Name: Dr. Carl Hart & The Argument for the Legalization of Drugs
Uploaded: 2021-03-05T21:09:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Carl Hart & The Argument for the Legalization of Drugs' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Carl Hart & The Argument for the Legalization of Drugs' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-05. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience well that's dr. Karl Hart's argument as well he
prefers
heroin yes yeah have you been paying attention to all the controversy about
his new book really interesting it is really interesting I mean I read it
cover to cover it's great I love that guy me too he's so brave like the way he
talks about things to for the guy to be a professor at Columbia and to just be
openly stating I enjoy heroin and it makes me feel good it makes me
compassionate
you know and he uses pure heroin he likes to sniff it it's tremendously brave
and I you know I was working on my show for such a long time and you're doing
it
in isolation and then it comes out you're wondering what people think of it so
I
was name searching myself and saw some reddit thread of all these people kind
of insulting Karl Hart and I just felt like I think the average person doesn't
get it I don't think they understand exactly how brave Karl Hart is because I
have traveled around the world I have interviewed countless academics I've
been in academic circles throughout my life drug use of the sort that he
describes is extremely common it's extremely common but being honest about it
is
incredibly rare and is commendable and and if more people were like him I think
a
lot of these stigmas would be reduced and I've even heard people say well how
dare he
reduce the stigmas associated with these things that's cruel if you reduce the
stigmas you're hurting people they should be stigmatized no they should not
be stigmatized maybe they shouldn't be encouraged but if you find yourself in
that sort of situation you shouldn't be ashamed you should see it as if
anything a
medical problem or a social problem not something that you need to be hated for
right because we're not we don't hate people for being alcoholics right we
praise
them for their sobriety like can they get their 90 day chip or whatever they
get
you know people say they don't they look at you like you know you're you're
some
sort of a fool because you couldn't handle alcohol they go oh he was an
alcoholic but he sobered himself up good for him oh yeah yeah you know the
heroin use is just so stigmatized and I'm not a heroin user I haven't used
heroin but I did have a
morphine drip once when I had a surgery it was awesome oh my god I kept hammering
that thing you press a button to give you a morphine drip I had knee surgery
and I
was in the hospital and I was on this perpetual motion machine you ever seen
one
of those because I had an ACL reconstruction arterial cruciate ligament it's a
big injury they take a piece of your patella tendon a piece of your shin bone
and a
piece of your knee and they open you up and screw them and drill them in place
pretty fucking painful and so while you're lying in bed my knee is on this
thing and it's going like bending and straightening my knee over and over and
over again and I'm lying in there and they give you a drip and anytime you want
just press that button and you get a little drip of morphine and I'm going
bang bang bang bang bang bang and it's just ah I felt so good I felt so good I
was like oh now I get it now I know why people like this shit and morphine is
basically heroin right pretty close
extremely close yeah yeah I get it morphine I get it yeah it's probably awesome
but
for him you know he's talking about pure heroin small amounts he understands it
he's a chemist and I mean he really gets it no he's a research scientist you
understand you know he was a complete straight-laced guy wasn't doing anything
to lose in his 30s yeah I know pretty crazy story it is a crazy story and what
I
really appreciate about what he does is I think there's a lot of perhaps
justified
insecurity in the world of drugs so people have been oppressed for such a long
time that they need a justification of some kind I'm using psychedelics because
it's religious I'm using psychedelics because it's medical it's a therapy I'm
using psychedelics because it's traditional it's part of my religion I'm
using psychedelics for this reason or that reason it's very rare that people
will just stand up and say I'm using these things because that's my freedom
yeah I
don't need to justify it I don't need to say that I have chronic back pain and
it's
treating it and I should be allowed to treat my pain it doesn't matter it's
just my
choice as an adult even if it's bad for me it's my choice as an adult yeah it
needs no justification like whiskey yeah I mean whiskey celebrated it's on
television you can watch ads for whiskey during TV shows it's like
celebrated have a glass of whiskey and I like whiskey but you drink a lot of
whiskey it will fuck you up and we don't care we we're just accustomed to it it's
become a part of our culture so it's a traditional use it's it's sanctioned by
the government you get a nice tax stamp on it and so we're okay with it but all
these patterns I just described emerged during prohibition as well yeah so you
so alcohol is prohibited so you have medical whiskey you have you get a
prescription from the doctor for whiskey because it's a it's good for your
nerves
one of our sponsors Buffalo Trace they've been around longer than the United
States they've been around since 1773 and they made whiskey during prohibition
they're still running they're the longest running distillery in America and
they
made whiskey for medicinal purposes during prohibition just kind of hilarious
and of
course we see it with cannabis as well and I get it I understand why people are
doing this because it remains very controversial and so you want some kind of
justification but you should remember at the end of the day that no
justification should be required and if you get too lost in the justification
you
might forget why you're doing it in the first place like an analogy that I've
been
thinking about for years like it's kind of like a long analogy so it's gonna be
like a one-minute analogy but like it would be it would be like if in the 60s
people started listening to music for the first time and they decided that it
was
associated with the counterculture anti-war movement some people were
listening to music too loud and causing irreversible damage to their hearing
and
so medical doctors said okay this is clearly a problem this person is deaf as
a result of listening to music we've got to regulate it we've got to prohibit
it
to protect people because it's a problem and then on top of that there's an
added advantage that because everyone is going to continue listening to music
we
can selectively prosecute the people that we want to because it's a little
crime that everyone is committing and then that keeps going for years and
people
continue listening to music and playing music and they create their own biases
where they say it's okay to listen to music it's just as long as you don't
perform it or record it it's alright as long as you're just a listener and then
eventually some scientists get together and they all say that they've never
listened to music before because if they had it would somehow bias their
understanding and that would be terrible so they've never listened to music
before but they've looked at old pre-prohibition information on music and
they've decided scientifically that it is in fact very good and can be used as
a
medicine and then everyone embraces it as a medicine and says oh I just
listened
to music today it was so wonderful for my anxiety it was really fantastic and
that
would be great and that would be good and that would be a way to make music
legal again but it also would entirely miss the point that music doesn't have
to
be a medicine and to be clear you could do these studies with music music is a
medicine there is music therapy I'm sure you could design a study where music
treats neurodegenerative diseases or music treats depression I guarantee it and
you could get positive results and you could then say that music is a medicine
but so what it doesn't need to be a medicine right and I just want people to as
as much as I enjoy this new medicalization and the decriminalization
that's taking place I just hope people remember that it doesn't need to be any
of those things and this history of justification is ultimately something
that we are doing because we're afraid afraid that to acknowledge the fact that
we should be free to do whatever we want regardless of whether or not it's good
yes yeah well said so I mean you could use that for anything right you could
say that about
exercise you can say that about running you like to run well there's been
medical studies that show
that running is bad for your knees you should stop running oh yeah yeah yeah
fuck like we should
outlaw CrossFit you know many people fuck up their back tear shoulders for
CrossFit well we need to
stop CrossFit you could say that about anything and the problem is a lot of
what you get when you have
people telling people to not do things is people that don't have any experience
in those things telling
people not to do them and whether they're drugs or whether they're physical
activity or whether
they're there's a lot of different things that people do that you could racing
cars you could deem them
detrimental and I am a proponent of freedom and I don't think there's any all-knowing
all-seeing being
that's wiser that understands the correct way for all human beings to move
forward in life and the
correct decisions to make there's no father figure there's no god-like human
being out there that can
guide us the correct way that it's not there's pros and cons to everything that
you could abuse almost
everything you do you know like if you if you show that people if they jog a
little bit every day it's
actually turns out to be good for you but ultra marathons we have to outlaw
because uh these people are
rhabdomyelosis they're they're they're pissing out diet coke and they look
terrible and they're dying
like no you got to be able to do whatever you want to do you're a human being
and you are finite no
matter what it's not like if you die the uh entire world suffers some irreversible
loss and and millions
of people starve to death because you decided to run 100 miles that's no it's
you and your life
do what you want whether it's smoking marijuana or running 100 miles or doing
whatever the
you want and unless we embrace that we're going to see more of this nanny state
nonsense that we've
been dealing with since prohibition in this country and we're dealing with it
right now there's a lot
of things that will never kill you that are illegal cannabis being one of the
big ones because that's
the most preposterous one catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for
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