The FUTURE of Recreational Drugs & Their POTENTIAL Could Change Your LIFE | David Nutt

Medical cannabis is is going to be the big revolution in the over the next 20 years if we use it properly. David Nutt, welcome to the show. Good to be with you. I'm really excited to talk to you today. I'm super intrigued by drugs in general, by the brain, by the way that we can manipulate our brain chemistry through drugs, and your latest book Cannabis makes a pretty compelling case for all of the interesting things that marijuana can do for us, and I'm curious. Why do you think like when I look at the stack of things that you talk about in the book that cannabis does, controls, may potentially help with in the human body experience, it's a it's a long list. Why is cannabis so active? Well, of course we discovered that in recent years because the brain makes its own molecules like cannabis. It makes several of them. We've identified one called anandamide, one called 2-AG, and it turns out that those chemicals work on receptors, the same receptors as THC, the active ingredient in cannabis works on. And and it was a mystery for 20-odd years when we cannabis receptors were discovered, no one had a clue what was going on, but turns out that the brain makes its own cannabis molecules, and it makes them in a very special way. It makes them from nerve membranes. So, when nerves are activated, they release some of the membranes into the fluid around the and they get converted into these these cannabinoid substances, and they usually go backwards. And so they affect the nerve that's releasing the neurotransmitter. So, they're a very novel form of what we call feedback inhibition. What is feedback inhibition? Right. So, for instance, let's put it this way. If you a nerve a nerve fires and the way in which nerve communicates one nerve to the next is not by electricity, it's by chemicals. Mhm. They're called neurotransmitters. So, for instance, if a nerve and and most of the a large proportion of the nerves in the brain actually release a chemical called glutamate. So, glutamate comes out of one nerve ending, goes across the synapse, hits the other nerve ending, stimulates it, the nerve starts to fire. As it starts to fire, it releases these molecules which turn into these endocannabinoids which come back across the synapse and turn off the firing. So, they it helps regulate, like a thermostat in a house, it helps regulate the functioning of that particular synapse or that whole complex of synapses. I don't know if this is connected, but one of the more interesting things that I've heard you talk about with psychedelics is that part of what you discovered or has been discovered in the research is that when you take a psychedelic, it's not activating areas of your brain, it's actually turning off areas of your brain. Is that Is that a similar kind of function that we're seeing here where the inhibition of something is creating this I mean, I guess depending on where you are, sort of euphoric feeling that marijuana can bring about or is this completely different? That's a great question and the answer is it's it's complicated. One of the real paradoxes when we discovered that psychedelics actually turned down brain activity we scratched our head and then we looked around to see what other drugs did that. And And interestingly, the one drug that does not do that is cannabis. It increases brain activity. So, I am I have used marijuana. My wife is a big fan. I'm a sort of but it feels like I'm sort of collapsing inside of myself that I can get lost in a single thought. That that one thought just becomes so all consuming and not in an unpleasant way, but just that I'm I'm lost in that thought. So, it feels like less of my brain is active. So, what part of the brain is actually lighting up that gives that sort of all consuming sensation? Well, the answer is I think think we know because despite the fact that cannabis has been both widely used for for for many many decades and also has been a medicine in America now for 20 years. There's been very few studies on cannabis brain imaging. But, what we think is happening is that at one level, it is working like psychedelics. But, not at the metabolic level, but in the circuit level. So, we think that the circuits are similar. And what what we know happens with psychedelics and we've got less data with cannabis, but what we know happens is that the the normal mechanism that basically tells your brain what to do, there's a network in your brain called the default mode network and that that basically drives your current thinking. And and makes you who we what you are. It's where your sort of sense of self is. That gets switched off to some extent by the cannabis and by psychedelics. And and that switching off that basically detaches you from your normal routine daily thinking, the standard way in which your brain works and that allows you to then think differently. Now, in your case, thinking differently means that you get interested in a particular topic and you get deep deep deep deep into it. In other people, it's different. In other people, the mind kind of opens and people get sort of broader sense of being more out there, more communicating, you know, more part of a of a the outside world. And why there are individual variations in this is completely unknown at present. It's It's probably got something to do with personality, with interests, with um what you were doing the day before. Do you think it has anything to do with enzymes? Be And I'll I'll explain the question and then you can either shoot the theory down or let me know, but uh so, the first time I had no interest in trying marijuana. My wife finally convinces me to give it a shot. And I try it and I'm like, this is the worst experience ever. This sucks. There is nothing interesting about this. I feel like I just want to lay on the couch. My head felt heavy. I would be like, wait, we're still watching TV. It was like somebody was pressing play and pause on my brain. It was horrible. And my wife was like, you know, that's interesting that you say that. She was like, when I first started smoking, I had some kind of like sense like that, but she's like, it's not like that for me anymore. And I remember thinking, that doesn't make sense. Like, how could it be different for you now than it was in the beginning? So, anyway, years go by, she gets me to try it again. I have the same sensation. This is lame, not interesting. Years go by, she gets me to try it again. And that time I had a body high. Now, that is a whole different experience, which we'll get into later. But that prompted me to want to try it again. And so, then all of a sudden, because I tried it a week later, it felt completely different. And I was like, oh my god, she's right. And so, I was thinking of it kind of like alcohol, where, if I understand alcohol metabolism correctly, you get to the point where you have the enzymes that can break the alcohol down, so you're able to get it through your system quicker. It takes more to get you that same level of intoxicated. And so, I was like, is there something my it really feels like my body now handles it very differently if I smoke sort of with only a week in between? What's happening there? Well, that probably isn't it's probably not metabolism. It's probably some kind of adaptive changes at the level of the receptor. Interesting. you're probably and and and this you raise, you know, again, really fundamental question which is almost unstudied. Often when people start smoking cannabis, they do get very weird experiences and they often find very unpleasant. They often get very anxious. And then over time, that goes away. But then over time, something else happens and people begin to get more sensitive to it in a different way and they get more paranoid. And and that's actually one reason why quite a lot of people give up smoking cannabis in their 20s and 30s because of the the paranoid feelings begin to develop. And so, there are almost certainly two separate processes going on. There's a process where the receptors or or the circuits begin to adapt so that they they get less less worried in if you can use that kind of term for a circuit by the changing brain function and that then allows you to engage with the positives of that function cuz you're not so concerned about the change. But then over time, something else happens probably in a different circuit or different neurotransmitter system which then turns on probably something like the dopamine system which then leads to paranoia. So, you've got to remember, you know, cannabis can affect pretty much every other neurotransmitter system in the brain. Yeah, that's In fact, I want to go back to that. It seems to be impacting some sort of master regulatory system. Well, one I think it would be useful. Your book talks a lot about seizures. But you also and and the role that cannabis can play there which is pretty extraordinary. I had not heard about the connection between cannabis and seizures. Uh Um and my first interaction, the first time I ever saw somebody smoke weed, it it like put a um like my brain took it down as like there's something here because this guy would he had tremors, like really bad tremors. Like the amount that my hands are shaking right now, if you're watching YouTube, you'll see uh if you're just listening to this, my hands are shaking a lot. And you could hear it in his voice, like he had that like if you're really nervous and your voice is quivering, he sounded like that all the time. If he smoked, like literally 6 minutes later, you can watch his tremors stop and then he could talk normally. And I was like, "What just happened?" It was at one point I actually thought he was [ __ ] with me. I was like, "How's it possible?" So, as walk us through a few of the things that you enumerate in the book that cannabis does. So, we've got seizures, um weight loss. Like there one, you've got you you talk about this in the book, you've got if people smoke, they tend not to gain too much weight, smoke weed, not not even tobacco, which is a whole different thing. But they smoke weed, they tend not to gain too much weight, but they also don't lose too much weight and it can be used on that side. That's exactly right. You have that's a very good example, isn't it? Of an adaptation. The cannabis helps it paradoxically when you get the munchies, you don't get diabetes because that somehow things it normalizes the biological processes relating to appetite. All right, my friend, I have a big announcement. My incredible and talented wife Lisa is about to launch her new book, Radical Confidence. In it, she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear, sometimes a lot of fear. Now, let me tell you, nobody knows Lisa better than me, but when I read Radical Confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big, exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the TV shows that she wanted to watch or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams, it was brutal for me. I would never say though that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it, but I will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut, find her voice, and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things. So, while it hurts me to know the dark place that Lisa went through, I really am excited for people who are going through something similar right now to read this book. Radical Confidence is an instruction manual for how to become the hero of your own life even when you're scared to death. Look, I know better than just about anybody how easy it is to get off track in life or to just not have yet found your calling. And it's even easier for people to feel so insecure and unprepared that they don't even want to pursue the things that they want. But what Lisa shows people in Radical Confidence is that the radical part is that you can accomplish extraordinary things even when you feel fear. That's what Radical Confidence is. Being afraid and unsure and having a toolkit that allows you to still make massive progress. Pre-order your copy today because if you act now, you can claim the bonuses that Lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com. They're only available if you pre-order, so act now. Then, once you've done that, we'll get back to today's episode. All right, guys. Read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life. Peace out. When you get people that are really pro cannabis, they make it sound like a panacea. And as an adaptogen that's very interesting and I don't know if there are other drugs that function in a similar vein, but um is marijuana a panacea or are there limits like what's your general take? Medical cannabis is is going to be the big revolution in over the next 20 years if we use it properly. In the same way as in the last 20 years the big revolution has been in immunotherapy. But medical cannabis is a way way cheaper than the new immunotherapy. And potentially as for many disorders as effective. The big problem and and this is particularly what is an American and Canadian problem really is is that the opportunity's already almost been missed because so many people are using medical cannabis, but it's still illegal under federal law that until very recently you couldn't get federal funding to study the medical benefits. So you you've genuinely missed a huge opportunity in the states for by having this complete mismatch between what the states are doing and what the government wants you to do. But hopefully at some point that will change and then we would start doing very systematic analysis on a range of different disorders. And and actually can I just tell you that's one of the things we're doing in Britain. In Britain we have we hardly use medical cannabis at all because we have socialized medicine. And the NHS is very is and the doctors in the NHS are resistant to cannabis. And we can't therefore go out and buy it like you can in the in the you know, we we don't have the that that that facility that cuz we you know, you have recreational cannabis in many of your states. We don't have any at all. So what what my charity Drug Science did was we set up a registry. We we worked we found some cannabis suppliers. We found some doctors who wanted to prescribe outside of the NHS. We brought the price of medical cannabis down to be equivalent to what people would buy on the illicit market. And and we've given we've set up this large database of people who are getting medical cannabis privately. We've got 2 and 1/2 thousand people in that database now. Of which half of them are using it for pain. So that's 1/5 of the total number of people in the world who have had measures of pain taken on cannabis. And 44% of the people who were using opioid painkillers before they went into this study have stopped using them. 44% nearly half. That's absolutely transformational. So one of the interesting things we've done in the last year again through this charity Drug Science is is to evaluate different forms of cannabis for pain. And we and we've compared them with other drugs like antidepressants, gabapentinoids, and opioids. And also the simple painkiller called ibuprofen. And we use the special technique called multi-criteria decision analysis which allows us to properly evaluate both the the benefits in terms of pain relief and in terms of quality of life. And also the benefits in terms of safety. And when we did that we discovered that the best overall product for pain relief was actually a combination of THC and cannabidiol. And that's actually what I wanted to say cuz we have patients involved in this analysis as well. And this is more than opioids? Oh much more. Much more than twice twice twice as good as opioid. Is that though just based on the danger of opioids or is there actually sort of close proximity to pain management as well. Bit of both. So, that combination of CBD and THC, so you're looking at maybe, you know, 10 to 20 30 mg of CBD and 5 to 10 mg of THC, that produces pain relief which is actually greater than that of opioids in in chronic pain, not acute pain, not not surgical pain, but with people with chronic pain, opioids aren't very good in chronic pain. Cuz you get tolerance and Can you Can you differentiate between the two types of pain at a nerve level? Like can Could I look at a scan of some kind and say, "Oh, this is acute pain or this is chronic pain?" Um That's not yet possible, but what is clear that chronic pain When pain starts, you know, you break your leg You have your leg amputated and you get run over by a truck, your leg gets crushed. Right? It's a lot of pain. Opiates good for that. You cut the leg The leg gets destroyed, you cut the leg off, you amputate. What happens then? Eventually, the pain starts to recite itself in the brain. So, this chronic neuropathic pain becomes a brain disorder rather than a a what do you call it? A traditional pain disorder from the nerve endings in the periphery. And when it gets embedded in the brain, opiates don't work particularly well cuz they tend to work at the level of the spinal cord. But but cannabinoids work pretty well. They work as pretty much as well as the antidepressants and the gabapentinoids. And and they're also better than um the opioids. But they have quite a high side effect burden, whereas cannabidiol THC is it came out higher on our scores because it's very well tolerated as well as very effective. Well, that's really interesting. So, does that tie back to what you were saying at the beginning where you get this quieting of the nerve signal when you're um taking in I guess it's both THC and CBD, but is that the mechanism that you suspect is at work? I think that's the mechanism at work for the THC. We're still it's still a bit of a mystery why cannabidiol helps there. I think it it might simply be that it makes the THC more focused in its action, so it takes away some of the unwanted effects of THC. It may have an effect like so. It's almost I mean there's almost zero almost zero research on the brain effects of cannabidiol. It's really interesting. So, you had a conversation with Peter Attia that I liked very much and one of the things that Peter brought up that you said really resonated with you is this idea that if you're taking a drug and you have to like take it forever to keep getting the benefits, that's less ideal than something that you take and it actually creates a long-lasting change. What Peter called it changes your trait. So, I have these obsessive thoughts. I'm having to intake marijuana to keep it at bay to make it manageable, but are there things that I can do in certain circumstances like psychedelics where I might be able to completely disrupt that pattern? Well, that's what we believe and in fact we're doing a study now of of psilocybin in chronic pain trying to see if we can as you suggest break down those repetitive thinking processes which have become over learned and and so you can see pain as a thinking habit in the same way as twisting your hair or picking your nails as a motor habit, yeah. And that study is about to start, so in a couple of years we'll be able to answer your question. Hello my friend. You know that I believe success requires you to see failure as the ultimate learning tool. Success requires you to be disciplined and gritty and to never ever quit on your dreams. I say all of that because one thing is certain, the road to achieving your goal is not smooth or linear. I wish it was, but it's not. It's going to be bumpy, sometimes scary. Some days you'll take two steps forward and slide 10 steps back. And that's why success also requires you to know how to pull yourself out of a rut and get unstuck fast. Life is short. You can't be messing around with your goals. You've got to make progress every single day. So, I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University called How to Get Unstuck, which you can watch for free with the link on your screen or by clicking below. When you join me for that free preview of that workshop from Impact Theory University, I'm going to teach you my strategy for how to understand exactly where you need to be going, how to identify the obstacle that's blocking you, and the best way to make the most progress towards that goal, and keep your momentum. All right, click that link and let's get to work. All right, I'll see you on the inside. Uh psychedelics, as we talked about earlier, are turning things off, not on. Do we have insight into what exactly it is that they're turning off that creates this It's like we're seeing things that we would have seen maybe as a child, an an infant, and it's sort of bringing us back to a more primal I don't think you ever use that word, but what what are we shutting off? So, yes, it's the way the brain works is uh to create hypotheses. Well, if let's take the example of vision, cuz that's the easiest one to explain. Your brain is not a camera. You're looking at me now, but you're not your brain isn't taking photos of me. What your brain is doing is analyzing the lights that's coming from from me into your eye or from your from your computer into your eye. And then it's turning that those different light signatures into electrical impulses. Electrical impulses are then going into your back of your brain, the visual cortex, which is a large chunk of brain, as you know, it's like a bigger than an orange. And it's going to different parts of those cuz different parts of your brain deal with different parts of the vision visual system. And and then over over period of multiple layers of analysis, you you go from between the very primary electrical impulses to you start your brain start to construct multiple levels what it ends up being an image that you see. And when you're a baby, it's all buzzing and and complicated and your brain isn't very good at making hypotheses cuz it's never made any before. It hasn't met things. But as you as you start to grow up, you start to make these ideas that something out there, you know, there's your mother, there's a chair. So you might see a chair you know, you something sticking out, you know, a wooden thing. And then you might touch it and discover it that oh, that's right, that's a solid thing. And then your brain learns okay, what I thought was there is there. And that process of gradually creating a whole series of estimates of the world and then testing them and retesting them and is actually why the brain is the most efficient computer ever known. It's 10 times more efficient at computing things than the best computers we have today because cuz it it's much cleverer. It makes these estimates and when it's worked out what something is, it doesn't bother to re-update them. It doesn't bother to spend energy repeating it. It just knows it's there and carries on. Now, when you take that process of building up requires interactions in the visual system, probably 10 billion neurons are working to make a visual image. When you give a psychedelic, the neurons in the brain the visual system which connect the color center to the movement center to the darkness center to the shape center to make an image. Those neurons are disturbed by the psychedelic and don't exactly know why they got so many receptors for psychedelics, but they do have. And and and that when you disturb those neurons, you can't reconstruct the full image. So what you see as these Christmas tree lights, these what we call elemental hallucinations under psychedelics. You're actually seeing the very early first stage processes of visual reconstruction when the impulses from the eye first get into the visual cortex. We know from physiological experiments in in in in frogs for instance that the way the brain works is to construct simple shapes, squares, circles, spider webs. Simple colors and it puts them together. So one of the most remarkable things about psychedelics are putting you back to seeing what what you used to see when you're a very very young baby before your brain learned to make the these simple images into much more complicated ones. And I find that really kind of appealing because it's You obviously can't remember seeing them as children because you didn't have the memory system, but now you can you can infer what what it's like to to start seeing things afresh. That's really intriguing. So I've never done Well, so I've microdosed psilocybin, but always micro, so I've never had any hallucinations or anything. But my understanding from hearing people talk about it is that they will see and sometimes interact with like a dragon or a flower comes to life. And so it isn't, at least as they've related to me, it isn't just like sort of shapes and things like that. It does seem like they're putting something on it. Um and I don't know how much you get into, you know, the collective unconscious or, you know, how many Like, are those things that we just are carrying with us, or it's an overlay? There's some sort of reversion to what you how you would see as an infant just getting sight for the first time, but there's also this sort of layer of abstract meaning that's laid over it. Like, what's that interaction like? A really important question. So, yes, so there's much more to a psychedelic trip than just seeing Christmas tree lights. I mean, they're pleasant, but there's And And but people often see much, much more complicated kinds of imagery. And also they have a low whole range of other experiences, like that their body might dissolve, and they might go to heaven, and you know, go into another universe, or different dimensions. Or actually, we don't understand why some people have different kinds of of content. I think we do understand that the that the the change from normal consciousness to to psychedelic consciousness does involve perturbations across the whole of the brain. Our imaging studies, particularly with LSD, show that the powerful, really complicated, rich, dream-like hallucination, visual hallucinations, and often beliefs that people have under LSD when their eyes closed, they're due to the brain becoming hyperconnected. So, normally, the visual system is just embedded in the visual system. But under psychedelics, because you break down the default mode network, the visual system can then connect everywhere in the brain. And that contributes to things like synesthesia, where, you know, you might, you know, see sounds, or It's already connected, right? It's not like the connections happen during the trip, but there's a the inhibition is shut down, and so now they can actually communicate. Exactly. The whole point human brain development But why do Why do we have a brain after, you know, several billion years of evolution? It's it's come from a food targeting process. It wants to get out get you out there and get food. And of course, the second main role of the brain is to find mates so you can reproduce. Okay? Uh now everything else on top of that is kind of incidental cuz the brain you know the brain really just wants to make sure there's another brain in the next baby. So you get big enough to have reproduce have a baby. Right? So the brain it's become really efficient at doing the things it needs to do. Uh and and that's the problem. The default mode in in many ways creates that efficiency. But it also because it it distorts it and it it limits the capacity of for many people to do other things. I mean there are people who don't there are people you know who do have spontaneous visions. There are artists who see the world in a very different way and and can create you know completely new ways of thinking. But for most of us the brain is a pretty boring it creates a pretty warm world because it's that's the most efficient thing to do. Just do the same old thing and then pass it on to the next generation. And psychedelics break down those habitual processes which limit our vision and limit our vision in the sense of opportunity rather than just seeing things. That's a really intriguing way to think about psychedelics that it's one the connectivity and I saw an image that you um put up where it's like here's what you know the normal level of connection or communication maybe is a better way to say it. The normal level of communication and then here and it was like all these extra um lines of communication. This is what it looks like during psychedelics. And as somebody who and this is your your really intriguing uh me around trying psychedelics because I consider myself just obsessed with hyper efficiency. And something has changed in me as I've gotten older. And I do wonder if in getting more and more and more efficient, if I'm not narrowing something wonderful out of existence. And so, yeah, that's that's a very intriguing idea. That was originally why I microdosed was I had heard that microdosing makes you feel more creative. And so, I just I wanted to try anything that was going to make me feel more creative. Tried it, nothing. Tried marijuana, nothing. They don't make me feel more creative. Um marijuana does shut down my default mode network. I think that's a perfect way of explaining it. But um I don't feel increased connections. Now, the only thing that I do feel like does that is meditation. I refer to that state as calm and creative, where I feel like weird areas of my brain that don't normally talk start talking. Well, exactly. I mean, that A week after we published our first the first paper on the altered state of psilocybin consciousness, a group from Yale, uh Jed Brewer's group from Yale, wrote to us and said, "Look, that's just what happens when people go into transcendental meditation. They switch off the default We thought, "Wow, that is truly remarkable." The difference is, of course, you know, it is quite hard, you know, you've got to get a lot of practice to switch off that uh is it to get into a transcendental state with meditation. But if you do, you're actually pretty close to that the same state as on psychedelics. You are you're you're you're disabling, and that's what you're trying to do in meditation, you're trying to disable that inner mind, the default mode network, you're trying to disable it to allow you to think differently, because it doesn't want you to think differently. It just wants you to go to work and get up and have break- you know what I mean? And you've got you've got to fight with it to disable it with meditation, and psychedelics do it a bit more easily. It's really, really interesting. Talk to me about safety. So, you rank drugs by order of safety. Anybody listening to this conversation could probably um take away that, you know, we don't think there's any danger in all of this. Is there danger in this? Is there danger in marijuana? Is there danger in psychedelics? Um yeah, how worried should people be? Well, there's danger in all drugs. When we look at the deaths from drugs in your country, in my country, tobacco, cigarettes are way at the top of the list followed by alcohol and then then followed by opiates. And at the very bottom of the list are psychedelics. And and so forth. takes into account like the totality. So, I would In fact, I'm I'm curious if you had the same number of people smoking, the same number cigarettes, the same number of people smoking marijuana, the same number of people doing opiates, like then does it does it still come out the same or are there some that are just way more deadly? Like is marijuana 10 times more deadly or is just way fewer people smoke it? No, no, no, no. Well, it's the other way around. Fentanyl is 10 times more deadly. In terms of harm from the drug to the user fentanyl other strong opiates like heroin crystal meth they are the drugs that kill the individual. Uh lower down alcohol, tobacco and at the very bottom drugs like magic mushrooms like LSD, smoke MDMA they have much lower rates of harm to the individual. Now, cannabis is a bit between the two. Cannabis is less harmful than tobacco but more harmful than psychedelics. And and that's really because people tend to use cannabis much more than use psychedelics. Most people don't use psychedelics more than a few times in their life. And if you try to use it a lot, you get tolerance so it doesn't work. And so it's it's no point. Whereas a lot of people who use cannabis do use it maybe for 10 or 20 or 30 years. And the more you use a drug, the more chance there is of it causing harm. And what is the mechanism of harm for a cannabis? So, very few deaths. Okay, I mean, older men with cardiovascular heart disease, hypertension, it does put your blood pressure up. You know, and they get, you know, you can see that with the red eyes. So, there are people, you know, who occasionally get very stoned and then a heart attack or heart attack. They might have had a heart attack anyway, but it's not good for people with heart disease. Um Uh um that's the main harm. But, then the other harms as in terms of dying, in terms of other harms, there's dependence. If you get dependent, well, it can be um really quite upsetting and quite disabling to your life. So, over the last 10 years, we've done an an enormous imaging study. We've studied uh over a hundred people with opiate and cocaine addiction and alcohol addiction. And and compared their brains to with people who haven't had such an addiction. And before we started, my researcher said, "Well, what are we going to do about cannabis?" Cuz everyone smokes cannabis. What happens if they smoke cannabis? And I said, "Well, what we're going to do is we're going to divide the group, the drug-using group up into those who use cannabis and those who don't. Cuz if you get rid of cannabis users, you have the number." And I'm I said, "I'm going to bet you that the cannabis users have better brains than the non-cannabis users." And I was right. Interesting. Cannabis use is associated bet that? Well, because cannabis is an adaptogen. Cannabis is an anticonvulsant. Cannabis is possibly neuroprotective against brain trauma. I bet it I bet that because I it just seemed to me that from what I knew about cannabis 10 years ago, it was likely to be probably neuroprotective. And what was the the mechanic that you used to judge that? How how did we say it's healthier? Brain volume. Brain volume. Brain volume. So alcoholics shrink their the brain alcoholics brain shrinks as a result of the toxicity of alcohol and cannabis protects against that. But since then Why then is weed known for like oh you're you forget it's bad for your memory? Is that just a cliche that isn't true or is there something there? No no of course it's there's truth in that if you're stoned all the time yeah you you're intoxicated in terms of alcohol you're intoxicated all the time it it will impair memory it will impair but it doesn't produce an enduring damage to the brain like alcohol and alcohol is the only brain the only drug you can say on a x-ray look that's for a CT scan or a MRI scan that's the that's a damaged brain. Even even in a cocaine and crystal don't damage the brain the same way alcohol does. Whoa. It's recent study out of Harvard and School of Public Health they looked at people who drink alcohol and with or without cannabis and they looked at liver cirrhosis. The people who use both have much much lower rates of cirrhosis of the liver than the people who just use alcohol. And they're now doing trials it may be that cannabis can protect or treat alcoholic liver cirrhosis it may be an adaptogen in the liver. Okay that's this is where it starts to just seem too good to be true. So if and I know that it hasn't been studied so you're going to be guessing here but when we think of it being an adaptogen in the liver what I know about cirrhosis and maybe I'm just wrong but that it's scarring. So I'm curious as to what your guess would be on the so we understand the in inhibition where cannabis is going to trigger the release of a signaling molecule that's going to tell the nerve to stop firing but if we're punishing our liver by drinking too much alcohol we're running so much toxins through it that it begins to scar. What mechanism would the cannabis be using to protect? That's so confusing. Cirrhosis is caused by uh the production of what are called free radicals from the breakdown of alcohol. And um cannabis, particularly cannabidiol, soaks up free radicals. It's anti-inflammatory. Wow. Man, okay. So, we You said at the top of the thing that we should have been looking at this stuff all along and that we've missed a lot of insights. Make some predictions for me, knowing full well that you're a scientist and so these are hypotheses and you're more than happy to see them disproven. Um but where do you think like as we spend, let's say, the next decade really looking at this stuff, what are we going to find? Well, we're going to find that medical cannabis is uh the preferred treatment for chronic pain, for quite a few forms of anxiety, for people whose PTSD hasn't been remedied by MDMA or or psychedelics, for people with chronic inflammatory gut disease like Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis. A lot of people are using it and getting benefits there. We're probably going to find it's also got enormous utility in some cancers. One of the most horrible aspects of the of the um bans on cannabis was that there was a systematic attempt to stop the publication of papers showing that cannabis had anti-cancer ability. ability. Back in 19, I think back in 1978, the most senior lung physician in America had a study which showed that cannabis smoking had less lung cancer than the normal population. What? because the I was literally going to ask you about lung cancer. But didn't you say that it it seems to have, I mean if I'm inferring correctly from what you said, that it would be protective, not curative, but protective in some way in that you if you are smoking cannabis, you fall into a cohort of people who are less likely, could be correlation, but are less likely to have lung cancer. Is that true? Yeah, that was that was that was the the that was the epidemiological data. It's never been trialed as a as a protective thing. But what we say and what I say in Britain, in Britain most people who smoke cannabis smoke it with tobacco. I say don't do that. Do what the Americans do and smoke it neat, but it's it's harder for us to get neat cannabis here because it's illegal. So we you know, so but the it's to my mind it's none of this is surprising given what we know subsequently. We didn't know then, but what we know now about the the ability of of cannabidiol etc. to have this this anti-inflammatory and and possibly anti-cancer properties. It needs to be tested. We need to be doing lots of studies, but we're not because it's a plant product and it doesn't fit into the current model of pharmaceutical drug development. Wow. Well, David, you've certainly piqued my curiosity on this and make me want to learn even more about it. Your book was phenomenal. Where can people find out more about you, about your nonprofit? Yeah, what should they do to engage? So the best thing is to just go on to the website and look up drugscience.org.uk and then you'll see my charity. You'll see all all the publications there's there's lots of publications about cannabis. All I've talked about now in terms of our research is on there for free. There's slide sets, there's podcasts of me talking about this. Yeah, and then become a follower because drug science is you know, we we tell the truth about drugs and a very very few other places you can get that kind of truth. Amazing. Man, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. Guys, check it out. This is really intriguing. Our brains are neurochemical processing plants. So, once you understand that you're dealing with chemistry all the time, uh not that I'm a huge proponent of exogenous chemicals, but there might be enough research coming out in the near future to warrant some further exploration. So, check it out. Speaking of further exploration, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.