1142: Cannabis Redux | Skeptical Sunday

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I swear I saw this in the feed earlier. This is our second attempt.
We were still finding our feet with Skeptical Sunday. That was when we did round one of cannabis.
At the time, we'd only done a handful of these things, and I wanted to redo this one since it was downloaded so many times. I got a lot of feedback about it.
Positive, negative, great episode, too corny, all this stuff. We got put on blast from listener emails and that's how we learn and get better.
So round two with cannabis, here we go. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was told that cannabis was the devil's weed.
One should avoid it at all costs. Kids were dared to just say no.
We were scared with over-the-top ads. Today, some say cannabis is a cure-all from everything from

anxiety to chronic pain. So what is the truth? Are the alarmists right in their belief that

cannabis is the downfall of humanity, or are the herbalists of today onto something when they push

the medical flower? Comedian Michael Regilio is here to give us the straight dope on weed,

and let us know if it's a medical miracle or the hype is just smoke and mirrors. Yes.
Hi, Jordan. Hi, Jordan.
Ah, I see what you did there. And we're going to be easy on the puns, as I promised in the top of the show.
But no, I'm a busy man with a lot to do, so I am not high in this particular moment. And like I said, I've been told never to touch this stuff.
So, well, there are actually nowadays there are some that will tell you that it's a shame that you're not high. As you said, cannabis today is purported to have many attributes that are good for you.
This, of course, is in stark contrast to just 15 short years ago when we were told that our brains on drugs were not unlike fried eggs in a frying pan. Yes, I remember that ad with a very serious guy who says this is your brain, holds up an egg and then cracks it in the pan and then says any questions like, oh man, this guy, he means business.
But they didn't say cannabis, man. They said drugs.
Aha, yes. But the problem being that for the last 53 years, we have classified cannabis as a schedule one narcotic.
That's the same as heroin, meth, coke, all the bigs of the drug world. Now, the Biden administration did finally reclassify cannabis as schedule three, which means it incurs much lower penalties for possession and use.
For example, Tylenol with codeine is schedule three. So I don't know anyone doing hard time over possession of Tylenol with codeine.
So clearly this is an improvement, but it's actually a long road before cannabis is officially reclassified. I remember I had my tonsils out as an adult and they were like, we're going to give you codeine.
And I'm like, I think I've heard of this. Doesn't Tylenol have this? They're like some Tylenol.
And they're like, it's a controlled substance. And I was excited.
And also like, they take it real serious. They give you a special pad to go and get it from the pharmacy.
So I took this thing and I went to the pharmacy and they gave me what I can only describe as a bucket of codeine. Yeah.
I was like, really? There's a lot in here. And they're like, yeah.
And if you need a refill, we can refill it. And I'm like, how long am I going to be out? Because this is quite a bit.
And they're like, oh, yeah, you're going to be under for like three weeks. I never touched the stuff because it scared me a little.
And also, I guess I have a high pain tolerance. This was like a terrible sore throat.
But my doctor who took my tonsils out said it was worse than having kids. I would say just having seen my wife recover from having kids, that is definitely not true for me or wasn't true for me.
Maybe my mouth just healed fast, but I just thought it was hilarious. The absolute gasoline can of codeine that they gave me to recover from this operation.
And it sounds like I could have sold this stuff and the penalties would have been okay. Could have maybe added a couple thousand dollars to my top line revenue that year, but I ended up dumping it down the sink.
They gave me morphine when I broke my rib and they only gave me three pills. To this day, I still have one left because I was so freaked out about having something that addictive.
Yeah, I don't know what to tell you about that. I guess if you have a really bad headache one day, just eat a quarter of it and see if it still works.
We probably shouldn't be talking about this podcast at all. But anyway, yeah, all the fun stuff is on schedule one.
Even back in the days of just saying no, it seemed ridiculous that marijuana was grouped up with that. Cannabis has always just had a bad rap.
I'm going to just say no to that notion, actually, because cannabis historically always had an excellent reputation. And it's been around for like a really long time.
The first recorded use of cannabis was in 2737 BCE, or as historians say, a long ass time ago. Yeah, easy on the academic jargon there.
It's an audience of laymen. But wow, what is that like almost 5000 years of cannabis? Pretty impressive.
Wow. Yeah, and legend has it that Emperor Shang Nang of China, believed to have ruled around 5,000 years ago, so you nailed it, prescribed cannabis tea.
The earliest Hindu sects in India used cannabis for religious purposes and stress relief. Ancient physicians prescribed cannabis for everything from pain relief to earaches.
In fact, Hindus believed that the god Shiva brought cannabis to earth and not just for humans to use. Turns out the god Shiva was also a big fan of this plant.
God needing to get high is a little strange. Is Shiva the one with all of the hands? Because I feel like that would probably come in handy when rolling a joint.
Absolutely would. Yeah.
But look, different cultures consumed cannabis in different ways. Some cultures mixed it into food.
In India, they made a drink called Bang. Bang definitely sounds like a dodgy energy drink you get at a truck stop.
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I would be willing to bet that in our lifetime, we will see a sketchy energy drink called Bang.

Yes.

But in 1440 BCE, Herodotus wrote about cannabis steam baths. In the second century, Greek Dr.
Galen prescribed cannabis as medicine and Chinese doctors used cannabis for surgery. I'm hoping they used it on the patient.
The patients used it for surgery. Exactly.
I assume so. Although, interestingly enough, that was one of the PSAs of the 1980s that today it plays more like a Saturday Night Live sketch.
A surgeon stands over a patient smoking a joint while the narrator opines, if your surgeon was smoking pot, would you still consider it harmless? That's a pretty silly point. Because if your surgeon was drinking Jack Daniels during the surgery, would you still consider it? No, I don't even want that guy texting while performing surgery.
No, exactly. Interestingly enough, the Chinese made cannabis into a kind of wine.
It's versatile. During the Middle Ages, Muslims in the Middle East used cannabis, which is very interesting because the Koran strictly prohibited alcohol, but there was no mention of cannabis.

So is it true? Is it OK for Muslims to smoke pot or is it, hey, drugs are haram and alcohol is kind of the only thing we have around. So we're going to name that one.
But I'm curious if it's OK or not. I've never heard that before.
Yeah, me neither. And I did some research.
But let's just be clear. The olden days we're referring to, it was actually hashish that they were smoking, which is basically a potent extract of cannabis.
The first known mention of hash is in a pamphlet published in Cairo in 1123, accusing Nazari Muslims of being hashish eaters. So...
Does that work? You can eat it? All right. I don't know.
Maybe, but it may be just was an ancient insult being like your mother eats hashish. I'm not sure.
I see. Either way, hash was big business with Morocco and Afghanistan being the biggest exporters of this potent concoction.
But as far as the modern Muslims go, it's still debated. Most people agree that using cannabis for recreation goes against Islamic law, but using it for medicinal reasons is a different matter.
In 2014, the Grand Ayatollah Saeed Mohammed Sadeq Haisani Rouhani of Iran... Close.
I'm pretty sure it's Saeed Mohammed Sadeq Hussaini Rouhani. Really close.
He issued a fatwa, or a legal ruling in it. He stated spiritual plant medicines and psychedelics are halal for Shia Muslims with supervision.
So for people who don't know what halal is, it's basically Muslim kosher. And for people who don't know what kosher is, it just basically means the religious law says it's OK to eat or consume or use.
So with supervisions, basically an imam has to watch you tripping. It's interesting that it's psychedelics too.
I wouldn't expect that. Look, if you're going to trip, I guess you got to do it with your imam.
Both the French and the British, by the way, had their colonists growing cannabis in the New World. So our country was founded in some parts on weed.
Yeah, and other parts on slavery and misogyny. Yeah, yeah, because I forgot about that part for a sec.
I don't know if we can group those things together. Maybe that's what we're trying to do.
I don't know. No, I don't think the anti-cannabis people probably would, but I would say they are, I think smoking a little pot would make you less racist and misogynist myself.
I feel like our research bears that out, but we'll get there. Yeah.
In the 1700s, doctors widely prescribed cannabis as medicine in the Western world. The Irish doctor William O'Shaughnessy popularized its use as pain medicine.
And it probably works about as well as Irish whiskey, maybe lasts a little longer. Yeah, which probably worked better than what I tried smoking in high school, because back then cannabis was illegal, which gets me to the first person to outlaw cannabis.
It was actually Napoleon Bonaparte. When the little French general learned his soldiers had brought cannabis back from Egypt and were getting high, he outlawed it.
So no cannabis for the French. That's correct.
Napoleon was on to something, though. He may have been a little harsh on hashish, so to speak.
But people in his time realized that drugs and alcohol use was problematic. In 1868, the British passed the first drug laws, banning some drugs.
Around this time, people thought the cannabis use caused mental illness. This, actually, as we'll see later, that's still debatable.
So are we still debating reefer madness? You remember that whole thing? Yeah, well, not so much debating it as looking at the data. That's a better framing of it right now.
In 1894, the British were concerned about cannabis use in India. In lieu of keeping those they colonized in line, the British established the Indian Hemp Drug Commission.
The thing is, they found that moderate cannabis consumption was not detrimental and found no link to mental illness. So no reefer madness.
Besides, you'd think if you're trying to subjugate a population like the Brits were doing in India, you'd be fine if they were stoned all the time and lounging around and shoveling snacks into their mouth and just like philosophizing about dumb things like you do in your dorm room in college instead of, I don't know, marching on your colonial forces, wanting human rights and all that stuff. Yeah, excellent point.
But it does indicate that the tide was turning. In fact, the smoke was starting to blow in the other direction as far as cannabis's reputation went.
So much so that in 1906, the U.S. government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which said cannabis was dangerous and must be labeled before being sold.
And because history loves irony, in 1913, California became the first state to ban growing cannabis. Wow.
Well, I guess California was super conservative back then, maybe. That has to be it.
Maybe. But look, the whole country was going that way because in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act passed and Congress tightened restrictions on drugs in America.
It really was a free for all. I know there was cocaine in the cola around then, maybe, and heroin and cough syrup.
So maybe tightening restrictions on narcotics wasn't that out of line at the time. It's not like they only picked on cannabis.
During that period, there was also the Mexican Revolution, which brought many Mexicans north to the United States. And just like any group entering America, they were met with racism and xenophobia.
Yeah. The Statue of Liberty says, send me your poor and you're tired, but it does not say anything about people actually being nice to them when they get here.
Yeah, I guess that fine print is on the back of the statue. Yes, and it's probably in French.
I always find it almost comical that Irish and Italians, who you could never tell apart now in New York, right, were like, you're one of them. And it's like, really? You guys could be brothers for all I can tell.
One guy's slightly more pasty than the next. One guy lives in Hell's Kitchen and the other guy lives three blocks south.
And it's you're the enemy. It's just so dumb.
It was so ridiculous. Yeah.
Well, speaks to the tribalism that is inherent in human beings, I think. And how arbitrary it all is as well.
Yeah, for sure. People aimed their ire at Mexicans.
One of the things that people attacked was that many Mexicans smoked their cannabis and they didn't call it cannabis. They had their own word for it.
A scary, foreign sounding word. They called it marijuana.
The racists seized on this and demonized both the Mexicans and their marijuana. And by 1925, 26 states had outlawed the evil marijuana.
I guess if they couldn't outlaw Mexicans, and you know they probably wanted to try back then, they could take away their fun. And I wonder how things would have been different if Mexicans had called it like freedom flowers instead.
Fling to America to enjoy their freedom flowers that they brought. Yes.
Branding is everything. And that might well have worked.
Certainly worked with freedom fries. The next blow for cannabis came with Harry Anslinger.
OK, he was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and a racist piece of garbage. And he had cannabis directly in his crosshairs.
So he had a problem with cannabis because he didn't like Mexicans also? Oh, no. Anslinger was an equal opportunity racist.
But don't take my word for it. Take his.
Now, this is a little rough, but here is a quote I found from him. Quote, there are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S.
and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use.
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. End quote.
Yeah, make sure we know that those are not your words. So it does bear out marijuana makes you not racist and cool and sexy, which candidly sounds like an argument for marijuana, which I assume was not this guy's intent here.
I don't know. Do you think podcasters count as entertainers asking for a friend? Oh, by the way, Anslinger was not finished.
There's also this little gem, quote, reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men. Wow.
Maybe we stop quoting this guy. This guy is terrible.
Holy smokes. Yeah, no more Anslinger quotes.
Okay, mind you, cannabis was still legal in some places, but it was on its way out. Anslinger famously collected wild and exaggerated stories about cannabis use and then placed them in the press.
And in 1936, the film you've already referenced came out, Reefer Madness. Now it's time for sponsor Madness, Madness, Madness.
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And thank you for the support. So in truth, it's kind of a funny movie, right? With teenagers, they take a single puff off a joint and immediately murder their whole family.
So they run into oncoming traffic. They jump out the window.
And perhaps worst of all, they listen to jazz music. Yeah, that propaganda worked.
And not surprisingly, the following year, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which was written in part by Anslinger himself. The other force behind the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was the petrochemical industry, the DuPont Chemical Corporation in particular.
DuPont, who makes a lot of products in my garage. You remember the Stainmaster carpet ad that was all over TV in the 80s? You couldn't get away from it.
Yes, that DuPont. In the 1930s, DuPont invented cellophane made from petroleum, as well as nylon made from petroleum.
Cellophane was set to become the standard packaging for most American goods and nylon standard for most American fabrics. Around the same time, Henry Ford was promoting Khmergy, which fuses industrialization with raw materials, the best being cannabis.
Really? Why did Ford consider cannabis the best raw material? I've never thought about it like a thing you could make things out of. Oh, no.
Tons of things are made out of cannabis. Hemp is what they refer to as the fibers the cannabis plant produces.
And the outer fibers of the cannabis plant can be used to make clothes, fabrics, ropes, and packaging. All better than nylon, by the way.
The inner fibers of the cannabis plant can be used to make wood for construction. So let me guess, Ford was not homeboys with the DuPonts or Anslinger and had a different opinion about all this stuff.
Right. Cannabis was suddenly a huge threat to the DuPonts and other business moguls like William Randolph Hearst.
The printer? Yeah, the guy that owns the Hearst Castle, which is, don't get me started, I hate the Hearst Castle. Really? Who hates the Hearst Castle? Me! Because you go on the tour and they're just talking about how he took these ancient pylons out of Egypt.
He basically robbed ancient treasures and shoved them into a castle that he just hoarded to show off to his rich and famous friends. And then when they couldn't pay the bill on this, they dumped it on the California taxpayers.
Now we own. I did not know that.
I didn't know he just looted and plundered. I thought he just had a really nice house that he built into a castle.
And now we can get tickets and go see it. That's really tacky.
It is really tacky. And because of whatever agreement they have with the state, the film about him that they play you there calls him like this great man.
And then you look into him and you're like, I think you're using that word subjectively. Okay.
Great is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this particular film. Gotcha.
And so William Randolph Hearst owned most of the newspapers and paper mills at that time, and he viewed cannabis as competition. The U.S.
Secretary of Treasury, Andrew Mellon, that name sounds very familiar to me as well.

Yeah, Carnegie Mellon.

So Mellon was heavily invested in the DuPont company and feared cannabis costing him money.

But they were in luck because Mellon's son-in-law was none other than Anslinger.

So Mellon was able to get Anslinger easily appointed to the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which developed the Marijuana Tax Act. So the Treasury Department basically went to war with weed over private money.
So these guys had investments and they were like, let's use government power to protect them. Exactly.
Pretty much. So Hearst, Mellon, Anslinger, and the DuPonts had a lot of reasons to hate cannabis.
And a lot of those reasons were, like you said, financial. So big business is just looking at the bottom line, which candidly, that is reefer madness more than anything else that we've spoken about so far.
That's ridiculous. I had no idea, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Right. Reefer madness.
Business as usual is what we should call that kind of reefer madness, except Henry Ford. But he was in the minority.
DuPont was the number one shareholder in Ford's major competitor, General Motors. Even the Rockefeller family of Standard Oil viewed cannabis soursourced ethanol as competition.
Henry Ford's first Model T used cannabis to make the acrylic skin, upholstery, and ran on cannabis-based ethanol. Were it not for the Marijuana Tax Act, we would today at the very least be seeing a line of Ford cars run on biofuel.
Yeah, for the last 150 years almost as well, which is, I don't even want to go down the rabbit hole of thinking about how different things would have been. Instead of oil rigs spilling in the Gulf, we would just have massive amounts of weed being grown and then turned into fuel and then used for that.
Wow. The course of history would have been changed by this.
We wouldn't have needed as much plastic because we would have hemp plastic vehicles. Wow.
It's almost depressing to think about how different things would have been. Instead of tapping into oil wells, we would have been growing plants which breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen.
So we would possibly not even have the same sort of climate issue as we have now. OK, so besides Ford, was there other opposition to criminalizing cannabis? Yes, of course.
The other opposition to the legislation was from William Woodward from the American Medical Association. What do those guys know? The American Medical Association? Never heard of it.
Was it a bunch of doctors? What he said actually reads rather logical by today because he said no evidence existed that cannabis was dangerous and that outlawing it, quote, loses sight of the fact that future investigations may show that there are substantial medical uses for cannabis, end quote. So he was, of course, defeated.
And on October 2nd, 1937, a man named Samuel Caldwell became the first person in American history to be arrested for selling cannabis. Sorry, Sam.
It would seem you have started a tradition since then as well. Yeah, a big tradition.
23 million people have followed and continue to follow. Here's the thing.
Our government knew all along that cannabis wasn't nearly as bad as the hype. Take the findings of the LaGuardia report.
In 1939, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned a report on the effects of cannabis. The New York Academy of Medicine issued an extensive research report declaring that contrary to earlier research and popular get to the bottom of that one finally, or what? Sadly, that part remains inconclusive.
But Anslinger trashed the report, calling it unscientific. And don't forget, Anslinger had a powerful ally, William Randolph Hearst, who put his media empire to work demonizing cannabis.
Demonizing cannabis and plundering historical artifacts. You got to love that a politician who stands to make a boatload of money off of demonizing something can just take a report from the Academy of Medicine and be like, nah, I don't like that science.
So I'm just going to say it's not scientific because no one's going to say anything. And I also have this very loud microphone publisher guy who's going to say whatever I want him to say.
And they just trash this. At least Hearst wasn't against cannabis for racist reasons, just pure greed.
I'm not actually sure that's better, but these guys are terrible, objectively. American history.
Yeah, man. We got some skeletons in the closet.
In 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Act, which created a mandatory minimum for all drug crimes. In 1956, the Narcotics Control Act passed, which gave stricter mandatory sentences for cannabis-related crimes.
And just like Prohibition did for alcohol, these laws were making cannabis more popular. Is that true? Was it the laws that were making cannabis popular? Because it seems like this just caught fire on its own because it's fun.
Look, there's no way to say for sure, but there's certainly some correlation. When the U.S.
government prohibited alcohol, drinking went up. When they did the same with cannabis, came out of the jazz clubs and into the counterculture.
Enter the 60s. In the 60s, both the counterculture of the hippies and the American soldiers in Vietnam became big fans of cannabis.
Congress then passed the Controlled

Substance Act, which made cannabis a Schedule I drug, incurring all the same harsh penalties as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc., as we talked about at the top of the show. Right.
And that sure makes things unnecessarily difficult because now these people aren't just minor offenders that can be rehabilitated. They're like scary junkies.
Oh, absolutely

And doing scary, serious time

As we'll see in a bit. At this point in our history, we're just getting to the next bad guy in this story of cannabis, Richard Nixon.
Nixon, a bad guy. You don't say this guy.
He was prolific with the crap he did wrong. I got to say I got to hand it to him.
Just one thing after the other. Yeah, he was good at being bad.
In 1972, the Schaefer Commission founded by Richard Nixon found that cannabis was, in fact, not as dangerous as other drugs and recommended it be decriminalized. This, of course, did not play to Nixon's hand because arresting hippies was his way of controlling the protests against the Vietnam War and quashing opposition to his administration.

So instead of decriminalizing cannabis, he did the exact opposite.

He declared a war on drugs and established the Drug Enforcement Administration, or what we call the DEA.

Ah, yes, I feel like we need a dun-dun-dun. Hold on.

This has been decidedly non-cheesy, the episode episode so i wanted to add something like that in there all right so he knew what was right and he did the opposite just for political gain which is classic politician move right there yes it absolutely is and there's this rather damning quote from former nixon domestic policy chief Ehrlichman that pretty much puts everything into perfect focus. He said, quote, you want to know what this, the war on drugs, was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people.
You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. This guy said that on record.
Yeah. Holy moly.
That is so blatant. That is nuts.
I'm shocked. And I didn't think I would be shocked by anything coming out of the Nixon administration.
But that is just as black and white as it gets. We wanted to make being black illegal, but we knew we couldn't get away with it.
So we decided to just associate them with drugs and then arrest people. That is crazy.
God, that is messed up. Next level messed up.
Okay, I used to work in Detroit and I worked with a lot of these people who are in a group called Nation of Islam and they really don't like white people and they really, really don't like Jews. And it was a weird relationship because I didn't understand that and I was just like a normal nice person to them.
And they were also quite nice to me because I was a kid. I was like 18, 17.
And they would explain these crazy conspiracy theories to me. They were like, we know you're not a part of it, but do you know that the CIA drops crack in a black neighborhood? It would be like one thing after the other that was just kookier than the next thing.
And this is one of the things that they had said. And they were just not making this one up.
This one was real. I remember them telling me a lot about this alongside the how bad Jews and white people were.
But this definitely adds a layer of color and credibility over those conversations. Yikes.
Wow. It really happened.
And actually, it gets worse because in 1975, the Supreme Court ruled it permissible to give out sentences for cannabis offenses for up to 20 years in prison. I am legitimately angry about this.
This is horrible. I wonder if you add up how many people are in prison just for cannabis if it's like thousands of years of human lives that we're just paying to incarcerate.
It's crazy. Yeah, that is part of what Biden did to reclassify cannabis as Schedule 3, doing with the reclassification, relooking at a lot of people's sentence for cannabis over the years.
So there might be some amelioration of that, but we'll see. But let me add this in as we're talking about these harsh sentences that existed.
African Americans are arrested for violating cannabis possession laws at nearly four times the rates of whites.

Yet both groups consume cannabis at roughly the same rates. And while I'm on it, even though cannabis is legal in many states, cannabis today is half of all drug arrests.
Someone gets arrested for cannabis every 58 seconds in America. This is despite the fact that the majority of Americans live in a state where cannabis is legal.
My God. Okay.
So I'm looking at something right now. There's a huge page on this called last prisoner project.
They're trying to get people not locked up for marijuana because it's such a wasteful thing. And I can't read the whole page while we're doing the show.
But there's more than 40,000 people locked up at any given time in the US. And they say, we don't know.
It's more than that. But we don't know by how much like it could be 100,000.
And they're just not sure. Because it's really hard to get down to brass tacks on this.
But imagine 40,000 people are in prison and each one of those people cost us like 30 to $40,000. I mean, it's just hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars spent incarcerating these people over decades and all the lives we're in.
And of course, those people's earning potential. I mean, it's just disgusting.
Okay. So I'm, I've gone from sad to angry to even more angry.
Yeah. Look, it is rage inducing.
In 1980, Reagan was elected and conservative values came back into vogue and not like in a lovable Alex P. Keaton kind of way.
But Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, the D.A.R.E. movement and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America became completely mainstream.
Law enforcement cracked down even harder on cannabis with the previously mentioned racist disproportionality. It's morning in America and everyone's in jail for marijuana or weed or cannabis or whatever we're calling it for consistency's sake.
But it really was a new morning in America at that point because attitudes changed at that point and they changed fast. I don't know if it was just the bad hairstyles of the 80s that people were running away from but beginning in the 90s a real pushback against these draconian cannabis laws began to flower and bloom exactly thank you and in 1996 california passed proposition 215 the first state to outlaw the cultivation of cannabis became the first state to re-legalize it, medically in this case.
What a turnaround for California. No surprise, I guess, California turned nice and blue from, what was it, 1913, when they made it illegal, to 1996.
Yeah. And now it's turning nice and green.
Yes, nice and green. Look, and we all know what happened next, because since then, 38 states allow medical cannabis and of those, 23 allow recreational use.

OK, so this might seem a little late in the show for this, but I have to do it. What is cannabis?

Everybody knows in a broad sense what it is, but what makes a person high is probably what I should be asking.

OK, so actually, the more appropriate question is, what are we?

It sounds like we're getting all Sam Harris over here, but okay. Let's see what you got.
Okay. Maybe it's more, why does cannabis interact with us the way it does? Yes.
The scientific route. I can dig it.
Let's do it. Okay, so the answer is the endocannabinoid system.

I feel like I've heard about that maybe in a biology class or a dispensary or something.

What is the endocannabinoid system?

It's like a human body anatomy thing. Right, exactly.
It's a biological system in the body that helps regulate and balance key bodily functions like mood, energy, balance, and appetite.

It runs completely through our brains and our bodies.

So it's like... in the body that helps regulate and balance key bodily functions like mood, energy, balance,

and appetite. It runs completely through our brains and our bodies.
So it's like the nervous system receptors and all that stuff? Yes. The endocannabinoid system regulates functions through naturally occurring cannabinoids produced inside the human body.
These natural cannabinoids interact with cannabinoid receptors of which there are many.

So I'm with you so far.

So cannabinoids interact with cannabinoid receptors of which there are many.

So I'm with you so far.

So cannabinoids also exist in other places in nature, such as cacao, which is why dark chocolate makes us feel a certain way.

It's interacting with our cannabinoid receptors.

So is being a chocoholic kind of a real thing?

Yes, it actually is.

In fact, I have my six-month chip from Chocoholics Anonymous. Sadly, they made it out of chocolate and I ate it.
So I'm back to my week one chip. Look, cacao isn't the only plant that produces cannabinoids.
Yeah, is it cannabis? Correct. Cannabis has over 100 different cannabinoids.
But for our purposes today, we're just going to be talking about the big two, THC and CBD. So I'm pretty sure everyone's heard of those.
If you listen to podcasts and you haven't heard about CBD, I'm envious that you haven't heard 10,000 commercials for CBD. I won't run them on my show, but I hear them all the time.
Yeah. That's interesting.
And look, that's CBD, but I'm pretty sure that everyone knows what THC is. It's tetrahydrocannabinol.
And everyone knows that THC or tetrahydrocannabinol is the one that gets you high. And CBD or cannabidiol is the one with purported health benefits.
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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Maybe it's just in California or maybe I'm being targeted by CBD ads because I'm in California.
I don't know. There's a corner coffee shop here downtown.
You can order a freaking latte with CBD at the coffee shop and there's pet CBD that's for sale, I believe, at the same place. It's just everywhere.
Yeah, no, it's CBD is absolutely ubiquitous in California. You probably can get a happy meal with CBD in it, but it's probably actually those products you're talking about.
They're probably not doing anything because you need 100 grams of CBD for your body to absorb any of it. And products like lattes and teas and whatever you're giving your dog that you buy at the store, those tend to have around 20 grams or so.

So are the effects mostly psychosomatic, like placebo kind of thing?

Essentially, that's what my research showed. But I've had a few and it feels like it's more

than psychosomatic. But the point is, our bodies and our brains already have the receptors in

I'm going to go. research showed, but I've had a few and it feels like it's more than psychosomatic.
But the point is our bodies and our brains already have the receptors in place to interact with cannabinoids. The thing is cannabinoids like THC are way more powerful than the ones our bodies make, thousandfold more powerful.
When consumed, psychoactive components are absorbed into the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier. These effects are quick.
Way quicker than, say, drinking a scotch and soda. Cannabis, when smoked, enters the brain within 30 seconds.
Oh man, yeah, cannabis. For when you want to get high and you don't have a second to spare.
But also, that's probably why I don't like smoking it, because one, I use my voice. Smoking things isn't a good idea.
But two, it does not make me feel good. It hits me like a hammer.
It's like I just had five scotch and sodas and it's just all at once. Actually, that's interesting you say that because what kind of high you experience depends on the strain of cannabis you've taken.
Oh, yeah. You're referring to indica and sativa? Yes, of course I am.
And you are right. The two main strands of cannabis are sativa and indica.
There's actually also a strain called ruderalis, but it's so seldomly used that we're just going to skip it. Sativa and indica give different highs because they interact with our brains differently.
Let's start with sativa. Sativa plants are taller than indica and have longer leaves.
Sativa is considered more of a stimulant. Users feel more alert and focused when on it compared to indica.
Sativa is a mood elevator and makes people talkative and some call it a head high. Sativa does this because it's activating receptors in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
Sativa can reduce stress. It is believed to have some pain management properties and gives users a heightened sense of importance towards their activities.
Yeah, that sounds about right. It's interesting you said head high.
What kind of other high is there? I don't get it. There's head high and then there's body high.
Indica is considered a body high. It relaxes you physically.
That's why it's colloquially called Indi-couch. Indica is more of a sedative.
This is because Indica suppresses the amygdala part of the brain and also shuts down the hippocampus. The Indica variety of cannabis can lead to defects in memory.
Indica is often used for sleep disorders and anxiety relief. Ah, relief from the leaf.
I've heard that before.

So these are your options.

You either get talkative

and possibly really annoying

or you turn into a couch potato.

Not anymore, in fact,

because it's actually pretty rare

to find pure sativa or indica these days.

We live in the age of hybrids.

Through plant genetics,

growers have souped up

that boring old cannabis

and crossed sativa and indican to many hybrids that have qualities of both plants. To be honest, for years, I thought that people who said, oh, man, you don't like weed? It gives you crippling anxiety? Oh, you're smoking the wrong stuff, man.
I really thought those were just hippies who could not wrap their mind around the idea that this wasn't for everyone, that me panicking and trying to call my mom about homework I forgot to do in the seventh grade and telling her about how high I was was not a good idea at the time. But maybe they were onto something.
I just really didn't think it was scientific. I thought they were just dorks, weed dorks.
Yeah, the different strains do have different effects, but it's possible that marijuana in general is just not for you. But while we're talking about the genetic manipulation of cannabis, it's worth mentioning that they've also souped up the amount of THC, and that might be what's freaking you out.
Whereas the THC and the cannabis we discussed at the top of the show might have been around the low single digits. Modern cannabis is over 20 and 30 percent THC.
Okay, so it's not your father's pot because I never have a mild reaction to it unless I have an edible that's one milligram and I'm just like, I'm slightly relaxed now. It's been a long, long, long, long time.
But if somebody passes me a J and I try it, I'm just like, I have to go home now and curl up in the fetal position. Not fun.
Yeah, I think we've all been there before. So not your father's pot, like I said, right? It's different now.
No, look, my father's pot was kept in a coffee can above the fridge and was loaded with seeds and stems. He was getting hosed by his dealer for sure.
But as far as modern pot goes, growers have gotten so good at manipulating the plants that there are all new categories of hybrids, type 1, type 2, and type 3. Okay, so what do those types mean? I've never heard of this.
Those refer to the THC to CBD ratio. Type 1 has the most THC and a little CBD.
Type 2 has less THC and more CBD, and type 3 has very little THC, mostly CBD. So I suppose now is a good time to ask, what is CBD actually? I know it's sold everywhere, it's everywhere, we talked about that, but what is the actual compound? Okay, so CBD, just like THC, is a cannabinoid.
Only CBD doesn't get you high, but has other distinct effects. Many believe CBD has many great medical uses.
So you said many believe. Does that mean that there's no solid evidence to back up these claims? Is the science kind of new? What's going on here? Okay.
Let me start by saying that there is a very effective seizure medicine on the market today that is derived from CBD. So yes, CBD has medical merit.
But according to Margaret Haney, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Columbia University Medical Center and leading cannabis researcher, the claims are quickly outpaced by the research. Because cannabis is still a Schedule I drug, though, this stuff is actually really hard to study.
It seems like with the number of people using legal cannabis, the government should just make it easier to study.

Who cares? We need to learn more about this stuff. It's not like people aren't going to use it if it's illegal, for crying out loud.
Well, I mean, most medicinal claims aren't always backed up with hard data. Plus, most of this stuff is just subjective.
As we talked about, the placebo effect. If you think it's helping you sleep, it helps you sleep.
If you think it's calming you down, it calms you down. If you think it's helping you write good poetry.

Yeah, you write really bad poetry. Got it.
Placebo can't help you there. Okay, fine.
That part is true, but nothing can help you there.

But the fact remains that we're in the realm of the brain-body connection, and it's the intersection of things we still have a lot to understand. It's still a murky area for medical science.
Let's list a few proven positives of cannabis and CBD. There's firm evidence suggesting cannabis treats the side effects of chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis, spasticity, chronic pain, sleep disorders, neuropathy, appetite loss, and inflammation.
I got to say, a show fan sent me a bunch of supposedly CBD only gummies that were really mega dosed. And I took one because a show fan sent it to me and it was all wrapped nicely as from a real company.
I thought CBD is mostly a scam, but this is a mega dose. We'll see what happens.
This thing knocked me the hell out, man. I kept them for sleep aids and it is like I can be over caffeinated or anxious or whatever.
And I eat half of one of these things and it absolutely puts me down. Maybe it's not just CBD in there because it is made in California.
So it's not synthetic or whatever, but holy moly. Anyway, those pain relieving and sleep inducing benefits, that's all good stuff in my estimation.
You got a sore neck, you can't sleep, you got back pain, take some CBD, especially if you're like 60 years old. What do you got to lose at that point, right? What do you got to lose? That's all true.
Okay, so now let's talk about the bad things that are associated with weed. Most of the issues we're going to discuss are from chronic use.

And chronic use is considered to be more than twice a week.

Got it.

Chronic use.

Twice a week sounds pretty tame compared to a lot of the stoners I know.

I mean, the guys back in college who were doing this stuff, it was wake and bake all the way through the day.

It was twice before lunch.

Yeah.

No, I know the dudes you're talking about. Actually, okay, little sidebar, because I bet these guys all fell into this.
Before we get on to the really bad things, you won't be surprised to learn this somewhat benign effect of chronic use. Stoner voice and stoner laugh, they're real and documented.
Stoner voice is a real thing? I mean, you hear it on Scooby-Doo, but it's a real thing? All over. The, come on, man.
We all know what I'm talking about. That's an actual medical condition? I'm very surprised.
I thought that was just like de rigueur stoner, and they were leaning into it. No, no, no.
Chronic users experience disruptions in motor circuitry, which leads to stoner voice. It's not just Hollywood.
It's actually real. Wow.
Funny and interesting, but not exactly life-changing negative effects. You just sound dumb and checked out.
You do. True.
But there are real negatives. So let me emphasize this.
The most negative effects from cannabis come from when you smoke. At what point in the brain's development you use cannabis.
That does make more sense. Right.
Let's start with the most crucial, in your mother's womb. It is just a bad idea to smoke pot when you're in your mother's womb.
Okay. So don't be a stoner, baby.
Okay. Little joke aside, that's obviously the mother who's using cannabis.
Experts say it's really bad. THC crosses the placenta.
Fetuses, like adults, have cannabinoid receptors and cannot handle THC or CBD. Experts are very clear on this.
Don't use cannabis or CBD when you're pregnant. Like none.
Zip. Zero.
Yet, shockingly, women do it. That is insane.
I know women out there who think it's harmless or maybe even good for their baby or they do edibles instead of smoking, which is I don't know why they think that's okay. But yeah, that's really bad.
And like I said, the problem is the hype on medical cannabis and CBD is way ahead of the data. So there are literally people telling pregnant women to take a little CBD.
It's just not good. And if you're fortunate enough to have had a mother who didn't use cannabis, you can still screw up your brain, especially for young men, by using cannabis at the other crucial time in brain development, youth.
Yeah, but that's obviously when young men try cannabis. Is it just men or is it men and women? It's got to be young men and women.
Male brains and female brains develop differently. Young men's brains, it's the prefrontal cortex that develops more slowly, which actually is where one of the things is that we can run the movie forward and look at consequences of our actions.
That's in the prefrontal cortex, which explains why a young man not having a fully developed prefrontal cortex do stupid things. I certainly can speak for myself.
And it is in youth that most people try cannabis. And I mean, it's fun when you're young to go out and experiment.
And in fact, I did it. Full disclosure, that's exactly when I was

trying cannabis. These effects we're talking about are far worse for chronic use.
It can lead to depression and anxiety. In fact, chronic cannabis use makes people four times more likely to experience depression, especially amongst younger people.
Studies show that early use of cannabis on a developing mind can lead to psychosis at later ages. Psychosis.
Yikes, that is terrible. I've heard about that, but you never know what's hype and what's not.
But yeah, that's not good. Yeah.
And for those who use cannabis as young as 12 to 14, the probability of schizophrenic episodes more than doubles. Ooh, so it sounds like reefer madness in those instances is real.
Do experts understand why that's the case? That's really scary. Schizophrenia is no joke at all.
Studies show that adolescent cannabis use accelerates the thinning of the prefrontal cortex and gray matter in particular. The more cannabis used, the more impaired those neural circuits are.
And we talked about the prefrontal cortex and how important that is. Yikes.
So basically, say no to drugs at least until your prefrontal cortex fully forms. Yeah, I mean, I feel hypocritical saying it, but that's a good idea.
But here's the good news. If you're over 25, it's all good.
Of course, smoking or vaping, anything, comes with dangers, and chronic use is never a good idea. But here's the good news.
If you're over 25, it's all good. Of course, smoking or vaping

anything comes with dangers and chronic use is never a good idea. But these dangers, the ones

we just talked about, they cease to be as serious. But I should mention that for people who are

predisposed to mental health issues or violence tendencies, using cannabis can actually trigger

these things. If you have these predisposed tendencies, you should never use cannabis.
But this is a low percentage of people. If you're over 25, it's generally safe to smoke a little pot.
In moderation, I suppose. And that is good because adults are going to be smoking for the foreseeable future as weed becomes more and more legal.
All right. So here is something that I've wondered about.
Is there a sobriety test for cannabis? Is there going to be a weed breathalyzer? No, probably never, because the reason the breathalyzer works with alcohol is because alcohol is water soluble. Therefore, the amount of alcohol in the bloodstream or in our breath, it's a very good indicator of just how impaired you are.
But cannabis is lipophilic, meaning it lives in the fat cells and there is just no good sobriety test. So it will be hard to enforce as states legalize cannabis.
But that one minor problem is insignificant compared to all the good those tax revenues will do for those states, which that's really the good news about cannabis. I have to imagine those taxes have the potential to do a lot of good.
When you go to a dispensary and you buy legal marijuana, it's like 25 percent tax on what you buy. Yeah.
No, it's very high, as it should be. Right.
I'm all for that. And some of those cannabis tax revenue goes to education-related initiatives like school construction, school food programs, before and after school enrichment programs, and public libraries, environmental cleanup, law enforcement, and drug prevention programs, among actually a lot of others.
That is the promise of legal cannabis, though, right? The tax revenue. Love that tax revenue from drugs is going into drug prevention programs.
That is some delicious bureaucratic irony right there. Yeah.
And there's also the unseen revenue as well. All the money we're not spending on enforcement, court dates and in court and incarceration.
Look, I know I've come off like a bit of a Nancy Reagan in this episode, but I believe the government actually has limited rights when it comes to adults doing what they want to do in the sanctuary of their own homes. Ultimately, I think the war on drugs has been a complete failure.
Not that surprising since it started with false pretenses and racist motivations, which I didn't even realize. And I think no one's going to argue the war on drugs has been a success.
That's for sure. I absolutely agree.
I think adults should be free to do drugs or free to not do drugs. But education, that is the key.
Thanks, Michael. Appreciate that.
Thank you, Jordan. This has been a real joint effort.
Okay. All right.
I'm going to let you get away with one last poll, which we started at the top. We're not going to be punny.
You got one. That was good.
You smoked it. Thank you so much for listening.
Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Show notes on the website.
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Want to master the art of communication? Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, reveals key strategies for enhancing your connections and conversations in this enlightening podcast episode. Why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly? And then there's times when I talk to my wife and like, we cannot connect with each other.
And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right? Like it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves. Looping for understanding.
And it has three steps. The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question.
Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words. And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right.

And the reason why this is so powerful is because it proves that I'm listening to you.

It's really easy to stop thinking about how we're communicating.

It's really easy to stop thinking about what's going on until we get in the habit of it.

Communication isn't something that happens just one-to-one. Sometimes it's one-to-many.
But the same principles still hold up. You're still having practical or emotional or social conversations.
Laughter is actually one of the non-linguistic ways that we connect with other people. There's been studies that show that in about 80% of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to something funny.
It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you. Nobody is born a super communicator.
That's what feels tiring, is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't. Right, this isn't a behavior, this isn't a personality type.
This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it.

Learn how to categorize conversations, improve active listening, and overcome communication

barriers to build stronger relationships.

Tune in and transform your interactions into meaningful connections on episode 963 of The

Jordan Harbinger Show.