Name: The History of Cocaine and Why It's Illegal with Dr. Carl Hart
Uploaded: 2021-01-13T01:18:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The History of Cocaine and Why It's Illegal with Dr. Carl Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The History of Cocaine and Why It's Illegal with Dr. Carl Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-13. Transcript available.

but again I'm a responsible grown-up right I'm 54 years old and I know what
I'm doing so when we think about something like cocaine cocaine not the
bullshit that people sell on the street that's been stepped on so like when you
go to places like Columbia and you go to the source and you get really good
cocaine like Columbia cocaine is about $7 a gram whereas in New York it could
be anywhere from $60 to $100 a gram and not as good as a product in Columbia so
you go to the source countries and you get good stuff it could be a really good
evening with you and your significant other you know and all of these sort of
stories of people being paranoid about the cops with cocaine there are reasons
to
be paranoid if you're doing something wrong there there so I get that I mean so
you also worried about being arrested
that's what I'm talking about yeah that's what exactly what I'm that's exactly
what
I mean so there's a reason to that's a rational sort of thing but what's
irrational is that we are arresting people for what they put in their bodies
yes agreed yeah agreed a wholeheartedly and I always point out that you can go
to
CVS and buy enough liquor to kill yourself
absolutely 24/7 all day long absolutely so easy to do absolutely
yeah so but when we think about cocaine and
why it's illegal yeah the cocaine came to the United States in the pop for the
popular masses in the late 1800s and coca-cola this guy John Pendleton I think
his name was he put it in coca-cola well this product a coca wine and he was
out of
Atlanta and he put it in coca wine in 1894 the next year Atlanta banned alcohol
so before
prohibition alcohol was banned in Atlanta prohibition just Atlanta just Atlanta
I mean
cities interesting various cities banned this prohibition happened in 1920
nationwide so
since they banned alcohol in Atlanta he had to come up with a new formulation
and he
and so what he did was tuck the alcohol out added carbonated water and sugar
then
you have coca-cola what that's this is how this is how coca-cola was made and
he put
it in these soda fountains so he sold that pharmacies at the soda fountains and
they were for whites
only so cocaine was you was typically available only to white people at that
time but then in
i guess maybe 1899 early 1900s coca-cola began bottling the products now it's
available to black people
and now you start to get these the connection between violence and cocaine use
among black people
and this sort of narrative grew and grew to the point where we banned cocaine
effectively in 1914
largely because of its association with black people using the drug a similar
thing happened with opium
and the chinese that's the real reason that those drugs are banned not because
of pharmacology you
know what i'm saying yeah now that's not to say that people can't get in
trouble with these drugs
because people do you know just like they can get in trouble with alcohol that's
right that's right
but the only stories that we tell about cocaine uh is the one where people get
in trouble yes but i gotta
tell you uh recently i watched uh pete davidson's movie what was that this the
king of staten island
i think it is it was the first time in a popular movie where um the a hero uh
used cocaine and he was still a hero
so you might remember the scene where steve buscemi and uh i think bill burr
they were talking about i
didn't see the movie oh it was a great story it was great a great scene where
they were talking about
um pete's dad and pete's dad um had used cocaine previously and um pete didn't
know this and
but it was just a matter of fact the guy used cocaine he liked his cocaine but
he was still a good guy he
was a fireman he was a hero he was all of these things and they didn't besmirch
him for using
cocaine it's one of the few times that you see in popular culture that somebody
uses something like
cocaine and they're not besmirched they don't have they don't go down this path
of becoming an addict
and losing all of their possessions because of the drug yeah and so i thought
like they're doing
something here that's different and then that was really that was a great scene
yeah most of the
stereotypes about cocaine in hollywood are you know people using people seedy
people people that have
no compassion for each other ruthlessly ambitious people doing coke and just
all full of themselves
and high on themselves and i'm gonna take over this town ah that's what you you
hear and see you know
yeah um yeah i hope that changes man i know yeah well i mean uh i i would try
it with you yeah i
would try it yeah all right especially listening to you and knowing you
probably get the real
shit yeah i just uh i avoid things that make me confident i'm not interested in
that i'm confident
enough i'm plenty confident i like things that scare me that's why i like
marijuana so much
i do i too people think i'm kidding i'm not i i like the paranoia i like
freaking out because i always
come out of it at the other end with some sort of a lesson because i think
sometimes um we can shield
ourselves from things that are we're really worried about or shield ourselves
from concerns that we have
or even from ruthlessly introspective thoughts that come with uh high doses of
marijuana and that's the
thing that freaks a lot of people out i find them very beneficial some of the
best moments i've had
personally or after some of the wildest trips where i was like boy this is
rough and that but at the end
when it's over i come out feeling so much better i i feel you i mean that's
great i mean because you
know um that's useful uh you feel like you're a better person that's cool but
sometimes you just
want to be euphoric and just enjoy your significant other sure i mean you know
what i'm saying so and
and so cocaine or some other drug might be useful for that and so it's not like
you have to have only
that experience that frightens you and then you become a better person that
yeah at the end of it
um i'm all for that that's fine you got that um but i would just say broaden
your repertoire that's it
the problem is like get if it was legal it'd be great like you could get pure
cocaine and you knew
what you were getting but if you're getting cocaine in austin texas you're
probably getting it from some
sketchy dude yeah who uh is also selling a bunch of other shit and yeah i mean
i'm imagining i've never
tried to buy it yeah but you know um two things here um we got the technology
to put on the streets where
people can um just submit small samples of their drug 10 milligrams which is
nothing and then they
get a chem they get a readout of the chemical composition of their drug right
we have that
technology if the public would put pressure on their issues to make sure that
it's available to people
where they can submit their drugs small samples of their drugs free and anonymously
uh and then they
get this readout the problem is it's so taboo like if you even admit that you
do cocaine people are like
look at this guy ready to ruin his life barely hanging on over there carl look
at you doing cocaine
this is why in the book i admit my heroin use my cocaine use all of my drug use
so i'm trying to
change that image because i have met people all around the world some
politicians and so forth and
got high with these people uh of course i won't say who they are uh but um the
vast majority of people
who use these drugs are people who are responsible take care of their families
they care about their
communities they do all this sort of stuff but hollywood and the media and the
mythology is so
powerful in showing only this one image yes um and i'm trying to really disrupt
that because it's
it's so harmful to so many people catch new episodes of the joe rogan
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