The Joe Rogan Experience - #683 - Ethan Nadelmann

Episode Date: August 13, 2015

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York City-based non-profit organization working to end the War on Drugs.

Oh, an unusual early morning for me. An early morning episode of the podcast, Ethan. Very nice to meet you, man. Thanks for doing this. Good to meet you, too. No, it's my pleasure. So, Drug Policy Alliance. How far are we away? Let's get this done. Come on. Well, it depends what it is, right? When it comes to legalizing marijuana, I mean, we got momentum that nobody could have believed we'd had just four or five years ago, right? So, in that sense, things are flying. I don't think it's in the bag yet, though. One of my biggest concerns is a sense of

overconfidence where this whole thing could trip up. Yeah, my biggest concern is that, and it's also like Jeb Bush and guys like that. Like if those guys, or that fat fuck from New Jersey. Christy, can you believe the Kripola coming out of his mouth on this stuff? Somehow he's going to identify that

niche of the Republican Party that wants to keep locking up people for weed. And that Rubio was saying stuff like that the other day. I have a theory. Yeah. I have a theory. I think what he's trying to do is make sure he's never president. I really do. I really think that that guy is so deeply embedded in corruption in New Jersey that the moment he actually becomes a serious candidate for president,

I think this shit is going to come out of the closet like a broken fire hydrant. Yeah, it could be, Joe. He's going to find out. I think also his popularity has fallen so low in New Jersey right now that he just wanted to get out of town. I think that's why he's running president. It's better than dealing with stuff in Trenton, acknowledging all the screw-ups he's had. I mean, I'll tell you something.

We led, Drug Policy Alliance led that effort to legalize medical marijuana in Jersey back a few years ago. Governor Corzine, last bill he signed was that one. And then Christie came around, he diddled and doddled and didn't want to do it, wanted to have Rutgers University grow the weed. They didn't want to grow the weed. What? Yeah, it was weird.

And then finally, he went on vacation, like by 18 months his term. He came back and he goes, I want to do this now. And I kept wondering whether he had a puff on vacation, like, about 18 months this term. He came back and he goes, I want to do this now. And I kept wondering whether he had a puff on vacation. I mean, who knew? Now, mind you, New Jersey's still hobbling along, you know, and Christie. The funny thing also is when it comes to ending the drug war more broadly, he's highly unpredictable. You know, we took on the bail bond industry, the private bail bond industry, trying to keep people locked up for as long as possible in local jails.

And Christie ended up coming on our side. The bail bond industry was working to make sure that people stayed in jail? I got to tell you, if you look at all the corrupt actors in the prison industrial complex, you know, you get the prison guards union, you get the private prison corporations, the private bail bond industry, I mean, if ever there was a sordid gang, that had to be it. And so we led that effort. We got Christy to come along with us, push them back. You know, so Christy's done some decent

stuff. He'll talk about addiction as a health issue. There was an issue, you know, people dying of overdoses, and we wanted to deal with that. And he was initially vetoing it. Then we got Bon Jovi involved. He wanted to get a photo op with Bon Jovi, so whose daughter had OD'd and fortunately lived. So you know, he came along then.

So he's been a mixed bag. But for some reason on this marijuana thing, he's just going over the top anti-legalization. I don't really get it. I really honestly think he's trying to make sure that he's never president. I really do. I think he understands the tide. And I think he's terrified. I think he has a lot of skeletons in his closet.

He's involved in New Jersey politics. New Jersey politics is so much more corrupt than New York politics, which is the most corrupt part of the country. Yeah, although, you know, we're breaking some records in New York. You think just last six months, both the head of the Assembly and the head of the Senate have both been indicted? You know, so, you know, it's neck and neck between us and Jersey, you know. I mean, New Jersey's got that strong tradition and history. Remember, you know, Christie made his name by being the federal prosecutor going after these guys. Then he gets himself involved in this Bridgegate scandal, you know,

with the guy on one side of the bridge shut down traffic for two days because, you know, somebody had done something they didn't like. So I think Christie had his moment back in 2012, 2011, when he was hot and riding high in the polls and his whole bullying act was going over well. I think he's down and done with already. He just wants to be out of town. Well, you can only shine like that as a bully for so long. Because if you're that guy that's yelling and screaming at everybody else and sticking your fat gut out there, eventually people start going, hey, man, what about you? I mean, you know the sad thing?

That's the way Giuliani was. And the only thing that saved his ass was 9-11. Yeah, you're right. 9-11 comes along. All of a sudden, he goes from being like 20% of the polls to 90%, and he's the heroic mayor. But quite frankly, people were burnt out on his act, and it was only, and God forbid, when a crisis like that gives Christie a second run. Well, Giuliani was like the antidote for Mayor Dinkins.

Yeah, that's right. Dinkins was like, that's right. Dinkins was like this really calm, laid-back guy, and really racist people would call him the janitor. Folks who weren't around back in the 90s in New York don't know that, first of all, Times Square was a completely different animal. You go to Times Square now, it's this beautiful tourist trap. It's all neon lights and shining stars.

I kind of miss the old Times Square. It was seedy. It was seedy. It's now got overtopped the other way, you know, where it's like Disneyland on 42nd Street. Who would have ever imagined that, though? If you could ever go back to New York City in the 1980s and then see what Times Square was like and then come back again. You know what it is? I mean, because I live in New York City, and so I live in the center of the universe, and what you realize is that there's only so long the center of the universe can go on without, you know, people reinvesting in it.

The island of Manhattan has got to be the most amazing island in the world. And, I mean, it's just glowing these days. What do you like about it? Well, first of all, I mean, I like being in this, you know, some people say it's a nice place to visit. I want to live someplace else for me. I want to live in New York.

I want to ride that energy. And then as long as you can get out often, I mean, the key is being able to get out of town. And I'm out of town about half the time. So I get to go out, see the stars, see the ocean, you know, take hikes and then go back and ride that energy. I love the fact that it's a pedestrian city. I don't own a car, right? I can walk to work. I can take the subway, you know, and then I want beauty. This past weekend for the first time, you know, Californians and others might not appreciate this, but you're

all over the place. I drove my bike from the Upper West Side of Manhattan down to Brighton Beach, about a 20 mile bike ride over the Brooklyn Bridge through Brooklyn along the New York Harbor. It was gorgeous. And the next day I took my bike along the New York Harbor. It was gorgeous. And the next day I took my bike up the Hudson River, up to Dykeman Street. So there's great beauty there. Everything's there. I could live my entire life and not go more than five blocks from my apartment and everything's available. So the diversity of people living there, everybody comes through there. And New York's just the center. It's hopping. To you. It's perfect for you.

It's perfect. My friend Jeff, my manager actually, he's a great friend of mine, has been there forever, and he couldn't imagine living anywhere else. But he also has a house on an island that he visits occasionally, and he'll stay there for a week.

Yeah. And just sort of like... Oh, I gotta tell you. There's this place called Fire Island, which is about an hour outside of New York City. That's where he lives. Yeah. And so there's the famous, you know, the Pines is the famous where all the gay community is.

And then there's all the other little towns, you know, and I've been out there twice this summer. It reminds me almost of Venice. It's an island with no cars. And you take a one, my office is half a block from Penn Station. Jump on the train, one hour, then a half hour ferry and also on this gorgeous little island that's got no cars on it and you just relax and the no cars things is what keeps people away there's a lot of deer on that island there are there yeah there used to be more you know now they're putting all this birth control stuff in the water for the deers isn't that

hilarious yeah you know what they're doing in the water you know or not you should say the water because that would be get everybody but yeah they had to do. Birth control in the water for deer. I should say the water because that would get everybody. But, yeah, they had to deal with that problem. What are they doing? In food or something? Something like that. Costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, by the way. Is that right?

Yeah, they're trying to do the same thing to the Hamptons because the Hamptons has a real deer issue. And there was two options. One, bring in hunters, and they were going to hunt at night, snipers. You're reminding me. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal, I don't know, years, years ago, maybe decades ago. The Institute for Advanced Study is like, it's this gorgeous place next door to Princeton University. And it's where Albert Einstein was, some of the greatest philosophers and scientists. It's where they go when they're in their older years and do their thinking, bucolic setting. And they were over one

with deer. So the question was what to do? Well, you couldn't shoot them in, bucolic setting. And they were overwhelmed with deer. So the question was what to do. Well, you couldn't shoot them in this bucolic place, right? So what they did was they hired archers, professional archers, to kill them with bows and arrows. And there was this uproar, you know, like this thunk, thunk. You know, all of a sudden, you know, they're with the philosophers in the middle here and thunk, thunk, some deer bites the dust. But yeah, you know, one way or another, you got to deal with that stuff. Well, it's food, too.

These same people are eating cheeseburgers. They're eating turkey sandwiches. They're eating dead animals that are killed in a way more horrific way and live in a way more horrific condition. I know. I've always thought I have an obligation as an occasional mediator to actually see the process by which the food I eat is produced. I have to admit, I've never made good on that commitment to myself. I just started doing it about three years produced. I have to admit I've never made good on that commitment to myself. I just started doing it about three years ago. I started hunting three years ago, and I'm addicted to it now. I love it. I get almost all my meat from hunting.

I had bear last night. I served bear to my 5-year-old and my 7-year-old. Wow. See, now me, I grew up Jewish and kosher. I'm still kosher. It's the one relic of my traditional upbringing. And so traditionally Jews don't hunt, you know. Although it's weird, you meet Jews from the South, you know, Jews who hunt.

It's kind of a contradiction in terms. Are there Jews in the South that hunt? Oh my God, yeah. You know, it's part of the culture, part of the tradition. You know, most of those Jews don't keep kosher, so they don't care. So there's got to be some. And then you got Texan Jews. They're a special breed.

They got to do it. Just Texan Jews? They probably hide. Probably like Jews in Lebanon we were talking about yesterday. When you say that you're kosher, what exactly does that mean? Like you have to have a rabbi kill your beef and he has to like say some voodoo and then cut its throat? More or less. It's, you know, I mean, basically it's this, you know, some of it's ground in the Bible, you know, in some clause it says, do not eat the meat of a calf in its mother's milk, so you don't eat meat together with dairy.

And then they say, with meat, the animal's got to have a split hoof and chew its cud. So it has to be a cow as opposed to a pig. Actually, venison would be okay. Cow, deer, you know, sheep. Then it needs to be slaughtered in a special way, which for millennia was the

most humane way of killing. It has to be absolutely perfectly sharp. In the last couple of decades, there's now a dispute because in Europe, they're beginning to ban the kosher way of killing because it's no longer the most humane way, according to the science. Well, it takes more time. Have you ever seen it? I haven't.

It's rough. It's rough. I've seen it. I went to a butcher, not to a butcher, rather to a slaughterhouse once. A kosher one? Well, they do kosher as well. Yeah. It was a slaughterhouse for Fear Factor. We were doing a Fear Factor stunt there.

And the stunt was these people had to dunk their head in these giant buckets of blood. So we had to have this cow's blood that was chilled to slightly over 32 degrees. And we could only keep it for a short amount of time or it could possibly contain pathogens. So it was really cold water or really cold blood rather. So they gave me like a little tour of the place and explained to me how they do it. And they have this area where the cow goes in,

they lock the cow in place and a piston goes through the cow's head and kills them. But they're like, you know, the guy was pretty adamant about it. He's like, we have a rabbi that comes, and they do the kosher slaughters. And he goes, and it's way worse. Yeah. It's way worse.

They hold the cow in place with the thing, and then they slice its neck, and it bucks and kicks and falls to the ground. And for millennia, it was the more humane way, because in the old days, you'd just knock it over the head and all this stuff. And the kosher way was if the blade was not razor sharp, if it had the tiniest nick in it. And you discovered that afterward the animal was not kosher. So there was a way of doing it that was supposedly better. But it's the one – I grew up – my dad was a rabbi.

I grew up traditional and all that Sabbath observant. And this is the one thing I'm still keeping. But why? Why do you keep it? It's partially my own sort of commitment, my Jewish connection, a sort of daily reminder of that. It's partially a family thing, like a family, you know, we grew up this way. And it's partly superstitious.

Right. That this is part of my bargain with the cosmos, with my bargain with God, you know, that, okay, I'm going to do this little sacrifice in my life. And it's, you know, I've led a blessed life. And, hey, man, maybe this is part of it. Why risk it by stopping it? Have you ever had bacon? I've had some of these things by accident.

Like I've had ham by accident, probably had shrimp by accident. I've never had it intentionally. I don't think I've had bacon. Although when I eat in the diner, they got the bacon grease on the eggs I get. You know, I love the smell of bacon. I'll say that. You love the smell, but you've never eaten it? No, because it's just this thing I stuck with know what about bear bacon. Could you eat bear?

No, no, it's split huff chew its good. That's it. They don't they don't have a split hook. I have pause That's something they need to split. Oh, yeah That's the thing so and the only exception is you're starving to death and you can eat anything Chickens fine chicken that doesn't have a split. No, because that goes into the separate category of poultry. Oh. Right? So you can't shoot birds, but you can eat that. You can't shoot them?

Well, not. I don't think so. I think it's also got to be slaughtered a certain way. So there's kosher chickens as well. Kosher chicken, kosher duck. And living in New York, you've got a lot of choices. Right. When you travel around, mind you, the kosher industry, food industry, is growing faster

than the organic food industry proportionally. Really? I've got to tell you, I mean, doing this thing here with you in California, you go to Manhattan Beach now, you go to whatever, you've got the Trader Joe's, big kosher sections. And it's not just Jews. It's all sorts of other people who still see it as, and in fact, to some extent, it's more reliable, good quality. The highest end is not going to be kosher. But in terms of reliable, good stuff, you know, people say kosher is a pretty good bet. That's interesting. More than organic. I would never have imagined that. It's not bigger than organic, but it's growing

proportionally faster. Wow. And that's partially because you have Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing part of American Judaism, right? Really? Yeah, liberal Jews like me have one kid. I got one kid, two kids, right? Orthodox Jews are having, you know, five or 10 kids. So they're growing incredibly fast, right? So they're a market and you have Jewish, Orthodox Jewish communities popping up all around the country, Manhattan Beach out here in California. LA's got a big Orthodox community, you know, and then there are people, African-American people see it as basically, you know, they hear this kosher is better. And then remember, the Muslim halal is very similar to similar rules.

No pig, the slaughtering is, I think, somewhat similar. So a lot of people, a lot of Muslims buy kosher food because for them oftentimes... How ironic. I know, isn't that something? The Jews won't buy halal in place of kosher, but I think some Muslims will buy kosher because it meets the halal conditions. Headline reads, Muslims more tolerant than Jews. There you go. There you go. It happens.

Yeah, there's that area around Cantor's Deli in LA. Have you ever been to Cantor's? I don't think so. Oh, you got to go. It's the best deli in all of LA by far. It's so good. The pastrami's off the charts. The best pastrami in LA.

It's incredible. One of the problems, though, is some of these delis, they used to be kosher. Now they're just kosher style. It's like they got the pastrami and stuff like that, but it turns out, because it's expensive to pay the rabbi to bless it and slaughtering, so I have to make sure it's actually strictly kosher. Wow, you really do get into that, huh? So you would ask? It's been my thing. I've got to tell you, I've had more people, more friends than others rag on me for this than anything. People say, so would you ever stop?

And I say, the only way I'd ever stop, I think, is if they made it a law that I had to keep kosher. If they made it a law you had to keep kosher, I'd break kosher the very next day. Well, who would make it a law? Well, that's what I'm saying. It's not going to happen in America. But I look at what's going on in Israel, where the religious parties are becoming more and more powerful and dominant. And you go to Jerusalem, and they're saying, here's the rules on the Sabbath, here's the rules on this, here's the rules on that.

One can envision a generation from now that in Israel, you might have, you know, the religious folks driving everything and make a law like that. If they did that, and I'm still alive, I'll stop. So if they did that in Israel, you would stop in America? Probably. Just out of protest? Just out of protest. Just because you want bacon, that's what's up.

No, you know what happens? I'll tell you. The hardest thing when you keep kosher, I've never had lobster. I've never really had shrimp. I've never really had pork. You've never had lobster. That's right. The hardest stuff is when there's a beautiful steak or a beautiful piece of duck or a lamb

out there, and it's basically no different than the kosher stuff, but I can't eat it because they didn't pay the rabbi to bless it, and they slaughtered it differently. That's the one that hurts, right? People, I go out to people and they say, oh, do you mind if I order some pork or a lobster? I say, please, whatever you do, don't order a beautiful lamb chop or steak or something like that Something that you can actually eat That's going to torture me I'm eating my damn piece of fish for the eighth time that week

And, you know, it's a beautiful steak that I can't eat So is fish always kosher? The rule is if it comes from the sea, it's got to have fins and scales. Jesus Christ. So octopus is off the charts, too. You name it. All that stuff's off. Got to have fins and scales.

Oh, my God. All the shellfish is off and scallops and, for that matter, things like shark and skate. Catfish is the one I cheat with a little bit. And there's a debate about swordfish. I go with. I'm part of the school that says swordfish is kosher. My dad was a rabbi. He came down

that side. I'm going with my dad. Is your dad still alive? No, I died one time. I would have fucking had a lobster the moment that dude was in the dirt. Oh, yeah. Hey, he didn't even grow up keeping kosher. He loved rabbit, you know? He loved ham. Oh, God. When he became a rabbi, he had no choice. It just seems so odd to me that a rational man like you, who's obviously intelligent and educated, would follow that.

You know what's good about this? It gives me a sense of empathy for other people with irrational attachments. Ah. Yeah. Like irrational attachments to drugs. Exactly. Exactly. Irrational attachments to anything.

My view is irrational attachments are fine, maybe even good, so long as they don't hurt anybody else. My keeping kosher doesn't really hurt anybody else, right? And there's all sorts of other attachments to religious things, to types of gods, to habits, to name it. If it's not hurting anybody else, I can kind of, you know, I got that little empathic sense for what it means to be irrationally committed to something. All right, man. Look at you. You're looking at irrational thinking in a rational way. Yeah. I like it. You got to do that, you know? To be just totally rational,

that'd be kind of boring, too. So let's get back to drug legalization, because we've got right now, we've got two states that are across the board 100%. We've got Washington State and we've got Colorado. What's on the ballot right now? Well, remember, also, Alaska and Oregon joined the group last November. So we have four states that are legally there. And Oregon's going to open up sales, I think, in a few months. And Alaska should open up sales. I can't remember if it's the end of this year, beginning of next. So we got four states that have legalized, each one of them doing it with 55% of the vote,

typically getting more votes than the guys who are running for governor or attorney general in those states got those years. Wow, that's amazing. So it's big. D.C. did everything except legalize. They basically said you can grow your own, you can transfer it, but they haven't set up formal sales yet because people worry that Congress will sort of put a hammer on them, right? So you can't go to a store? No, no stores in D.C. There's a little movement on

Capitol Hill right now that might allow some room there. But the guy, you know, the city council, the mayor in D.C. who are on board with legalization, but they're just saying, do we want to provoke Congress? Because a lot of those guys would just come down hard. You know, they're used to treating D.C. like the plantation, right? It's one of the great absurdities in American politics that you got a population of what, six, 600,000, 700,000 people? I think it's as big as a few of the smaller states, but they've got no representation on Capitol Hill. They've got a member of the House who can't vote.

They've got no members of the Senate. They can vote for president, right? And then they've got Congress basically, you know, the ability to veto any law they pass. And they have an extremely fucked-up situation as far as the haves and have-nots in their own town. They really do. Although there's a shift in the...

I mean, you know, D.C. was traditionally like two-thirds African-American. Now, as it's become more gentrified, it's still about 50% African-American. Well, the issue is not just the African-Americans, it's the poverty. The poverty. There's massive poverty and crime in certain sections of D.C. and the fact that that's the nation's capital, they can't even clean up their own backyard. They've completely ignored it.

It was really highlighted when Marion Barry was president. Yeah, and I should say it's gotten better since those days in the sense that there's been more to address those issues. There's been some gentrification. Poverty's not as bad. They've still got bad crime rates. It's not as bad as Baltimore's been more to address those issues. There's been some gentrification. Poverty's not as bad. They still got bad crime rates. It's not as bad as Baltimore's been.

Right. A bunch of other cities. Well, Baltimore's one of the worst places in the country. Baltimore's been terrible. Detroit, New Orleans. Although you got a few places out here in California have a hard time. Oh, for sure. D.C.'s weird in that you can go from really nice to really bad in a couple blocks.

Yeah. I was shocked when I was driving through D.C. because I was like, this is crazy. You've seen these really cute white couples with their little stroller, and they're in these really nice brownstones, and they have a Volvo parked in front of the house, and right next to them is a BMW. And then you go two blocks down, and you see people drinking on the street, and there's kids with no shoes on, and it's garbage pil piled up everywhere I was like this is really not that could be partially about gentrification you know properties less

expensive so first typically gays will move in right because they don't have kids to worry about such and then after that you get some young couples and others moving in and so you begin to get that you saw the same thing in parts of New York City right with Upper East Side or Lower East Side. Yeah. You know, it's when things begin to change that way that you get that kind of stuff. Well, isn't that the big complaint about New York City is that so many rich financial people have moved in that the entire city is kind of used to be this artist community. And now that's kind of Brooklyn now. Well, the funny thing is now they're saying Brooklyn's becoming more like Manhattan and Queens is becoming the new Brooklyn. Really?

And I got to say, living in the Upper West Side where it's, I mean, I'm lucky I'm in a rent-stabilized apartment there. And I live in a beautiful tree-lined street in a little apartment. But then you see the banks moving in and taking over the street corners, right? And you see more chain stores coming in. And so Manhattan has become this beautiful place, but less and less affordable. Now Brooklyn,, people like most of the people work for me in New York, we're living in Brooklyn, but now they got to move out to the further, further away from Manhattan part of Brooklyn. And now Queens and the Bronx and upper Manhattan are becoming the places, you know? I mean, look, the city's hopping. It's great. It's amazing. The downside of our economic growth has

been that, you know, The same thing with Wall Street. Wall Street is the gap between rich and poor in New York City is horrific and huge. On the other hand, Wall Street is power-vining massive amounts of tax revenue, and New York City taxes itself at a very high level. So we actually have better services in New York City than most parts of the world. My friend Shane was living in Brooklyn, and me and my family came to visit and we hung out with him one night and we had this apartment that overlooks the Manhattan skyline. And we were looking at it and I was like, this might be the best looking view on the planet.

Like there's something about that. There's like, I think there's two types of amazing views. There's the amazing views of the mountains and, you know, and nature, which is pretty stunning. But there's something about the Manhattan skyline that is so insane that someone built that. It's gorgeous because it's all lit up and the shapes are cool and it has the history behind it. And you're looking at all this activity and bustling people back and forth. history behind it and you're looking at all this activity and bustling people back and forth. And then there's also the magnitude of the amount of effort that was put into creating something like that. It's staring you in the face too. Occasionally I'll be on a plane that's coming

from the North, say from Albany or Montreal or wherever it's coming from. And it lands up going down the Hudson River, right? And you know, Manhattan's basically a long Island. It's like, I don't know, 15, 20 miles long and about a mile wide or so. And you look down at that thing, and Manhattan and New York Harbor, and there's the Statue of Liberty. And there you can see Staten Island and Brooklyn and Jersey around it. And then you see the Empire State Building, and then you see the Freedom Tower, and you see Central Park in the middle of it, one of the largest inner city parks in the world. It brings tears to my eyes still. It's just incredible.

Yeah, it's a pretty awesome spot, but you can't get weed there. Well, what do you mean you can't get weed? It's hard. You can get a weed anywhere. You've got to hide. You've got to talk to some dude. David Lee Roth got arrested trying to get weed there. You know, you've got to be either really unlucky or dumb to get busted.

What kind of an asshole cop arrested David Lee Roth, by the way? I don't know. David fucking Lee Roth. Give him a pass. How dare you, sir? But I got to tell you, I think our delivery services are very well developed in New York City.

Right, but they're always under the wire. That was always the problem that I had in L.A. before it was legal. I used to deal with this dude named Jake the Snake. That was his fucking nickname. I'm not kidding, and he wasn't a wrestler. Jake the Snake was so annoying. He was so annoying, and he would sell...

I would get it from my friend Eddie, and Eddie would get it from Jake the Snake was so annoying. He was so annoying, and he would sell. I would get it from my friend Eddie, and Eddie would get it from Jake the Snake. And we would have to deal with this guy. So it was like we'd have these conversations with this guy every now and then. And I always felt like he wasn't a bad guy. It wasn't he was a bad guy, but it was annoying that you had to deal with this dude who was willing to do something illegal. Because there were some criminal aspects to it. I know, I know. So it was always going to be like and i gotta say i'm lucky because one of the perks of my job is i can just rely on

the kindness of strangers i mean wherever i go people are going to eat and anyone try a little this anything i think it's hard to take it home with me right but even in new york people are kind of so i haven't had to buy weed in a very long time, I'm happy to say. Good for you. Yeah, yeah. And now you saw that, hey, my job has got some very nice elements to it. And this is one of the informal positive benefits to it. But New York is now, they finally, the state just approved 20 outlets for medical marijuana. So most of those are going to be in the city. It's still going to be a very strict system. We led that effort in New York last year to legalize medical marijuana. Unfortunately, Governor Cuomo, you know,

acted in total bad faith and made a system that's far, far too tight. No logical reason for it. But that said, the state just approved five companies to have five growth sites with 20 outlets. So they're locking down the profit aspect of it. They are. I mean, my God, it's going to be a boondoggle for these five. That's so fucked up. Why do that? That doesn't make any sense. Is that the case for tomatoes? Is that the case for any other piece of produce?

Anything grown from the earth? What about lettuce? Can you buy lettuce anywhere? Can you imagine if there was a company in New York that locked down the lettuce market? And the only way you can get a salad from this one fucking company? Yeah. No, I agree with you totally. It's the same thing. company yeah no I agree you totally it's the same thing I don't know if you heard what's going on in Ohio right and Ohio is gonna have it get

to vote to legalize marijuana this year 2015 the only initiative on the ballot this year as opposed to next year Jamie's from Ohio it's in the papers today because the initiative just qualified yesterday right and what they found that we basically what happened there was 10, I think it was roughly 10 business interests got together, right, to put an initiative on the ballot. They each ponied up like over $2 million a piece, right? We asked for our help in drafting it, and we said we'd help them draft it to get some good stuff in there. But the one thing they did that nobody likes is they put into the initiative that only the 10 investors, or technically the properties they own, will be allowed to produce marijuana wholesale

in Ohio in perpetuity, right? It's like you think, wait a second, this is an agricultural product. We're going to have a constitutionally mandated oligopoly where only 10 properties can grow for the state forever and ever. And so I'm profoundly torn because that oligopoly model in the Constitution sucks. Yeah, Jay, you were talking about this yesterday. Yeah, it's bullshit. It's bullshit.

And you should pass on it and you should get weed illegally. That's what I say. Fuck those people. Because what they're trying to do is they're trying to take something that's good and profit off of it in a way that only they can profit off of it. And lock everybody out. And they think they're being sneaky. They can go fuck themselves. Yeah, well, I'm torn because on the other hand, if this thing wins this year,

Ohio is a major swing state in American politics. 2016, all the candidates are going to be vying in Ohio. Meanwhile, the thing will only be in theory because it will not have been implemented and there's all sorts of people trying to block the oligopoly provision. because it will not have been implemented, and there's all sorts of people trying to block the oligopoly provision. So what an Ohio win, this oligopoly provision, if it all works out well, this thing wins, opens up the national discussion, forces the candidates to talk about this issue, puts it in Ohio in a major way.

Meanwhile, everybody's so revolted by the oligopoly model, you already have the state legislature trying to knock it out with a competitive initiative. The thing's going to land up in the courts anyway. I don't see any of the other states adopting this model. I mean, none of the other initiatives on the ballot in 2016 have this oligopoly provision in it. I think the sense of revulsion, it's kind of doing that sort of thing. So my sense is, if it all works out well, initiative wins, the oligopoly thing never gets implemented. That's why you're here, Ethan. We need to hear this. This is beautiful. We need to hear this kind of stuff. Now, do you face any pressure at all to not talk about the fact that you smoke weed yourself, being the fact that you're a part of the Drug Policy Alliance and you have to put ties on and meet with some serious folks?

You know, it's been an evolution, Joe, because I would say when I really got going in this in the late 80s, I was very careful about that because that was the height of the drug war, right? And not only that, my dissertation research, I wrote my PhD at Harvard, and it was on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement. So just three years earlier, I had had a security clearance.

I'd worked in the State Department's Narcotics Bureau. I'd wrote a classified report on drug trafficking and money laundering. I traveled all around South America and Europe interviewing DEA guys and foreign drug enforcement guys. I'd written a dissertation and the book on international drug control. It's called Cops Across Borders. So I just knew these guys, and they had opened their doors to me. And now three years later, I'm out there saying we've got to talk about legalization. And at that point, when the drug war was like, it was like McCarthyism on

steroids, right? It was just, so I was very discreet. I never would deny that I had smoked marijuana, but I would never talk about being a current consumer. And then as things began to ease up into the late 90s, early 2000s, I began to be a little looser with it, but I still would not say go to the cannabis cups would invite me. And I maybe showed up at the hemp fest in Seattle a couple of times, but I'd still be careful. Now the times are changing, right? And it's a lot like the evolution with gay people in America, right? At the points at which different people feel comfortable coming out and all this sort of stuff. And so now I'm quite comfortable saying, yeah, you know, I smoke weed. I've been

an occasional consumer since I was 18. It's been a net positive in my life, you know, I smoke weed. I've been an occasional consumer since I was 18. It's been a net positive in my life, you know. And I actually, even a few years ago on psychedelics, you know, we do this big biennial conference. And a few years ago, I was in L.A., and I said, this is the content I did. I said, you know, I'm Jewish, right? And so once a year, I fast on Yom Kippur. 25 hours, no food, no water. I think it's good for the soul to, you know, do a Jewish, right? And so once a year, I fast on Yom Kippur. 25 hours, no food, no water. I think it's good for the soul to, you know, do a fast once a year.

And I say that's the way I view doing psychedelics as well. You know, that people should keep doing psychedelics at least once a year, well into their elderly years, because it's a good way to stir up the emotional sediment, the intellectual sediment, and stay honest as you grow older. And so I think, you know, I felt coming out about that as well. I think the times, you know, we're in a day and an age in America right now where we can talk about this and need to talk about it more openly. And what is your psychedelic of choice that you like to do annually?

Well, mushrooms is sort of the standard. I mean, that's one, you know, just over crucification. You know, I just did a sort of mega dose and it was really clarifying. How many grams is a mega dose? You know, for me, I'm doing a quarter ounce, you know, like six, seven grams of dried mushrooms. Jesus. You're a fucking hero. You don't want to be around me. Sasha Shulgin used to call me a hard head, you know.

It's like, I wish she meant, you know, I need a big dose. I mean, ayahuasca I've done a few times, both once in a Santa Dime ceremony and once in just a more laid-back way. And that was really amazing. You know, LSD, you know, that one, I mean, I've enjoyed it. I've never done a mega dose with that. You know, I think it's—but it's not resonated with me the way mushrooms have. You ever do DMT? No.

Well, sort of. You've done ayahuasca. You've had a milder version of it. I mean, there was one time somebody had made up a guy who was a good scientist, had made up a thing that was a combination of DMT and ketamine. Fuck that. Fuck that? No, no. He was an interesting guy, and he did it. I'm sure he was if he's doing that. You know, that was... Fuck that? No, no, no. He was actually... He was an interesting guy, and he did it, and he found...

I'm sure he was if he's doing that. Well, I'll tell you something. He had found that he was dealing with significant depression, and he found that this combo actually lifted his baseline depression, and now there's all this research about ketamine being fairly effective as an antidepressant. Well, we've actually had a friend on, Neil Brennan, who talked about it. He's a good friend of mine who's a stand-up comedian. He was the co-creator of The Chappelle Show.

Very funny guy. But he's had, like, some troubles in his life and went through legal in Los Angeles. Went through legal ketamine treatments for depression. And he goes, he wasn't exactly sure what it was going to be like, so he sits down. They do it intravenously, right? So he sits down in this doctor's office and they whack him out. And he goes, dude, I'm on a 45-minute journey through the universe. He goes, this is like the strongest fucking trip I've ever been on.

And I can't believe I'm doing this in a doctor's office. So I got to ask you, I was reading your bio before. And I saw that you have an isolation tank that you use it. Have you ever read John Lilly's book, Confessions of an Itinerant Scientist? I've read that. I read The Deep Self. I've read a couple of his books. Well, I remember reading that book, Confessions of an Itinerant Scientist. And for your listeners who don't know, right, John Lilly was the great pioneer of statetian communications, communications with whales and dolphins and all that. And also the person who may have invented the isolation tank.

And he goes through this period in his life where he starts injecting Ketamine every hour on the hour in his isolation tank like 12 to 18 hours a day almost kills himself In the end lives to be like in his mid 80s And that's the way in which he ventures into trying to figure out what the world is all about my friend Todd McCormick Did deep well has his tank? world is all about. My friend Todd McCormick did, well, has his tank. He owns his tank, and he did ketamine

in that tank with Lily. Is that right? Todd did that? Yeah. Todd did ketamine. Like, he was about to do the tank, and Lily asked him, do you want ketamine or no? And he's like, when John Lily asks you if you want to do ketamine before you get into his tank, you say

yes. So he whacks him with the ketamine. He goes under and apparently he was like screaming or something while he's in there because he's out of his fucking mind. First of all, the tank by itself is a psychedelic experience. Shut the door. I mean, you're more aware and you can shut it off at any time. It's more of a conscious decision to enter into the psychedelic state. And you can shut it off at any time.

It's more of a conscious decision to enter into the psychedelic state. But when you add that to the ketamine, apparently it's just this unbelievable journey through the mind. And Todd was just not prepared for it. So Lily, who had another tank next to his other tank, gets in the second tank, whacks himself out, and visits him. whacks himself out and visits him. Goes and visits him in the fucking ketamine dimension while they're both in side-by-side parallel isolation tanks. That's something to tell your grandchildren about, in my opinion. Forget about who won the World Series. So you've done psychedelics in your isolation tank?

I've only done mushrooms and edible weed in the isolation tank. The edible weed is my favorite. The high doses of edible weed is one of the most underrated psychedelics today. There's a lot of people that don't understand that if you get a really high dose, and it doesn't even have to be a big thing. That's the thing. What they're doing today with these concentrates and hash oils, they have these fucking gummy bears, man.

Gummy bears that are 250. Some of them, what is the Chiba Chews? 500 milligrams? They have 500 milligram THC Chiba Chews. If you eat one of those and get into the isolation tank, you will go on a journey that I liken to any DMT trip, any mushroom trip. Like the Vedic texts, a lot of the Hindu scriptures, they were all written by people who were eating hash uh-huh like a lot of the really crazy visuals in the psychic garuda and all that stuff you see that shit when you eat it it's really jokes i tell you for me i mostly

associate the high dose edible with just being knocked on my butt and just like you know didn't go high enough yeah well that could be it because there have been some good experiences and not quite i know what you're talking about but I haven't gone to that level with it. I've only gone a couple of times by accident. You know, the real accidental ones in places where I didn't know that I was going to do it. I've had some like terrible journeys on planes where like right before, like, I'm like, I don't like flying. It's annoying. I got to do it too often. So I'll take something like right when I pull up to the airport. I don't want to have anything on me when I'm going through security.

So I'll eat like a cookie or something right before I get. And then like as, you know, the bags are going through. And then I go to Starbucks, get a cup of coffee. And then I sit down at the gate and I'm like, oh, fuck. I might have taken too much. And then, you know, give the ticket, get on the plane. And then once I sit down, I'm like, okay, at least I know I'm going to be here for the next six hours. And then the universe dissolves and you get shot through some wormhole and to the center

of your mind and you reexamine your childhood and like, fuck. I don't know, man. I got to tell you, I've done that edibles on planes a few times. One time to somebody, like you said, don't want to carry on a plane, have a little nibble before Chicago to LaGuardia. I land and, oh, my God, please, somebody get me home here, you know? On the other hand, another time I'm flying to Europe, I'm thinking, God, this stuff knocks me out all the time. Why don't I just do a little edible instead of a sleeping pill?

Because I don't like some of the sleeping pill effects. It didn't work. It was kind of fidgety and it was closed. And, you know, so I've stayed away from the edibles on the planes. They're very Tricky because you you really have to be in the right state of mind and you really you have to treat them with respect I think edibles have always been associated with silliness And I think that's the trick that they've played on us like have a little pot brownie man We'll be we'll get crazy. I know it's not silly

It's serious business and the fact I mean it It's not silly. It's serious business. And the fact, I mean, it's funny because now with all the concerns about edibles, you know, somebody asked me the other day, what's the thing that most surprised me about the evolution of this whole marijuana reform thing in the last five, ten years? And it's been the emergence of the edibles. If you had asked me five, ten years ago, I would not have anticipated that edibles and drinks and oils would play such a major role in legal marijuana.

Oh, yeah. Well, the vapor pens, too? Vape pens, but at least those are more... The vape pens, I might have seen because of the anti-smoking stuff coming in

and the e-cigarettes coming along. But the edible stuff and the gummy bears and the chocolates and all this sort of stuff... Breath strips? Breath strips. Have you had one of those?

No. Oh, good. Don't ever eat a full one. Is that right? Yeah, you got to break them up, man. You got to break them up. They're too strong. Me and Tommy Segura, who's a good friend of mine, stand-up comedian, we tore one in half

and ate it on a plane. We were doing some gigs in Florida. Popped it on the way to, it was a nighttime flight, a red eye. And we landed and we both turned and looked at each other and we were like, how terrifying was that? Fucking terrifying. What was in that? I don't know.

Well, I got to tell you, dealing from a policy perspective, I mean, we're doing everything we can to have some responsible regulation in this area. You need better testing. You need to know that if you're buying a cookie, the stuff's going to be evenly distributed. Buying a chocolate bar, it'll be distributed. People got to figure out their dose, you know? I found for me, like right now, I know about seven milligrams. It's just kind of a nice, you know.

Seven? Seven. Relatively low dose. That's really hard to find. Usually the low is 20. I found for me, like right now, I know about 7 milligrams is just kind of a nice... 7? 7. Relatively low dose. That's really hard to find. Usually the low is 20. No. Well, what I'll do is I'll get a candy bar that's broken up into bits of 10, and I'll split it a little more than half or something like that.

So that's like a calm, mellow, easy kind. It's calm, nice to kick back, relax, maybe go for a swim, go for a massage, maybe go to a movie. I mean, it's that level right and the higher level can be good too but it's got the risk of knocking me on my ass the higher level to me is like this it's a potential like like a treasure hunt maybe a treasure hunt for ideas or an exploration of maybe there's something i missed you you know, maybe like, cause I'm always trying to like dig down into my psyche and find out what I don't like about me or what I need to improve or

what I need to work on more or what, what, what aspect of my career, my life I need to be putting more attention to. And usually the pot sort of lets me know about that. And the pot in the tank, that's my big exploratory journey. Eat eat a cookie, get in the tank, and then get out and go, okay, I got to go to work. That's interesting. For me, pot sometimes does that, but it's unpredictable when it's going to work that way. And then I grabbed the opportunity. I may be sitting at a concert and had an edible or smoke, and all of a sudden, my brain's flying and I'm getting stuff down, listening to music. But for me, the thing about the mushrooms, which I don't like to do,

when you get older, it takes more of a toll. You don't recoup. You know, like I do mushrooms, and the next day it's like, oh, I'm burned out. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, that wasn't true when I was in my 20s or 30s, but I'm in my 50s now, you know. Do you ever try 5-HTP when you come back from it? I was just talking about that this morning.

I don't think I have tried that yet. That's a big one. because for mushrooms or MDMA well for either one but much more so for MDMA than for mushrooms because that's a direct effect that's exactly what it's doing but mushrooms has a toll on it as well and a lot of people that have done the heavy mushroom trips have found success in taking l-tryptophan and 5-htp afterwards l-tryptophan actually converts to 5-HTP, and 5-HTP converts to serotonin. And you can get those over the counter, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We actually, I'll sell, I'll get you some. Do we have any new mood here? Do we have any of that stuff? We have some. We'll get you some. Yeah. Oh, this is it right here. Yeah.

Oh, no, no. This is, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that's a combination of 5-HTP and L-tryptophan. And all that stuff does is it gives your brain the building blocks to produce human neurotransmitters. That's what it does. It gives your brain the building blocks to produce that stuff to produce serotonin. Well, I have to say one of my great regrets is that MDMA, you know, I first did it, I guess, in the early 90s when I was in my early 30s.

And I loved it, I guess, in the early 90s when I was in my early 30s. And I loved it, you know, and did it both, you know, for going to occasional rave or with my wife at the time or friends. But I have to say now, it just doesn't seem to work for me as well anymore. That's the downside begins to exceed the upside. And it's a bummer. I've only done it once. And the downside was so strong. The upside was amazing. I may not have done too much. I took two tabs and The the experience was beautiful and it taught me so much about Insecurity so much about like the way I behave in the way people behave and interact with each other how much of is just based on Insecurity, you know, it was weird like this sounds gay as fuck

But this is exactly what happened me and this dude were on a couch and we were holding hands. And we were talking about how good it feels to just hold hands. And we weren't scared to, like, hold hands with another dude. It was totally non-sexual. It's so funny you say that story because I remember one time with a group of close friends. And some of these friends were, like, leading academics and drug policy, drug studies. I mean, major figures. And we'd become good friends and we would occasionally get together and do an MDMA studies, and I mean, major figures. And we'd become good

friends and we would occasionally get together and do an MDMA thing like once a year. And I just remember one of my friends who's a distinguished professor, four of us were sitting on the couch and he just lay down on top of our knees and we all just put our hands on him. And it was so loving, so wonderful. So I know what you're talking about. It's non-sexual. It's a weird thing. The MDMA, apparently they say, uh, I've never tried. I said, only did it once, but people say that it's really hard to have sex when you're on it. Right. Well, the thing is it's with, it's not the sex drug. It's a hug drug. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's the thing. And it's, it's, you know, something you can get aroused on it, but it's, you know, at some point, that's been my experience. You can get aroused and all that sort of stuff, but at some point, the energy is shifting

towards more hug energy, empathic, loving energy, you know, whereas, for example, psychedelics sometimes can go in a highly sexual direction. Yeah. Well, that was the argument that McKenna had for mushrooms being the catalyst for human evolution. Do you ever, you know about all that? Do you know McKenna's theories? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I kind of like the theory, the notion of hunter-gatherers, and the hunter-gatherers who consumed, you know, psilocybic mushrooms or whatever were the ones who were going to be better at whether it was warfare or hunting or a whole range of other things. So it's intriguing, and Terrence was a remarkable speaker. He was the best speaker. He was so fascinating and so unique. I only met him a few times, but one of the last times he called me up because I think he was supposed to speak at UCLA or USC. And at the last moment, they were going to prohibit him from speaking or whoever was loaning them the hall or something like that.

And so he just called me up and I called the local ACLU and they got on it and we solved the problem. Wow, that's great. That's beautiful. So you led to one of Terrence's speeches. I think so, yeah. And his brother, Dennis McKenna, he and I were both at the first World Ayahuasca Congress in Ibiza last October. And that was something. I mean, here you have—and it was odd that it was in Ibiza, because Ibiza's like the party island, and Ayahuasca's not a party drug. It's a serious thing. But there were about a thousand people in this conference hall in Ibiza. people in this conference hall in Ibiza. You had leading academic scientists like Dennis McKenna. You had shamans, both New Age shamans and traditional shamans from Latin America.

You had people who were, there was a guy, Polish guy, who would do an occasional ayahuasca ceremony where he would invite musicians who would then make music together under the influence of ayahuasca. And then I was invited because the organizers wanted to know how does ayahuasca connect to broader drug policy reform? So that was quite a gathering Dennis is amazing. I love that guy I've had him on a few times now and had some beautiful conversations with them It's just I'm always like I can't believe I'm sitting here talking to Dennis McKenna. He's psychedelic royalty. Yeah. Yeah No, he really is and the stuff, you know, it's funny I've never gone on one of those ayahuasca tours down and so have you ever done that

What I hate bugs apparently Dennis does too so he does them in a different part of Peru where it's a Not it's a dry climate. It's not a moist jungle climate. Yeah, he's like you don't have to go to the jungle Yeah, I'm like yeah, why go to the jung? It's fucking mosquitoes, man. You get eaten alive. But for some people, it's like part of the beauty of the journey. It's like the suffering of dealing with the bugs. Like my friend Amber got bit on the leg by a spider, and her whole fucking leg turned black. Or black and blue, rather. It was giant, huge. Yeah, some people doing these things out in the forest, and they start walking off in the middle of ceremony.

Nobody ever finds them again. Yeah, they get eaten up by jaguars. Yeah. No, I was perfectly happy to do my first ayahuasca experience in Santa Barbara, California. That's perfect. Yeah, no bugs. That's the place. Just rich people.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. The only thing that's a horror is the plastic surgery around you. That's true. Yeah. But I'll tell you, the ayahuasca thing, too, Joel, it reminds me, when you read about the emergence of LSD and mescaline in the 50s and the guys who went around dosing people, you know, Cary Grant, famous actors, politicians. Cary Grant used to dose people?

No, he didn't dose people, but he became an enthusiast. She was a famous female swimmer who then was in movies. I forget her name. But, you know, you had famous people doing it, Life magazine writing about it. And I think ayahuasca is almost a bigger version of that right now. You're having ayahuasca ceremonies happening all around the world. I mean, not just the US or North America and South America, but in Europe, Asia. I mean, it's extraordinary. And so many people describing profound and transformative experiences. And it's not totally without risk, but the benefit-risk ratio is so enormous.

Well, what is the risk, though? There's no physical risk. The risk is only psychological. And if you're a psychologically unstable person, you really shouldn't be doing anything to perturb your consciousness. If you have issues with psychosis or you're bipolar, there's a lot of people that have legit...

That's right. The other thing with powerful psychedelics is if you have a cardiovascular risk, because you're, you're, you're so stimulated, so stimulated. And then the thing is, because ayahuasca, you know, every shaman makes the batch a different way. So you're not exactly sure what's in that stuff. And then there's the thing about making sure the person's safe while they're under the influence. You know, it's like the horrible story that happened with that guy in Colorado with the edible, right, who had never done it before, and he jumps off a balcony. Or the horrible stories about people doing LSD and thinking they can fly.

You know Bill Hicks' joke on that? What's it? Yeah, Bill Hicks. What a tragedy. Someone jumped out. He goes, what an idiot. He goes, if he thought he could fly, what did he take off from the ground first? This whole bit about it, about young man on acid, it was a

bit about a positive drug story. And his thing was like, all the media ever tells you about is these negative drug stories about a guy jumped off the roof. Well, I mean, it's part of what's... As marijuana is becoming more legalized in our society and hopefully around the world, and as we move

forward on the psychedelics to begin to open them up as well, and maybe, and now you have all the new psychoactive substances and some of the synthetics, which may have some upsides to them. But the key is going to be putting out a norm out there about what it means to use it safe. I mean, for example, doing mushrooms or LSD and going to a concert with 50,000 people around or 10,000 people around, generally not a good idea. Unless they're also on LSD and you know them all. That's true.

That's true. That might work okay. Maybe. But that's the scary thing. It's like people think, oh, let's go do this as a party drug. And all of a sudden, all sorts of information overload and you're losing perspective and all this sort of stuff. And people don't know what's going on. Or you see, go on to Burning Man, right?

And I remember meeting a guy who had done some weird drug, and he had just totally flipped out. He thought an animal was trying to eat him alive, right, while he was flipping out. And fortunately, you know, Rick Doblin, the guys at MAPS, had set up these kind of, you know, safety zones. And so they were able to get this guy away from the cops, because the cops were going to shackle him, put him on a helicopter, and take him to a jail, which could have been horrible. And instead, they gave him to Rick and Rick was able to talk this guy down and, you know, do it. But we have to be aware that when people are taking these powerful mind altering substances,

which can have these wonderful things, as you and I have experienced, we got to be aware that there are people who are not as stable as they think they are. People who have deep seated shit going on and they don't know what's buried that's going to come flying out. People who don't understand that, yeah, if you're going to jump, jump from the first floor, not the fifth floor. So we've got to make sure. Don't even jump from the first floor. Jump from the ground.

Jump from the ground, exactly. But it's going to be so key. I mean, look, just to shift away from the silos for a second, one of the issues we're working on big time is trying to reduce the number of people dying from overdoses involving either heroin or pharmaceutical opiates. So the last couple of years, more people have died of an accidental overdose involving heroin or other pharmaceuticals than in a car accident. It's the number one cause of accidental death in America today. Wow.

I mean, it's absolutely crazy stuff, right? And in fact, when we say overdoses suggest you took too much, most of what are overdoses actually are drug combinations. They're typically doing this opiate, pharmaceutical opiate, oxycodone, whatever it might be, might even be prescribed to you with booze or with benzos, Valium-type drugs, right? So what we're trying to do is to put out there the notion that if you're doing opiates, don't combine it with booze. Don't combine it with tranquilizers. There's a miracle drug called naloxone, and we're trying to make that stuff as widely available. It's like an antidote for an overdose. Make it available.

We're passing 9-1-1 goods from Aaron and Laws. So if people are around and a buddy there's overdoses, they don't just flip out. They call 9-1-1 right away the way they would a heart attack. So it's true with the psychedelics and marijuana. But even with the drugs that we see as less elevated in a way, but that huge numbers of people are using, like the opiates, it's really important that we become more and more of a society that understands the notion that we need to make it safer to use these drugs. Right? We've got to keep people from getting hurt the way that people get hurt Well, we had a guy on here yesterday his two guys Chris and Mark Bell who

They were a part of a documentary called bigger stronger faster Which is about steroids and now they have a new one called prescription thugs And it's all about the the opiate pill industry and how many people die from it and how many people are addicted to it and the Numbers I wasn't prepared for the numbers when we had them on and we started exploring the numbers They were talking about this from 2010 there was eight point seven million people Abusing these pills on a daily basis in this country. Yeah, I mean that's a staggering I mean those nobody really knows the number, right? Because what it means to abuse it and whether it is abuse. But 20 years ago, you had a massive problem of the

under-treatment of pain, right? That people were so flipped out about using opioids that people who were terminally ill, children who were terrible burn victims, people going through traumatic post-operative recovery from surgery and stuff like that, were not having their pain treated. And the failure to treat pain appropriately can shorten people's lives, lead to major depression, lead to other drug taking and all that sort of stuff. So over the 90s, early 2000s, we began to solve that problem. So now opiates are used much more correctly.

But then what happened is that what we really have in America is an epidemic of chronic pain, right? Really? Lower back pain, sciatica, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel. I mean, tens of millions of Americans, maybe close to 50 or 100 million Americans, go through some chronic pain episode during the course of every year or two, whatever it might be. And it turns out that for many people going through dealing with chronic pain, opioids don't work that well, right? They just don't work.

They're appropriate for sort of severe pain, and they're appropriate for some chronic pain patients. So what happens is people start taking this stuff. They have chronic pain, and they're taking opioids, and the doctor's giving giving the opioids, and then they're building up tolerance. So they're taking higher doses, which is building the risk, right? And then maybe they're combining it with like a Valium-type drug to reduce their anxiety, or maybe they're taking alcohol because that makes them feel better. And then what happens is at some point, your heart, you know, your breathing stops, right? And so what we need to do, that overprescription of these opioids. It's not just by physicians who are criminals and are doing these things for money. It's not just black market marketeering of this stuff. It's also a lot of people just trying to help good meaning doctors trying to help people who are suffering with pain by giving them the opioids they think they want to need when it turns out that's probably not the best way to deal with it well there's an issue that people have with pain that comes from work from sitting down all day there's an issue that people have from not taking their body as important or as

taking the health of their body as significantly as they should, I think that there's a lot of people that just don't, they don't know the consequences of sitting at a desk with bad posture all the time. Like these chairs that you're sitting in, these things are special ergonomic chairs that make you kind of support your body weight up straight. They're called Kapisco chairs. There's a company called Ergo Depot. But before I got these, i sat in regular office chairs at the end of every episode out of my fucking back the middle of my back would be killing me and this eliminated them

ergonomic chairs are very important sometimes people like to sit on those balance balls that's important but what's also important is taking care of your health and fitness taking care of your body like yoga yo if more people did yoga you would have way less back pain way less joint pain way less stress but they don't have the time or if they do have the time they choose to do that time to go get drunk or they're like me and I've had more people

tell me to take up yoga than any other piece of advice in my entire life and I just can't get into it have you tried it? yeah I've tried it many times now you know I'm sitting I'm in your beautiful ergonomic chair here joe but i'm slouching so now i'm going to sit up straight let me readjust the mic here you know and then i'll feel better i'll breathe better you know it's a i got to tell you something but what do you mean by you can't get into it i just don't enjoy it you're not supposed to enjoy it by the

way it sucks i will say an hour and a half of suck. Yeah, but you know, other parts of life suck. Why do I do that? You know, I will say this. But the idea is that there's a benefit for that suck. One of the things I love about weed is I love to stretch when I do weed. I get into my body, you know, and that's the thing. It's just whether it's swimming.

But the only time I like feeling that, you know, stretching my, I hate, I hate stretching my hands. But when I'm high, it can feel good. Well, you know, that's what McKenna believed that yoga was in the first place. Yoga said, McKenna had this one lecture that was talking about yogis and that the real secret about sadhus is that they're high as fuck. And what yoga really is, is it's almost like a how-to manual on how to properly use cannabis and that they believe that eating cannabis especially or smoking hash and then going into these yoga poses would they would achieve these higher states of consciousness and so they would

pass this down from generation to generation and the indian in india rather the hindus have a long history of both eating hash and smoking hash. And he believed that that was the dirty secret of yoga. That yoga was really all about how to use cannabis correctly, which is why it feels so good to stretch when you're high. I'll tell you a few things about that. One, I think it was the San Francisco Chronicle just last month or so had a piece about yoga where they basically asked people to smoke before they go and do the yoga class the other thing is have you seen this and what they say what was the result i mean i mean people it's the same thing so many people are like me they get more into their body right that marijuana helps in that respect you know the other thing is have you seen this book that was

just reissued called zigzag zen no you should have this guy on, Alan Bediner. Zigzag Zen. Zigzag Zen. And the painter, you know who Alex Gray is? Sure, good friend of mine. Alex is the one who did the artwork for it, and Alan Bediner did the writing. And as I recall, what the book is about is he was struck by all of these kind of Zen spiritual leaders in America for whom their psychedelics experience in their younger years was pivotal to their evolution and to their becoming a master of some type of meditation but who would not talk about it right and it's so it's

very interesting because you know there's also you have in some of these you know spiritual world whatever that you they're looking down on the use of marijuana psychedelics that you should keep your body as a sacred vessel and keep it free from these substances. But in fact, you see a lot of evidence that these things go really well together. Well, the issue is legality and also most of these people have actual jobs. And when you have an actual job and you start talking about drugs, people look at you like you're some sort of a fucking crazy person. If you work as an insurance company and you say, well, on the weekend, you know what I did this weekend?

I smoked DMT with my friends and I experienced God. They're like, what the fuck is wrong with Ethan? I know. This crazy asshole. And then you get passed up for job promotions. They think you're a loose cannon. It can be detrimental to your interest or your family, especially if you have children.

There's a lot of people that have children that don't like to talk about drugs or even admit they smoke pot anymore. I've experienced that resistance. All over the place. Or what about if your kids are inviting their friends over, and then you have to worry about that your kids' friends will tell their parents, oh, so-and-so's parents smoke weed or whatever, and then all of a sudden you have the neighbors and the fellow parents

getting all worked up about that or telling their kids they can't go over. Well, listen, I go through that. I mean, that's me, you know, look, I have pot tattooed on my body. You know, I have a DMT molecule on my left arm. It's, it's pretty well known that I'm into drugs. I like them. I think they're awesome, you know, but I'm healthy as fuck. And, uh, I'm not an independent operator as am I, but it's so true. I've got to tell you, the emails I get from people who have solid employees for 20 years, and then a drug test popped out, and they were totally fine at work. It's just because they got high on the weekend and they lose their job after 20 years. Exactly.

That sort of stuff that's going on. I think, by the way, John Oliver may be doing something on this issue soon. Well, it's a nonsense issue. The idea that you can get high on Friday and lose your job on Monday. How come you can get drunk all weekend and show up on Monday and be fine? Well, I'll tell you something. I'll give you a policy dilemma. So back in 2010, the ballot initiative in California legalized marijuana.

Richard Lee, the fellow who was driving that, and we agreed. We put in a provision there that basically said people could not be fired for testing positive for marijuana so long as they were totally competent at work, not high at work. And there's, we wanted to protect people who were having a joint in the evening or on the weekend, right? Right. The Chamber of Commerce flipped out, right? And the problem is, is you don't want to provoke some very powerful bears and all this sort of stuff. The problem is you don't want to provoke some very powerful bears and all this sort of stuff. So now when we're drafting these initiatives around the country for 2016 and beyond, what we find is we do not include a clause protecting people because we know the one thing that might get the Chamber of Commerce to all flip out and to basically defeat the initiative. And then what you basically hope is that as marijuana becomes more legalized— You can revisit it.

And I think that's what's happening. I haven't looked as yet in Oregon and Washington, but my guess is that the number of employers who are drug testing for marijuana is decreasing, right? I mean, look, it's always been a bad way to determine performance, right? Because we know marijuana stays in the system. You know, the craziness of drug testing. If you want to get totally bombed on a Friday night and be okay at work Monday morning in terms of drug testing, don't smoke a joint, right? Alcohol and cocaine is the right combination for you. That's a crazy message to send with drug testing, right? Yeah, because cocaine's out of your system in like 24 hours or so.

Exactly. And the alcohol, same thing. It's stupid. You know, it's really stupid. And these stereotypes are ridiculous. These stereotypes that pot smokers are dumb and lazy and, you know, they insult me. You know, it really drives me nuts. And I hate having to defend it because you're defending just these ignorant stereotypes that were propagated by reefer madness.

I mean, that was like really started it all off. And the effectiveness of the propaganda that Hearst Publications put out in the 1930s, it's amazing how well that worked almost 100 years later. You know what else it is? And I used to make this analogy more often than I do today. out in the 1930s. It's amazing how well that worked almost 100 years later. You know what else it is? And I used to make this analogy more often than I do today. But I'd say, you know something? In America, 50 years ago, everybody knew a gay person. They just didn't know they knew a gay person. Right? And therefore, their image of who was gay was determined by what they saw in the media, somebody getting arrested in a men's room or somebody flamboyantly walking down Christopher Street in New York City or people who are very, very effeminate, right? Now, of course, everybody knows a gay person, right? It could be their cousin or their employer.

It's all around the place. And therefore, our image of who is the gay person, right, has become we don't have any associations. It's just the person who seems effeminate or just the person doing odd stuff. Well, similarly with marijuana, everybody in America knows not just a marijuana user, but a responsible marijuana user. The problem is they don't know they know them. Therefore, who's their image of the person who's a marijuana user? They think of that high school dropout or the kid with, you know, hemp leaves and his blonde dreadlocks who's a troublemaker at school. They think of their friend's kid who got in his blonde dreadlocks who's a troublemaker at school. They think of their friend's kid who got in trouble with drugs.

That's who they think of. Now, mind you, the kid who just got straight A's and is going to an Ivy League school or to UC Berkeley or Stanford or whatever and who's also smoking weed, that kid's being more discreet, and nobody knows he's doing weed except his friends. So we have a biased image of who, in fact, the marijuana user has been in America. Now, as it becomes more legalized, as people become more open and out with it, I've been struck at all the people I've known for many years who are finally saying to me and admitting to me that they've been using marijuana or psychedelics regularly for a long time. Now we're seeing that thing begin to shift in our society the same way we saw it happening with gay people in this country.

I think you're right. And I think I've seen a giant shift just within the last 15 or so years. You know, I started smoking pot when I was 30. I'm 48 now. So I've been smoking pot for 18 years. And before I smoked pot, I thought it was for losers. I really did. I got lucky. I met my friend Eddie Bravo, and he is this really creative musician and explained to me that it helps him write music and create music. And he's this interesting guy that I used to do jiu-jitsu with. That's also a weird thing about martial arts. A tremendous amount of UFC fighters smoke pot. I mean, a massive amount, where it's a huge issue for them involving drug tests, that they have to stop smoking weed for the last four weeks or so in order to pass drug tests.

When I say more than don't, more UFC fighters smoke pot than don't smoke pot. Same thing true of the NBA. Oh, well, the NBA, it's giant. The NFL. I met a retired football player, Marvin Washington, at the end of last year. And he was getting involved in the medical marijuana thing, but he's really a brilliant guy and cares about the policy issues. We landed up drafting with him and three other, you know, Pro Bowl, you know, Pro Bowl winners, basically a public letter calling on the NFL to change its marijuana

testing policy, to admit that marijuana has medical value, that it's safer for many players, that when it comes to dealing with concussion injury, that marijuana may actually have a therapeutic dimension to it. Well, not just may, does. Does. Without a doubt. So the evidence is there. I was also encouraged-

Anti-inflammatory properties of it. Do you see the US, the International Olympics Committee, what they've done now is I think they've changed the level or when they test for marijuana. they've done now is I think they've changed the level or when they test for marijuana. So they basically are saying, if you haven't used marijuana within the 24 hours before a match, you're not our concern anymore. So you see an evolution happening and at different rates in different types of professional sports. You do. And it's so important.

It really is. Because otherwise you're basing your laws and the way you punish people on ignorance. It's foolishness. And the idea behind it is foolish. What are you doing? Yeah, I mean, it came out. I mean, part of this came out of the drug war ideology, right? Drug testing sweeps into American society in the Ronald Reagan days in the mid-'80s.

Drug war goes crazy in the late-'80s. Everybody's feeling you have to drug test. Most major corporations are drug testing. So we just got caught up in that. you have to drug test. Most major corporations are drug testing. So we just got caught up in that. You know, being a professor at Princeton in the late 80s, early 90s, and I saw the kids, like they knew they were going to be applying for jobs where you needed to be drug tested. And it just began to shape the whole way they thought about this sort of stuff.

Yeah. It's just so unfortunate because it doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you a lazy person. These are the thoughts that are implied in testing people. The idea is like, hey, I am your employer. I don't want you fucking up on the weekend and then coming into work on Monday all scrambled. But there's no evidence of that at all. Well, I would say this, because what I always want to do is to give the other side what I think might be true or might conform with our experience. For some people, marijuana, smoking too much marijuana does make them lethargic. Well, ask if they smoke it at work. Well, if they smoke, if people, look, nobody wants kids waking and baking before they go to school, right?

Some people can smoke marijuana 24-7. It's sort of medical, doesn't harm their workability. Other people, it's a problem. You know, it can be a motivating for some people. Look, it's a drug. And that means that some people can use amotivating for some people. Look, it's a drug, and that means that some people can use it in the wrong ways problematically. The problem is, and this is where we fundamentally agree, the large majority of people who use marijuana do so responsibly

and are not having a problem with it. And there's a huge number of people who use marijuana in a way that actually enhances their life. And there are many of them who find it preferable to using pharmaceutical medications or alcohol or things like that. There are people I know, brilliant intellectuals and academics, who've done some of their best work and come up with some of their best ideas under the influence of marijuana or psychedelics. So marijuana can be a huge positive in many people's life. It can be neither here nor there in some people. And for some people, it's a negative. Including Carl Sagan, who was a huge proponent of marijuana. I think that the people that have issues with marijuana have issues. And that's one of the things that's been

sort of dusted under the rug. You're blaming it on marijuana. These people that smoke pot and it ruins their life. I mean, I had a joke about it where I was like, it's just because pot got there first. It could have been anything that fucked your life up. It's usually some sort of an underlying traumatic issue that you're trying to run away from or hide or cover up. Yeah. I mean, the problem, of course, is when people in power hold that. I mean, I'll tell you, on both ends of the country, Governor Cuomo and Governor Brown, I don't know what their issue is with marijuana. Well, their issue is that there's financial interests that are trying to lead them in the way of illegal.

I don't think so. I actually think I've talked to both of them about it. And I can see, and both of them are willing, I think both of them have been decent governors in other areas of their life. I think some of them have been okay on sort of rolling back some elements of the drug war. They're kind of mixed in that regard. But Cuomo just has this weird anti-marijuana thing I don't get.

And Brown talked to him a few months ago about this same thing. Well, when you say weird, okay, well, let's be specific. It's not political. For Cuomo being such a jerk on New York's medical marijuana law and trying to carve it down so only like five businesses can run this thing. I mean, all the stuff he did. Medical marijuana is supported by 80% of New Yorkers, right? There was no political reason for him to do that sort of stuff. But somehow, some weird anti-marijuana thing was in there.

Hold on. But that doesn't seem like an anti-marijuana thing at all when you're talking about boiling down to five businesses. It sounds like a business interest. Look, there may have been some of that there. There may have been. That seems like the only motivation. It seems to be there's no rational motivation other than financial.

I don't know, because in the end, there was a whole competitive process for who got the five licenses. It's hard to sow whether the governor's friends. We haven't seen any evidence yet that it was governor's buddies who benefited. I think there was something that he felt a need to be hyper-controlling in this area. I think sometimes people go through— But he's not ignorant. He's got to know the financial massive profit margin, the possibility for profit that these people are going to experience. He's not ignorant.

He's got to know that you're talking about something in Colorado that just the tax revenue alone has been $100 million. But that's a good reason for him to have done the right thing, right? The question is, why does a guy like that try to sabotage a good bill and put in a bad bill in place? What's your thought? I don't know. All I know is sometimes you think it could be that something involving a friend of theirs, a kid of theirs, their own personal experience. I think it's something personal oftentimes. And with Jerry Brown, I've heard rumors with both governors that they used to smoke.

I've never heard other people say, oh, no, these guys are— Jerry Brown in California didn't used to smoke? Who the hell knows? That would be more shocking than he did. Who knows? But, I mean, I've got to tell you, Jerry— He's probably high right now. You talk to Jerry, I don't know, Jerry thinks, oh, marijuana's the downfall of American civilization, right?

I mean, but there's a part of him that actually— Is that what he says? He actually does say that, publicly and privately. And he actually seems to almost believe that at times. And I think the other part of his brain is smart enough to know it's ridiculous. But there's a lot of people who have had a negative encounter with marijuana. They've had a kid who started smoking weed and waking and baking and went into bigger trouble with other drugs. And I think they just go, this is bad.

This is bad. Or there are people who have had experience problems with alcohol in their family. And they think if alcohol was that bad, weed's going to be even worse. And they think if alcohol was that bad weed's gonna be even worse I think there's still that irrational stuff driven oftentimes by knowing somebody or knowing of somebody where they Associate marijuana with bad things having happened to that person I think Jerry brought his Jerry Brown's got a bigger problem and that no one even knows he's the governor That guy became the governor of California after Arnold Schwarzenegger and no one paid any attention Like literally no one even knows he's the governor. You never fucking hear Governor Jerry Brown. You said that and I had to...

And I know. You said that and I go, oh yeah, he's the governor. Oh yeah, I forgot. Sometimes that's a good sign. Well, he used to be the governor a long time ago. Everybody knows Christie's the governor of New Jersey and he ain't so popular anymore. But he was a governor and he was an interesting candidate for president in the 1980s, right? Was it the 80s or the 90s? The 80s or 92

maybe? What year was it? It might have been 92, the year that Clinton beat everybody else off. Yeah, it was a long ass time ago and, you know, they would call him Moonbeam, Governor Moonbeam, and they were making fun of him. But he had some unique ideas when it came to running for president. I actually thought he was

a really interesting candidate back then. I remember that. I remember that. And I actually, I mean, from New York, you know, it's funny. When I bumped in on a plane, we're chatting, and then we're making chit-chat as the plane lands. And he goes, how's that New York governor of yours doing? Cuomo. And I say, he's kind of like you.

He's a pretty good governor overall, but he stinks on the things that matter when it comes to drug policy. And actually not all those things. Did you say that to his face? I said it to his face. Were you ready to get hit? No, he laughed. He laughed? Let's say he smiled.

He smiled. Yeah, yeah. No comment, though? No, I got to tell you, Joe, you want to see something ugly, go on YouTube and type in the words rude debate or type in the words really rude debate. And what pops up is me and Jerry Brown pummeling one another on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! show in 2008 when we had a ballot initiative that would have been the biggest prison reform ballot initiative in the history of America.

And Jerry Brown was then the attorney general, and he did everything he could to kill it. And so we just went at it one day. About what? What's his rationalization? I think at that point he wanted to run for governor. He wanted to have the prison guards behind him. The prison guards union was making very clear that if they were going to deport, he wanted to run for governor. He wanted to have the prison guards behind him. The prison guards union was making very clear that if they were going to deport him, he

had to block this. They got every former governor and governor and gubernatorial candidates to get up and stand up against this. I got to tell you, if California passed that ballot initiative, Prop 5, back in 2008, it would have solved a big part of the prison problem in this state at that time. That seems like... I hear stuff like that. I feel like it's treasonous.

I really do. When I feel like a guy is doing for his own benefit, trying to block something that would be beneficial to people, especially recognizing that we have a huge issue with the prison industrial complex in this country and the idea that we had privatized prisons in the first place, the idea that someone's profiting off of putting people in jail and the idea that they're actively lobbying to make sure that there's profiting off of putting people in jail and the idea that they're actively Lobbying to make sure there's more laws in place that are gonna Incarcerate people so that they can make more money the idea that that's illegal is it that that drives me a bit

I gotta tell you with it between the prison guards union on the one hand and the private prison corporations on the other and please I mean just thank God they hate one another the prison guards unions and the private prison corporations, because those guys have just been venal in that regard. It's just money, man. It's just money. Whenever you get money involved in anything, when you get money involved in pharmaceutical industries, when you get money involved in this, the marijuana thing with these five different corporations that are going to control all the pot, money, it's fucking money. People trying to get more money. It is. But the basic idea, Money, it's fucking money my people trying to get more money it is but the basic idea Joe where you're saying before That that you have a prison guards union that needs to keep the prisons full in order to pad their overtime pay

Sick or that you have a prison corporations that are making money if more people get incarcerated and they'll end up becoming advocates for laws that lock up more people or Advocates for opposing the reform of laws that are blocking up too many people. Look, being a prison guard is a shitty job, but those dudes need to do is grow weed. That's what they should do. You want to know something interesting? That's a great job. Prison Guards Union did not oppose the marijuana legalization initiative in 2010.

Really? Yeah. And I think the reason is, I think there's two reasons. I think one is marijuana prohibition sends a lot of people to local jails, but not that many to state prison. But the second reason is if you're a prison guard and you're living in the middle of God knows where, California, surrounded by nothingness, what do you want to do when you get home from work? You want to get high. Exactly. In fact, my guess is the prison guards union is like anybody else right now. They probably

got members of their union who are medical marijuana patients and dealing with state laws that probably prohibit their using marijuana. Do you think that with the current climate that we have with social media and the ability to distribute information and when outrageous laws are trying to get passed, you can tweet them and Facebook them and people find out about them in these online petitions. Do you think that this is lending itself more to transparency and this transparency is beneficial to getting these more rational laws passed or more rational ideas promoted? It's a great question. I think it leans in our favor. It's not the cure-all. It means that the ability of young people to express themselves to legislators, the fact that more and more legislators pay attention to Facebook and Twitter and things like that, I think that's generally good for us. On the other hand, what I also know is that, you know, we now see, not just on legalization of marijuana, we see all this bipartisan consensus that there's too many

people behind bars in America, that we need to reduce the prison population, that there's this horrible racism permeating our criminal justice system, that the incarceration of black people in this country is just an absolute humanitarian and social and racial nightmare, right? So we see all of that happening. We see bills being introduced to reducing the prison population of states and at congressional level. And then a new drug scare pops up. All of a sudden, it's flaca or bath salts or synthetic cannabis or blah, blah, blah. And then there's this knee-jerk reaction like, you know, criminalize first, ask questions later, right? And that's the thing we're still dealing with, that people will begin to come to their senses about more sensible policies.

And then they get scared. And when they get scared, they do dumb things and pass bad laws. That's interesting because things like bath salts only exist because what we would call, quote-unquote, legitimate drugs are illegal. So you find a workaround. What's the market for synthetic cannabis? Most of that has to do with the fact that people are worried about drug testing for marijuana. God, all of it. All of it. Nobody would choose. If you had a choice between regular pot or synthetic whatever the fuck it is, what is that stuff anyway? What is it even coming from?

It's either synthetic cannabinoids or maybe it's... There's also, I think, cathinone, which is the ingredient that's in cot, the thing they chew in East Africa and Yemen. That's like an amphetamine. It's a stimulant. I mean, it's sort of like used the way that Indians chew coca in Bolivia and Peru, Colombia. So when it's done in the chewing the leaf, it's fairly innocuous. When you extract the chemical, you can then make it into something much more potent and much more problematic. Oh, see, I was under the impression that even chewing the leaf had more of an amphetamine-like effect. It is. But same thing like chewing coca leaf, right? Chewing coca

leaf releases a slow drip of cocaine into the system, but it's basically almost a healthy form of cocaine consumption. Yeah. Isn't that funny? Yeah. It's hilarious that the leaves itself, like chewing the leaves, like I have a friend who recently in Peru, and they would all do it. They'd give you a bag of it, and they were on these hikes, and they would chew it. And I'd be like, what was it like? He's like, well, it's like coffee, but better. Yeah, exactly. And it actually has flavonoids in it and vegetable proteins.

What are the properties of vegetables that are healthy? Phytonutrients, like different, like it's actually good for you. You're chewing green vegetables. Twenty years ago, the World Health Organization organized a global study of coca and cocaine. They had experts from 19 countries. And after this extensive survey, what they found were two things. One was that the vast majority of people who use cocaine, sniff cocaine, whatever, did not have a problem with it, were not addicted to it, even though there was obviously a minority who had a big problem. The second thing they found was that the chewing of coca leaf by

the Indians probably had a net benefit from a health perspective for exactly the reasons you're talking about. There were vitamins in the leaves that they were consuming. When you chew coca leaf during the day, you're consuming essentially the equivalent of a few lines of cocaine, which over the course of a day is like having a few cups of coffee in a way, right? And what they found is the only downside was that to release the cocaine from the coca leaf, you had to add a little lime, and the lime could hurt, I think, something in the teeth.

The enamel in the teeth, too, right? Something like that, yeah. There's an issue with people that chew coccolies all the time. They have these rotten looking teeth. Yeah, that may be from the lime. I don't know. It may just be that they generally have bad, you know, teeth hygiene in those parts. Who knows?

It's just like people say about meth mouth and losing your teeth. That's not about methamphetamine per se. It's that methadine sort of, you know, reduces the moisture in your mouth. And so you have to take extra special care of your teeth if you're using amphetamine with any regularity. And most people know that people taking amphetamine aren't taking extra special care of anything. Well, the funny thing is this.

If you look at the 10 to 20 million kids, teenage boys in America taking Ritalin or these other things so they can focus better in school, some of them being prescribed it appropriately, others not. That's essentially the same as amphetamine or methamphetamine. Isn't that crazy? And the methamphetamine that people are smoking and getting in trouble with, if you take that in an oral form, like a pill, it's essentially indistinguishable from the Ritalin that kids are taking in schools. You know, I was reading an article on sugar and the negative aspects of sugar, of processed sugar, and how much

of it is in our diets and how much of it is in things that you don't even consider. And that's really essentially the same thing when you're talking about extracting it from fruits, because everybody agrees that eating fruits is healthy. And that's, you know, I mean, when you're eating bananas and you're eating apples and oranges, why does it taste good? Well, you know, there's sugar in it, natural sugars. But those natural sugars, when you get them in that form with the fiber, with the plant itself, with the vegetable itself, it's actually good for you. It's actually good.

The same as the coca leaves. The three most powerful drugs known to humankind, sugar, fat, salt. Sugar, fat, salt. Sugar, fat, and salt, yeah. of the sort of food-producing corporations and their science and their ability to produce products that kind of hit that part of the brain in a way that sort of is beyond their capacity. When they look at the explosion in obesity and people being overweight in America and many other parts of the world, part of that is about the part's ability of food-producing companies to produce products that hit that part of the brain.

I remember Chris Rock, he at one point doing a routine and he was talking about Krispy Kreme donuts. And he goes, I found the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme donuts. Crack cocaine, right? But in point of fact, if you think about it, I remember walking past a Krispy Kreme donut outlet when they first opened up and you could not walk past it without this part of your brain twitching, right? In the same way that somebody who's addicted to drugs gets a twitch when all of a sudden, you know, they smell or see that drug in place.

So the power of those substances, their psychoactive properties, we're used to them. These are powerful drugs we know and love. But in point of fact, if you ask what's doing more harm to the health of Americans today, sugar, refined sugar, or cocaine or heroin could well be refined sugar. Well, there's an article, like I said, that I was reading that was, they were making the argument that it's a toxin. They were saying essentially sugar is a very common toxin that people consume. But as you say, when it's consumed in natural forms, or for that matter, consumed in moderation,

no big deal. But when you're taking large amounts, we see all the to diabetes and drinks and yeah yeah i mean just what you get in a glass of coca-cola that's way more sugar than you're supposed to have in your day yeah and it's in a coke one coke and how many people have three four cokes throughout the day and you see these people with their guts and you know they have all these issues with their body and your face is fucking fat like what is that? Well, that's you're taking in too much sugar way too much Yeah, you look at people from the early 1900s what they looked like I mean obviously a lot of that is refrigeration

They didn't have as much food people were much smaller than because they weren't it was literally malnutrition It's a common aspect of where we've gone completely the other way now We have enormous human beings people are way bigger than ever the It's a Small World ride in Disneyland had to be, they had to carve their trench deeper. They had to shut down the ride and carve their trench deeper. I was at Disneyland the other day and I was with my daughters and their friend. So there was three little girls and me, but we couldn't sit in the same row because you can't have more than three people because they've got this thing. I'm like, I weigh more than the three of them do together.

Like, this is crazy. Like, I can't sit with them. When are the airlines going to adjust the width of the seats to accommodate this thing? No kidding, right? I travel a lot, and my one nightmare is sitting next to somebody who's just kind of double sized, and all of a sudden, part of them's in my seat. How about triple? I mean, my friend Ralphie May is a stand-up comedian.

I don't know if he flies first class, but even if he does, it's not first class enough. He's 500 fucking pounds. I don't know how—I literally don't know how he does it. Although I did read that the country's turning the corner on this, that it's actually beginning to come down. Really? Yeah. Because the fat people are dying.

I think the message is beginning to sink in. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Because the fat people are dying. I think the message is beginning to sink in. Really? Because, you know, some of it is just a matter of just kind of being a little more conscious, you know? I mean, that whole supersize me stuff and all this kind of stuff. But once you get that big, it's way past that. That's lap band stuff. Well, Ralphie's had a couple of surgeries. I think he's had at least two of those lap band things and he blows through them. You know, when you, uh, I know several people who've had that operation broke, whatever they fixed, you know, like they shrink your stomach down and then you wind up having to go back and having another operation because you're stretching this tiny new stomach out too much because it'd be, it's a psychological issue more than it is

even a physical issue it's the same thing when you're talking about people that abuse marijuana well is it marijuana that's causing you to do that or is it some underlying trauma that you're trying to smother with food with sugar with pot with alcohol with whatever the fuck it is it seems like this psychological issue is as much of a factor as the physical addiction. There can be no doubt there are physical addictions to food and sugar, but what is really going on there that's overwhelming your life and making you indulge in it?

You know, I've got to tell you, what some people would say, and I think there's really something to this, is that if we have an epidemic of anything in our country and maybe in many modern societies, it's pain. And it's a combination of pain that sometimes manifests physically, but actually has to do with emotional pain and a sense of emptiness. And that food and psychoactive drugs are ways of filling this sort of stuff. I mean, I will tell you that we were talking about, you know, back pain and all this sort of stuff before and about the overuse of opioids. Probably back in the early 90s, two things happened to me in short order that really affected, really powerfully affected my understanding of the mind-body relationship. The first one was doing MDMA for the first time, and that was sort of just kind of not just mind-opening, but opening up my consciousness

around mind-body consciousness. But the second one was I had gone through three terrible episodes of back pain and sciatica. And I got MRIs and CAT scans, and I had a herniated disc, the L4, L5, L5-S1, the whole sort of thing. I was 48 hours away from being operated on. And surgery is risky. And then I called a friend of mine, Andy Weil, Dr. Andrew Weil, who's a well-known integrative medicine guy. And he said, don't get the surgery. He said, go see this doctor, this guy named John Sarno at the NYU. Yeah, I know you. You know, talk about, and Sarno's theory was all of this stuff about herniated disc causing lower

back pain and leg pain and radiating down. He goes, it's overwhelmingly bullshit. And his theory is that what's really going on is that there's nothing physically wrong with your body, that there's underlying emotional anger, angst, whatever it might be, and that your brain plays a trick by turning this emotional pain into physical pain. And it does that through a process of reducing the flow of blood around those nerves and muscles, et cetera. So without going on with this, reducing the flow of blood around those nerves and muscles, et cetera. So without going on with this, this approach, Sarno approach, worked for me. I went from having this horrific pain to sort of coming out of it very quickly,

being able to pick up my little daughter again, do the sports I used to do, and seeing myself as having a totally healthy back. Now, Sarno believes, right, that it's not just lower back pain and sciatica, right? And he uses, this is not just faith healing. This is, I mean, pretty, he's, his stuff is 90% supported by the science on this stuff, more than any other, any other theory of this stuff. But his thing is that a lot of pain is probably underlying emotional pain being turned into physical pain. And then we deal with that through food, through alcohol, through opiates, whatever it might be. And the reason why we land up getting in such trouble with drugs or with food is because we're trying to address this underlying, almost existential pain,

not by dealing with what's really causing it, but by trying to feed it things that we think will cover it over. Now, if Sarno's right, and I can't prove he's right, but based upon my own personal experience and my reading and my understanding of what's going on with drugs and food in this country, I think there's a lot there. Well, Sarno certainly has some really good points, but there are definitely some physical aspects to numbness and bulging discs, impeding on nerves and atrophy, like atrophied limbs, which is a big problem with athletes that have nerve issues where bulging discs push down on nerves and it actually cuts the nerve supply to the muscles themselves and cause them to atrophy.

That's real. That's all real shit. That is real. Injuries are real. But I think it's very important, though, that you recognize and that everybody hearing this recognizes that there are legitimate injuries that you have where your discs bulge out and impinge on nerves and you need to get that treated. And there's a bunch of different ways to treat that that don't involve surgery.

Yoga's one of them. Yoga's a really good one. Another one is decompression, because I've gone through all this. I've had some serious bulging disc injuries from jujitsu, and I've had MRIs that show this issue, and I've dealt with all of it without surgery. So it can be done, but I think it's important to see. There are people that have legitimate injuries. Yeah, no question about it.

I think even Sarno would say there are people who have legitimate injuries who need this sort of stuff. How did you hurt yours? Well, that's the whole thing. See, part of what Sarno points out is that now that we have MRIs and CAT scans being done commonly in our society, that if you take 100 people who are showing that they have herniated discs, right, and you have 100 people who are showing no herniated discs, you'll have the same incidence of back pain. What he'll show is that the evidence that when you see that, that people assume there's a causal relationship between that MRI or CAT scan of the herniated

discs and that lower back pain. Now, it could be that you've had a serious injury, right? You've been hit by a car, you've been in a sports injury, where there really is something going on there. But for many people, there's not a serious injury. There's some little thing that kind of triggers it, but then somehow it transforms in this. And then he looks at people who live in other societies where lower back pain and sciatica are not sort of accepted reasons for missing days of work or all this sort of stuff. And he finds much lower incidence of these pain, right? And the same thing, look at the carpal tunnel thing. What's that about? I mean, people have been using typewriters forever and ever and ever. And all of a sudden, we have this epidemic of this thing, right? And then somehow that epidemic begins to fade and is replaced by

something else. Well, let's hold on a second there because carpal tunnel is real. And one of the reasons for carpal tunnel is repetitive stress. And repetitive stress causes inflammation and inflammation inflammation locks up when you're forced to sit at a keyboard in the same position over and over again and repeatedly do the same exercises you absolutely do put undue stress on your hands and on your wrist and if you're not prepared for it if your body's not conditioned and you're you you're not a rigorous person you can have real issues with it my mom had to have surgery for carpal tunnel. I mean, it's legitimate. But then raise the question, we had in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, tens of millions of American, mostly women, who were typing eight hours a day,

12 hours a day. Well, first of all, you couldn't type as fast because there was a whole reason why the Cordy method was invented to keep the keys from binding up because now we don't need that because you have your fingers just gently touch these things you can do it really quickly the other thing is diet um there's a lot of inflammation promoting foods or foods rather that cause inflammation and that's just a fact sugar is a big one alcohol is a big one processed flours wheats like things your body has to break down which it breaks down to sugar like this this big thing in this country like gluten-free this, gluten-free that. What it is, gluten, there are people that have gluten intolerances, celiac diseases, things along those lines. People have wheat intolerances. But I think what a lot of it is is just sugar.

Because if you're eating bread, your body breaks that stuff down, processed flours, directly to sugar. Bread and pasta, all that white stuff, that shit's not natural. You're breaking it down. Your body takes that bleached, processed flour, and it converts it directly to sugar, and sugar causes inflammation. And that's a huge issue with people. Yeah. I'm no expert on all that sort of stuff, Joe, so I don't know.

I'll say that my takeaway from going through that pain experience and all the reading I've done on this thing is that when it comes to treating certain forms of chronic pain like this, that the approach that works best is the one that one most believes in. Whether it's chiropractic, whether it's yoga, whether it's Sarno, whether it's surgery, the reason why surgery tends to have the most immediate benefit right away is because surgery is effectively the most powerful placebo there is. But when you see research that's showing that three years after people who have had back surgery are as likely to have a back problem as the people who did not have the surgery, you have to start questioning the evidence around

some of that stuff. Well, actually, it's because of lifestyle choices. I mean, if you think about a person who has surgery for a back issue and then three years later they have more issues, most likely they're living their life in the exact same way, which means they're putting the same stresses on their body they were doing before, like sitting at a desk all day or doing something like you're picking stuff up. Folks that work in warehouses and things along those lines, you have to pick stuff up all the time and your body's not conditioned for it. So you have repetitive stress in that regard. There's a lot of issues involving what caused it in the first place.

You may be right, that could be it. And that certainly can trigger the pain. But I'm gonna tell you, having been through the Sarno experience and have met many people since that for whom it worked, I think, and because the Sarno approach, if it works for you, is one where you get to see your body as whole once again and

not as vulnerable. And because it pushes you to deal with underlying emotional stuff that may be driving some of this physical pain. I mean, for all those reasons, I think my view is when people ask me and I'll say, read Sarno's book, you know, on back pain, right? Or healing back pain. And I'll say, if it doesn't make sense to you, try something else. But the thing about the Sarno thing is, if it does work for you, it's in some respects the most miraculous of all the cures. Well, I think the Sarno approach is a great approach. Don't get me wrong, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive to taking care of your body in a physical sense. And I think that most people just don't take care of their body in a physical sense. They don't exercise. I think exercise, and especially treating your core as if it is the foundation of your body,

something that supports you all day long, your back. There's very few people work out their back in a sense of long, static exercises like yoga, where you're holding poses for 30 seconds and doing one after the other and doing it over a course of a night. It's not fun, like you said. You can't get into it because you don't find it enjoyable. But the benefits of doing that man I'm telling you I just got into it about like less than a year ago I've been doing on a weekly basis like fairly regularly the benefits are tremendous

I mean your your back just feels way better just feels like you have more. It's more vigorous with a core exercises Well with yoga with yoga exercises yoga a big part of what yoga works is, you know, what we call our core. I mean, it's literally your spine, you know, from your neck down to your back. And that's a big part of what you're holding these poses. And, you know, you have to hold your body like in a straight line. What are you doing? You're supporting everything with your back and with your spine. It's not like lifting weights.

It's a different sort of thing where you're holding your own body weight Well, I'll tell you so it's returned to where our conversation got going One of the great things about living in Manhattan is we walk Hmm and the result is that there's a lower incidence of obesity in much of Manhattan than there is in most of the United States Makes sense and that walking is when the safest and even for people who don't want to take up the time to exercise because walking is the way we get places. It turns out that we land up to live relatively healthy lives in a place like Manhattan, notwithstanding all the craziness. Think about it. I mean, what are you doing when you're walking? I mean, what do you weigh, 180 pounds or something like that? You're carrying that 180 pounds around, whereas that amount of energy and that amount of calorie expenditure is lost if you're sitting in the car driving to work

getting in an elevator going to your office sitting in your cubicle all that's lost all that's lost and it's probably the thousands of calories a day yeah you're also making me think about you know when I remember my experience with MDMA you know how there are some people when they do MDMA and they just like to sit and get in a place. And other people like me just want to move, move around, you know, get the energy going and such, you know. I also found sometimes, you know, we talk about going back to the whole mushroom thing. I remember feeling especially that sometimes the mushrooms, you take them and they start to come on. And I can find like it's like this energy force going into your body.

And in some ways, the best way to deal with that stuff is movement. It's running. It's swinging around. It's moving around. Like opening up your body to let that powerful energy in. Yeah. I think there's a lot of tension that people carry around their bodies where their bodies just aren't being used correctly or they're bunched up or they're not stretched out. They're confined and bound up and they have poor posture and then the stress of life and bills and all the things that are weighing down.

I think in that sense, Sarno's at an excellent point that pressure and stress and pain and just frustration just causes you to be tense and everything is fucked up. And if you can address that and sort of relax a little bit, just that alone, just alleviate a lot of tension. And that's a lot of what people carry around them. That's also a lot of what people like about pot. Like you said, how we like to smoke pot and stretch out. What's going on there? You're releasing, you're releasing tension. You smoke pot. Like, man, I love doing that before a show. I like smoking a little weed before a show and stretching out. You know, it's one of my favorite things to do. Just sit in a dressing room before I go on and just stretch, warm up, loosen up my back,

stretch my back out, stretch my body out. It's something that we don't do enough. Yeah. Your meat vehicle. Move that fucker around. I know. I know. It's true.

Look, man, I work in an office a lot of the time and it's just so easy. You get in that zone. You're in front of that computer. That's what you're doing. You know? And all of a sudden you realize your shoulders about no you're exactly right well you're carrying especially if you have bad posture you're carrying it like if you're sitting like i you know when i had my back injury which was sports related but when i started getting treatment for it i realized there's a lot of other underlying issues and one of them is if you're sitting in a desk and you have poor posture,

the strain, there's been a lot of studies done on this, the strain is in a very specific area. So instead of being straight, where your back is carrying the weight in an even form through the top of your head, all the way down to your lower back, you're causing this undue spot, this weird spot in the middle by slumping, where you get all this pressure in this one area that really shouldn't be there. And over time, like cab drivers that have a thick wallet and they keep it in their back pocket and they sit on there, they develop bulging discs in their back. It's just the slow water that causes the rock to go smooth. Well, the other thing that… It cuts a channel through the... I mean, for me, the thing I've learned from so many people, and it's basically the kind

of common ingredient in almost all spiritual practices, meditative practice, is just simple deep breathing, right? Because just having to fill your lungs, it just forces you to have to sit up all of a sudden if you want to fill your lungs. And that breathing, just the slow breathing gets one to focus to center i mean i know that when i'm stressed oftentimes i'm just grabbing a drug because i think that's the wrong way to use drugs just trying to remember take a breath yeah try to take five breaths ten breaths slowly in and out and that's one of the best centering things there are well you know i've been teaching that to my

five-year-old. I kind of taught her when she was three. We started talking about it. Like she would get upset, like something would happen. Like she would, you know, like stub her toe or not even like a big deal, like hurt or something would get her upset. And she would cry. And when she was crying, and then I fell down. And I'd be like, you got to breathe in and breathe out.

Let's do this together. We'll do it together. And I'd do it, you've got to breathe in and breathe out. Let's do this together. We'll do it together. And I'd do it with her. I'm like, take a breath. And she's like. It's hard for them because they're hyperventilating. But it made me realize, like, well, that's a lot of people that go through that with issues in life. You have some incredibly stressful issue. And it just overwhelms you.

And you take this shallow shallow panicky breath. And, you know, it's one thing when a three-year-old doesn't know how to deal with, you know, hurting herself or falling down or whatever it is that made her upset. But when an adult, you know, gets to 50 years old and they still don't know how to deal with stress, it's kind of a tragedy. Yeah. It's like either you haven't- Well, we don't really teach that in our society anyway. You know, it's interesting, Joe, my niece has just started medical school and I was asking her what she was thinking of specialty she was thinking about. And I was saying to her that my,

I think if I would ever decided to pursue medicine instead of what I did do, I think the single most fascinating area of medicine right now is pain management. It is the most interdisciplinary of all areas, because it requires you to understand physical pain, requires you to understand pharmaceuticals and biochemistry, but it also requires that element of understanding things like breathing and exercise and the body. And it's that area. I mean, physical pain is such an epidemic in America today for all these reasons. You and I are giving different reasons and agreeing on a lot of it. But I think that becoming a more thoughtful and sophisticated society in terms of how we deal with this, how we alleviate it, how we prevent it, and doing so in a way in which the government is playing a positive role as opposed to a destructive role? Because right now, right, the role of the government vis-a-vis physicians who want to properly deal with pain management is intimidating

them and scaring them. The way in which the pharmaceutical companies drive what drugs people have means that oftentimes people don't have access to the things they need. Meanwhile, the failure to think about the importance of breathing in our society, of posture, the things you're talking about, exercise, is another element of all this sort of stuff. And on some level, I think, you know, look, a lot of the drug problem has to do with issues of race and class and stuff like that. But a lot of it also has to do with this kind of pervasive sense of pain, physical and emotional pain that people are trying to treat in all sorts of ways. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's also the requirements

of life are really unnatural. The life that we've set up for ourselves, the requirements of managing bills and dealing with taxes and dealing with the stress of marriage and the nonsense that comes with divorce and the chaos that comes with all sorts of different aspects of our life. It just seems just overwhelming. And then the existential angst of your own mortality. It's compounding every day, the futility of getting up every morning when you want to stay in bed,

the alarm goes off, you hit that fucking button, you get up and you put your fucking clothes on just like every other day, and you drink your coffee, and you do your rituals, and you go to a job that you find unsatisfying. That is the vast majority of Americans and probably of people in the world. I think that you live a fulfilling

life. You're doing what you enjoy doing. And I'm very lucky to feel the same way. But I think that we're in the minority. And I think there's a large amount of people out there that are longing for something better than what they have. Whether it's a better relationship or it's a better connection to their family or it's a better relationship, or it's a better connection to their family, or it's a better, some rewarding thing to do with their time. Well, you see, I mean, part of that explains why more and more people are seeking out the church, whether it's evangelical churches or other types of things. Is that true?

I think so. I mean, look, you see those numbers growing, these mega churches that are happening, and you see other... But I think that the numbers of people that are involved in organized religion are actually dropping. I think the ones who are going to the conventional churches, the more mainstream churches and synagogues, that's what's dropping. The ones who are being drawn to the evangelical ones, the ones where they sort of are more attentive to bringing the spirit and the body into the practice of religion. Many evangelical churches, you know, you dance, you move, you do all this sort of stuff. I think people doing the same thing in the world that we know of, psychedelics and doing these things, people want to link their body, their mind, their spirit, community.

Look at millions of people, young people now, going to sort of the whole kind of dance world, the nightlife world, all that stuff. Same thing, that kind of almost collective, quasi-religious, communitarian feeling of letting go in the company of others. I think people are so much want and need that. And it's a good thing for people to do that, to the extent it's not hurting other people or people not getting hurt in the process. And that's another, one thing we started Drug Policy Alliance is a whole project on trying to keep young people safe as they're in this whole nightlife dance scene, right? People are taking all these drugs or doing things sometimes they're

drinking too much they're overheating and people get hurt and the question is young people going out and enjoying themselves for hours or days listening to music being with other moving and even doing mind-altering drugs can be a perfectly healthy and good and even liberating thing, good for their lives, but we need to make sure it's being done safe. That notion of making our societies as safe as possible for people to open up and let go, whether it's with or without drugs, I think is something we have to evolve towards. I think you're dead right, but I also think that the issue is that we haven't built a foundation of stability in these people up to this point where they're taking these exploratory journeys of the mind.

I mean, their foundation is fucked up. There's so much going on outside of that that they need to take care of before they just dive into the world of psychedelics. And that's one of the reasons why people have bad trips. I mean, what is a bad trip? You're resisting all the things that these drugs are exposing. You put these blinders on, gone through this life, and whether it's childhood trauma or, you know, unfulfilled expectations that are haunting you, whatever it is that is causing the quote unquote bad trip, a lot of what that is is resisting the message that these boundary-dissolving

experiences are giving you. They're sending you as a message that you're inherently unhappy. You're unhappy in almost like a cellular level, and that it's not as simple as just like diving in and having a mushroom trip and it's all going to clear out. You've got to deal with the foundation of your own personality. Yeah, but I agree. The question is, how do we do that really, right? I don't know if we can across the board.

When you look at, you know, now, I mean, look at younger people who are on the internet 24-7. It's constant, you know. Just stand on any corner and see the number of people walking around looking at their little gadget, looking at their Facebook, looking at this or whatever.

People are interacting with the world in an entirely different way. And then, of course, the way society is evolving so quickly. Entrepreneurial folks can thrive, but for huge numbers of people, there's no sense of security about what the economy, the society is going to be like in the future. I mean, we are kind of hurtling into the future. Artificial intelligence is going all sorts of crazy places. All sorts of jobs are being displaced by robotics and things like that. So, you know, I'm talking with my daughter, my daughter, who's now 20, about to be 27. And, you know, it's just it's a it's a whole the world is, the pace of change is so remarkable in this regard.

And there's so few guides. And the ability of the parental world to play a constructive role. First of all, many parents aren't that good as parents, or they're not that good at helping young people, you know. But beyond that, they're so disconnected sometimes from what's going on for, you know, kids growing up in a whole different way, right? When I think when I was growing up in the 60s and the early 70s, you know, the pace of change was so much slower then than it is now, right? So I don't know what the cure to all that stuff is. Yeah, I think we're going to have to adapt to this new world where people are getting information at such a staggering rate that you got to decide how to manage it. And, you know, some, like my friend friend Ari Ari Shafir

He switched to a flip phone He's like fuck this I can't do this anymore Because he would say he would tell me that he would get up in the morning and then he would spend like a half an hour Going over Facebook and going over all this and that before he ever got anything done Now he just gets up and does stuff and if he wants to take care of all his bullshit He does it on a computer so he sits down he says okay now I'm going to answer my emails now I'm going to instead of just constantly being attached to social media I got a weird experience I accidentally signed up for Facebook two weeks ago right I

have this public Facebook account was like my staff managed but then my phone got lost I had a Reese get the reset the whole thing. And I reset it. My Spotify account was hooked up to my Facebook thing and the password. Next thing you know, bing, bing, bing. All of a sudden, I created my own personal Facebook thing. And so now I'm trying to figure out what do I do with it? So I friended a few people, a few people I work with. They were all freaked out that the boss has friended them, you know.

And now I'm scrolling through and I'm going, oh, God, now I understand what people are looking at. And you talk about sugar, fat, salt, nothing more addictive than that little gadget there. Yeah, it's very addictive. I've backed off way hard over the last few months. Over the last few months, I very rarely even go on my own message board. I have a message board on my website that I've had since 1998. And I go on there occasionally and check to see what's going on in the news or what people are talking about or debating and this and that. But I find it to be, there's a massive requirement of time to check all these different things, to check Facebook and Twitter and then there's social media, there's websites that I visit. There's message boards that I visit. Different websites that aggregate news stories. And it's just too much.

It's just too much. I back way off of it over the last couple of months. I try to stick with the discipline that there will be at least once or a few times a year where I will go into a total blackout on any communication using that gadget. blackout on any communication using that gadget. I did a vacation a few years ago for seven days where I did not pick up my laptop, computer, even my phone, my, you know, nothing, right? And, you know, for the first day or two, like my hand was like fidgeting, you know, like it was going through withdrawal from that whole sort of thing. But I have to say, I got to day six and I had achieved a level of calm that I associated with like, you know, bodding surfing as a 12 year old on the beach. I mean, it was so, so good.

And I got to tell you something, I haven't done it since I did it for a few days over Christmas. I am so looking forward to finding some days in the next week or two where I'm going to do that again. Almost brings tears to my eyes when I think about that level of disconnection I think I think human beings need to do that well I certainly don't think that we're designed to deal with the influx of information and the opinions of other people thrown at you and just en masse like like we get with social media I just think it's too much and I think it's very addictive. Communication is addictive. And just being able to, like you always think you're going to miss out on something. There's going to be some new thing that comes out that you're not aware of.

And I think that managing that is really critical. Because we're not, we haven't developed to deal with that. This is a completely new thing. And I don't think we're designed, even media, I think just movies and songs. There's a bunch of people running around out there that don't have a realistic view of human beings. Because their view of human beings is based on heroes in movies and songs playing when people talk. And everybody either acts nobly or they act obviously evil. It's like these ideas of human beings are shaped by fiction. And when people are doing that, you're getting, as opposed to reading, reading novels as I did when I was younger but barely do today, you get a much more deeper and nuanced sense of human beings by reading novels than you possibly can by watching a movie or watching a thing. Right. So you're exactly right. Same thing with body shapes, body consciousness, all the ways in which that's so screwed up in our society, once again, shaped by the media.

I mean, I'm trying to do my few little disciplines, like trying not to look at my phone over the last hour before I go to sleep, because they say you sleep better if you don't do that. You know, just trying to find some space, some time, trying to turn off the ringer, you know, more often, just some way of carving out that space. Yeah, I think that that's a good thing. It's a good thing to manage what's coming in. It's a very, very good thing to manage what's coming in because you just can't, you can't

rely on all these other people to have access and to be able to input, you know, into your own mind. It's just too many. There's too many people out there that want to, first of of all how many people just want to bark at you to get attention how many be if you were fucking doing your job pot would already be legal and you read they like what the fuck man I don't even know this guy and he's yelling at me that I'm not doing my job he doesn't know what I'm doing he doesn't even know me he doesn't want to know you what he wants his attention and

he's using this as a vehicle like a whiny baby screaming out for attention and oftentimes that squeaky wheel does get the no I say I don't even read a lot of that stuff that shows up on various You know public outlets when I do when I speeches go up on YouTube or stuff like that, but it's it's it's true It's just the other thing of course There's a power dynamic here Which is that for people who work for somebody the risks we're moving into society where your boss or your employer expects you to be accessible, you know, so I got to let my staff all know at Derek Halsey Alliance, if they get an email from me on a weekend, which they might, because I sometimes work on weekends, there is no obligation and no expectation that they answer that thing

till Monday, right? I mean, just so people know there's a sense of space. I have a friend who goes to work on Monday and his boss will get pissed at him if he doesn't answer emails from the night before. Like, he'll get an email at night, and he's like, why didn't you respond to that email? And he's like, look, you know, I came home. I want to spend time with my family. He's like, look, there's no excuse. Check your email. Check your email. He's like, what the fuck kind of a job have I gotten? That's not the definition of a civilized society. And isn't that what's going on with drug testing?

Because if someone's telling you that you can't smoke a joint after work, what they're telling you is they own your body. They own your body. Because if you smoke a joint at 9 o'clock at night and you go to work at 9 o'clock in the morning, guess what? That joint's gone. The effects don't linger. Quite frankly, the employer has a greater basis if you come to work Monday night morning hungover. Because that may affect. Of course, that will.

If you've been up all night because you were in pain or having a fight with your wife or your kid was sick, that may affect work performance. But the fact that you smoked a joint on a Saturday or did something else and you're fine on a Monday, none of their damn business. This is ultimately about sovereignty of our own minds and bodies, right? I mean, the core principle right here is that we are all sovereign over our own minds and bodies and that my boss, my government has no power to tell me what I do to my own body, you know, or my own mind, so long as I am not hurting another soul. That has to be the core principle of a free society. Not only that, it's the same sort of argument in respect to doing crimes when you're on these drugs. Like, the crimes

themselves are the issue, and the punishment should be in relation to the crimes. It should have absolutely nothing to do with what substance caused you to do the crime. Exactly. My view on this thing is that if you use drugs and you don't hurt another soul, that's none of the government's business. If you use drugs and you go out and hurt somebody, well, the fact that you use drugs or that you were addicted, right, you have to be held just as accountable, right?

Somebody's drug addiction cannot be an excuse that will allow them to do harm to others. in the middle, that if a judge in his wisdom or somebody else decides that you hurt this person and it was driven by your drug addiction and decides that you should go to some treatment program instead of jail because that's better for you and better for society, then that might be the reasonable compromise. But ultimately, people need to be held responsible for their actions as it affects other people. Yeah, that's very well put, the reasonable compromise. But it's very difficult to leave that in the hands of the judges, because when you

let judges impose their own moral ideas and attach their own... I mean, there's been so many instances just really recently. There was a guy who got in a fight with his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and beat him up, and the judge told him that if he didn't want to go to jail, he had to marry the girl.

Like, who the fuck is this judge? And here's another one where this young boy, he's 19 years old. He was on this social media application. It's called Hot or Not, where someone decides whether or not they think you're hot. I've heard it, yeah. So he contacts this girl. She's 17, goes and drives to her house, has sex with her. Turns out she's 14.

So now he's uh locked up they put him in this uh this database as a sex offender and yeah and one of the judge one of the judge's statements is that sex should be something that people do when they're in love and that it should be this very important thing this sacred thing and you shouldn't be involved in these social media things where you just go around fucking each other. Like, who the fuck is he? I gotta tell you, we have, for Drug Policy Alliance, the problem of drug court judges,

I mean, some of these guys are doing the Lord's work, but so many of them are simply imposing their own moralistic views about drug use. They're telling people, okay, I won't send you to prison as long as you're clean and sober for the rest of your life, for as long as you're under my supervision. And if somebody wants to smoke a joint, that then becomes a basis for taking away their freedom. So there's something fundamentally wrong with assuming that judges who are not trained in these areas,

who have their own biases and prejudices, should be determining how people live a life when they haven't done anything to hurt anybody else. Well, it comes down to human beings being put in positions of power over other human beings. And once you can dictate what happens to that person's freedom, that's an intoxicating feeling to a lot of these guys or gals. And they just choose to impose their own viewpoints on that person because they can. That's how they get their rocks off. That's how they avoid their own existential angst That's how they avoid their own depression by imposing power over these other people. That's Judge Judy, right?

I mean, that's that's that show the whole show is she's a cunt and she's allowed to be yeah The most vino of all the actors, but we're talking about the role which money is driving the prison industrial complex And what you're saying about judges the worst of all the actors, but we're talking about the role in which money is driving the prison industrial complex and what you're saying about judges. The worst of all the actors are the prosecutors, those guys, because it's all about power. It's about interpersonal power. It's about power within the criminal justice system. For many of them, it's about making a name for themselves by beating up people and thereby running for politics. And ultimately, it's not money in many cases. It's about power. Power and showing how effective you've been as a prosecutor. Look at my record. And in that sense,

I liken it to sports. I think the real problem with prosecution and even with police is that it becomes a winning and losing thing. If the guy got off, you lost. It's not that the guy was innocent. It's not that you were incorrect in assuming that he had broken the law and should be punished by the laws of our society by The rules that we've agreed to govern ourselves by no no it's a game. It's a game like basketball It's a well-driven game. We've decided in America that we're gonna have an adversarial system of justice, right? Right and and but what happens of course is that most of the power you're rich, is in the hands of the government and the prosecutor. It's why poor people are getting—why does America have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Why do we have the highest incarceration rate of any democratic society in history?

Why do we lack up more black people at a rate that far exceeds the rates of incarceration in the Soviet gulags of the 30s, 40s, and 50s? In part, it's because we have an adversarial system that's fundamentally broken, and where the cops and the prosecutors drive this thing overwhelmingly, and where if you are the typical person in that system who doesn't have money to hire a good lawyer, stuff like that, you are going to be reamed, and you're going to be caught in a system where you may never escape it. You know, why? America, we didn't used to be, right? We had an incarceration rate that was basically at the world average for most of our history. But in the last 40 years, we went just apeshit in terms of locking people up in this country, especially black people. That's the thing we have to fight to pull back from. That's where we have to undermine the power of the money-driven interests, the corporations and the prison guards unions. It's where we have to challenge the abuse of power by judges, and especially with prosecutors. They have to be pulled back in a major way. And the sheriffs, I should say, because in California, you've got the sheriffs who are the ones trying to build new jails and keep marijuana illegal and all this sort of stuff. That gross engorgement of power

in the hands of people whose job it is to take away people's freedom and to use no judgment in the ways they do that, or minimal judgment, and the presumption that if you violate a law, you have to lose your freedom, that's what screwed things up so badly in our society. That's the movement we're trying to build to end. And on that, Joe, I've got to go to my next meeting. Beautiful. You nailed it. Thank you, sir.

Really appreciate it. Let's do this again. When are you in town often? I come to town fairly often. I may be back here in October with a ballot initiative in California coming up in 2016. You know, so I'm here a lot. Let's do it in October, man. Come on back.

Let's work on that ballot initiative. Let's get people active. Sounds good. Thank you, Ethan. Really, really appreciate it, man. Great to meet you. Great to meet you, too. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. All right, fuckers. See you soon. That was fun. That was great.