Ask Dr. Drew - Is Long COVID a Disability? Lex Frieden (an ADA author) on Civil Rights in a Pandemic – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 108

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

[Broadcast on 7/27/2022] This week marks the 32nd anniversary of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. Lex Frieden, one of the ADA's architects, joins Ask Dr. Drew LIVE to discuss civil rights and how the ADA protects COVID-19 long-haulers from discrimination in employment, transportation, and equal access. Lex Frieden, MA, LLD (hon) is a professor at UT Health School of Biomedical Informatics and directs the Independent Living Research Utilization program at The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research at Memorial Hermann. He is best known as being one of the architects of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). July 26, 2022, was the 32nd anniversary of this landmark legislation. Follow Lex at https://twitter.com/LexFrieden. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (http://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. SPONSORED BY • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew GEAR PROVIDED BY • BLUE MICS - After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew's iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don't need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue's lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew's Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato's Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew's streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are going to pay an homage to an important anniversary and birth date of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 32 years old, I believe yesterday. One of the authors, Lex Frieden, professor of UT Health at the UT Health School of Biomedical Informatics, as well as directing the Independent Living Research Utilization Program at the Institute for Rehab and Research at Memorial Hermann. Again, one of the architects of the American with Disabilities Act of 1990. We're going to talk a little bit about how much that has done and what is left to be done. And perhaps even sort of folded into the current issue of COVID and long COVID.

There's all this consternation and sort of really excesses in the press about a wave of disability. But that doesn't minimize the fact that there will be people that will have disability for sure, like with any serious illness. And we'll sort of talk about what the American with Disabilities Act has done to protect all of us, particularly as we age, we all may become increasingly relevant.

So let's get right to it. Our laws as it pertain to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat.

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And welcome, everyone. As I said, we will be celebrating the birthday of the American with Disabilities Act of 1990 with Lex Frieden, who is one of the architects of this program. We are also, of course, as always, out on Twitter spaces where you can raise your hand, and if you agree to come up and ask questions, it will be streamed out on multiple platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, everywhere. Rumble, wherever else we can stream it, we tend to stream it. I don't think you have to tell them now for Twitter, because Clubhouse was different. That was like sort of a it was we were behind the scenes we were reaching outside of social media that's a good point okay

all right maybe i'll stop that little rejoinder i mean people should know that it's going to be out there in perpetuity which after twitter space is over it disappears and then you know but one of the reasons we are late is we had a little bit of uh technical problems getting our guest in here so he's going to be joining us via zoom we are are going to wrap that interview up at some point here and start taking just calls on any topic, if you wish. We will get to that a bit later, so please hang on if you have other issues or leftover questions from yesterday you want to get into. People seem very interested in that. Susan has a whole new idea for what she wants to do with Dr. Victory. Of course, we have not yet consulted Dr. Victory. No,, we have not yet consulted Dr.

Victory. No, we have. Okay. So who knows what that will actually mean? She used to work with John on KBC and I used to listen to her religiously over there. And I got to say, she's always very spot on with her views and she's very well educated and harvard medical school person public health training yeah i mean she's she's just so smart and she's down to earth but she's also not messing around yeah you know she and she has a point of view and i don't necessarily i mean we she and i can have very good in-depth conversations, and I'm not necessarily endorsing her point of view or even agreeing with some of her stuff. It's hard for people to tell how we differ because these topics get very granular. But let's get into our guest today. is at the UT Health School of Biomedical Informatics and also the director of the Independent Living Research Utilization Program

at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research. Lex, welcome to the program. Uh-oh, I'm not hearing Lex. I mean, we're... There you are. I hear you off in the distance there. Hold on one second. Caleb, are you correcting that in our end, or is there something else that needs to be done? I think if you stop talking, we'll be able to hear him.

Okay. Welcome, Lex. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm glad to be here. There you are. So let's start with a little history, if you don't mind. A, what your personal journey was with disability and why this became something you had direct knowledge of back in the 80s, what wasn't being done. And I literally can't remember a time without the Americans with Disabilities Act, so it's hard for me to even understand what that was like. And I think California was a little

ahead of the curve. So it was sort of things were getting done here already in the 80s. But tell us what your journey was and what things were actually like for people back then. Now, I graduated from high school in 1967 and went to college and started my fall semester at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. About two months in, we were about to get a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. And I went driving around town with a group of other students. I was in the middle of the backseat. There were five of us in the car. The driver had been drinking.

You know, we'd all been drinking. And we had a head-on collision with another carload of students who had been out that Saturday night. And 13 of us went to the clinic via ambulance. I was the last one to be seen by the triage nurses because I was the only one that wasn't bleeding. I didn't have any obvious wounds, and so they triaged me last. I kept complaining that I couldn't move, and the nurse convinced me I was in shock and laid a few more blankets on top of me. Finally, when the doctor saw me, he diagnosed my spinal cord injury. I was treated in Oklahoma City and later here in Houston at TIER. We call it TIER, by the way, Dr. Drew.

I just saw that, yes. The rehabilitation experience for me was a good experience. And when I left here, my doctor said, you know, you can do anything you wanted to do before you broke your neck if you can figure out how to do it on four wheels. And frankly, that wasn't difficult for me at the time because we had astronauts floating around on their way to the moon. And they, quite honestly, had less mobility than I did. So I had an optimistic view of the campus on the level plains of Oklahoma. They had level entrances, elevators. They were even recording courses. They would record the classes so that students who were not able to be there on one day could review the notes and the lectures from the

day before. That was unique at that time. And they turned me down for admission because they said I indicated I used a wheelchair for mobility, and their policy was not to admit students with disabilities. And that, you know, frankly, that was pretty shocking. I think it would be for anybody. But that sort of started my motivation to work toward some kind of equal treatment for people with disabilities, and to ensure that people with disabilities had opportunities and could be productive without being frustrated by illogical rules, standards, admission criterion, and job qualifications, frankly, that had nothing to do with the work they were going to do. So it was a great learning experience for me.

So you're literally describing a discrimination, that it was an active, open discrimination of people with disability, which is wild. Well, and I called him on it. I mean, I spoke to the dean of admissions after I got that letter, and the dean said, but, you know, there's nothing that says we can't establish our own admission criterion. There's no law that prevents us from doing that. And my conclusion was there ought to be a law. And what did you do? What was the next move? Well, I began to talk with other people with disabilities. And we would meet, and occasionally we would meet members of Congress and tell them how we were frustrated.

People had various ideas. Some people wanted to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Others didn't think that was a good idea. Some people wanted to work on state legislation the way they did. You mentioned California. California at that time had a lot of progressive state legislation. And we in Texas tried to model some of the work that had been done in California. But collectively, we felt like there needed to be some kind of federal protection. And in 1983, I was invited to speak before a congressional committee that was reauthorizing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. So this was an 83 hearing about a 73 law. And that 73 law was important because

there was a Title V that Ted Kennedy introduced into the bill and it passed. And Title V prevented discrimination by public organizations and, in fact, universities. And that bill passed in 1973, but there were no regulations for it. And the disability community rallied in the late 70s to get the regulations approved and signed so they would go into effect. So in 1978, we had rules that promulgated, in effect, the 73 Act that prevented the discrimination that occurred to me in 1968. And Oral Roberts sent me a letter in 1978, 10 years afterwards, and invited me to reapply as a student. I informed him I already had a master's degree and wasn't interested in it. But, you know, we...

Go ahead. Where did you end up to school? I finished at the University of Tulsa, and then I went to graduate school at the University of Houston. I did some additional work at Cornell, and all that was a good experience for me. But after we got those rules passed, the disability community was empowered, and we thought we'd take the next step to get a law that covered everything. And in 83, I made that testimony. In the testimony, the congressman from California actually asked me what I thought needed to be done to ensure equal opportunity for people with disabilities. And I told the committee that I thought they needed to do a

study, that I was one person. I couldn't represent the community. They should do a study and ask people with disabilities all over the country that question. And so there was an amendment in the act that included provisions to authorize that study. And a few weeks later, the president, the White House personnel, Reagan's presidential personnel office, asked me if I would come to Washington to lead that study in effect. And that was the establishment of the National Council on the handicap, as they called it then. So we did the study and eventually produced a recommendation for the ADA. And who was that? What department were you in doing that study?

Was that National Institute of Health or something? Yeah. Few people understand it well enough to ask that question. Congress was concerned that if they put that that study under any agency, that agency would dictate the outcome. They created an independent federal agency called the National Council on the Handicapped, which is made up of 15 at the time, 15 presidential appointees who effectively wrote the proposal for the ADA that was contained in a report we did called Toward Independence. See, it seems very smart to have done so, but it seems also extraordinary in the face of a president that was claiming to shrink government, to do less, you know. We worried about that. We were, you know, I prayed over that before I agreed to take that position. But then when I saw the people who the president was considering appointing to the board, I thought, you know, this may be an exception.

And another thing happened on the way to the party. And that is a report was due. It had a congressional due date of January 1986. And we were eager to present the report to the president. We imagined having a press conference there on the steps of the White House. And at that point in time, in the morning, when we were scheduled to have that press conference, the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. And of course, the president, you know, everything was scuttled. And the president wasn't able to accommodate us anytime soon after that. So we met with the vice president, and that was

fortuitous because George Bush made it a commitment to work with us on that till it got done. And as luck would have it, two years later, he was elected president. And among the promises he made to the American public in his first speech after the inauguration was that he would work to get a bill passed and signed that would protect people with disabilities from discrimination. And that, you know, that was a huge, huge breakthrough. Were you happy with the initial document? Oh, we loved the initial document. It was 13 pages long, and anybody could read it and understand it in a few minutes. By the time Congress got finished with it, and I'm glad they, you know, it was 52 pages long.

Hard to imagine somebody understanding that in one sitting. That sounds, in today's bureaucracy, that sounds like cliff notes. You know, it sounds like you lucked out. So I'm wondering what work, from the perspective of today's world, what work needs still to be done? Well, any law, you know this, the important part after the law is made is to implement it. And George Bush wanted those regulations written as soon as possible. And they were all done within two years. So we began the implementation process early.

And a lot of things happened early that were remarkable. Virtually overnight, the public transit system in the United States became accessible to people with disabilities. One gap, by the way, in the ADA, and we had this covered in our 13 pages, but the Congress took it out. And that was coverage of discrimination in healthcare and healthcare insurance. We felt that was important. It wasn't included. So after the ADA passed, we began to work on trying to fill that gap along with others. And since then,

the Supreme Court has ruled in the case of Olmstead, which made it clear that ADA covers opportunities and independence for people with intellectual disabilities. The ADA has been amended one time in 2008, and George Bush, the second George Bush, signed that Amendments Act, which included genetic discrimination and protection and protection in the internet, which is obviously important and didn't exist before 1990. So we've been working since the law passed to fill these gaps, and some of them are important, and health care is one of them. And again, back to today, where are we? What needs to be done further?

Well, you know, we have to. Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, has to be maintained. So many people are dependent on health care insurance, and they're able to get it because of the Affordable Care Act. And if that piece of legislation goes away, or if significant parts of it go away, there are going to be millions of Americans without health insurance. And that's strictly based on the fact that they have disabilities. Well, I can't help it if I have a disability. I still need health care, and perhaps I need it worse than other people do. So that's a big issue. But we also have to be conservative. Go ahead.

You mentioned it in your introduction. There are 76 million people in the United States who were born between 1946 and 1964. It's the largest demographic bubble in our population. And these are what we call baby boomers. Most of us are retiring. And as we age, we become disabled naturally. Some of us lose our vision, some are hearing, some of us are memory, some of us are ability walk. I mean, people, you know, we are not indestructible. And time makes a difference in our lives. And as we age, we lose capacity. And this is a population that will soon need assistance.

And we don't want to be providing that assistance in nursing homes and institutions. Number one, it's not a good place to be for anybody. The quality of life is nil. We need to be providing assistance to people in their homes where they can age in place and live a life of productivity and a high quality life throughout their lives and not simply pitch it off to an institution. I 100% agree with you. And we need to start having, I was saying it during COVID when nursing homes were part of the headlines every day,

that it's an opportunity to start talking about aging and end of life and whether or not people ever want to be in a nursing facility and what the options are when people become so disabled by the aging process or so medically decompensated that they need institutional support we have lots of things we can do now that you know you don't have to go to nursing home I was there was a piece of data

that I fell on to during the the darkest days of covid which was the average duration of average life expectancy of a male admitted to a nursing home was six months. And do you really want to do that? Do people want to do that? I know I don't. Yeah, we've done those studies. It is a death sentence. And I'm sorry to put it so strictly, but that's a fact.

And we can support that contention by data. And people who age in their homes, in the community, with their families and with their neighbors, live a long and healthy life. And there's a misconception about the cost of care for older people if their needs are met appropriately as they have them. You know better than anybody else that we can prevent the long-term effects of disability and try to contain some of the issues. But people will need help dressing and undressing. They may need help bathing. They may need a few hours of help a day.

But if that's the case, why would you pay for 24-hour-a-day care in an institution? It makes absolutely no sense. And from the standpoint of economics, our public, to the extent that they may want to share some of the costs, will share a lot lower cost rate in the community than they will in an institutional setting. But to be fair, I do a lot of geriatric care. I worked in a nursing home for years. And you do reach a point, if you're lucky enough, so to speak, you reach a point where you need two people or more to turn, to clean, to feed, to deal with ongoing whatever neurological stuff is going on, bed sores, et cetera.

And my point is, personally, having seen what that is, there's this thing called palliative care. If we get to that point, then there's things to be done too. And it's fine. It's good. This is about dignity and, as you said, productivity and flourishing. And eventually, aging gets to a point, if you're lucky enough, where it can, not always, it can become really a serious thing. And there's stuff to be done then too.

But we've got to all be talking about it realistically to plan from what you're talking about to what I'm talking about. It's all got to be laid out ahead of time. Not only that, we in the medical system have an obligation to help people understand all the resources that are available, and there are plenty. And you see, that circles back to the ADA. One of the pillars of the ADA is choice. We don't have opportunity unless we have choice. We don't have independence unless we have choice. We don't have independence unless we have choice. And if the only option

is to move into an institution, then we have a really, really, really challenging decision to make, which is effectively move into the institution. Wouldn't it be better if we could say, let's go to the community and find caregivers who live in the community who are looking for work who will help their neighbors and organize a system of of an infrastructure of home-based care yeah and and uh most physicians most you know there's visiting there's all kinds of stuff available. And we're getting better and better at it all the time. And we have to because a lot of people are going to need it.

What is it that you're doing at TIER now? What's your job there? Well, my job at TIER is to conduct a research program that looks at the issues we're talking about to provide technical assistance to independent living centers. Dr. Drew, there are more than 400 centers for independent living run by people with disabilities around the country. And these centers provide technical provide peer counseling to people with disabilities and other kinds of assistance, maybe even finding personal care aides. Here at TIER, we feel like we're the information source, and we work with those programs. And we also do advocacy. We operate the Southwest ADA Center, and we answer 9,000 calls a month from people who are looking for information about their rights under the ADA, their obligations under the section, and there's a lot of appreciation for what you have done.

So I want to flip the script a little bit and ask you, what do you wish the non-disabled, the able-bodied would do to support and to raise awareness? We've talked about the aging piece of this, but what can people do now? Well, I think people need to, as you suggested, begin a dialogue with their neighbors, with their family members, with their public officials to talk about what we can do as a community to address these problems. Otherwise, each of us are going to deal with it by ourselves. And many people don't have the capacity to work out solutions to home care, and they wind up being victims of the default. We don't want that to happen. We want people to have a choice. And if I have a choice of hiring somebody in the neighborhood who wants to spend a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours in the evening helping me, that's the choice that I

would like to have. But we don't have any kind of a system that will help identify those people. You know, wouldn't it be cool if we had an Uber-like care system where when you're ready for help, you just dial the number and somebody pulls up with the skills to help you? Somebody's got to do that. Yep, yep, that makes perfect sense. We were going to talk about sort of COVID long haul and what the Disabilities Act might be able to help protect those folks who are worried about disability from this illness. Now, to be fair, we haven't really defined. I don't know. One of the problems with long hauler syndrome is it's not well defined.

Is there adequate protection for people in the ADA as it pertains to this new disease? Absolutely. The ADA is not based on a disease, a diagnostic category, or anything of that nature. The ADA defines disability based on what personal capacities may be compromised in the context of what you're trying to achieve. So if you have lost a major life function or even had one affected, and let's define those as hearing, speaking, viewing, vision, intellectual capacity, memory, mobility. I mean, you can identify major life functions. Pulmonary, every organ system can get you down. GI, pulmonary, they can all, yeah.

If it affects your behavior and your ability to engage in work, to engage in self-care, to engage in activities of daily living, then you have a disability under the ADA. As a matter of fact, if someone perceives you to be so affected, you are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, you know, I would say that people who have COVID, who have effects of that, symptoms related to the COVID that affect their ability to work or do other activities, should not be discriminated against and may have protection under the ADA. Are there areas that need further refinement? I'm thinking about neurological and psychiatric behavioral stuff. I'm guessing that gets very into the weeds.

Is it hard for ADA to protect those folks? No. The answer is no. Now, it may be hard for individuals to obtain protection, but according to the law, they are protected. And they need to feel comfortable making complaints. One of the biggest problems, and again, we documented this in our research at UT and TIER, one of our biggest issues is that the authorities that are responsible for implementing the law and for assuring a non-violation of the law never get complaints. They don't get complaints from people that they should. I get calls all the time from people wanting to know how the university can get by

with not providing them certain accommodations they need to get through their classes. And my question to them is, have you asked the university to do it? Most often, they say no. Well, then you need to start there. Number two, if you have asked and they haven't provided, have you filed a complaint? And most often they say no, and you need to move to that step. Right now, the Department of Justice can receive complaints about violations of public spaces and in public spaces. The EEOC can receive complaints about employment violations of the ADA, and the U.S. attorney's offices around the country have been very good at exploring some of these issues and ensuring

compliance with the law. So compliance becomes one of the real challenges now, primarily because people don't make complaints. Well, I'm glad I asked that question because I hope it motivates people if they have any concerns or know someone who does to do exactly that. The other thing, Lex, that you've provided us with, in addition to an interesting sort of historical sweep of all this, is people are very inspired that one person can have this kind of an impact. Do you see it that way yourself? Has it been a satisfying experience or has it been a frustrating long experience? I mean, I have a lot of stories, a lot of things that only I experienced.

But everybody has stories and everybody has the capacity to influence their lives and the world they live in. And I think sometimes we simply don't take advantage of the opportunities that we have to do that. I'm frequently reaching out to members of Congress, to people in the administration to support issues that obviously need supporting. And I'm frustrated because others don't do the same thing. I can tell you briefly an anecdote. When I was in Washington, and we were about to send our report at the, you know, to have an ADA to the White House. We had sent a draft report over the day before. And the White House called me in the morning at seven o'clock the next morning. And

one of the White House staff said, you've sent us a report which cannot be published by this administration. And I said, the first point is, we're not a part of the administration. We're an independent agency. And the fellow who called me said, well, that may be the case, but you work for the President of the United States. He is the one who hired you and appointed your members. And I said, okay, point taken. He said, be here within 30 minutes to discuss this report, because we need you to make some changes in the report. And I said, I'll be there as soon as I can. But I'm not going to promise we make changes in it, because we are following the law that we've been given to do the report. And I showed up there in his

office. He tried to dictate changes in the report. I asked him, frankly, who's your boss? Is it the president? I'll talk to the president about it. He said, no, it's the chief of the domestic policy council, Bill Roper. Dr. Roper, whom you may know, was a scholar, a graduate of the University of Alabama Medical School at Mobile, I think. But Dr. Roper I had heard about before this occurred, and I thought, you know, maybe Dr. Roper would have a different view. So I asked the fellow, could I speak to Dr. Roper? And Dr. Roper took the time to meet. And he said, how can you defend this report? The president is not really a civil rights advocate, as you may have heard. And what you're asking for is something that this administration might not necessarily be wanting to spend time on.

And I said, Dr. Roper, we have 36 million people with disabilities in the United States today. Most of them would work if they had the opportunity to do it. Most of them would go to school if they weren't discriminated against. And I said, for goodness sakes, is that what, does that live up to the principles this nation was built on? Are we really into discouraging opportunity? And do we want these people whom we spent millions of dollars providing health care to, to keep them alive, sitting at home with their feet up on the table, drinking coffee and watching television. And Dr. Roper said, well, since you put it that way, I think the president would welcome this report. And in fact, I'll deliver it to him personally,

recommend that he endorsed it. And two weeks later we got a letter from the president thanking us for the hard work on this report and in fact endorsing it that the letter by the way you might be able to see it uh is it the one over your left shoulder sort of it's over yeah no orientation it's back next to a large frame document oh yeah we see it back there yeah i see it that's amazing that's a great story you know it just represents little steps by little people sometimes make big waves and my little steps along with those of many others, produced the Americans with Disabilities Act. Were it not for family members of people with

disabilities? Were it not for gay and lesbian people at the time who actually stood up and said, we want to stand with people with disabilities? Were it not for African Americans and Black people in the United States at the time who stood up and say, we support this, there would be no ADA. So, you know, it wasn't the work of one person. I'm glad to be recognized for the little effort I put into it. It's also a good lesson in framing that you can change the argument completely just based on how you frame it. The other question I had, this is really my last question. Did you encounter any of the sort of wranglings that we seem to be going through as a country today? It's like, well, the Constitution doesn't specify that the federal government should be involved in this.

We want to leave it to the states. Was any of that kind of thing a pushback that you got into? You know, that's the first thing we dealt with. The first thing we did when we wrote our report was to tie it to the Constitution and to determine whether there were any kind of link to the Constitution. And we were able to do that. We actually found a piece of legislation dating back to the 19th century where when railroads began to operate, the Congress and the Supreme Court agreed

that the railroad trains must provide little wooden footsteps for people to use when boarding on and off the trains. And that tied us directly, linked us to federal legislation and the Constitution. Genius. You would think that just the pursuit of happiness would be sort of in there as well. But I love the idea that the previous Congress had not only contemplated that they had the authority, they did it, which is sort of really the ultimate argument. Well, Lex, thank you so much for sharing your story with us and for doing the work you've done and continuing to do. And please, I feel like you've got a bunch of fans here now that would

love to help out in any way they can. Is there a website or anything they should go to if they want to be a part of the solutions? Well, there are many websites. I would recommend people who want to get involved and stay involved join a national organization called the American Association of People with Disabilities. And AAPD is led by some ardent advocates. It's a good site and good people. It's an opportunity to be engaged in advocacy. Dr. Drew, I want to thank you for shedding light on some of these issues and bringing light to the 32nd anniversary of the ADA. And I, you know, I ask you to continue keeping the discussion of these important issues about independent living and opportunity alive on your show and your dialogue. Done and done. And I'm just looking up the AAPD right now and seeing what I can

get involved with there. So hopefully we'll all do so. And Lex, thank you so much. Appreciate it. One more thing. Anybody who finds themselves with a question about ADA, I'm going to give you a national toll-free number, 1-800-949-4232. That's the ADA technical assistance line. There are sites all over the country,

regional sites where that phone number will be answered, and people can get information about their rights under the ADA. Let's say it again, 800-949-4232. 1-800-949-4232. 1-800-949-4ADA. 4ADA. And then I'm sure, Caleb, you can throw that up there at some point here. Yes, I'll put it up on the website. Okay, fair enough.

All right, Lex, thank you. We'll take a little break. We'll be back with your calls after this. Thanks, guys. I think we have found the holy grail of skincare. GenuCell has absolutely changed certainly my skincare regimen. I like that vitamin C serum, the under eye creams, skin nourishing primer. Susan loves the eyelash enhancers, uses it on her eyebrows as well. GenuCell has everything to make us both feel and look amazing. Best part, the quality of the

products. Using pure ingredients like antioxidants, copper peptides, and a proprietary calendula flower base, GenuCell knows how to formulate products to perfection without irritation. For Susan, she hates that annoying dry area on her nose during allergy season, like right here. She's tried everything, but no matter what, the skin is flaky and dry. Nothing seemed to help until she started using GenuCell's Silky Smooth XV Moisturizer. Soaked right into the skin, she was hooked after one use, and now loves all of their products as well. I am a snob when it comes to using products on my face.

The dermatologist makes a ton of money for me. But when I was introduced to GenuCell, I was so happy because it's so affordable and it works great. I was introduced to the Ultra Retinol Cream, which I love at night. All the eye creams are amazing. People notice my skin all the time, and I'm so excited because it's actually working. Right now, you can try GenuCell's most popular collection of products and see what I'm talking about for yourself. Go to GenuCell.com and enter code Drew for 10% off. That is G-E-N-U-c-e-l.com and the code is d-r-e-w isn't i think oh there we go i'm busily signing up for the uh aap pd's email list and whatnot

this looks very interesting organization uh all right let's try to get some calls here anything you guys want to talk about, I am happy to do so. What you do is you just request to come up, and I will bring you up here if you have any questions, anything left over from yesterday. And as we normally remind you, we stream out on multiple platforms if you are brought up here. Ask me anything. Ask me anything. That's really sort of the zone we're in right now.

So let's start with Josh and see what he's got up his sleeve and what's going on. Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey, buddy. I was just thinking of the homeless problem when you mentioned disability. And I know it's a different legal thing, but I feel like people with severe mental illness are disabled because they need help, obviously. And I wanted not to talk about the legal stuff, not to talk really about what your guest was talking about and not, not, you know, but more like what to do with severely negative affect with people with severe sort of trauma history. Yeah. And it can be more, it's, it's almost,

it's, it's more, you know, it's, it's beyond the ability. Well, it's, it's beyond the ability of the person to handle it,

but it can also be beyond the ability of someone else to handle even the best psychoanalyst or practitioner. And that's why I think they're on the street because we, no one can help them. No one's good enough to do it well I mean I completely agree with you that um distress psychic distress can be more disabling than just about anything and that neurological phenomenology is often very subtle you can't see it it may be as simple as you can't organize dealing with your activities of daily living or you can't organize you know sort of the again the brain there's

the way we are able to maintain our environment in which we live is because our brain is functioning but there can be subtle regions of dysfunction that all of a sudden you can't manage your toiletry or you can't manage sort of storing things or you can't. It's overwhelming to think about clothing or whatever. There's all kinds of things that can happen neurologically. And the fact is there is treatment for all of it. There's especially treatment for all the drug addiction, all the psychiatric stuff on the street. It's not as though there's not treatment for it. There's good treatment and it works.

The problem is you're not allowed to render the care unless the patient is begging for it, asking actively for the care, and they have to continue to ask for it even when the going gets rough. I've never seen anybody on the street that I felt I couldn't treat or hadn't treated something very similar successfully.

Now, I'm not saying that all treatment is 100% successful, but there are a lot of treatment options these days. So maybe even if your goal is not to restore to a completely flourishing existence, you can at least make people not die. You can pretty much do that now, and you can also give people the support that they need psychoneurobiologically psychosocially to be able to make up for whatever those shortcomings wherever those deficiencies are in brain function

but not if you're not allowed to not if you're not allowed to what about the the day you know the days of like you know the family therapist who has been there and knows it in his own life i mean not this not this that's what he'd be on exactly what i'd be on the streets he'd be on the streets that's exactly what i'm saying so you have you know you can treat them yeah but it it means taking them out of where they are and yeah you know taking them to where you are essentially i mean that's right that's exactly right that's but so we need more people who are like have been there in a sense or who who can who have you know had this amazing trauma history because then at least they

can go down there and say you know i've there, I've done this and maybe a combination. And so it's not so extreme where the person has to go to a completely new setting or place. Um, well, let me just say, yeah, it does. But, but you know, that's why I, you know, encourage Anthony Brown, for instance, to speak out so much. I mean, he was homeless, you know, criminal on the street, uh, and street and with severe trauma issues, severe. Now, the reason I have him speak a lot, you know, one of my motivations for getting him out in front of people is not so homeless people hear him and are inspired. It's so people who get in the way of treating the homeless people understand that you can bring people to a fully flourishing life again.

And that when they're in the state, and he will tell you this, I don't know if, Anthony, if you're on the restream right now, or if you're listening, oh, he's busy. He's out in Ohio right now. But you're not in a condition to be able to hear what Anthony's got to offer. So it's really the people that are getting in the way of those of us that know how to render the services that we're trying to reach. The government and the do-gooders that really are doing bad, that are actually involved

in actively harming people and killing them. It's really bad times. And if you've never had training in or never done this work, there's no way for you to know it. There's no way you could understand what can be done or how to do it. It takes years of exposure to this stuff to understand how to do it. So everyone that gets in the way of that, like Jesus, I guess, said, they know not what they do, but they are really hurting a lot of people. And so back to the actual treatment, I mean, there are people listening to this program who might be listening because they're not doing that great. Or I mean, who knows? I, I'm, I could be in that list too. We all, we all have our issues, but for me, it's sort of like,

it's about integrating that negative experience into normal human functioning. I feel like, and you're, you're, you're a neuroscience guy, you know? Yeah. And it's like, that's really what we're talking about, right? Yeah, well, in a way. I mean, you're talking about, you know, tolerating misery and owning misery and, you know, dealing with our regulatory system.

And as you and I have discussed before, it's others. It's satellite brain systems that fix brain systems. It's not just all about the medication. There these other things that can also be very helpful for people that are severely ill but it is literally what you're talking about it's brains heal other brains uh anthony i would look to you know alan shore peter foneghi steven porges um cozalino all these guys i I mean, all that stuff. It's all now sort of becoming more. When I fell into this work and to that material, it was 25 plus years ago, and it was not sort of routinely embraced.

And now it really is. Now it really is. Vibes. You may have a question. Let's get to your that's your question vibes there you are hey how you doing can you hear me yeah gotcha what's up hey i appreciate you taking your time to talk to the folks you know i want to ask you a question you know me myself i had a an addiction problem 19 years ago and it's been 19 years drug free and to see all of a

sudden that you see legal weed all over the place and how people are changing behind it, what are your thoughts with them legalizing all this weed all over the place and people making it like it's no big deal? Yeah. So I, I try not to get, not to get involved in the laws. In other words, there's not such a thing as a good drug and a bad drug. And so when people start arguing that alcohol is legal and weed is illegal, that's illogical, that doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense.

But do you want, and we really tried to make alcohol illegal. That doesn't work so well but and no drug is worse than alcohol in terms of its effect on society so it becomes a weird discussion i'm not looking for more things to be legal because when they're illegal it helps me help the patients though in this state we made everything illegal we made everything legal you can do drugs you You can traffic drugs. You can steal to support your habit. That's California.

And so people aren't coming to treatment because they're not having consequences from their using. And that's why they're dying. As it pertains to cannabis specifically, because the cannabis that's out there, first of all, there's just this, there's a weird gloss over it. Like, not only is it not bad, it's only good. And that's just not true, particularly at the concentrations that is out there right now. If you're dabbing, you need to look at what you're doing. It will affect you eventually. It just will. And I'm not passing judgment on anyone that does that. And I'm not saying it on anyone that does that. And I'm not saying it's something that, you know, you can't do, you're going to do what you do and good on you,

but you're going to have to deal with that eventually, because if you're at that level, it, it, it gets, it gets very, uh, it gets addictive. It gets very addictive at that point. And it's much, much harder to, to see what's happening. And it's much more, because again, when you get really going with a drug, you get something called anosognosia, which is a block of insight. You block the ability to see what's happening to you. It's a sort of the common term is denial, but denial actually has a kind of a biological basis to it. And when you really get going with something, you can't see what's happening to you. And that's how people get into real trouble. And Vibes, I don't know what your name is, but I'd love to hear it and congratulate you on your 17 years. I appreciate it.

My name is Rob. Rob. So it's been 19. So, you know, the reason why I bring that up is because it's not like when I try to talk to the people about this, it's not more of the law aspect, whether it should be legal or not. It's more from the side effect of it has a lot of side effects that people don't realize are coming down the pipeline. Like one of the common one is a paranoia and psychosis. Yep. But trying to explain that to people, it's a little hard.

So just to get your input, because I know you've treated a lot of people for a variety of addiction. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, you do get, you can, paranoia is extremely common with this stuff. Psychosis, not so common, but it does happen. There's anosognosia where the patient cannot be aware of their conditions, a neurological deficit. And it happens with addiction. It happens with most serious mental illness. But I will tell you, Rob, the one thing that you can get through to people on is the cannabis hyperemesis, which happens very commonly. It goes down as a rare condition. It's common. Most people just don't tell you that they're vomiting three times a week. So if you ask them, ask everybody, you're vomiting, you have reflux? You're vomiting? You've asked your doctor what it's all about?

That's the cannabis. And it will not stop until they stop. You know, it's interesting you say that because I actually came across somebody that I was just talking to on Normal Talk. And he works at one of the marijuana dispensaries. And he was telling me that one of the biggest side effects from people, and a lot of people don't know this is like you said, the uncontrollable vomiting, but also seizures.

And that's pretty interesting. Seizures. Again, that's kind of a, it's not that it happens. I wouldn't point at that as a common thing, but it does happen. But the emesis stuff,

you can't imagine how many people tell me my boyfriend he vomits every day and he's seen all these doctors and he says endoscopies i'm like for god's sakes does he smoke weed every day oh yeah i make my wake and bake every day it's like yeah well guess what that's uh that's what's going on here we need to have paulina on the show yeah happy to have it too yeah and she got all the way through college she's like i am this she was going in and getting endoscopies and throwing up and just like all the time she she came to my house she was watching a movie she got triggered and threw up all over my she didn't get triggered she just that's part of the thing my silk rug cost me six hundred dollars to clean it caleb you trying to ask

question is that you yeah do you do you know why? So it's like medical marijuana is one of the things that sometimes is recommended for people who have chronic nausea. So why does it help with nausea for some people but then make it so much worse for others? If you're using it, it's really not great for – it's an issue of the frequency, duration, and dose. And if you're using Marinol or something for nausea, that doesn't have these side effects. If you're using occasionally for nausea, no, you're not going to get the hyperemesis. It's really back into this high-potency stuff

where you start to see all the stuff, all the side effects. And you're not really interested in dabbing when you're taking cannabis for, yeah, you're taking your vape pen or your whatever, your bong, and just having occasional use. And that doesn't cause the hyperemesis. And that can help with nausea. It's one of the paradoxical qualities. And it also can help with appetite and things like that.

All right, Liz, what's going on? Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey, now. How are you doing? Good. Good. Susan, how's it hanging? Susan Prinsky. Hey, now. How are you doing? Good. Good. Susan, how's-

Hola. How's it hanging? Susan Pinsky. I love it. I love how he's like, oh, Susan Pinsky is here. Like so generic as if it's not like you don't sleep in the same bed every night together. Right? But oh gosh, where do we start, Dr. Drew?

Okay, gosh, I mean, there's so many things here. Okay. And I feel like I always have to, like, rush through it because, well, you know, we don't have all the time in the world. But number one, I would like to say, as far as the last caller, was it Rob? Rob. In the 19 years? Yeah. Dude, I just want to give you a high five and clap and good for you, man, because, you know, good for you.

I'm proud of you. I'm sure you're proud of yourself and you should be. It's a great thing that you've been able to do. Also, I'm wondering, I mean, Dr. Drew, it's, you know, marijuana, we should have our own. You should have. I'm not saying we. I don't know why I'm saying we. You.

I guess I don't like to tell people what to do. So I don't want to be like, you should have your own marijuana segment. But you should, right? I mean, it would be great. Well, we'll get, we'll get, uh, we'll get my daughter in here. Uh, she can talk about it as a, from personal experience and, um, and I can sort of follow on. You always kind of have to have a case to talk about these things. And by the way,

there's not a lot known about some of the things that are happening right now. Like they don't know what causes the cannabis hyperemesis. There's our book. And, uh, and they don't know what causes the cannabis hyperemesis. There's our book. And they don't know what causes it. They used to be called, back when they first started observing it, they call it scrommeting because the vomiting was so intense that people would scream while they vomited.

And the only treatment we had for it was hot showers. Hot shower seems to help it. Now, Dr. Drew, can you please tell us about this? Because, I mean, I know a lot of stoners in my life, and I have never heard this kind of thing. You know what I mean? I'm not saying that I partake. Look up, just look up cannabis hyperemesis. And there'll be pages and pages and pages will pop up off Google.

Well, she was waking up and taking bong hits for breakfast. Yeah, but a lot of people do that. A lot of people do that. It's not uncommon. Yeah, COVID a lot of people do that. A lot of people do that. It's not uncommon. Yeah, COVID was not kind. She was part of the, what is the word that they have a way of glossing over it? They call it harm avoidance and they call it rational use. It's so healthy for you.

It's not like alcohol. Ways of glossing over what's actually happening. Well, I think moderation is key too. You know what I mean? I am not anti-wheat. I agree. I am not anti-wheat. I am not anti-wheat. That is not my position. As I've always said. I mean, if I got up in the morning and drank a drink, everybody would be all over my ass.

You know what I mean? But I don't. I wait until 5 o'clock. Yes. And we're all over your ass even then. 5 o'clock somewhere every time. Huh, Susan? Even then we're all over our ass.

No, but I mean, she was just doing it all day and like thinking nothing like you know that I mean I didn't know I she lived in Brooklyn yeah you know and they but I guess my question is just like I I know that I know a lot of people do exactly what Susan said yeah they wake up and they take them. And some people have no problem and they function fine, but it, it, it's funny. It depends how much, how potent, how often this kind of stuff. And if you're using the high potency weed, it really, it, it will catch up with you. It just takes time. One of the more common things that happens is that you start to get depressed and, and the, the, and then there's something about long-term cannabis that eventually,

not may take years and years, but eventually you get some depression. Or it might make you want to take other drugs too. Well, no. Like, oh, I've got anxiety. I need to take Klonopin. That's what they say. No, here's what happens. Let me tell you what happens.

I'm going to put you on the- Susan made a great point. That's what people say. No, she didn't. I'm going to tell you. Maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. I'm not a happened. I'm going to put you on the- Susan made a great point. That's what people say. No, she didn't. I'm going to, because I'm going to tell you- Maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. I'm not a doctor.

I disagree. Liz, I'm putting you back in the, I'm putting you on time out because you have to listen to what I'm saying and you will agree to me when I tell you exactly how it works. So the way it works, I've seen it a billion times, is people love weed. They love it. They're into it. They're into it. They're doing it all the time. It works for them.

After some period of time, it stops working as well. They start getting depression and anxiety. In response to that, they smoke a lot more and try to get that dose up to get it back, which brings back the relief and accelerates the decline into more anxiety and more depression and susan that is when the klonopin comes in and that's when people switch to other drugs that's what i said and they because they're now they don't stop the pot and

they will say things like the weed isn't working anymore that guy said in fact i know or they just get depressed and then they're on then they have to take a bunch of that won't work that won't work either but i i know a lot of uh weed That won't work. That won't work either. But I know a lot of weed smokers that are aware of this phenomenon and will actually sort of pace themselves so they don't get that. They start realizing if they don't take breaks, they start to have this sort of resistance to the effects and they start getting depressed and that kind of thing. So it does happen. When I take pot, it just doesn't do much. Yeah, it really doesn't do much for me. I just don't understand it.

But again, we have never done this high-dose stuff, and who knows? I'll probably get psychotic. Oh, I would not. I get paranoid. I remember in the 80s when I was in my teens, I used to get really paranoid. I haven't done it really since then.

Tea time. Tea time says, Susan is not a doctor. What? Really? I'm not a doctor. I said that. I'm not a doctor. It's tea time. time says susan is not a doctor what really i'm not a doctor but i said that i'm not a doctor it's tea time how dare you but i can say whatever i want because i don't have a medical license yeah okay casey's talking about taking the time off to get the tolerance down that's right that's what people do they manipulate their side effects of the medication quite

literally uh okay so let me look at your guys on the restream right now i'm gonna have to wrap this thing up in just a couple of minutes here uh i mean i just i've seen i've heard a lot of stories i mean we did a whole show about drug addiction called this life you live hashtag you live if you look it up it's a couple hundred episodes and i think we interviewed everybody who was on Celebrity Rehab who's alive, and maybe some that weren't with my show. And then, you know, Bob took us down so many paths with all the different addicts that we interviewed.

And, you know, I've heard every story. But, you know, when I found out my daughter was in this, you know, we're not immune to it. You know what I mean? Just because Drew who is who he is, doesn't mean your kids aren't going to get addicted to something and have a, she's sober right now and she's got COVID and I want to shout out to her. I wish she felt better today, but, um, she did an unbelievable turnaround. did an unbelievable commitment to recovery.

It was just sensational. Well, her boyfriend was kind of the one who was getting more into the depression and all that. And then she saw him have kind of a psychotic break because they were withdrawing. Or whatever. We don't know. We weren't there. From pot. We don't know what happened.

We're not there. No, I'm not saying like her side of the story. But I have heard stories many times and i've heard you know you helped steve-o you helped you know i don't know what his drug of choice was but i've seen you save a lot of people's lives and some of them were addicted to pot and then it ended up being that's why joe rogan got mad at me because i said that out loud before people understood that that was possible. But a lot of time like Xanax comes next and then they get addicted to the Xanax.

If somebody's really into it, what comes next is stimulants. Because stimulants correct some of the depression from the cannabis. And so that's the most common way people get to stimulants is this way I just described. At least historically that's the way it always was. And you're right. The psychotropic medications are people that go to doctors more and doctors hand more of that shit out. Well, Paulina was on that too.

Here is Proposition 54, legislation for legalization of medical cocaine, everybody. So there's something up in California that's on the way to getting cocaine completely legalized. So there we go. Whatever, everybody. No, Joe and I do not have a beef, uh, but Joe used to sort of talk shit about me. And we talked about it since we saw him recently. I guess you guys are friends. Caleb, what are you asking? Oh, no. I was going to say that my, the, my friends that I knew in California, the ones

that smoked the most weed were also at the same time, they would abuse Adderall as well, so it fits. It didn't make sense to me because one seemed like it was an upper and one was a downer or something like that. But that's what they would go for. They literally- If it's weed, then do Adderall. Yeah. Yeah, and they think about it in terms of,

weed is the love of their life, right? And they've known it for the first time they got high off it that's one of the characteristic features of cannabis addiction you look right away you love it and not immediately like two or three you you have to you have to your brain has to get primed to this i love it effect and usually it's two or three doses in sometimes it's the first dose um and then it's you know what what can i do to maintain that relationship with this thing i love so much and stimulants tend to do that which is why they you know, what can I do to maintain that relationship with this thing I love so much? And stimulants tend to do that, which is why, you know, again, you're right.

Back to the psychotropics, they're getting it from doctors. It's Adderall, it's Klonopin, it's whatever. All right, everybody. Tomorrow, we are back with you. And we have Michael Huckman. He's another physician. We're going to talk. He has a program.

Let me see. Do we have the information on his stuff coming in? He is the husband of the pediatrician we like to interview here, Jessica. And I don't know that I have any information about what he is bringing. I forgot. I did know at one point. And I asked specifically to have him booked because I was interested. Are we doing a show on Friday, Caleb? Not this week.

Okay. And for those of you, can I talk about the show we're contemplating doing? Yeah, sure, Caleb. Let's talk about it. Yeah. We have two things we're contemplating doing. One is a side-by-side commentary

with The Real's live PDd show which is apparently now almost exclusively uh responding to drug addicts and the psychiatric illnesses and so i'm going to sort of explain what the cops are coming up against it is exclusively it's always been that way from the start like even when this it used to be called live pd so as you can tell i came on screen because we are the biggest fans of live pd and we were shocked whenever it was canceled because it's not like the show is just going around just showing cops in great light it's showing live what's happening literally on the streets what people are dealing with and my wife and i we were watching the new version of it called on patrol live and every five minutes

i was pointing at the screen and saying i really wish that we had drew just on FaceTime on the side to say what, what drugs this person is on. Like what, what makes a person get violent, which drugs are causing them to collapse in front of a church, which drugs are causing them to attack someone or to speed off in the car and the police to chase them. And that's whenever you and I were talking yesterday and we thought, why don't we do a, like, what was it? A, what's not the fear of the walking dead. It's where they would, you know, what was it called? The talking dead where they would stream at the same time as the TV show was live and have you give some commentary completely independently of it. I think we could do it. I think we might do something like that. I'm willing to do this

right. If you want, but I don't know about next Friday. Let me see what, let me, uh, we're going to be in New York. We want them to, we're back. Oh yeah.

Yeah. They're working on some like technical issues on their side, but yeah. All right. If there's anybody that watches the show, then back to the hottest place in the world. And then Susan wants to put something together for me and Dr. Victor Kelly on rumble.

So she, i think they would be a good co-hosting situation and get some new new people in over there i know and then you guys who are over on twitch and youtube and facebook and twitter can come over there for you know one show a week if you guys are into the whole uh kelly victory controversial stuff and dr true that way we can build a relationship. Rumble's been very good to us. They put us on their homepage. YouTube never does. They've tried

to put us on the back page for a really long time. And, you know, we love Facebook. We want to see some of you guys over there too. But we just, we have, I don't know, Rumble's being cool. Oh, they want a Susan episode too.

We could do that. Oh, where I have to be on the screen? Either on the screen or at least I'll just turn, you know, we can do calls where you sort of field some of the stuff. Can we talk to psychic people? That's a different show. You can do that also if you wish. All right, well thank you wish. All right.

Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you, Kayla, for producing. Where are you going, Suze? What are you doing? Computer's dying. You're jumping around. I know. Sorry.

So, it looked very odd. There's Michael Hockman coming in tomorrow, I believe. Well, I'll get you all the details tomorrow, so hang out. And next week, we are only in here on Friday, right?

Well, we're traveling Thursday. No, because we'll be in town fast enough early enough. Oh, we have to fly. Yeah, next week. Sorry, you guys. We're going to be gone next week until Friday. We can do Friday. Yeah. Are you good for Friday? Caleb, next Friday. Caleb, we have to schedule our tech guy. This Friday?

The week from Friday. Yeah, we don't have any shows this week. We can schedule this off the air. I think I could do it on the 5th. You don't want to do stuff off the air like this? Yeah, let's go ahead. Let's go through the calendar right now. Our schedule changed.

We have to stay an extra night because we have a cool guest who's going to be there on Wednesday. The After Dark format is now bringing back the comedians that we've had comedians not exclusively comedians but yes podcasters people that are you know in the news good podcasters funny people if you saw luis gomez in there with me that they actually moved that one up to give you a flavor of what's going on I know that was funny you guys check it out yeah do check it out new programming over at

After Dark so we have a really great guest can we tell them who it is yeah we're going to hang out with Jeff Ross so he's funny he's going to be in Austin I guess on Friday so if anybody's in Austin he's going to be in Austin, I guess, on Friday. So if anybody's in Austin, he's going to be performing in Austin Friday the 5th and 6th. So we'll see him on Thursday the 4th.

Right. Or no, yeah, right? Isn't that what it is? Well, I'm going to... No, he's performing Thursday and Friday. Wednesday night, I'm going to see him. Yeah. We'll see him on Wednesday.

Yeah, and then we will i don't know when they'll air that but we'll figure it out uh but the point is he's like the last of the older generation of of comics that's still alive i want you to talk to him about that i mean gilbert godfrey died bob saget um there's still plenty i mean a lot of the ones that artie lang continues to thrive oh yeah artie is good and so you need to get artie lang on already we need a new we need a new show i'm gonna create a new show called artie lives and it's a great example of you can get through this stuff even when but i mean he's not on the big tour circuit like some of these guys. Like, you know, Jeff's still doing the tours and telling his stories. Okay.

I love him. Oh, you don't know that I went up on stage with him in New York City. Oh, yeah. That's right. It was just a couple months ago. He was doing his, you know, he roasts people and brings them up. And who wants to be roasted? And I just raised my hand.

He goes, Drew, you sure? I went, okay. I'll help you out. What did he say about you? I don't remember. I just remember I was he goes Drew you you sure I went okay I'll help you out what did he say about you I don't remember I just I just remember I was thinking I got to help him I whatever he says it's going to be I'm up here to help out yeah take it yeah take it like a man take some take some punches yeah I remember being kind of kind to me I think it's hard to roast you yeah no he can do it trust me he's fine uh so, we are going to aim for a week from Friday, but we will be away all the middle

part of the week. And then from New York the following Tuesday and then back here on Thursday. We got to work it out with Caleb. Maybe Monday. The engineer has to be in the house. All right. Fair enough. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. We'll see you tomorrow. Sorry, we're giving up. Yeah, we're rambling. Three in the house. All right. Fair enough. All right,

everybody. Thank you so much. We'll see you tomorrow. Sorry, we're giving up. Yeah, we're rambling. Three o'clock Pacific time.

See you then. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

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