Name: Joe Rogan Experience #698 - Dr. Carl Hart
Uploaded: 2015-09-21T23:16:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #698 - Dr. Carl Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-09-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #698 - Dr. Carl Hart' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-09-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #698 - Dr. Carl Hart

Yes.
Welcome back, Dr. Hart.
Good to see you, brother.
Good to be here, man.
Pull this sucker right up to you right there.
It's good to be here.
I was in Mexico City and I'm in my hotel room
and there's only like two different channels that speak English.
So I'm forced to watch Fox News.
And I saw you on the Bill O'Reilly show.
Those clusterfuck shows where they have one person,
like Bill O'Reilly's the host,
and then they have all these boxes with all these different people
and everybody's talking over everybody
and the whole thing only lasts like three minutes
and they're tackling these complex subjects.
You got maybe like a half a sentence out before you got interrupted.
I don't even remember what the topic was.
It must have had something to do with drugs and addiction.
They brought you on, right?
Yeah, I think that episode was drugs and texting addiction.
Texting addiction, really?
That's what it was?
It degenerated into texting addiction, yeah.
Jesus Christ.
I thought it was marijuana or something.
No, it was marijuana initially, right?
Because we were concerned about, well,
they were concerned about the supposed high number of marijuana users,
the new high number.
Right.
And then the thing is, is that I was trying to make clear that the numbers of
marijuana users today
is considerably lower than what they were in 1978 or 1980.
But they weren't aware of the information from 1978 or 1980.
Is that like the numbers per capita?
Because there's so many more people now.
No, it was the percentage of, in this case, the percentage of high school
students who were reporting marijuana use in the past 30 days or the past year.
Okay, it's like, I recently found out that there's 100 million less Americans
in 1970 than there are today.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
That is fucking crazy.
If you really stop and think about that, I mean, 40-whatever years ago, 100
million less people.
Yeah, yeah.
We're still growing, yeah.
God, we're fucking crazy.
We can't keep this up.
That's ridiculous.
So they were smoking more pot back then.
More kids, a higher percentage.
Yeah, the highest percentage of Americans who were smoking or using any illegal
drug was about 1978 to 1980, about that time period.
It hasn't been anywhere near that high today.
It was probably like right after the Nixon administration.
Like, that fucking idiot probably had everybody just doing drugs.
When you've got a president that's that messed up, gets busted with, you know,
Watergate and, you know, just all the foolishness involved in his
administration, I bet he led people to drugs.
Well, you know, there's a whole lot of theories about it, but, you know, one of
the theories is that people became distrustful of government and things that
government was saying.
So not only that, kids were experimenting in the 60s, and this was later in the
70s, and they were still experimenting and being distrustful of the government.
So it's not surprising, but the thing is, is that even then, drug use rates
weren't that high, really.
I mean, because the people who were using marijuana at the time, they're now
running the country.
They're now doing these, they're in these responsible positions, and they're
doing about as well as previous generations.
And so it's not a big deal that people use drugs.
In fact, you know, I'm working on a new book, and the thing is, is that what I'm
going to argue in the new book is that more people should be using drugs.
Like, well, when you say more people should be using drugs, here's the thing
about, I hate the term, I hate, there's two terms that I have a real problem
with.
I don't, I don't hate them, but I think they're, they're, they're weighted.
Addiction is one of them, and drugs is another one.
Because addiction is like, when you start talking about addicting, being
addicted to texting, I have friends that are definitely, they definitely are
inclined to check their phone way too much.
Like, they feel compelled when they're in traffic, they feel like, there's a
red light, and they're like, oh, good, let me check my phone.
Like, I'm at a red light.
Like, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on?
But I think that's an impulse.
It's just a foolish pattern of thought.
To call that an addiction, and then to call, like, alcoholism the same thing,
where you could literally die if you stopped drinking, well, that's crazy.
These are not the same things.
Yeah, well, you know, when we think about addiction, it's a simple sort of
definition that we use in medicine, and the definition is that, does it cause
you a tremendous amount of distress, and is it disrupting your social
occupation or your family's sort of functioning?
That, that's kind of it.
I mean, so people can indulge in a behavior every day, multiple times a day,
but they're handling their responsibilities, and they are not distressed about
this behavior.
They wouldn't meet criteria for addiction, whereas somebody could, like, use
alcohol or cocaine or some drug once a month or once a week or what have you,
and then they have all of these disruptions surrounding that drug use, and they
may meet criteria for addiction, whereas I could be using cocaine every day,
but handling my responsibilities, I'm not distressed by it.
I don't have these problems, I don't have these problems related to it, I'm not
an addict, even though I'm using it every day.
So addiction has to do with social disruptions and being distressed, not actual
amount of use or how many times you engage in the behavior.
But this sort of definition is missed upon many of people in the general
population.
Yeah, most people don't think about it that way.
Most people think that if you don't use it, you're, like, if you don't, say if
you do something every day, like, I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and he
worked with this guy that would shoot heroin every day at lunch.
And that always freaked me out, because the guy showed up for work every day on
time, he was a responsible guy, he was married, he had children, and this guy
would get heroin, he would cop every morning, he would go there, and he would
sit in his truck, and he would shoot up, and, you know, whatever, however long
that lasts, you know, he gets an hour lunch break, and he would come back and
go to work.
And I would, like, every day?
He goes, every day.
I did it every day.
Well, you know, this past summer, the past three months or so, I was in Geneva.
I just got back in the States, and I was working in a heroin clinic where they
administer heroin every day, seven days a week, twice a day, to people who meet
criteria for heroin addiction.
And when I say they administer heroin, I don't mean, like, small doses.
I mean doses that go up to, like, a gram a day, a thousand milligrams a day, a
lot more than what people use here in the States, typically.
And these people who are getting heroin every day, a large percentage of them
also go to work.
A large percentage of them have families, and they're taking care of their
responsibilities.
This is their treatment, and this is a treatment that works for them.
But their treatment includes two daily doses of intravenous heroin, seven days
a week.
You know, and so, like, when I think about, well, one of the reasons I went
there and I did this is because of the way we think of heroin in this country.
We think of it as such as evil drug.
And that's just American mythology, and that's just wrong, and that's ignorance.
But that's how many, including drug experts in this country, think of heroin.
But that's just, we have all of this great technology, but we're so ignorant
when it comes to many of these drugs.
So, heroin administered intravenously on a daily basis, it's not devastating?
No.
In fact, some people would do better by having a daily dose of heroin or
another opiate.
No, it's not devastating.
See, even me, I would go, fuck, man, that's got to fuck you up, like, taking
heroin every day.
Yeah, and it's been, this whole journey, man, since I saw you last time, I've
been all over the world.
And this whole journey to see what people do with drugs or what drugs they're
using and how they do it, it's been so eye-opening.
Even for me, someone who has spent their life studying drugs, and I'm learning
so much more now.
But the Swiss experience, the Dutch also do this.
There are some parts of Germany that does this.
They have small programs.
In the U.K., they had small programs.
There are other countries.
But the Swiss, by far, have the biggest program, and they've been the most
successful.
They've been doing this for more than 20 years now.
And they started doing this in response to HIV concern.
People were worried about folks getting HIV, so they had to do something.
They had to have clean needles.
They had to make sure that the drugs were pure.
So they were worried about death, HIV, all of those things.
And this was the rational response, where they put it in a medical community
where people got treatment.
And along with their heroin.
And they have no plans of going back.
Nor should they, because it works.
Boy, that's hard for Americans to swallow, right?
And is it because of all the propaganda we've been fed?
Is it because just of misinformation?
I mean, you would say propaganda, but even me, someone who's a pro-drug for the
most part person,
I would say, God, heroin every day is probably going to fuck you up.
Yeah, I mean, but you raise a good question.
Is that part of the propaganda?
I don't know.
I mean, obviously, there are people who use this as part of propaganda, but in
part.
I don't think they're trying to use this propaganda.
I think they're ignorant.
And they're close, many people.
But then there are other people.
Just think about some of the films.
Train, spotting.
You think of a number of these films.
All of those films now can't use that salacious story anymore to grip us.
It's not reality, but it makes great films.
It makes great sort of subjects for documentaries.
When we think about musical heroes and people who say, well, they were
misunderstood, so they
used heroin.
That's not, I mean, they use heroin because it's a rational sort of use of the
drug when
you think about its ability to decrease anxiety, its ability to, like, make
people or have people
relaxed and just be in a space where they finally can get some peace.
When you think about all of the things that many of these sort of musical icons
or these
great artists have to deal with, it's rational.
It makes rational sense.
The thing that I'm trying to do is, how do we allow people to do these things
and be safe?
How do we still keep them safe?
Because people are going to do it.
That's a fact.
I mean, we've been trying to get rid of heroin in our country for some times,
but every year
we have 100,000 to 200,000 new heroin users every year.
That number has not changed for 40 years, and I don't expect it to change.
Well, if that number hasn't changed, but the population has increased, how does
that work?
Well, that's why it's, like, between 100,000 and 200,000 every year.
I mean, it's been fluctuating between those numbers.
But the point is that we're going to have a substantial proportion of heroin
users, new heroin users.
These are new heroin users every year.
And on top of that, people don't consider the people that take opiates in pill
form that are prescribed by their doctors, which is incredibly high.
And I've known many people, close family members that have ruined their lives
getting fucked up on pills.
And I want to say addicted, but now I'm reluctant to say addicted.
Well, maybe some were addicted.
I mean, maybe that describes some people.
But please understand, the majority of people who use those pills use them
responsibly, and they know what they're doing.
But there are people, like you said, who ruin their lives as a result.
But the thing that we have to think about is that if the majority of the users
of these pills are fine, and then you have this subset, this smaller subset who
are not, it tells you that