Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - JRE review of 1250 with Johann Hari

Episode Date: February 23, 2019

Johann Hari is a journalist and has studied addiction. Joe has had him on before and it’s always a fact filled podcast. Johann is very knowledgeable about his subject and speaks very fast so PAY ATTENTION! LOL. There are a lot of really interesting points made during their conversation that taught me a lot about drug addiction. Really liked it.   Enjoy my review folks! Please email me with any suggestions and questions for future Reviews: [e-mail]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the JRE Review. Today I am reviewing conversation 1250 or podcast 1250 with Johann Harry. Johann has been on Robyn's podcast before in fact he told a couple of the same stories I believe as he did last time or at least I'd heard the stories before and I only make sense that they would have come from him. But you know he probably does a lot of interviews and when he's making a lot of lectures and when he makes certain points, probably certain stories fit well to give an example of those points. But either way, he's a very intelligent guy, he speaks very quickly,

he's obviously done a lot of research, and just from listening to him, the amount of names and places he could just pull up right off the top of his head and throw down, makes me believe that when he says something, he's read it, learned it, it's backed up, it's somewhat factual, and they had a really good conversation, so let's start the review. Welcome to the Joe Rogan Experience Review! Where each week I review every single episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. What more do you want? If somebody asked me the other day the way that I start

My podcast is I often will just say it's a great conversation Let's start the review and get into it that way though. I don't always and somebody said that you ever find the conversations Not great. Well, of course, you know that not every Joe Rogan experience is the best one you've ever heard. It's so more interesting than others and so on, but a lot of the conversations are very good, and I really try to only say it when I truly enjoyed a podcast. Not to say if I really couldn't stand a podcast or hated it that I would talk about that I don't think that I would I would just assume I was probably in a bad mood or I wasn't concentrating very well

But yeah, generally I'm gonna try to be as honest as I can be about what I enjoyed and what I didn't enjoy With this podcast I liked it because one I learned a lot about addiction drug addiction in particular, through what your home is saying. And you know, that sheds light on different things. It's often easy to just assume that somebody is weak because they're addicted to something. But you know, maybe that's not the case. And you know, there's a complicated situation.

There's a lot of factors in there. And I think anything that gives you more understanding and a little bit more compassion towards people is not going to hurt at all. So this one was an important conversation. So Johan is a journalist, right? And he's studied addiction. He has multiple books.

He had drug problems in his family. When he was growing up, that was And he studied addiction. He has multiple books. He had drug problems in his family when he was growing up. That was kind of the motivation to getting behind a lot of this work. And then really hit a lot of his point now is just trying to explain the drugs and not what you think that they are, right? So he gives reference to this experiment that was given to these rats and they were in a cage and they were kind of miserable when it was a crappy environment but there was like a heroine water and a regular water in the end of rats drank all the heroine water and they died or cocaine water I can't remember one of the two. So then but so it's easy then to just say, oh cocaine's terrible, it will kill you and it should be illegal and that's the end of it and that's this is addiction and you can't fight it.

Well, that's well and good, but the point that Johan makes is they went ahead and made this place called Rat Park, which was like a beautiful sanctuary for rats where they could play on you know little rat toys and you know choose stuff and hang out with each other and have community. They also had cocaine water and regular water and none of them almost none of them preferred the cocaine water and in fact none of them died of it either. So really the point there and he goes into it in more detail in the podcast and not doing it justice But basically what he's saying is when you got shit going on your life and your life's good You won't need these drugs and this is a lot of the point that he talks about when he references What Switzerland's done and how they've legalized hard drugs like heroin and they make you go to a place

Station where in the morning you can shoot up on heroin and take as much as you want and all the rest of it and they don't even encourage you to take less, they just give you what you need. And then they give them these heroin addicts other help to sort their life out and what they're showing is number one nobody's dying of heroin abuse that's doing it in these places because it's all medically controlled and the heroin's pure. And then also people are quitting quicker and using less, right? Because it's giving them support, helping them out, fixing their lives.

And that's a fascinating thing because the point that Johan makes on his podcast over and over is that America doesn't do that. America logs you up, they can find you, they make it seem more like the rat experiment. You know, they just don't give you the help that's actually been shown to be effective. They just throw the book at you, find you a lot, tell doctors not to prescribe to you because you're addicted, take the drugs away, force you to buy them illegally. I mean, it's kind of a messed up situation. Now, I don't deal with drug addiction myself. I don't have histories of it in my family and my friends, at least my close friends, that I'm where I'm not suffering from this. So for me, I don't think about it much. So that's why in this podcast, I really enjoyed kind of sitting through it because it's not something

that I'm constantly contemplating and trying to figure out solutions for and that's why I appreciate this conversation in particular because I was able to kind of reassess and it gives you a little bit more compassion for the people that are stuck in these situations. And you want to live in a society where I would want to live in a society where my country, you know, the place that I love to live has a government that can help people effectively get away from these addictions. Because you've got to ask yourself, like, what is your government good at? If they can't do that well, or even close the well, if they just lock everyone up and they don't give you any support to like kick the addiction or even understand what

it is, what other things in your society are they not doing a very good job at? I mean, if they don't listen in one direction, how many other directions are they not listening in? And then when how are they even figuring out the best way to do things. I mean, those sorts of questions to me connect and that makes me a little bit concerned. One thing that Johan talked about, which makes a lot of sense is, for example, if you have a pill addiction, right? And you get pills from your doctor

but you have pill addiction. And then your doctor finds out you're addicted, like you don't need the pill for pain anymore You're just addicted to the pill by law the doctor has to cut you off Well imagine if that was you and maybe it is you or maybe this has happened to somebody that you know Or this is someone that you're closer to What they're gonna do then is they're gonna go buy those someone. So now they're supporting like the illegal process of selling pills, right? And you know, it's easy to just say, well, they shouldn't do that,

that's illegal. But they're already roped in, right, to these addictions. They were already originally given this medication by a doctor that's now saying they can't have it because of the way they're taking it. It's a slippery slope and then to just take it away like that, I mean it's going to cause them to create some issues. One cool story that Johan talked about is in Switzerland their top police officer back in the day like the 90s or something, said that he thought if they legalized these drugs in Switzerland, like before they wanted to do it,

it would be the worst thing, it would be pandemonium, there would be everyone be addicted to drugs, it would be such a mess, nobody would ever kick it, people would be dying everywhere, be disaster, right? This is what he said. But years later, after they did legalize it and they saw the results, what he said was really quite fascinating.

Bear in mind, Switzerland's quite a conservative country as well, so it's not even like it's just super liberal and they thought, hey, let's just legalize drugs. They just had a real problem with it and wanted to fix it. Anyway, that they could, and they followed some science and it work. And this, this police officer said that he was really ashamed because everything he

said that would happen didn't happen. And everything that the people that wanted to legalize it and the scientists and the doctors said would happen did happen. And he was ashamed because he was in a position of protection, protecting the people and helping them. He thought he had a great deal of information on drug abuse, drug crime and the violence that came with it. He thought he was making good assessments, but he was wrong. He isn't too egot court to admit that, you know, and it's an important message that you can be wrong and even somebody like him at his level, a conservative person as well and the law enforcement can like take a step back and see that.

And in a way, America, in places, it wouldn't be a bad idea to adopt that in a similar way. I mean, look at all the stories coming from Mexico. You know, the murders, the drug wars, the gang stuff, and you know, the gangs are so powerful and so ingrained in like the local governments and even governments on big sale. These people can't even, their cops can't even enforce stuff over there. And it's coming from drugs and it's because we don't legalize them. Now it sounds like I'm jumping on the bandwagon, right? Well, you know, I did just listen to the conversation and it is, it was compelling, but my point is just a different way of thinking about it. Really, it's clear that whatever that we've been doing doesn't work that great, so I don't think it would hurt to try a new strategy.

At least take some of the power away from these car tells and get some tax revenue for certain drugs. I mean, you don't want to encourage the continual usage of really awful hard ones, but I mean, we're making money off marijuana and that's definitely taken some power away from the cartels in respect to what Drugs would have been smuggled into the states where where it's now legal at least I would assume I have a zero data on this of course Another thing that your hand talks about is just look, drugs aren't going away, okay?

If we legalize them like alcohol, there's no deaths from people selling alcohol. There's no alcohol drug dealers killing people. Though in prohibition, back then there were, there were gangsters, there were the alcohol types. I mean there was murder wherever you legalize something that still has or make illegal, something that still has highly demand, there will be gang crime that comes with it. It's not the product's fault necessarily, right? It just, it isn't that way. it's just drugs are an easy thing to

kind of point that finger at so it's really how we handle the drug that's super important how we make it legal how we don't like every culture he was saying has something like you know it doesn't matter what culture throughout history they've all found something that they can get high on. For as far back as we can even remember, he was even saying the Inuits where they didn't have drugs available, they would just like do some sort of fasting for extended period of time that gave them like a heightened high feeling. And he also gives the example that even kids when they're young, they're spin around and make themselves dizzy, they're kind of making themselves high, like it's in our being to just occasionally take ourselves outside of our normal feeling for a period of time.

We find it fun, right? And a lot of this, at least the drug use in a sense or the escapism of it, comes from the parts of our lives that are really not good. Like people often are using this stuff to escape, whether it be a really bad job or relationship or whatever. And you know, with bad jobs a lot of times, it's because people are being heavily controlled. Their boss is angry and mean to them and they control all of their actions. And you know what? I mean, if you're finding yourself doing some sort of drug to escape a bad boss, I'd definitely recommend trying to get a new job at almost any cost.

Because sure, you need your money to pay your bills, but is it worth it when it comes to you having to potentially injure your health or get stuck in an addiction for it. But, I don't know, sometimes we are, just stuck in shitty jobs. And it leads to these areas of addiction. I think Johan's conversation with Joe is very important for a lot of people here. And I'm glad that he got that exposure, as well. I brought up some interesting points. He has a couple of books out so check those out. Johan Hari has them on Amazon but anyway I enjoyed the conversation you guys check it out see what you

think. I really appreciate you guys. Peace! you