Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1246 - Pot Debate - Alex Berenson & Dr. Michael Hart
Uploaded: 2019-02-13T23:04:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1246 - Pot Debate - Alex Berenson & Dr. Michael Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1246 - Pot Debate - Alex Berenson & Dr. Michael Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1246 - Pot Debate - Alex Berenson & Dr. Michael Hart

two one and we're live ladies and gentlemen uh or gentlemen you two ladies and
gentlemen
listening but you two uh unless you have some non-binary handle that you enjoy
it's it's a new
world please please introduce yourself sure so i'm dr mike hart originally from
st john's newfoundland
now i'm residing in london ontario and i'm a family doctor and i've been
practicing cannabis
medicine for just over five years and use her my name is alex berenson i used
to be a new york
times reporter uh then i became a spy novelist and most recently i wrote the
book tell your
children the truth about marijuana mental illness and violence which came out
last month and uh has
not endeared me to the cannabis advocacy community i'd say have they uh
attacked you mercilessly for
this book yes they have and that's and that's okay um uh i've also heard from a
lot of parents
you know some users but parents who've told me uh that the book really encapsulates
their their
family's problems in the last couple years um i suspect my my real thoughts
here before we even
get started is that we're gonna find that the truth is somewhere in the middle
here um i don't think
marijuana is 100 safe honestly for everybody i really don't i know too many
people that have had
experiences where they took too much particularly edibles and uh i don't i want
to say i know anybody
who had psychotic breaks but i know some people that freaked out for weeks you
know in fact uh we just
had a uh a comedian here from brazil um a couple days ago rafi bastos who said
he took a couple of hits
of a vape pen he was high for 14 days went to a psychiatrist and and he's a big
guy he's like six
foot five six six you know and you know they told him to keep taking it because
you know he's like
you're so big just keep smoking and so he doesn't smoke so he just kept hitting
his vape pen he said i was
high for two weeks yeah so you need to do it properly right it needs to be held
to the same
standard as any other medicine so we need to identify that there's risks and
there's benefits
to it yes right and and some people are definitely you know going to be more
susceptible to those risks
yeah and we need to kind of you know tease out those people and make sure that
those people you know
don't uh put themselves at risk yeah i i think so as well and this is one of
the reasons why i want to
state this because i'm a well-known marijuana advocate but i i do believe i
believe absolutely
there are great benefits to it i think there's great benefits in terms of uh
relieving pressure
ocular pressure for people that have glaucoma people with aids who are on
medication people with cancer
that are going through chemotherapy find great benefit in terms of helping them
and then there's also some
people with autism i know people that their children have autism and they give
them small amounts of edible
marijuana and stop seizures it's incredibly beneficial in the form of cvd for a
lot of different ailments
but i think with all things and this is a stance that i've kind of like really
come to accept over
the last few years with all things that affect the mind they affect everyone
slightly differently
absolutely yeah alex you want to say something no no well first of all i i
suspect you know there
are people who said don't go on with joe he's just gonna you know he's gonna
try to eat you alive and
and especially they'll be it'll be two on one i told them the truth first of
all i i'll go on with
anybody and i'm glad you had me on or you're having me on because uh you know
bill moore he won't have
me on he's afraid to talk to me about this why what did he say well he you know
he told the or his people
told the simon and schuster pr people uh we just don't want to have him on and
uh and npr had a national
npr show had an interview scheduled with me an hour-long segment and they
canceled it they said
they said we don't believe in the conclusions of the book okay you don't
believe in the conclusions
of the book have me on ask me anything yeah and that's why i'm so happy that
you're not afraid to
have me on that we can have a conversation that we can have a conversation come
at me with any question
you want about the science um i mean i'll say right off the top i don't think
marijuana is medicine
uh it has a few uh medical uses uh that have been you know cbd has been shown
to reduce seizures in
kids that's great uh thc has been uh shown to reduce the nausea associated with
chemo chemotherapy
that's nice uh but for the most part people use thc and cannabis as
recreational intoxicants they
use them to get high the same way they use alcohol the same way they use other
drugs and the sooner we
we accept that reality the better off we'll all be that this is a drug and it
has risks and benefits
and the risks and benefits are different than alcohol they're different than
other drugs but i don't
think if you look sort of on a population level basis they're less than alcohol
i don't think you can
even say that i don't i really strongly disagree with that and i mean you just
have to look at the
death rate right uh you know more people die from alcohol than you know almost
all drugs combined
but when we're looking at cannabis there's zero deaths attributed to the use of
cannabis itself
sure you could say you know someone could use cannabis and jump off a cliff or
something like that
but we're talking about the lethal dose you cannot die from cannabis and just
based upon
that alone it makes it much much safer than alcohol yeah how could you say that
if that is the case
so okay so that's a really good question uh the normal number that's used for u.s
deaths from
alcohol is about 90 000. now about 30 to 40 000 of those deaths are deaths from
the physical effects
of alcohol right essentially liver damage either chronic liver damage you get
cirrhosis you die
in some cases you can drink so much that you kill yourself in a night uh so
that's about 30 to 40 000
deaths the other deaths are generally associated with alcohol meaning somebody
drinks exactly violence
suicide car accidents and all those numbers are basically based on studies from
the 90s and before
where you know people looked at traffic accidents and there were a certain
number of those accidents
where people had a blood alcohol content of higher than 0.1 they said okay that's
an alcohol
associated death that's a fine way to count as far as i'm concerned nobody has
ever done that count for
cannabis and i can tell you based on the on the talk screens that i've seen
from colorado where people
uh had cannabis in their blood and committed suicide people had cannabis in
their or i should say thc in
their blood and uh and got into fatal confrontations with police officers if if
if and when we do this
number for cannabis which we need to do as soon as possible the number is going
to be a lot higher
than zero i suspect it will be in the 10 to 20 000 range we won't know till we
actually do it okay
but let's let's eliminate let's go even over the alcohol let's eliminate all
things like violence and
let's eliminate suicide and let's assume those people would have committed
violence and committed suicide
without it you're still looking at a giant number of people who drink
themselves to death thousands and
thousands and thousands of people every year versus zero with marijuana and you're
aware i'm sure
that correlation does not equal causation and that especially in a place like
colorado where you're
dealing with cannabis something that stays in the system for many many weeks if
you're testing people
and they test positive for marijuana and they wind up committing suicide or
they wind up committing
violence they don't even necessarily have to have been under the influence of
it well as you know there's
when you test the blood you can test the both the active metabolite and the inactive
metabolite of thc so
so the test when you do a blood test on somebody who's you know who's committed
suicide it's
sophisticated enough to tease that out um so there's a lot of people who have
the active metabolite in
their blood um i agree alcohol is a physically toxic substance cannabis is a
neurotoxin for a lot of
people but in addition to you know the death there's also just morbidity that's
associated with alcohol
i mean it ruins people's lives it ruins marriages uh it leads to weight gain it
leads to a lot of
metabolic disturbances i think you can say that for some people with marijuana
too i think you could
say some people especially weight gain that some people smoke a lot of pot and
they get lazy and
they start eating cheetos all day and and you could also say that with some
people you know the waking
bakers that you know seem to be wasting their lives away and that's like the
stereotypical negative con
you know when you're talking about a negative description of a marijuana user
it's the waking
baker right the person who's high all the time you could absolutely say that
could really ruin relationships
you could absolutely say that it would ruin your job yeah you could but again
too you know we're using
the term marijuana and really we should be using thc or high thc when we're
saying that okay because
you know people who use uh high cbd every day as we know or most people
listening this cbd is non-psychoactive
it does not get you high super beneficial you know that can be yeah extremely
beneficial for you know
a variety of different disorders that people have yeah so you know we really
need to be careful about
using cannabis versus using you know thc because it's really the thc that can
do that and to your point
you know but you know you say like thc can cause the munchies and of course
that's you know not
good for someone who uh doesn't want to gain weight and just you know so people
know the the way that it
does uh do that is when thc attaches to the cb1 receptor you get an increase in
a hormone called
ghrelin and ghrelin uh can actually induce hunger and that's why people get get
the munchies but you
know that is not necessarily a bad thing if you're someone who has cancer or if
you're someone you know
who's wasting away from from from a terrible illness you know so sometimes you
know having um having the
munchies is is definitely a good thing um and i know you know a lot of people
uh have said to me you
know it's not available so you should probably you know not talk about as much
but there is another
cannabinoid called thcv so you know there's there's over 100 cannabinoids in
cannabis thc and cbd are only
two of them you know those are the main ones that people know about so thcv has
been shown to actually
reduce appetite so if we can get that out there in the market you know like we
have with cbd then we
can almost you know eliminate or potentially you know substantially reduce the
problem that people
have with with thc by using it uh with thcv dr i have a question for you when
people come into your
practice did they do they want high cbd products or did they want to get intoxicated
and no absolutely
canada it's fully legal sure of course yeah so it's like if they don't need to
go to him to get
intoxicated right so people so you're seeing a population that is genuinely
interested in the
health benefits absolutely because i mean if and i mean i'm glad that that uh
that's legalized in
canada because it does make my job a little bit easier because like basically
everyone who's coming
to me now i know that they want to use it medically because if they want to use
it recreationally i mean
they just go to the store right because it's kind of a pain to you know get in
to see me come in and
have the discussion all that type of stuff so you know the people who see me
now um you know they're
all using it medically um and then you know to answer your question though alex
almost all my
patients as soon as they come in they say i don't want to get high i don't want
to get high like that's
almost what everyone says so you know i think the word is ou