening, I have not gone one day since 2001 without putting a cannabinoid in my body.
It's not always been THC. It may be CBD and a combination of terpenes and other things, but I have used it every single day.
I think that's part of the reason why, you know, and yeah, of course, I may be just an N of one.
I don't think I am an N of one.
I think that If some doctors really were to research me and look into what's going on, what our federal government claims happens with cannabinoids is that there is some neuroprotection that has been going on inside of my brain and my nervous system from my continued use.
And I'm at a saturation point and was deliberately at a saturation point, and I think that's what's helped protect me.
And when I shifted over, it changed my life.
So how has the MS community dealt with the fact that you went outside the system?
Oh, let me tell you, you know, I not only went outside the system using cannabis, but I went outside the system when I first got diagnosed because I had found out so many things about I was never really—and even up until about maybe four or five years ago,
I was disparaged by lots of the national organizations when it comes to the— MS, because I wouldn't jump aboard and throw my name out there and say, go ahead and raise money and let these people buy cars and buy planes and buy houses.
That's not what I'm about.
I'm about making sure that if we're going to do something, then you're going to do this with a patient in mind.
And I want to make sure if you call yourself a foundation or a nonprofit, you better be coughing up at least 90% of what you raise to go to the programs that you claim you're going to do.
Independent of all that, there was still a closing off, I think, of the medical community to the possibilities of this.
If you can, give us a brief history lesson.
I'll start, you finish.
Thousands of years ago, tens of thousands of years ago, cannabis plants had to develop a way of protecting themselves.
So they began influencing very specific receptors in the brain, just the way opiates affect endorphin systems.
So you go running, That runner's high.
It's not just endorphins.
It's also a little bit of endocannabinoids.
Yes.
Endocannabinoids, big words, basically the receptors for the marijuana plant.
It was widely used as a medicine for that reason.
By the way, many of the medicines we use, aspirin, right, comes from little bark.
A lot of chemotherapies.
Periwinkle plant gives, you know, right, to a chemotherapy that we use for leukemias.
Yes.
So there's a history of plants protecting themselves and humans learning how they protect themselves and then harvesting it to benefit us.
So fast forward, it's early part of the 20th century, 1900s, and it's being used.
How many tinctures are there in 1900 with marijuana?
If you go, you can go look up online, go and pull up any newspaper from 1898, And flip it back to the classifieds, and you'll see probably 20 tinctures a page that have some sort of cannabis product in it.
And also you'll see a lot of them that had cocaine in them.
Right.
Coca-Cola had cocaine in them.
Yeah, but you'll see a lot of tinctures that were sold all across the country.
So we believed in, and we knew that marijuana was a good, efficacious product.
But the problem was, back then you couldn't track a seed.
So across state lines, there was an inability for different states to be able to tax the product appropriately.
So marijuana was made illegal, what a lot of people don't understand, by something called the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. And it was promoted and funded by William Randolph Hearst and DuPont.
Why?
Randolph Hearst was the paper magnate.
He was a furniture magnate.
He was a guy trying to chop down every big tree in America that he could chop down.
His competition was a weed that grows anywhere Hemp!
So he wanted to make sure he could corner the market, so he backed Henry Anslinger, and DuPont wanted to make something called textiles.
And up until this point, every sail, every rope, every covered wagon, every sheet, even the uniforms that were worn in the Civil War, both the North and the South had something in common.
They ran around in hemp uniforms.
And, you know, a lot of people don't know, even when we made marijuana illegal in 1937, 1941, the namesake mayor of the city, De La Guardia, commissioned a study, and in his study, he came back and said one of the most egregiously offensive things that America has done is to make marijuana illegal because of its medical efficaciousness.
When you say the Tax Act of 37, how did that make it illegal?
That just puts a tax on it.
No, it was a tax act making it illegal to actually use it across the state lines.
Transport across state lines.
And therefore, it shut down the ability to be able to sell it.
And then Henry Anslinger worked for the next 40 years till about 1962, 63, to get marijuana banned and hemp banned through a U.N. treaty.
And so the United States banned marijuana.
And in that treaty that was signed in 63, they allowed for testing and for studies to be done at a country's university level.
It wasn't until under—a lot of people don't know this, and let me give you a little bit more education.
Back when first Bush was president, he started a compassionate care program that allowed— Back then, they took 21 or 24 patients into a program where the U.S. government, through a program at the University of Mississippi, for over 40 years, has been growing.
And distributing marijuana started with 21, 23 patients.
Now it's down to four because they have passed away.
And every month, every Wednesday, I think it's the first Wednesday of every month, the University of Mississippi ships out across the country for the last 40-something years a canister of pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes that individuals were allowed to take on airplanes and cross state lines with.
And what did they find?
Who got these things?
Oh, I know one of the guys I interviewed on my shows, Irv Rosenfeld.
Irv, I even have one of his characters.
What was the problem they were treating?
Oh, multiple different problems.
Back...
The program was shut down and stopped because the second that the first Bush authorized the program, AIDS was one of the first was detected then.
And so they got inundated.
15,000, 2,000 people wanted to be a part of the program and they shut it down and said no more patients.
But they have everything from tumor diseases, bone diseases, neurological diseases, all of those 20...
One, 23 patients.
Had a myriad of different illnesses.
Did they publish this data anywhere?
No.
Let's see.
This is what's so criminally and absurd about this.
We have a government that says we need more research, yet every year for the last 40-plus budgets that have been passed, there is a budget line that has funded the University of Mississippi to study and grow marijuana.
Not only that, but we also funded studies in Israel.
We studied back 10 years ago.
The federal government gave Raphael Meshulam, the doctor in Israel who discovered the endocannabinoid system, discovered THC, and also discovered CBD plus CBN, and the majority of the cannabinoids that are discovered today.
We funded probably $60 million of research in Israel for this, and it's been published worldwide.
But the U.S. government keeps claiming we don't have enough data.
How much more data do you need?
First off, anybody who's a congressman who passed the bill, a budget that had a budget line in there to fund this should go to jail then.
Because you've been lying to the American public.
You've lied for the last 40 years claiming that there's not enough research been done and you've been paying for the research.
Which is crazy to me.
Did you hear this, Disa?
No, none of it.
You know, I should say right here, I'm going to pull it up again on my phone, but the United States government owns the patent on THC and CBD. It's patent number.
Look it up yourself, everybody out there watching.
It's 6630507. And it's a patent that in its own patent application under something that's called, you know, the space where they have to fill out the abstract, where they have to fill out what it does, the U.S. government claims unequivocally that it knows that cannabinoids work for a myriad of diseases and has an antioxidative effect, especially when it comes to some of the chronic illnesses we face today.
This was written over 14 years ago.
There's lots more when we come back.
So take me back for a second.
What is it that drives the U.S. government to ban a substance that arguably has been used for medicinal benefits from Ramosodon human history?
And I know that in 1930, the AMA was asked about this.
Twenty out of thirty experts that part of the surveys said it was rot.
It was wrong.
To ban medical use of marijuana.
So how did we get here?
What was Anslinger's purpose?
You know, if you really think about it, again, go back to William Randolph Hearst and DuPont, textiles.
Yeah, but Anslinger's, but what was his goal?
His goal was, and I told you I'm going to get you this so you'll be able to hear it yourself.
I can look it up right now if you want, but I want to tell you.
But Anselinger stood on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and made a statement that marijuana, because he wanted to make sure he could vilify this plant to get people to help him ban it so that his friends could make money.
But you got to recognize his whole objective was to make this a race issue.
So he stood on the Capitol steps and said that marijuana makes a black man want to step on a white man's shadow and white women want to have sex with blacks and Hispanics.
And if you look at Reefer Madness and some of the literature that came out back then, they always had a villain that was a black person hiding in the corner that was using marijuana or some musician who was black or Hispanic.
Crazed.
Always crazed.
And the truth of the matter is...
I'm going to knock the medical community a little bit, but you take a look at geriatric drugs.
You know, in this country right now today, we probably have majority of people over the age of 70 are on anywhere from 9 to 10 medications.
And why did Israel just call it a geriatric drug?
Because if you give older people cannabis, it can solve some of the issues that they are reaching out to have solved by other chemicals.
And, you know, the amount of money that was spent over the last 70 now, 100 years, almost 100 years on other medications that were so much more expensive.
And remember, the sativa marijuana plant and hemp plant is a weed.
I can fly over a desert and drop it out of an airplane, don't have to go back and water it, go back five months later, and it's grown.
So this is something that doesn't really have to be cultivated and pruned the way we do it now anyway, which is really kind of stupid the way it's even been processed in the United States.
So I think some of the issue with medical marijuana is that it It bleeds into recreational marijuana.
If you remember, I don't know how many years ago, five years ago, California made medical marijuana legal, but you walked down Venice Beach and you could get a prescription within five minutes and have it filled, and there was no medical reason for it.
My back hurts.
Five years ago, the DEA came out and said unequivocally that every state that passed a medical marijuana law, medical marijuana or marijuana usage amongst teenagers, goes down.
So it's really just bad information that's been given out to people.
I don't even have a problem with the fact that, you know, if I go to an event this evening, like I went to an event last night, everybody left that event, a fundraiser, and went to the closest bar and had three or four shots of an alcohol.
Well, it was very funny.
I was talking to a guy.
A doctor yesterday who said that he's recommending to his wife that they had a conversation last week that their three daughters, he's going to say to them, I think you ought to skip the alcohol and just use marijuana.
And the wife said, why would you say that to our daughters?
He said, because when you look at what goes on with people who use alcohol, it lowers inhibitions and it may stop our daughters from premature pregnancy if they're not using alcohol.
Okay.
Also, fewer calories.
Fewer calories.
Yay!
You don't get any weight from pot.
Well, you're hungry then, so I guess you do.
You don't necessarily have to be hungry from marijuana.
How do you not get the munchies?
Because there's different strains.
And there's different strains that have different chemicals.
Again, we've got to go back to this whole conversation about the other chemicals that are in the marijuana plant.
CBN, THCA, CBD, CBDV. There are several different cannabinoids that are in there that if in the right composition, it won't make you go out and devour your entire refrigerator.
So, you know, I think one of the things that we have to do is now completely destigmatize the plant.
You know, it's gotten its bad reputation.
And we're afraid of euphoria.
Why are we afraid of euphoria when all the pharmaceuticals that we sell provide some sort of euphoria?
So why are people addicted to Vicodin?
It's not because they just want to take Vicodin.
It's because they get a buzz out of Vicodin.
Why are people addicted to opioids?
Because they get a buzz out of it.
And why are people addicted to alcohol?
Why does everybody go out and try to get a drink?
Why are we trying to stop something that is something that human beings have tried to reach and achieve since the dawn of man?
They try to find some euphoria even through meditation.
Are we going to ban meditation because it gives you euphoria?
What's the data on opioids versus marijuana?
There's now been two studies that have come out that I've seen in the last year that when we did a show on it, you did a show on it before this was vogue and everybody.
Again, I don't understand and I'm not knocking other people, but you know, you get this one hour special on a cable channel that says CBD, CBD, CBD and the whole world changes.
But that special should have said cannabinoids.
All of them.
You did a show about the fact that there's science now that's starting to prove that Cannabinoids could be the exit drug for opioid addiction.
Actually, there's chemicals in cannabinoids that actually block the ability for the brain to receive the entire amount of opioid.
So there's an addiction center in California right now that's been experimenting with actually using cannabinoids to stop people from using opioids.
And it's working!
More questions after the break.
Can you explain to folks who don't know that much about marijuana, and I've never gotten high, so I know there's textbook answers.
The modern strains of marijuana have much higher amounts of THC than historically what humans were using.
And that might actually be a problem.
Because some of the literature that we've seen that I've been exposed to would indicate that more traditional plants with balanced amounts of the THC, the psychoactive element, and the CBD that has a medicinal benefit may not cause the kinds of central nervous system impact.
And in fact, we may not need a THC at all.
That way we can have an actual pill like a CBD that has no psychoactive effect.
And so it gives us all the other benefits we have if it's going to work for you.
Right.
You know, I think one of the things that people, again, here in America have to understand, that during the latter part of the 50s, early parts of the 60s, and through the 60s, growers in the United States try their best to grow all of the non-THC out of the plant.
And try to see if they can increase the levels of THC because people assume that since THC is the active ingredient that is responsible for, you know, the euphoria, the more of it you put in there, the bigger your euphoria.
Well, I defy somebody to call you up right now and tell me that they can tell the difference between a 6% THC plant and a 11% or a 17%.
Does your high become more intense?
Does the euphoria become more intense?
Some people say yes.
Some people say no.
Some people say that the higher level of THC really only is responsible for the duration of the euphoria.
More testing needs to be done.
But I'm going to agree with you.
I think that, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to do myself is that we do know that there was probably back 3,000 years ago only about seven different strains of the plant.
Now, in the last 30 years, the U.S. and a couple of other places in the world have led the charge in trying to crossbreed, crossbreed, crossbreed, crossbreed, crossbreed, crossbreed, crossbreed, and come up with all these silly named, stupid, you know, bubble this, bubble that, bubble do, you know, you know, bubble this, bubble that, bubble do, you know, ignorant names for products just so that they could differentiate something that they could sell.
But they weren't differentiating the plant in a way to make it any better.
They were just trying to make sure that they had a different name that they could sell and sell you something.
Bubba Kush, Bubba this, Bubba that, Bubba that.
If you broke this all the way back down to the original seven plants, you'd find that the THC level in those original seven plants was probably no greater than about 7.5%.
Now we're looking at some people trying to grow plants that have 29-plus percentage of THC. And 7.5%, do you get high?
Yes.
And, you know, different than yourself, as a kid of the, you know, I graduated from high school in 74, but, you know, as a kid of the late 60s and 70s, I consumed some marijuana back then.
And I'm going to tell you that I remember back in, you know, high school that I probably thought I would never be any higher than I was back then.
Using probably a marijuana plant that was no greater than 7% THC. And the intensity of my high was way more.
I remember I'm looking back and think about some of the stupid things I did back then.
I would never be that stupid right now with that kind of high.
But I know that I felt or I thought I felt way higher than I feel today using products that claim to be...
We now can extract and turn them into oils.
And I have a product in California...
And also available in Oregon where I'm doing something different than anybody else in the industry.
Since we've now defined both CBD and THC, my THC products all have a percentage of CBD in them.
As a matter of fact, I made formulations that are 10% THC, 90% CBD. And that's because CBD has a protective effect?
Has a neuroprotective effect and also has a calming effect on Takes away a lot of the edge.
So I actually formulate my products 10% THC, 90% CBD, 25% THC, 75% CBD, 50-50, 75% THC to a 25% CBD, and I have one that's called a 95-5.
And why did I do this?
I did this because how dare I, the manufacturer, believe that I know the titration level you should have?
For you personally, what do you normally use?
I took those different levels, and I mix and match them depending on what I feel.
What do you normally use?
He lines them up, he takes a puff from each, and then it's all blended.
Well, no, almost.
But I utilize, well, I'm going to tell you, I could say I'm sitting here right now in my pocket where we happen to be where nobody knows.
I have what's called a 1090. So most of my daytime, I'm using a 10% THC and a 90% CBD. And that helps me keep my pain at bay.
And is it a pain reliever?
It's a pain disassociator.
So my pain's gone.
I don't recognize it's there.
Don't think about it.
Sometimes later on in the day when I've had a hard day and I've been walking around on hard cement, I will increase the level of THC to about a 50-50.
And then, you know, early evening, I'll go up to a higher THC because now I want to relax.
So I'm a 95-5.
That 5% CBD helps me take the edge off the top.
I don't have paranoia and anxiety.
My hope is that the arduous work you're doing will shed light for a lot of Americans like me who don't know anything about the marijuana culture and get us to appreciate this as an area that has to be researchable Absolutely.
And yeah, we're not all going to agree about the recreational stuff.
It's going to take a lot to sway my mind there.
But for sure, if someone needs it, for whatever the many reasons that historically have been used, we need to get to the root of it.
Let me just, if I don't mind, close about something that I teased at the opening of the show.
You called me in the middle of a health crisis last year.
Scared the heck out of me.
You had a problem that I knew as a doctor was devastating.
That it's not the most common reason that people have a stroke, which you're having one, but it's the most dangerous.
You were bleeding into your brain.
Yes, sir.
You were lifting weights.
You felt the pop.
How are you doing now?
How did that experience change you?
You know, let me tell you.
First off, let's go back.
Well, two days ago, I went to see my neurologist here.
And God bless.
I am as blessed as anybody could be on this planet.
First off, the type of stroke I had and the size of my stroke normally kills 50% of the people who have it.
And the other 50% who survive it can take anywhere from a year to two years to regain faculties.
I'm blessed.
I've been back to work for six months.
I saw my doctor and my neurologist yesterday and she said, let me tell you something.
I have never seen a patient like you.
Had somebody not told me that you had a stroke, if I didn't know that, there's no way for me to tell that you had one now other than me looking at your MRI and seeing the fact that there's a stain there from the blood.
Right.
So I've recovered, and I'm doing really well.
Now, I'm going to say, and again, I may be the N of one, but I really truly believe that my extensive cannabinoid use and neuroprotection that I was able to garner from the extreme amount of CBD that I've consumed for now 17 years is partly responsible for my recovery.
And I won't say the name of the hospital.
But I literally, on day five, when I was laying on a gurney, barely able to move, started reintroducing CBD into my Daily regimen.
As a matter of fact, I increase my CBD in the hospital here.
Wouldn't that be amazing?
I never thought about that.
I thought you were lucky.
Because, you know, you could have been in a vegetative state with the stroke you had.
What if it actually...
I mean, again, please don't start doing this at home.
Yes.
But this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
What if it doesn't hurt you and could help you, then we should be trying this.
Why can't we reach Research this.
Why can't we get research on this?
With your leadership, we're going to Montel Williams.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you, sir.
Montel's podcast is fantastic.
It's called Let's Be Blunt.
He always is anyway.
Emotionally blunt, lovingly blunt.
You can hear lots more about him by checking out his podcast.
