TRIGGERnometry - David Nutt - The Truth About Drugs

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

David Nutt is a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've had this phrase obviously used in the last year in particular, which is following the science. Yes. Right? When it comes to other things. Have we been following the science on drugs? No, we've been actively denying the science. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We have a brilliant guest for you today. He's a neuropsychoporacopharmacologist, and he was dismissed from his role advising the government on drug policy back under the Blair government, I believe.

Dr. David Nutt, welcome to Trignometry. Good to be here, thank you. Did we get your introduction, right? You did. It was the Brown government. It was the Brown government, even worse. So it's good to have you on. Listen, we started the show three years ago, and you were literally one of the names at the very top of our list. We didn't manage to make it happen until now.

So you can tell I'm very excited to have you on the show. Tell everybody, before we get into it, a little bit about who are you? you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? So, I am a doctor, trained as knowledge as a psychiatrist, but as you said, I am a neuropsychopharmacologist, and that is someone that studies the effects of pharmacology on the brain. Why do I do that? Because the brain is a chemical organ.

Your brain communicates, all the neurons in your brain communicate with each other by chemicals. There are 80 different chemicals in the brain. And in order to understand the brain, you have to understand the chemicals. And to understand the chemicals, you have to use drugs to manipulate them. So as part of my work and my research, I think I've achieved something that's rather special. I think I have administered more different kinds of drugs to human beings than anyone alive. Pretty much every class of drug that has ever been given to someone to change the brain I've given. And so I know quite a lot about drugs in the brain.

And that's why the government, 20 years ago, asked me to join them to advise them on drug policy because I was an expert on drugs. But after 10 years of doing research on the harms of drugs, I came to the conclusion, which wasn't surprising, I suppose, that current drug policy and the current drug laws weren't based on evidence. And then I started saying that publicly, and they didn't like that, so they sack me. That is so funny. But look, a lot of people don't know the action. scientific evidence. I suppose there'll be things a lot of us don't know. Can you talk to us about

which drugs are actually harmful, including the legal and illegal ones, and which drugs are less harmful than others? So we can kind of get a picture of if everything was allowed to be taken, which drugs would be doing the most damage and which would be the safest? Well, we did a very, very systematic analysis. There are 16 ways in which drugs can harm you. Wow. There are nine harms to the user, and they range from killing you as soon as you take it, like fentanyl, or making you go slightly crazy, perhaps, like a psychedelic. And then there are seven harms of society.

So if all drugs were legal and they were equally used, the most dangerous drugs, which would harm the most number of people, would be drugs like heroin, fentanyl, crack cocaine, crystal meth. But then quite soon after, you'd come to alcohol. Alcohol is about the fifth or sixth most harmful drug to the user. And the thing I got really angry with the government was it the drugs which are relatively less harmful, drugs like ecstasy, like LSD, like Magic Mushrooms. They're the ones that attract the highest penalties,

even though they're much less harmful than drugs like even alcohol. You say that. I'm going to ask you this question, and I've wanted to ask it to you for a very long time. So when I started in comedy, I was a fan of Bill Hicks, the comedian. And when he used to have this routine about, have you ever noticed, it's the drugs that do the least for you that are legal, the ones that get you to question, to push back, to think for yourselves and made illegal? Do you agree with that? Totally. He was a genius. He was a genius. Absolutely completely on track. The drugs that make you question the establishment, question your government, drugs like psychedelics, they were banned. LSD was banned because people were questioning the war in Vietnam.

And because at that time, as is still the case today, the only response of Western governments to drugs is to ban them, they got banned. It didn't affect people using them, but it absolutely hammered people like me who want to research them and who want to use them as therapies. And why is it that we just can't have a very simple rational discussion about this without it invoking people getting very angry, upset, you know, blanket bans, which have been proven time and time again not to work? Yeah, that's a really interesting question.

Why can't we have a rational discussion? It's because I think now it's been so long that we've been lying about the harms of drugs. People, even people who kind of know intellectually that the relative harms are lying, the drugs that are banned because of lies. Even the people that know the truth kind of feel uncomfortable about telling the truth.

And I think obviously a lot of people do believe the lies and they do believe that drugs like LSD are more harmful than alcohol, for the alcohol, which is, of course, completely wrong. And we've had this phrase, obviously, used in the last year in particular, which is following the science. Yes. Right? When it comes to other things.

Have we been following the science on drugs? No, we've been actively denying the science. And we've been denying the science. Do you know when it all started? It started in 1914 with the Opium Act. The Opium Act was brought in at kind of. at the behest of pharmaceutical companies who didn't want people using plant products.

They didn't like people smoking opium. They wanted people to use the pure extract of opium, which is called morphine, which they had patented, and in fact they patented other extracts like codeine and heroin. So there was an antipathy to using plant products then. It was a sort of gaining control of the markets by big pharma, particularly those German pharma companies. But in order to get opium banned,

you couldn't just ban it because it was competing. with family. What they had to do was create the fear of opium. And that was very easy. You just created a fear of Chinese. And in London, the east end of London, where we are now, you know, this was, you know, basically Chinese people living here were smoking opium. And they would create, you know, hysteria was created about them being evil people and they were corrupting them, you know, particularly young women, getting them smoking opium. And so that, the fear, you know, that it was generated around Chinese people smoking opium, both in here and in the States to get opium banned.

That was the beginning of it. And then it rolled on. Then the biggest sea change came with the prohibition of America, of alcohol in America. And that was driven by very puritanical individuals, lobby groups. And they were concerned, quite understandably concerned, about the damage that alcohol was doing to families.

So rather than have a rational policy to alcohol, which would be through taxation and limiting access, they banned it. And it wasn't just America. Sweden, Norway, Finland also banned alcohol. We nearly did in this country. People don't realize, in, I think it was in the 1923 election, Winston Churchill stood in Dundee against the temperance candidate.

And the temperance candidate beat Churchill by, I think, about 15,000 votes. So there was a huge international pressure to ban alcohol. Anyway, the Americans succumbed, alcohol got banned. What happened? Well, hell let loose. Organized crime rose because people like alcohol, and people weren't prepared to give it up, just to protect.

possibly protect families that were being damaged. Anyway, what's that got to do with modern drugs? Well, what happened was in 1932, I think, or 33, the Prohibition Act got repealed. But at that point, because the prohibition was so corrupting of the police, every policeman in America was on the take from speakeasies. Because every street corner had a speakeasy. You're underground, you get your booze. So the police were all corrupt. So the American government created a special army, which we now called the Drug Enforcement Agency, to fight the mafia. and to try to stop people using alcohol. And that ended up being about 35,000 people

run by a man called Harry Anslinger. And suddenly one day, he knew that alcohol was going to be legal, so he couldn't be fighting alcohol anymore. He'd lose his job, and all his men would lose his job. So what did he do? He created a new monster, which was cannabis. And he changed the name from cannabis to marijuana, because it's Mexican.

And then he started the classic process, all governments do when they want to ban a drug. drug. They associate it with some other group, in this case the Mexicans. And then the same stories. The stories we had about the Chinese corrupting white people became the Mexicans were correcting white people. And the Mexicans were coming into America and selling cannabis and young men were going crazy and they were killing their mothers. So he created a hysteria about cannabis. But worse than that, he persuaded the rest of the world to be hysterical about cannabis. And in 1934, the League of Nations, America wasn't even partisan.

banned cannabis effectively worldwide. And that really started the whole chain, you know, the chain reaction of just keep banning any drug you don't like until we've got to the 1968 war on drugs with Nixon, where, you know, he just went right over the top in order to get elected. And we're talking about it now, but it does seem that we're starting to have a more balanced approach,

starting. For example, New York have, I think they've legalized cannabis, have they not? Do you think that's part of a wider trend, David, that we're seeing now? Yeah, well, the debates happened. I think, to be honest, my sacking made a contribution in this country to the debate. Because people said, well, why has it been sacked? And they said, because he's saying that alcohol is more harmful than LSD.

And the cannabis should be legal because it's less harmful than alcohol. And people start to say, really? Oh, but he's a scientist. Oh, maybe he's right. You know, we have the ex-postman, the secretary, Alan Johnson, sacking me, saying I think I was wrong on the harms of cannabis. I mean, who are you going to believe? You know, you're going to believe at least me because I have done some research. I do have sort of integrity and I do have some knowledge. David, why do people take drugs?

Well, everyone takes drugs. So that's the book. Including the people who make the laws against them. Right. Let's be clear about this. So the first thing to say is that taking drugs is one of the core features of humanity. What defines us as different from other primates. Well, we have language, we have art, and we take drugs. Those are the three things that. We seek out drugs. Why do we do that? Because we have a hell of a big brain, and we understand that there's a lot of capacity in the brain, which is underutilized. So humans have always sought out drugs, and generally it's for pleasure or to reduce pain. So 98% of the world's population take drugs. I mean, mostly they take drugs like tea or coffee. Coffee. You're having one now.

Yeah, I'm having one now, that's right. 80% of adults drink alcohol. It used to be 60, 70% of people smoke tobacco. Now it's a lot less. People take drugs to relax them, to take away some of the stress of life.

And in some cases, to actually expand their understanding of life. And that's where drugs like psychedelics and maybe MDMA come in. And we've always taken these drugs. And it just seems bizarre that we live in a society which has banned them. Because

Yes. Magic Mushrooms were banned. I think it was 2005. Correct. And what was the government's, what was their justification for banning it? Do you want to know the story there? Yeah.

So David Cameron had come into, become the leader of the Tory party. And he said before he became leader that one of his ambitions was to reduce the classification of MDMA, which is a Class A junk. Class A Schedule 1 drug. In fact, MDMA at that time in 2004,

people are getting longer prison sentences for MDMA than for heroin or crack. Wow. Why is that? Because judges hate people having fun. Seriously. They don't admit that, of course, but that just happens. That's the only rational explanation. Okay, so Cameron said, I'm going to reduce MDMA from Class A to Class B,

I think largely because he was associated with a lot of people that were taking it. His wife was quite a raveer. She went to raves. You know, it was a popular drug, and it was people. It was a drug which, you know, was changing particularly people's attitude to the police. The police would go to a rave, and for the first time in their life, they'd be hugged. When they went to a pub, they got beaten up. Anyway, so there was a strong move to that MDMA was going to be more open, openly available.

Cameron became the head of the Tory party the next day. I mean, you know, I monitored this, obviously, because I was a government advisor at the time. I monitored it. One day, you know, I'm going to review the drug laws the next day. You know, I thought about it. MDMA really dangerous drug, the drug laws, you know, we're going to stick with the current classification. He swapped overnight, he switched.

Then what did he do? People started selling in Camden Market. A couple of shops started, head shops started selling dried mushrooms. The technology for freeze drying magic mushrooms came along. The Daily Mail did not like that. The Daily Mail always had hysteria against drugs. And they goaded Cameron to do something about these two shops selling magic mushrooms. So Cameron then goaded Blair and said, look, you know, you're soft on drugs.

We've got a drug here because the active ingredient of magic mushrooms is cylo-cybin, which is illegal if it was pure, but the mushrooms were legal in this country. And Blair, because he was like many left-wingish governments, more liberal governments, are terrified of being seen as soft on drugs. I mean, the classic example, of course, is Clinton in America. Clinton brought in the most restrictive regulations. He's the guy that brought in the third. strike and you're in prison forever.

Because he was told he had to be harder than the Republicans, otherwise he wouldn't get elected. The same here. Blair decided it had to be harder on drugs in Cameron. And instead of coming to the expert group, the ACMD, which I was a part of, instead of asking us for advice, which he should have done by law, he set up his own committee.

We don't know. Well, I mean, it's alleged because, of course, it was none that's documented. But this was a classic Blair, the kitchen cabinet. You know, I think they called it the sofa cabinet. he got in the police, he got in the army and they sat around and they decided

what are they going to do about magic mushrooms? I mean, it's kind of completely bizarre. And we as the experts and the government's formal advisors heard that they were having these meetings and we said to them, you cannot change the law of magic mushrooms without consulting the ACMD

because that is what the law says. The mischief of drug act says you cannot change the law without consulting the experts. And they went quiet for a couple of weeks. And then we got a note saying they were going to have a vote in the Commons next week on rescheduling and reclassifying magic mushrooms. And they said, what do you think? And we said, that's an insult.

You've reached the law and you can't put us on that spot. We can't give us three days, effectively, to make a proper harm assessment because it takes us a few months through that. And so they went ahead without us. And then they voted to ban Magic Rushrooms and make Magic Russians a Class A drug. And that was actually the beginning of the end for me. because you're sitting here saying magic mushrooms weren't, you know, a million people are using them each year

in Britain and no harm. And then suddenly they're alongside crack cocaine. What kind of lawmaking is that? And that was, you know, at that point I began to rebel and start saying, you know, come and guys, you know, you can't have decisions just made by essentially by the Prime Minister and a couple of

coronis. And we're talking about magic mushrooms. You've been heavily involved in the field of psychedelics. Yes. Do you think that this is the next phase for medicine, you know, as a way to treat things like anxiety, depression, etc., etc. Absolutely. I mean, it's like in the 1950s and 60s, particularly LSD, was being heralded as a revolution. It was really the first medicine we had for the mind. And it was being

widely used. There were a thousand research papers published in the 1950s and 60s on LSD, showing powerful, effective treatments for everything from anxiety, depression, addiction. And then he got banned. He got banned because of the Vietnam War because people thought the anti-war protests would go away if he's banned at this deal. Of course, nobody's. I mean, it is the classic adage, isn't it?

If you're a hammer, everything's a nail. You know, if you're a drug policy person, everything's a ban. Anyway, so that ban had destroyed research. It's the worst censorship of research in the history of world, of all research. Because I think 227 countries in the world signed up to that ban in no country in the world

has LSD subsequently been studied as a treatment except a tiny study in Switzerland where it was invented. And when you look back at the evidence, the fact that LSD treatment for alcoholism is the most powerful treatment is twice as powerful as the best modern treatment and yet you can't use it because it's illegal. And that's why I started, and my team, you know, 10, 15 years ago

and I started fighting back because it makes no sense. It's not as if the ban has stopped use. All it's done is stop research and clinical attempts. And so I'm going to wear a Tim Faw hat, and I'm going to ask you a Tim Faw hat question, and feel free to push back. Do you think part of the reason that we have been so wary

with this particular aspect, with things like psychedelics and treating mental health, is because of big pharma, who've got their own particular treatments and don't want them to be encroached upon? Yeah, there's several answers to that question. It's not simple that they... I think it's possible, I don't have any evidence,

but it's possible in the 90... Towards the end of the 1950s, other treatments for psychiatry were coming along, non-psychedelic treatments. And I think one of the justifications that governments used to get rid of LSD was, well, we got the alternatives. Yeah.

We've got antidepressants. So I think... I don't think Fama was trying to get rid of LSD, but I think maybe they were, I don't know, we haven't got any data on that. but certainly governments could say, well, we don't need it because we've got alternatives. And that's essentially, when you put a drug in schedule or one, which they did in this country in the UN conventions,

that says that you don't need it because it's very dangerous and because there are alternatives. Now, more recently, I actually think in a strange way, I think the pharmaceutical industry is pleased to be what we're doing because they have given up on developing brain treatments. As one of the vice presidents of GSK said 10 years ago, He said, any drug company that works on the brain needs a head red because it's too difficult. And that's so that most of them have now, well, in fact, almost no drug companies work on new treatments of the brain.

They're almost all working cancer and heart disease and, you know, of course, and vaccines. Is that really true? Yeah. That's incredible. I mean, we bang on about mental health more than ever, and rightly so. You could argue, certainly for some people, the treatment is needed, but they're not, they're not looking to deal with that market. They're not looking to find solutions for that. They think it's too difficult.

Really? And so I think they're quite grateful that we're finding the solutions. But the problem is the solutions are still illegal. And until we change the law, we can't roll it out to the millions of people who need it. And so you were saying about, you know, and push back if I'm wrong, that this is that the psychedelics are more effective than the synthetics and the antidepressants. Can you explain to us why? Yes, because they work in a very different way.

And this is really the nub of my research. I mean, just to be just explaining a little bit more. I started researching psychedelics because it was the last class of drug I hadn't studied. I said everything else. Stimulants, opiates. You know, you name it. I'd given it to humans. But we hadn't done psychedelics.

Why? Because it was just difficult and they were illegal. And then I thought, well, you know, I'm 60 now. If we don't start soon, I won't ever get it done. So we started. And then we found these weird things. You know, we found that, you know, although they open up your mind, they actually switch off your brain. So the brain activity goes down as your mind expands.

And in fact, what was remarkable about? about that because that's exactly what Ardo Suxley predicted. In 1953, when he took Mescaline, he wrote about it in the doors of perception. He said, my mind has been expanded by this drug. What does that mean? Oh, it means that something's constraining my mind. What's constraining my mind? Must be my brain.

And he came up with this wonderful phrase, the brain is an instrument for focusing the mind. And we showed exactly that, because when we switch the brain off, the mind expands. So that was the first thing. You know, we completely turned everything on our head. No one expected that these drugs would switch off the brain, except Tuxley, because he was dead. But then we showed that it switches off the parts of the brain

which drive conditions like anxiety and depression. So then we thought, well, maybe it'll work in these conditions. And then I started reading what people knew about them in the 50s and 60s, and I realized what it was obvious, you know. But we had the brain science now. We could actually go to ethics committees and say, we can switch off the part of the brain that caused depression. Can we do a study?

And they said, well, it took us two years to get permission, but in the end, we've got permission. And it was. Cytocin is the most powerful treatment. A single dose of psilocybin can lift depression in the vast majority of people with severe depression. People who've been untreatable for 20 years can get better a day after a trip.

Really? And by better, what do you mean, David? Well, some are killed. Some of the people we treated in the night. We started doing the study in 2013. and some about 20% of the people in that first trial are still well now most of not most of relapse because depression is from people who've had depression for decades often many people start having depression in childhood because they get abused their brain becomes set in a depressed mode and we can suppress that but it kind of creeps back so but but it is still the most powerful

treatment single treatment of depression has ever been shown David, let me ask you, Francis normally is the one wearing the tin-for-happed, but I'll put one on for this purpose as well. He mentioned Bill Hicks and this idea that the drugs we are allowed to take are a certain type of drug. And if you look at them, you know, tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, whatever, these tend to be drugs that facilitate us being in the world as it is. Yes.

Being obedient workers, going into the factory, going into the office, sitting there, taking another shot of coffee to be able to stay at the computer. Whereas, as you say, drugs that can be blamed for opening people's minds, getting them to question authority, reject whatever they're being told that they're supposed to support invasions of other countries, whatever. They are the ones that tend to be illegal. Is that a connection you see as relevant or is that just a... Totally, totally.

Yeah, politicians are absolutely terrified of mind-opening drugs because it changes the way people vote. That is kind of the basis of the war on drugs, Nixon's war on drugs. They, you know, they were really determined to try to portray the anti-war people as crazy drug users. They wanted to frame rebellion and protest with drug use, and they succeeded. And we brought into that. You know, basically, our misuse of drugs act in 20, sorry, in 1971 was essentially written by the Americans. I mean, basically, they told us, you get, you write this, you know, basically, your drugs act has got a mirror ours, otherwise.

whatever. I don't know. We're not going to put nuclear submarines in somewhere. Anyway, we had up to that point kind of resisted doing exactly what they told us, but by then in the 1970, when we gave up. So let's, there's two other things I want to focus on in the con, because we're having a very positive conversation about drugs, which some people may feel is, gives not enough attention to the negatives. So let's talk about addiction. and the fears that people have about legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, the impact of that. Because as you said yourself, there's 16 ways that drugs can harm people,

including society in general. So if we were to decriminalize or legalize drugs or most drugs, would that not have a huge negative impact in terms of people just getting addicted, being stuck in negative cycles, whatever? Well, that's exactly what the politicians say. Yeah. That is the fear that politicians can spout all the time. If we change the law, it will expand use and expand harms.

And there are multiple arguments against that. Well, better than arguments, there's loads of evidence against that. So the first thing is that the law doesn't work. So we have illegal cannabis in this country, you know, recreational cannabis is illegal. Yet we have a greater proportion of young people using cannabis. than they have in countries where it's legal. Why is that? Well, and that's kind of been well known since the 1950s, really.

Illegal markets creates demand, and they create demand by getting people to use drugs and then selling drugs. So when you criminalize people for drug use, they don't have much options. As we've got a million young people, a lot of them, you know, black and minority ethnic, with criminal records for cannabis possession.

They can't get jobs in the police or teaching or the civil service. It's even quite difficult to get into the army with a criminal record for cannabis. So we've got a million people. What do you do then if you can't work in conventional work? You deal drugs. And perhaps the worst example of that was heroin. So in 1971, this is one of the really terrible examples of what America forced us to do. We were prescribing heroin to heroin addicts until 1971.

because we knew that if we didn't, they would go to the black market and get it. But the Americans hated us for that, and they effectively said, you've got to stop doing that, so we stopped doing it. Now, you take a heroin addicts who's getting a prescription from the doctor on a regular basis,

and you say, sorry, you can't have your heroin anymore. What do they do? They don't say, oh, well, that's all right. I'll go and run a marathon or something. They say, I got four hours. I got four hours to get my next hearing. hit. And who do you go to to get heroin in four hours? Well, you go to the black market, you go to the criminals. And where do you get the money for it? That's the other part of it.

Well, that's right. So then you can get your drug. Someone will give you the heroin. And then they say, yeah, they want 100 quid. You know, back in those days, back in 97, it was a lot of money. And then how do you get the money? Well, you either steal from your parents or your, you know, your partners, or you prostitute yourself, or then you become a drug dealer. And that's what happened. the majority of heroin users from 70 to 80 to 90 became heroin dealers in order to pay for their habits. So we went from 1,000 addicts to 300,000 addicts in 20 years. Wow.

And we documented that. There was an amazing case. One heroin addict went to Crawley down in Sussex. I've been to Crawley. You shouldn't go to Crawley. And they've traced it. I think this person had bigger problems. That one person created, I think, about 25 other heroin addicts.

addicts in Crawley. It was like an infection. They wanted to how he grew and grew and grew and all this. And each one has to then get other addicts. So it's like a Ponzi scheme. Now, we knew this. Nobel winning prize winning economists have said this is what happens. We've known this forever.

But people don't, governments don't want to believe it because it confronts their moral sensitivities about being rational about drugs. And then just to finally answer your question completely, there's brilliant evidence. It's called Portugal. So Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs about 17 years ago now. Why? Because it was pursuing the policies that we follow and the other countries follow was bankrupting them. So they decriminal.

But what's happened to their drug use? We've now got data on 15 years of decriminalization in Portugal. Heroin deaths have fallen to a third of what they were before. Over the same time in Britain, heroin. deaths have risen to two-thirds of what they be for. Every year in Britain, we get a record number of heroin deaths because we don't treat them. In a Portugal, someone gets arrested for possessing a heroin. They don't get put in prison. They get treated. And that means they stop creating other addicts, and they can be, they stop dying because they get treatment. So the Portuguese experiment has

absolutely shown us how you can have a rational policy that works and saves huge amounts of money, because they empty their prisons. In Britain, we have doubled our prison population in the last 30 years, and all of that is drug-related crime. And the Dutch and the Portuguese with more sensible drug laws have actually managed to reduce their prison populations. This is what I wish people would understand.

We talk about all sorts of issues on the show, whether that's racial inequality, the policing, racism, immigration in America, all of these things that are driving the political landscape in a very powerful ways. Actually, I mean, how many of the people coming through the southern border from Latin America are escaping

drug cartel-operated countries? How many people are in prison because they're there because of things that shouldn't be illegal, in my opinion, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, when you create a narco state, which is what Mexico is to some extent

even some of the West African countries now, Guinea-Basawa, you actually completely destabilize, the state, you de-servoirs economy, you essentially create, the state is run by drug dealers, and they're generally not very good people, and they're generally not that concerned

about the welfare of the population overall. So, you know, we've created that monster, particularly in South America, and Latin America, which is actually fueling this enormous desire to get out of there and get somewhere that's actually less oppressive and horrible. Hey, Francis, do you think it's cool that the same company that controls 50%

of online retail also passively eavesdrops on every conversation you have in your home? What? What about the idea that a single company controls 90% of internet searches and gets to track everything you do on your smartphone? I'm so screwed. You are. Trigonometry is now going to be a solo project. Big tech is more powerful than most countries are and they profit by exploiting your personal data.

It is time to put a layer of protection between your online activity and the these tech juggernauts. That is why I use ExpressVPN. FICA is over. Unfortunately so. Sadly, every site you visit, every video you watch, every message you send, gets tracked and data mine. But when you run ExpressVPN on your device, the software hides your IP address, something big tech can use to personally identify you. So ExpressVPN makes your activity harder to trace and sell to advertising. It is absolutely done for it.

And the best part is how easy it is to use. Download the app on your phone or computer. Tap just one button and you're protected. Francis, please stop crying. My new shoes are getting wet. If you don't want to end up like me and want to protect yourself from big tech, go to expressvpn.com slash trigger

and get three extra months for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N.com slash trigger. to learn more. David, to you, what is a good drug policy? If you were in charge of a drug policy now, what laws and changes would you implement? So if I was running everything, yeah, I would actually have a,

I would decriminalise personal possession of all drugs so that people go into treatment rather than prison. I mean, putting people in prison for drugs is just stupid because they actually end up taking more drugs in prison. When you say treatment, just to interject briefly, tell people a little bit about what you mean by that. Well, if you are addicted to a drug, if you're caught in possession of a drug and because you're addicted to it, then I would say you're mentally ill because that's what an addiction is.

So you should be treated as someone who is ill rather than someone who is bad. But putting drug addicted people into prison is both extremely wasteful of money because it costs a lot of money to put people in prison. and it just perpetuates the cycle because they don't get treated in prison. Drug use in prison is greater than outside of prison for various reasons, not least of which prison's a horrible place

and drugs can't help people deal with the misery and also, you know, a significant proportion of prison officers and no drug dealers because there's a lucrative trade. So criminalising people for drug use is always counterproductive. So you arrest people, if you find people with drugs in their possession, you decriminalize that, they get treatment, and that's a combination of like psychological and medical and whatever they need. Right.

Okay. And then? Now, if they're not addicted, then the weakness of the decriminalization approach is what you do. Well, in Portugal, what they do is they have civil sanctions. They basically say, okay, well, you've got to clean the streets for a couple of weeks. So you don't get a criminal record. And that's critical. You mustn't give people criminal records.

But they pay some kind of penalty. They call it dissuasion. Now, my own personal view is, I would go further than that. And my view is that if for drugs which are less harmful to the user than alcohol, then they should be available. Because I think for two reasons. First is a moral reason. Why would you want people to take a more harmful drug if they could take a less harmful drug?

Well, the only reason for that is because the drinks industry want you to. And then the second reason is a pragmatic reason. If people use less harmful drugs, there's less harm. and this myth that politicians are, oh, well, they'll be taking alcohol and they'll be getting stoned on top, and that's just rubbish. About a third of people in Britain,

if cannabis was legal, would reduce their drinking. They'd switch to cannabis. I wouldn't have another drop of alcohol ever again, personally. So there will be almost certainly overall health benefits for making a mark. But I'd have these drugs available in what we call, you know, licensed premises like pharmacies, you know, where they've got their drugs.

And just reflect on the fact that until 19, 1974, we used to just sell alcohol in license premises, which were called bars or off licenses. And then one of the worst things that any government did, and this was John Major's government, was to allow supermarkets to sell booze. And the massive increase in alcohol harm, which we've seen has been driven by, I think, it was it about 94 that he opened up essentially the licensing laws. And alcohol consumption effectively doubled. as a result of allowing people to buy it in supermarkets

or the increase in alcohol consumption since the mid-90s has been in supermarkets and that doubling of alcohol consumption is led to a tripling of alcohol harms because there's a kind of the relationship between alcohol consumption in harm is not linear, it's actually curvilinear. And so you decriminalised possession

and what do you do for people who are dealing drugs like crystal meth, etc., etc., Would you legalize something like that or would you still make it illegal? So I think drugs, they're more harmful than alcohol. So I would keep that, I would keep, so the dealers would still be criminal. In the same way, as people who are bringing in illegal alcohol, you know, they're criminals. If you've got a regulated market, then you have to protect it. So if people are deliberately flouting the law by bringing in drugs which are more harmful than the ones people go by, then yes, I think you have to criminalize them.

But the hope would be that their market would dwindle. Because if you've got to, look, we've seen this. Can any of you remember a methadrone, mcat, meow, meow? Yeah, I remember, yeah, yeah. Remember that, right? So this was an amazing example of how rational drug use or drug users are. So in 2007, methadrone began to come into Britain. So this is a, it was a legal cathedone.

And it was actually pretty safe. You could take a gram of methadrone and you wouldn't die. Whereas if you've taken gram of cocaine, there's a good chance. should die. So, and if you took a gram of MDMA, they really is good. So, so people started to switch particularly from cocaine and amphetamines to methadrome, which is a kind of weak, weak cocaine, really. And cocaine deaths fell.

Year on year, cocaine deaths. So the cocaine deaths halved, and amphetamine deaths reduced by about 40%. When people had access to something, that was not killing them, but not equally acceptable, but preferable because it was legal. But what happened? The government got hysterical. Sorry, the sun got absolutely hysterical. The son determined it was going to ban methadrone.

And it set out to create scare stories about methadrone. And it was a 2010 election. Brown was getting anxious about being seen as weak on drugs. So they decided to ban methadrone just before the election. And what happened? cocaine deaths then rose and rows and rows. We now are the highest number of cocaine deaths we've ever had. Methadron deaths, there were never really any methadron deaths.

They stayed virtually zero. So people are rational. If you give them a safer legal alternative, they will use it. And that will save lives. So that's the model on which I'm making the argument that we should have a regulated market for some drugs. And where do you stand on cocaine, David? Yeah, cocaine's a tricky one, actually.

And I'm interested in whether we could have a regulated market. Now, the organization called Transform is actually just written a paper because they're trying to see if you can get a regulated cocaine market in Mexico because that could dramatically undermine the power of the cartels. So I think if Mexico go down that route, we could monitor that and see how it goes. I think cocaine is on the edge. It's more harmful than alcohol, but is it so much more harm. for that you might, there might be benefits

in having a regulated market in the sense you get rid of organised crime. So, you know, I think that's the most difficult one at present. David, let's talk about addiction a little bit. Yeah. Because I think this is a very important part because I think you talk about the political

reluctance to follow the science, to use the term. And it's clear from what you're saying that, you know, those political decisions are killing people. But they are based, I think, the politicians make their decisions based on their perception of the public perception of drugs.

And the public's perception of drugs may be at a sort of individual level, well, I don't want my child, I don't want this, I don't want that. And we do see people, and, you know, even with drugs that are not in and of themselves massively harmful like heroin, but people have problems with alcohol, people have problems cannabis, people have problems with all sorts of drugs, right? Why do people get addicted to drugs? So there are three main drivers to get addicted to drugs. The first is the drug.

Some drugs are more addictive than others. Heroin, cocaine are very addictive. Alcohol is pretty addictive. Tobacco is pretty addictive. And some drugs are not addictive. MDMA, LSD, other psychedelics. They're anti-addictive. They're not addictive.

So that's the first thing. The drug varies. The second thing is the nature of the drug varies. And the way you take it. So if you're shooting up crack cocaine or smoking crack cocaine, you know, it gets in the brain so fast that it is more addictive than, for instance, if you snort cocaine. And that's one of the reasons, actually,

we encourage people to smoke heroin rather than inject heroin, because, again, it's not just safer in terms of infection, but it's also a bit less addictive. So the speed at which the drug gets in, it has quite a huge impact on addictiveness. And we can easily, and we can use that to actually develop treatments, but that's another story. And then really the third thing is why are people using the drug?

This is what I want to get into. If you're using the drug to dampen pain, then you're less likely to get addicted if you're using the drug to get high. Because getting high, for most drugs, the effect, the high gets less and less. So people keep chasing the high. If you're using, say, alcohol, though, to do with pain or misery in your life, then you can get, because you get tolerance to alcohol,

then you've got to keep more and more. So you need to look carefully as to why people are using drugs. drugs. And if it's for self-medication, that's generally not a good thing. That is, you know, you're vulnerable there. And then the final point, and this is particularly relevant to cannabis. Why do people get to do it to cannabis? They didn't used to get addicted to cannabis very much when I was an undergraduate, people were using cannabis. There's much more addiction to cannabis now because our policy has changed the cannabis market. Back in the 70s and 80s, cannabis was resin or hash. It was a mixture of bit of THC, maybe 5 milligrams of THC in a spliff, you know, but also

a thing called a substance called cannibalial, which is a kind of antidote. And a balanced mixture of traditional cannabis isn't very addictive. But because we're hysterical about stopping the importation of Moroccan or Lebanese plants, we've got homegrown cannabis. And people then now are growing hydroponically under permanent light. And that grows strong THC without cannibalial. So 95% of the stuff you buy in Britain called cannabis. is skunk and it's up to 15 to 20 percent THC,

which is more addictive because it's stronger than the old stuff, but also hasn't got the protective element. So our policies have driven, absolutely driven, the rise in harms from cannabis. But then it gets worse. We're the only country in the world that has really got a big problem with spice, synthetic cannabinoids. And we've caused that.

We have created the spice monster because we have tried to stop prisoners using cannabis. We started testing prisoners for cannabis, which hangs around in the body for weeks. When we started testing back in the early 90s, it was an experiment just to see what drugs prisoners were using. I'm trying to know prisoners were using a lot of cannabis. They carried on testing.

And basically, if you tested positive for cannabis, you lost your probation. So you could stay in prison for two more years. Now, prisoners are not stupid. So they switched. The first thing they switched to, which is well documented in the government, they switch to heroin because heroin disappears in the day. So then we had a rise in heroin use in prisons because people, I mean, isn't that the most a policy which drives people from cannabis to heroin?

You know, you think, hang on, perhaps we should stop doing this. Perhaps you should stop testing. No, no, we just carry on rolling out testing because we want to stop people using heroin. And then they switched to GHB and gabapentin's. And then someone realized that you could actually have these synthetic cannabinoids which aren't detectable. And so now we have in prisons, we've had 70 deaths last year from synthetic cannabinoids, these are extremely toxic compounds that prisoners are using to avoid detection for using cannabis.

Every prison in Britain now has to have a special platoon of big male paramedics to deal with the people who go crazy and who have heart attacks and have fits from synthetic cannabinoids. No other country in the world has this problem, but because we're so obsessed with punishing people, even when they're in prison, testing them, don't testing them, we've created this monster. And can we put it back in the bottle? You know, we've seen it on the streets. You know, the streets of Manchester a couple of years ago,

it's cheaper to get stoned on synthetic cannabinoids than it is on alcohol, so people switch. And they're, you know, they're so much more toxic. It just seems that we seem, that we're just making the same mistake again and again. Totally. And again. Are we ever going to actually wake up and deal with this

in a calm and rational manner? Well, we did have a sense of it when? The really sad thing. there was an opportunity in the coalition because the Lib Dems were very sympathetic to a sensible policy. In fact, the Lib Dems now have a policy of legal cannabis.

It's just that they don't have any... They can't even touch power anymore. No. But in the coalition, there was a Lib Dem minister for drugs, Norman Baker. And he was very sensible, very rational. In fact, he's on one of my upcoming podcasts.

And he went around the world and he got evidence of better policies around the world, he was not allowed to, he's a drugs minister, he couldn't publish his own paper because at the time the Home Secretary, someone called Theresa May, refused to let him publish his evidence. And she, Theresa May has been the biggest problem

because she is religiously anti-drugs, except to alcohol, of course. I mean, it's completely absurd. She brought in the Psychoactive Substances Act, which is a completely stupid piece of this. station, there was almost no harm from other psychics of substances. It was all hysteria driven by the media. But also not just the media. There are some quite powerful, the Puritans, they got alcohol banned in America in 1923. They're still there. You know, there are still people that want

to ban all drugs, including alcohol. And there, things like the public policy exchange, they're still pushing, pushing all the time to ban things. And as I've said, banning things almost always leads to the rise of more toxic substances. You know, it's interesting because we, we, You know, we talk to people from all over the political spectrum, and one of the things that I always find kind of more troubling about some of the excesses of the left is they tend not to think about things in a practical way, but rather in a very utopian way. But this is an issue on which the right is completely mental when it comes to the thing,

because their approach is very much that. It's we can get people not to ever use drugs again, and it just seems to be counter to the human experience. Well, of course it is. That's completely stupid. but I don't, the left are no better. Really? Well, Blair and Brown, Blair and Brown,

these million young people with criminal records, that was driven by Blair, incentivising the police. Making cannabis possession an offence, that was part of the police target. I mean, the police is the easiest crime in the world. Police would literally do this. They start on a shift at 6 o'clock in London. They'd walk into a park, stop a black,

guy filling in his pockets, find some cannabis, that's done. I've met my criteria of arrest for the day. Off to the pub. I mean, it was absolutely ridiculous. And that's one of the reasons we had the riots because Hogan Howe decided he was going to really impose this when he came into power. I mean, arresting young black people for possessing cannabis by police who the black people know are using a more toxic drug called alcohol is not, it's immoral, it's racist. The whole thing was just so corrupt. And now, you know, there's a group in the Labour Party that I've been lecturing to and talking with who won't reform drug policy. But Kirstarmer, perhaps not surprisingly, given that he was a man that locked up a lot of people for drug use, says no, no, the Labour Party

are terrified of being seen as soft on drugs. So they won't change because they're scared. In fact, I think it's going to be the Tories that are going to change sooner because the economic value, for instance of having a regulated cannabis market is enormous. It's going to bring brilliant billions of pounds into the exchequer. And actually we've saw just recently, and I spent a lot of time advising Norwegian experts, Norwegian government on drug policy. And actually they funded some research by us to look at the right policies.

And they had a vote in Norway just recently about decriminalizing drug use. Who blocked it, the socialists? And I think the problem is, there's still this sort of Stalinistic view that you can control people, you know, and you can stop people using. Not alcohol, but you can do some other drugs. And so the left are just as bad as the right, I think. That's really interesting.

On the politics of it, the one thing I think really pisses me off, and it really does piss me off, is look at our current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. He's admitted to using all sorts of illegal drugs. And yet the people who are enforcing and passing the laws against this stuff, You know, we had a whole wave of revelations from the Home Secretary, Jackie Smith, I think, all the way through to other members of front benches on both sides of the House of Commons, admitting to taking drugs.

And yet these are the people who are passing laws to criminalize other people for doing the thing they did and got away with. Yeah, well, of course, dishonest politicians, it's not news anymore, is it? I mean, you know, I think the public think, what do you expect? Yes. That's all they do. They just lie and lie. I mean, it's, I just find it.

I mean, it is absolutely disgusting, isn't it? Absolutely. Michael Gove can say, yes, if I was caught, I'd have gone to prison. Well, he wouldn't have gone to prison because he's white and rich, and he's got good lawyers. And that's the other thing. Drug policy is so racist. You've got, I think, five times more likelihood of being prosecuted if you're black and if you're white. But so he could have, he should have been, you know, if the law was applied to him and he had been caught.

Everyone knew about his cocaine parties. Everyone knew about... Alleged cocaine parties. Sorry, sorry, Elizabeth. I don't think he denied it. Did he not? I don't think he ever denied it. I think he admitted he'd taken in.

He admitted, you know, he had misused drugs in the past, and he could have... I think he actually said he could have gone to prison. Maybe he said he should have done. But the reality is, it's... He needs to be asked the question, why are you still opposing a rational policy? Maybe he'd say, well,

maybe if cocaine was legal, I'd have taken more. It's a bit hard to imagine how you could have done. But, you know, I mean, I don't know what they think. I actually don't think they just lie. They just know that as long as a daily male in the sun, I kept happy, they'll stay in power. And that's all. They're just appeasing the newspaper editors who, for some reason, have this,

well, I don't know if I don't actually know if they care about drugs. I think they just find drugs at a very easy way of stirring up interest in the newspapers. It's amazing, isn't it, how it's become this political football? And we talk about drugs and the legalisation of drugs. Do you think gambling is a drug? No, but gambling does make use of the same brain circuits that drugs do to get you addicted. So gambling is clearly addictive. And we're using that fact to try to understand brain circuits of addiction.

Because we've done a lot of work on alcoholism and on heroin and cocaine addiction. And people say, yeah, you can show me these circuits in the brain that are altered in these people. But how do you know that's not just due to the drug? And we say, well, actually, we can't be sure. It could just be that if you use drugs enough. And we say, well, people who aren't addicted to use drugs don't have the same changes. But they say, well, yeah, but maybe it's just these people we're vulnerable to start with. But if you study gambling, most gamblers can't afford drugs.

So they don't use, you know, they're not dependent on drugs. So then you can actually look at the core processes which underpin addiction. And we hope that that will give us insights into new treatments. That's what I was going to ask you, actually, because there are people, with alcohol, it's a very well-known thing. There are people who can drink alcohol and never become addicted. And there are people who just cannot drink alcohol without becoming alcoholics. Yes, right. Do we have any idea on what the difference is between those two people, two friends sitting next to each other,

and they have completely different outcomes from the same point? Yes, we do. We can't predict, but we can explain. And there are several things we've discovered that, disposed you to becoming an alcoholic. And the first one is having an alcoholic father. So there's clearly genetics. But we can go further than that now.

And in fact, we know that that vulnerability is in part due to brain chemistry. And it's kind of paradoxical. But people who start off being resistant to alcohol, the people that can stay sober or stay standing after their first binge when all their friends are on the floor, they're often, they've got alcoholic fathers. And so they like pre-tolerant. Now, they're a super, you know, everyone thinks, wow, he's an amazing guy. Look how much you can drink.

But the problem is, they end up drinking more and eventually become dependent. So that's the first thing. And then the other thing is that we've shown that they're, so there's the people who drink all the time and who like drinking all the time and want to drink all the time because they can. But then there are the others.

So this is in some ways a more common group. And we all know them, the people that actually don't want to drink all the time, but can't stop when they start, the bingers. And we've shown that the bingers, they have probably some deficit of the endorphin. You know, the brain's endorphin system, the sort of natural high system,

that's a natural opiate system. And we think what happens is that when they start, they go to the pub absolutely, totally intended. I'm going to have two pints and I'm going home to her wife. And then after the second pint, the endorphin system has been turned on. and then they lose control. And you know, we've all seen it.

And then, you know, it's 15 pints later and they're getting divorced. So there are at least two separate chemical pathways which control different forms of alcohol addiction. What about abuse and trauma, which you mentioned earlier? Johan Harry, who's written stuff about, I don't know if you're familiar with his work or what you think about. Yes, I know Johan very well. Oh, you do?

And his book on addiction is brilliant. Well, that's his central thesis, isn't it? that really people get addicted to drugs because they're dealing with childhood trauma and that has damaged the way that they experienced the world and they need something to help them deal with that. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. And in fact, well, it's not just childhood trauma.

I mean, we know for veterans, you know, come back from Afghanistan or Iraq, you know, they've been traumatized. They've got PTSD. The vast majority of people with PTSD, PTSD, whether it's through war or through rape, or even to some extent, less just the car accidents, people who cannot deal with PTSD turn to alcohol. It doesn't cure the PTSD. It just numbs the pain.

And there's huge problems with alcohol in people with PTSD, which is actually why we have just done a very interesting study. So some of you may know that over the last 10 years, there's been interest in using MDMA, the sort of pure ecstasy, to treat PTSD. And it helps people essentially overcome the emotional memories of the trauma. And a couple of years ago, me and my colleague, Ben Sessa in Bristol, we thought, well, a lot of people who are drinking alcohol excessively are doing the deaden their trauma. So we did a study, which we just published last month, on using MDMA, two sessions of MDMA, the same as in the PTSD trials, in people who are drinking because of stress. And we had a phenomenal act. 80% of that group were able to start drinking for six months,

which is unprecedented outcome. Because our normal treatment, which is just talking therapy, it's about 20% stay sober. So this is really exciting that we can actually target the cause of the drinking, the trauma or the trauma memories, and help people then not need to drink. Wow. That is, I mean, that's revolutionary.

Well, I think so too. But the problem is, of course, MDMA is illegal. So actually we can't treat people. So now, you know, we've got, I think we have, we've got about 100 emails at least of people saying, can I go into treatment with you? And we say no, because it's illegal. And if we give it to you, they'll lock me up.

And I'll tell you, the Daily Mail would love to lock me up. So we have to change the law so that people can at least doctors. I mean, isn't it bizarre? Why would a doctor not be allowed to use a drug like MDMA when he can use a drug like fentanyl, which is way more toxic? That's incredible. I mean, it's just the law is completely wrong on terms of those drugs. It's moronic.

It's like, I have to get marijuana for my mum, because my mom has chronic osteoarthritis, is in pain. But the synthetic drugs that she gets prescribed are highly toxic. You know, you read it. The long-term use causes dementia, stomach problems, can lead to, you know, ulcers, cancers, all the... But I can't give her marijuana to help her with her pain. But, you know, drug science has been making progress here.

So she can now get proper pharmaceutical grade medical marijuana through the Drug Science 2021 initiative. Yeah, and she's at a good price because we've negotiated with about five different producers to keep the prescription price down to 150 pounds a month. So your mother can log in to the drug science website and get assessed for medical marijuana for her arthritis, arthritis pain through 2021.

Really do try that. It'll make life so much easier for everyone. You, her. But also, you can absolutely guarantee what you're getting. It's made to pharmaceutical standard. Well, there's a happy ending to an interview. David, listen, we've run out of time. There's so much more we could talk about.

Perhaps we'll do it another time. But thank you for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. First of all, we're going to ask you our last question. Then we'll do some questions for our local supporters. But before we do go to our last question, Tell everybody a little bit about your podcast and the other stuff that you were doing that they can check out and follow and where they can find you online, etc. So when I was sacked by Alan Johnson and Gordon Brown in 2009, I was pretty angry and pretty upset.

The next day, a guy called Toby Jackson, who'd made some money developing computerized trading on the London Stock Exchange. He emailed me and said, what they've done is outrageous. if I gave you the same amount of money as the government spends on drug policy in the ACMD, would you set up a parallel organization? I said, sure would. And we set up, in those days, it was called the ISCD, Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

Now it's called Drug Science. All the scientists who resigned from the ACND when I was sacked have joined it. So now we have the drug science is now the premier scientific think tank on drugs in the world. There's absolutely no way. no competitors at all.

And over the 10 years, we've done a lot of interesting things. Like we've done these detailed assessments of comparative harms of drugs. We've set up a journal to publish sensible data on drugs and tell the truth about drugs. And we've held conferences. We've set up 2021 to allow access. We've now got a thousand. The thousands of patients has gone into 2021 just last week. So we've got a facility in Britain where people can access medical cannabis,

even though they can't get it on the NHS. And I've also set up a podcast. And do listen to my podcast. I think we've now got about 25. And there are very interesting people. They range from therapists like Gabo Mate, who's a sort of pioneer of childhood stress and the use of psychedelics to deal with adults with that problem.

Through to people like Rick Doblin, who's developing MDMA, his campaign for 25 years to make MDMA a medicine. And then we've got some therapists, and we've got scientists, people that have discovered interesting things about psychedelics and ketamine and cannabis, etc. So, yeah, do listen. What's the podcast called for people? Well, it's just called the drug science podcast.

The drug science podcast. And it's on our website, thedrugscience.org.org.com. Fantastic. I mean, that's... And please, please, to everyone watching, go and give it a follow, go and give it a listen because it's very, very important work. And David, the one question we always finish, all our interviews with, is always the same.

what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be. We should be talking about the lives lost over the last 50 years by this irrational war on drugs. 300,000 deaths in Mexico alone. But when you look at the other side of the coin, when you look at the lives lost because people haven't had access to treatments, it's way more than 300,000. So I've estimated just for alcoholism alone, not heroin addiction or other addictions, in the 50 years since LSD and Silas Ibin were banned, there have been over 100 million premature deaths from alcohol.

there have been actually about 300 million premature deaths and tobacco. These are disorders which are treatable with psychedelics. And even if only 10% of those people who were addicted to alcohol and tobacco were cured by psychedelics, that would be tens of millions of life saved. And that's why I say the banning of these drugs for research and treatment, the worst censorship of research and treatment in the history of the world. More people have died as a result of those bands

than as a result of any other health policy ever. It's a very important point, David. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and thank you for watching at home. We'll be back with another brilliant interview like this one, Aura Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.

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