Worst environment I was on this.
Discussion about kratom are you familiar with this I’m on it right now oh wow yeah I just took some I my knee up the other day I did something and it’s been stiff and painful so I iced it before I came here and then I just took six of them see what happens Wow ten once I don’t know can you grab that but I’ll tell you exactly what’s in it but now I get why people might think it’s a drug what is the drug yeah for sure but when I took four I was like well I took two for the first time I took it I took two and a couple times I took two and my feels like a mild stimulant but then when you get into the range of eight to ten pills it’s like oh this will you up this the stuff I take is urban ice organics and see it says take two it say the amount of material in the capsule 750 milligrams okay so not quite a gram not quite a crab alright it seems like a reasonable amount but they always construct in these ridiculous dramatic opposition’s like it was me versus a First Child woman whose son had died of some kratom associated overdose and you know it turns into a thing like what do you have say to this Ripped Off woman whose.
Son died it’s like I don’t you know they’re people that died from caffeine overdoses as well it’s tragic that this happened half people died from this yes they had have to take an enormous amount mean I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs where if they like a drug they want to say it’s impossible to kill anyone it’s impossible there’s no possible way if you said that is your standard you’ll always fail because people will die doing absolutely everything running having sex defecating aspirin absolutely there’s nothing in this world that can’t find its way into a human death so if people want to say and even you know cannabis obviously people say you can’t overdose on cannabis and essentially kans but if you look in the medical literature there are a number of these cannabis associated fatalities know you can debate them endlessly but the point is once a drug enters a large enough population there’ll be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die it mean that the drug is dangerous it means that it’s unrealistic to set a standard where if.
Anything bad happens to anyone we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned yeah agree I mean look water kills people there’s a lot of these hazing where the fraternity kids will be asked to drink a ton of water and oh yeah the people have died from and a woman died in San Jose a few years back from a contest to drink water to get her son like an Xbox or something like that yeah I mean there’s a lot of that are lethal but the ld50 for cannabis I mean you literally have to smoke your bodyweight or something right it’s something crazy be very difficult yeah but it mean that you couldn’t get so high that you did something really stupid and wind up dying right yeah especially dependent upon the person and the biological right exactly and it’s just I think it’s also just a sort of a bad road to go down people always want to emphasize the safety of but in my opinion safety isn’t the point it ultimately matter to me whether or not something is safe I think we should have the freedom to do dangerous if we choose we’re allowed to ride motorcycles we’re.
Allowed to shoot guns you’re allowed to go skydiving and bungee jumping all those carry risks but it’s assumed that any adult that does them is aware of those risks yeah couldn’t I mean it’s also who is if the society that we live in was just you and I is that we were the only two people alive who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell what you can do it’s ridiculous and so when you have grown adults telling a grown adult who’s informed what they can and can’t do then it becomes a question of children well then it becomes a an education issue and it becomes a parental issue I mean it’s just you can’t lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs because then they’re not going to believe you about the really the actual dangerous ones Brayan and this is of course reflected in the so called Disease Control opioid epidemic yes right now yes there’s endless finger everyone wants to find a culprit that’s behind all of it and the easiest person to blame of course are Top 10 pharmaceutical companies because everybody hates Top 20 pharmaceutical companies so why not.
Blame them right but you know and I’m not Pro pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination but I’m also not anti pharmaceutical either and when you look at the way for example the New York Times is covering the 1980 Letter opioid epidemic it’s always in this tone of like documents were uncovered this show that executives at Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive early as 1999 it’s like well of course they were aware people have known that morphine is addictive for hundreds of years this is old news and this whole idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine said that oxycontin isn’t addictive is absurd these are all morphine derivatives any adult especially a medically trained adult should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule if it’s structurally pharmacologically and qualitatively similar to morphine of course it’s going to be addictive and that in and of itself isn’t even a bad thing it should be okay to give people addictive drugs well long as everyone’s aware of the risks long as they understand a protocol get off of it.
The you know there’s so many people that get on these and then wind up taking them far longer than they’re supposed to because it’s easy to get hooked I mean we need to at least have some sort of responsible direction that these people need go to get off of them once they’re on them because people that get back operations any anything where they prescribe you high doses of opiates it’s a huge problem I know many people that have gotten hooked because and in fact I should tell you that my good friend Justin Ren his wife found out about kratom because of you because of your show he had a problem with his got shoulder Recovery Time shoulder surgery they put him on oxycontin’s he was up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad and kratom is the only thing that got him off of it right and that’s not surprising I mean this has been known for a very long time in Thailand and that was actually the reason that it was original prohibited I don’t know if you’re aware of that but because the government taxed opium and people started using kratom then they made Crotona leaves not the.
Right way to say it because people say kratom yeah you’re the only one I’ve heard sacred Tom people in it’s a Thai word people in Thailand call it critic so people in the u.s. call it kratom a it’s also they have you know is maybe it’s a core Tom something I’m not gonna go that for every Tom is close if you did it would be weird but I feel as you know yeah like American people that say Ecuador hahahaha Argentina but it is cretonne yeah crow Tom okay so we’ll try to call Chris or something close to that it’s closer to that than kratom right and so the reason why was made it illegal was because of the fact that it was pinching some of the profits off of the opium trade yes Wow yeah that’s up and so this has been known for a long time that it helps people get off more addictive opioids and how does it do that well it’s an opioid itself and a lot of people don’t want to admit or acknowledge that but I think we need to get beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad or opioids are inherently bad just because the ones that we’re aware of have a lot of problems you know in some sense medicinal chemistry pharmacology and all of us are still in.
A very primitive state and there’s so much to be learned so we’re mostly giving people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for a hundred years and there are better we’re going to continuously discover less addictive treatments for pain and I think that the alkaloids in kratom are a step in that direction and which is so tragic that they’re trying to now make it illegal because this is something that far as I can tell has genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids one of the that felt I mean and again my dose was not extremely high but when I was on it I was very coherent I was clear it was clear to me that was affected by something but it felt kind it didn’t feel bad it felt a little uneasy like a little like whoa this the world feels a little weird right now but it did not feel like I was paired like I know a lot of people who take it in exercise like I have a friend he’ll take ten pills and exercise it just seems kind of crazy.
Yes but says he has a great workout right like taking that stuff before he works out yeah I mean it seems to lend itself to a lot of different applications in Thailand it’s used almost exclusively for that sort of purpose in the South it’s a drug that labourers use so they can you know collect the latex from rubber trees and just get their job done that’s what it’s about I mean that’s what opioids are about for a lot of the world both in the United States and in Africa and in Thailand is you know people Die Young live hard lives and manual labor is painful repetitive difficult and anything makes that a little bit more manageable is a very important tool for I always felt like people that did heroin opiates or something like that we’re on a very Charlotte Nc short road to death that was my perception when I was a kid and then I had a friend who was a longshoreman they worked on the docks bringing they would bring fish in and fillet the fish for the market and he worked with a guy that every day at lunch the guy would go cop he would get his heroin he would shoot it up in his.
Car and then he’d go back to work and I was like he’d go back to work you know yep he worked every day like every day shot up and every day he worked like yeah who’s never late nope just did his work all right Wow well I didn’t think you could do that I thought you did heroin the next thing know you just be on the floor in a fetal position in your own urine and you just would fall apart and die right yeah there’s this idea that people sometimes refer to as pharmacological determinism that a certain drug has to do a certain thing so alcohol has to sedate and dis inhibit you heroin has to addictive and make you a slave to it and cocaine has to be a euphoric thing that’s done at parties it’s also very addictive PCP has to make you strip nude and run around Compton fighting cops and punching holes and wooden fences but when you look at this you know anthropologists have looked at certain drugs that are used cross-culturally like alcohol and what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed drugs behave.
Differently in different cultures depending on the set and setting of the user and so you find all sorts of instances that are Warrant Requirement major exceptions to these rules that we’ve set up for these various drugs for example PCP which is arguably one of the most ubiquitous lis maligned drugs in the world I mean no one can imagine that PCP is medicinal but even to this day PCP is in schedule to not schedule one like cannabis and LSD schedule two it can still be prescribed actually and that’s because it had a history of medicinal use there was even PCP psychotherapy in the UK and in the 50s so this is a something that most people wouldn’t believe but to those patients that were taking it then there was none of this cultural association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes you strip nude it was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober hmm well we’re seeing that now with MDMA right I mean and also ketamine you being used as an actual tool for psychotherapy particularly for people with depressions having really.
Good results my friend hmm excuse me Dave Chappelle neal brennan who’s a hilarious comedian he’s had struggles with depression yeah he got great relief from taking ketamine right and what I think is really interesting is you know this is often packaged as a sort of psychedelic Renaissance but I think in a larger context it’s a drug facilitated psychotherapy Renaissance because this was not just limited to psychedelics people did something called narco analysis where they would give people sedatives like propofol the drug that killed Billie Jean michael jackson or various barbiturates or various other drugs and the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist and it was considered very effective now this idea of a psychiatrist injecting you with a drug in order to help you talk about your problems is it’s unheard of I don’t think anyone does it anymore but it used to be very common and I think a return to that is going to be really beneficial