Name: CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Reversing His Medical Marijuana Stance
Uploaded: 2021-10-13T17:54:26.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Reversing His Medical Marijuana Stance' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Reversing His Medical Marijuana Stance' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

I wanted to have you on first of all because I really respected that you made
this change of opinion publicly. When you were first talking about marijuana
you
were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit and it was really just a
recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful. Is that a assessment
that you agree with? Yeah, I think it certainly didn't seem to have any
medicinal benefit. Right. But then upon further examination you publicly
changed
your position and in doing so you actually examined all the scientific
evidence that pointed to for many people with diseases, many people that are on
chemotherapy, many people with some serious ailments, marijuana can be very
beneficial and you talked about that and I really admired that because that
takes a
lot of courage because a lot of people when they have an idea and they proclaim
it publicly they double down and they just you know use confirmation bias and
whatever you know echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm
their initial position and you didn't do that and I thought that's a real a
real
thinking person who is trying to honestly figure out what's going on instead of
just working on being
right. Well I look I appreciate that and I have been very it was very illuminating
for me because I think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society I
think sometimes surprises people I do think and maybe this will dovetail even
to a little bit of what's going on now but but the thing is that
when you looked at the so if you were just to look at the bulk of evidence
around cannabis at that and I'm talking I wrote this Time magazine article
back you know this is probably twelve thirteen years ago and I looked at the
bulk of evidence and you say okay I'm going to just look at the 400 most recent
papers I'm going to read the abstracts I'm going to dig in deep on some of them
and ninety four percent of them were basically the hypothesis was where's the
harm here show me the harm right the hypothesis was not show me the benefit
that was only true for about six percent so right away you're dealing with a
sort of very biased sort of set of data and that's one stream up now if you're
just looking at papers you're like well this one
potential lung harm this one possible addiction this one gateway you know you're
seeing all those individual studies but at a very high level of evidence and
that's one stream up now if you're just looking at papers you're like well this
one potential lung
lung harm right the hypothesis was not show me the benefit that was only true
for about six percent so right away you're dealing with a sort of very biased
sort of set of data and that's one stream up now if you're just looking at
papers like well this one potential lung harm this one possible addiction this
one gateway you know you're seeing all those individual studies but at a
broader level one step upstream you realize that most of the studies that are
getting funded are designed to look for harm right yeah so when I saw that that
was the first time I thought well why why are the studies that are
the studies that are getting out there why are they all designed to look for
harm then I started looking in other countries and some really good research
out of places like Israel in particular guy named Raph Mishulam who's 91 years
old now he was the first guy to ever isolate THC and then synthesize it he's
been doing this work forever he may get the Nobel Prize before he dies for his
work in this they were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments
including refractory seizures in kids
mm-hmm and that one really that really got to me for a couple reasons one is
that I think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain it's it's
hard it's a subjective thing right and so you think is is how do you how do you
really have conclusive proof that this is working the way that you think it is
someone says their pain is better and that's important but how do you measure
that a little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having
seizures is a much more specific sort of metric
yeah and it it seemed to work really well in kids who did not respond to
existing seizure drugs which was kind of amazing to me and I think I told you
when we've spoken before that that to me in some ways that wasn't just a
medical issue at that point it was a moral issue because nothing worked for
these kids and they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications
for them
for them. And these parents are like, you know, in their kitchen sinks,
stirring up, you know,
cannabis, trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture
they could put
underneath the kid's tongue. And it was working. And, you know, I did stories
on these kids and
they were emblematic of thousands of more kids. These weren't just anecdotal
stories.
And that's when I said, you know, there's something here. But I got to tell you,
when I wrote the article saying I changed my mind on this, you know, you hit
send at night and then
you wake up in the morning and I work at a university. I'm a practicing
physician. You
know, I live in that world. And part of me did wonder, like, what is the
response going to be?
I felt very comfortable with what I had written. What I did not know was how it
would be received.
Yeah.
And that's always a challenge, I think.
How was it received?
I think, well, I'm still employed. So that part of it was good. You know, I
didn't know if my
chairman would say, hey, look, you know, I may agree or not agree with you.
That's beside the
point. You shouldn't have done this or whatever. I, you know, I had no idea how
they were going to
respond. I think it was received well, Joe. I think that it added to the
knowledge tree of how we
advance as a society.
It was a sign of the times, I think. I think if you had done that a couple of
decades ago, maybe
there'd been a lot more pushback. I think people are coming to much more of an
understanding and
and also the logical aspect of it. Like when, when people look at all the
things that human
beings are allowed to consume and including this, uh, that you gave me here,
this looks
pretty spectacular.
I'm pretty proud of my gift that I've given you here.
Some serious bourbon here.
Well, thank you for that.
For the man who has everything.
This is, um, legal, you know, I mean, we can enjoy a glass. It's normal. It's a
normal
thing. And we all agree to that. It's, it's a, you know, it's a longstanding
tradition for
people to drink alcohol socially, marijuana for whatever reasons. And we could
go into that
if you want, but it's been demonized unfairly. And people know that it's not
like heroin or
crack or things that you've seen people's lives fall apart on it on a regular
basis. And I think
most people are aware of that now. So in the, the era that you publish that it's,
people have come to an understanding that it's not, it's not one of the hard
drugs. It's not the
most dangerous thing in the world. It's not good for kids. It's not good for
some people. It's not
good for some people, maybe with a possible schizophrenic tendencies. I think
there's a real
concern there.
Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, I, you know, it's, it, you're, you raise a really
important point. You know,
one thing I tried to stay away from whenever I wrote about this was, I felt
like it was a little bit of
a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things. Like I think things should
just stand on their own
two feet. You know, well, it's better than this, right? What you're saying is
true. I feel like
alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain. I really do. If you think about the
way alcohol
affects the brain, very different than the way cannabis affects the brain. And
that, that part
of it is true. But the idea that it could be a medicine in particular, I mean,
you know, I, I think
that, that, that is really quite striking and it's a plant, you know, and there's
all these things.
And I listened, like I said, I listened to your podcast and I listened to Brett
and I listened
to others and I get the points that they're making about that in terms of, can
you look to the earth
to heal? And oftentimes you can, you know, we've been given a lot of things,
but I think that with,
with cannabis in particular, the, the, the evidence, I'm not the first to say
this, obviously people
have been saying this for a long time. Maybe the timing was right, but two
decades ago,
people were saying this, three decades ago, people were saying this, this was
on the formulary
in the United States in the 1940s, post reefer madness, which I think was like
1936 or something
like that. People were already saying, Hey, wait a second, this could be used
to treat addiction.
This could be used to treat, you know, even, uh, Parkinsonian like symptoms.
There was all
these things that they were putting out there. And then it went through this
cultural sort
of assassination for a while, which was, which was wild to sort of reflect on
historically.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.