Professor David Nutt - Drink? Why Alcohol Is The Most Damaging Drug In The World

Full transcript: Professor David Nutt on London Real

3:52 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Professor David Nutt, the neuropsychopharmacologist specializing in the research of drugs that affect addiction, anxiety and depression. You are the deputy head for the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, alongside Dr Robin Carhart-Harris and Dr Rosalyn Watts, both of whom recently appeared on the show in 2009.

4:18 You famously asserted that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol, and you were subsequently fired from the government advisory council on the misuse of drugs. Your latest book, Drink, explores the science of alcohol, its detrimental effects on one’s health, and the damage it causes to humankind. David, welcome back to London Real pleasure being here. Right, this is your third time on the show, David. Over six or seven years, lifetime achievement award.

4:45 Look, it’s great to have you back. We’ve got a lot to talk about. The book is very interesting. Also, everything you’re doing at Imperial College. A lot of stuff I didn’t even know about.

4:54 I’d love to talk about everything you’re doing with marijuana, with the psychedelics, MDMA and everything as well. So, super excited to have you here. I wanted to kick off and talk about something that I posted recently and the reaction I got to it. So as I think I just told you, I’ve been two years now without alcohol. Right before that, if I could be really honest, I probably struggled with alcohol for 30 years of my life.

5:22 Started drinking in my teens like a lot of people, and then pretty much drank heavily in college at my fraternity house, then on to Wall Street, where that was kind of what we did, and pretty much drank every day for a large part of my life, and it was something, David, that I just couldn’t figure out, and it was something I struggled with because, you know, if you look on the degrees on my wall, I’m supposed to be a smart guy, but I couldn’t figure this out, and it was damaging me physically, my self-esteem and, I could never really figure it out, and I posted this 20-minute vlog talking about this on my channel, and it’s been watched about 150,000 times, and so I think it shows me that a lot of people struggle with this a lot. A lot of people don’t understand what’s going on, and I think it’s because it’s wrapped up with a lot of things you talk about in the book, because it’s not considered a drug by many, which has been kind of the story of your career.

6:22 It’s woven into the fabric of our society. Um, and you could have a grandfather that would never do drugs, but he’ll drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. Exactly. And so it was really eye-opening to me, the way people reacted and responded to this confession. For me, it’s been a powerful, just thing for me to realize.

6:44 And I mentioned one of the movies we made last year was Iron Mind, and you probably didn’t know, but I openly talked about my struggle also with heroin in 2001, and even an overdose I had when I was in New York City. So I’ve kind of been through various stages of different types of drugs and can understand the harmfulness and less harmfulness, but I thought I would just kick it off mentioning that, and the fact that a lot of people, I think, are interested in understanding alcohol, their relationship with it. So it’s powerful that you wrote this book.

7:17 Well, that was one of the reasons I wrote the book, because if you, if you remember, I start off the very first paragraph is about how my first evening at university I’m confronted with the effects of alcohol on 18-year-olds, effects I’d never seen before. I hadn’t really, I thought very much before I went to university the first night. The medical students were sitting around, and then one of the, we get, they get drunk, very drunk, I get a bit drunk, and one of them just starts to cry, and I think he’s going to kill himself.

7:51 He’s weeping and wailing, and I’m saying, should we get an ambulance? And another one of the other guys who went to the same school as him said, no, he’s always like that when he’s drunk. And I’m thinking, wow, isn’t that interesting? You know, this drug which you can just go and buy in the shops can produce these enormous changes in people’s minds. And in fact, what was that, that guy had problems with alcohol most of his life.

8:12 The guy that told me not to worry, he actually died of alcoholism. Two of the nine undergraduates in that class in medicine down in Cambridge, 1969, two that their lives were seriously blighted by alcohol, and these are smart people, extremely smart people. You know, it’s quite hard to get into Cambridge and it’s very hard to get to do medicine. Yeah, I mean, you know, academically they’re up there, but you know, it’s intellectuals. In your case it is not a defense against the vulnerabilities of drinking, and why that should be is interesting.

8:46 I’ll come on to that perhaps in a minute, but the book is the reason I’ve written the book. There’s never really been a book like this that actually helps people understand their drinking. There are hundreds of books on how to stay sober, and there are a few, there’s quite a lot of books on what it’s like to be an alcoholic, but I don’t think there’s one that actually says, look, you know, try to understand your drinking, try to make sense of it, try to work out why you drink.

9:07 And if you are having problems, well, actually, this is the first book that helps, I think, people make sense of the normal problems as opposed to the extremes, which is like, you know, you know, if you’re losing your job because of drink, well, you know you’ve got a problem, but a lot of people get into difficulties with drink without even really understanding. Right? Why do you have a hangover? Why does it affect me less when I eat? Why does it affect different people differently?

9:30 Like you cover a lot of those things. Yeah, I try to. I mean, this, so that was my, that was 1969 and that’s 40 years ago, so I’ve tried to distill my wisdom, not just my scientific wisdom, because I’ve researched alcohol for 40 years, but also just my life wisdom, in terms of work, being around a lot of people, friends, family, acquaintances, who drink as well. You know, when I got to this country back in the late ’90s, for me it felt like alcohol and the history of Britain and the culture of Britain are very interwoven.

10:01 Absolutely. Um, well, I mean, the point is, uh, until the mid-1800s it wasn’t safe to drink the water in most parts of Britain. The standard drink in Britain through the Middle Ages was what we call small beer. It was a weak beer of about two percent, 2.5 percent, and you gave it to kids. Everyone drank it, because it was safe, because the fermenting of the beer killed the bugs.

10:26 Right? Killed the bacteria. So, and you know, until we got proper hygienic water provisions back in the sort of 1860s and ’70s, that was what people drank. So it was part of our life. It was called small beer, and when you want, when you have a party, you have the real beer, the strong beer.

10:43 Right? All right. Heavy beer. So it’s just part of life. It’s part of everything.

10:50 It goes back beyond. Yeah, even, but you know, you go back to the Bible. Yeah, you know, one of Jesus’s great miracles was turning water into wine, because you couldn’t celebrate a wedding appropriately without wine. And of course, ancient Greeks used alcohol a lot, along with psychedelics, particularly the ergot fungi, to get experiences and alter their consciousness. You know, the Romans had their bacchanalia in there.

11:15 You know, I mean, alcohol pervades Western society. Yeah, and that’s why I watched one of your interviews that you did on the BBC maybe six years ago, back today, and when you start bringing up some of your research and start telling them that factually these drugs that have all of this emotional baggage, like LSD and MDMA and crack, are maybe less dangerous than alcohol. It’s just funny to see sometimes that people have this reaction, like, no, no, no, no, no, this is what I, I have, my grandpa had, I have at my weddings, and this is for those, those people over there that are throwing their lives away.

11:54 It’s visceral. And it’s visceral because people don’t want it to be true. There are two things I would say about this. The first is that at both a conscious and a subconscious level, people, people are fearful of other drugs, illegal drugs, because it helps deflect their attention away from the problems of alcohol at a personal level, but also at a political level. Politicians love to get hysterical about a new drug, because it means they can do something about drugs, and they don’t have to be held to account over their failure to deal with the problems of alcohol.

12:33 Right, so that’s the first thing. Second, thing is that I would say that there’s almost no family in Britain, if you look at an extended family, three generations, in which, which doesn’t have someone who’s been damaged by alcohol, through addiction, through violence, traffic accidents, or being a victim because of someone else who was drunk and violent. Almost every family in Britain is affected, and, but we don’t own up to it, right? We kind of push it under the carpet.

13:05 You know, we know there’s a problem, but we don’t talk about it because we don’t know what to do about it. We’re embarrassed, and so that shoveling alcohol, you know, hiding, hiding away the problems has been something we’ve become very expert at, very good at. And so because we don’t want to face what, for many people, is their own drug problem, because their own dependency on alcohol. Absolutely, to a certain extent. And since it’s not a drug, it’s alcohol, or a tobacco.

13:32 We just it’s normal and we don’t want to talk about it. Governments don’t want us to look. That’s why I was sacked, because they, they did not want, we said, well, look, it’s alcohol, it’s a drug. Of course it’s a drug because it changes the way your brain works. Of course it’s a drug, and they said, no, we want to talk about it.

13:49 And the Misuse of Drugs Act, and they said you can’t, and we said, of course, the Misuse of Drugs Act doesn’t say we can’t, and the Home Office said, we don’t want you to. And he said, well, I don’t care. You know, we’re gonna, you know, that’s science. We’ve got to do it, and that’s why I got sacked, really, because once you start evaluating the comparative harms, particularly to society, of different drugs. I mean, you see alcohol is way, way more damaging to society than ecstasy or mushrooms, or, well, it’s the most damaging drug to society as a whole.

14:18 It is, and what’s interesting about that is that we did that very sophisticated analysis back in 2010, published in The Lancet Korea that was really why I got sacked, because it kind of showed it was, and I said it was. But then two things have happened subsequently. The first was that the European director of justice gave us some money to redo that analysis in Europe. He was particularly interested in the comparative harms of other drugs, but we said, of course, we’ve got to do the same 20 drugs.

14:50 We’ve got to put alcohol in, and we redid it with 30 European experts from 20 different countries, and alcohol came at the top there. Then last year we rated it in Australia. Same thing in Western cultures. Alcohol is the most harmful drug overall, because it’s the most harmful drug to society, because it’s the most widely used drug. Right, and it creates all sorts of collateral damage.

15:15 If you go to the A&E, the emergency room, on a weekend, it’s almost all alcohol related. Absolutely. To 90. That’s right, and we put up with that, and we put up with that, we put up with that because the media lie about it. There’s this terrible… the reason alcohol is never in the spotlight is because politicians don’t want it there, because they get kicked back through the drinks industry.

15:37 The drinks industry doesn’t want it in the spotlight, because they’re making it. I mean, it’s the easiest way to make money. Used to sell booze, the margins are ridiculous. Absolutely. Yeah, and then the newspapers are in the pay of the newspapers, get a lot of support, encouragement, that drinks industry free booze, not to take on criticism, not to criticize or accept criticism of the drinks industry.

16:01 So you find, if for every time I say something that is critical, you get nanny state, you get oh, scaremonger, you get let us drink what we want, we’re adults, and all that kind of crap. And actually, the only way I think we can get around this, apart from education as in the book, is one, but the only other way is to keep banging on about the cost implications for a normal rate taxpayer. You, about a thousand pounds of your tax each year is going to support binge drinking, the damage on our streets you see every weekend from kids getting drunk.

16:35 Obviously, if you’re a higher rate taxpayer there’s more. Now I calculated if we had brought in just a simple measure like they’re doing in Scotland, minimum unit pricing, which would have no impact on the cost of what the taxpayers pay, because they’re buying booze at more than the minimum price anyway, but it would reduce consumption in young people, reduce consumption in people who are alcohol dependent, by reducing consumption in those two extremes, you actually reduce the costs of alcohol, because they’re the ones that are getting into fights, as the ones that go into hospital. So I reckon minimum pricing would actually make taxpayers better off because it would save money in police budgets and health budgets, but that was rejected in England, fair.

17:18 It was rejected. It’s been rejected many times in England. I mean, I think they’re gonna, they’re gonna bring it in in Northern Ireland and Wales soon, but they brought it in in Scotland and it is working. I mean, Scotland, before they brought it in, 40 percent of all intensive care beds in Scotland were occupied by people with an alcohol problem. 40 percent.

17:41 Now, if you reduce consumption in those people just by 10 percent, because the relationship between alcohol and harm is so curvy, linear. If you just reduce consumption by 10, you can reduce harm at the extremes by 30, 40, you can get them out of intensive care into ordinary beds, and you know, an intensive care bed is what, ten thousand pounds a night? In ordinary beds, a thousand pounds a month. You know, I mean, you can save a huge amount of money by making relatively small changes in pricing that just affect the most vulnerable people.

18:09 But all the time people say, don’t, you know, I don’t want more tax, I don’t want to pay more for my booze. You won’t pay more, you’ll save, and you’ll save money on taxation. But to get standard media to accept that it’s really difficult. Eventually, I mean, a few years ago I did manage to get The Spectator to take an article on that. That’s the only newspaper that actually really dared to sort of put that message out.

18:29 And this is this minimum price for alcohol, certainly minimum price, my unit isn’t flooded with cheap alcohol. Correct. Okay, I mean, it’s absurd. You can go into supermarkets and buy alcohol at a less price than water. I mean, it is a weird world when that can happen.

18:48 Very weird. But it’s a powerful industry, and it’s, it’s probably the most sophisticated lobbying industry, maybe defense, I don’t know, but I mean, it’s, it’s the dark one. They’re very clever. They watched what happened to tobacco and they learned the lessons. They didn’t actually lie.

19:09 I like the tobacco, and tobacco and she lied, right? It’s not addictive. Oh, we’ve got data. They didn’t lie. They just made it appear that they were taking it seriously, and they said, yeah, and then they started putting out messages, drink responsibly.

19:24 Hey, oh, that’s a great, I’d love to, you’d love to, you know, wouldn’t we all? The whole point of drink is lose response, you know, that you know, in a way that was their their gesture to try to reduce the harms of alcohol, which we know it’s a rather weak way of changing people’s behaviors. Yeah, it’s funny, I look at these Jack Daniel’s advertisements, they’re on the tube, and I always read their copy, because they always got some funny story. Yes, they’re talking about the history of Jack, and again it’s this whole glamorization of, and the story of, and your grandpa did it, and the tough guys have a drink after work, and the whole thing, and then it says, the very end, drink responsibly.

20:03 Yes, but I know they want to sell me four bottles at a time. Absolutely, but so they’re, they are super smart in how they do that, and of course the whole glamorization, the advertising, the marketing, is very intelligent. Yeah, I mean, they, they buy the best people. I mean, with the budget that I think they spend, maybe a thousand or ten thousand times more advertising booze than they do advertising how to, the health harness, and booze. You know, I mean, they completely saturate all the, all the information you get about booze is almost always driven by the drinks industry.

20:37 Okay, uh, some facts. I mean, it right now is the leading cause of death amongst men in the UK, ages 16 to 54. Correct. That would be shocking for most people to hear, and that’s why I want to keep beating that drum, and it’s going to be the same for women in a couple of years. Women will, it’ll be the same, ability and cause of death in women, because we’re seeing a remarkable change in women’s drinking, women under the age of 40 now drink more than men.

21:07 Why? Because they’re richer than men. Women got better jobs, they got better education, better jobs, and they often live with their parents, so that they can actually, if they’ve got less, more disposable income. So women are actually drinking more than men, and because women have got different metabolism, they’re gonna, they get affected more for the same consumption. So we’re gonna see that in women as well, and it’s very scary.

21:30 Wow. And this manifests itself in personal harm, cirrhosis of the liver, cancer, and then fatal injuries based on this drinking. That’s right. Um, and then you even go down and break down, like, the years that come off your life. And yeah, did you find that interesting?

21:47 I mean, you know, two bottles of wine per day, knowing that that could take off 21 years of your life, is pretty sobering. And I know guys in the City that drink two bottles of wine a day easily. Oh yeah, and that’s coming, it’s kind of minimum gear out, and that’s kind of happens. What, yeah, that’s a lot of drinks. Well, they tell them.

22:06 Yeah, and this is because there’s this peculiar relationship, between, this curvy linear relationship between alcohol and harm. It goes up very much like this. I mean, it goes up so steeply, you know, you eventually, you know, you just die, like all poisoning. You’d have to drink more than that. That’s one of the amazing things I discovered in my research over the years is, in Russia, you know, they don’t die of cirrhosis.

22:28 The Scots have the highest cirrhosis rates in the world, because they’ve got a, they drink enough to, but they don’t drink too much to instantly kill them. In Russia they drink so much that they just die of alcohol poisoning. Half of all Russian men die of alcohol poisoning before they get racist. It’s actually absurd. Wow.

22:46 And that their lifespan is really short. That’s right. They’re, it’s like 15, 20 years less than honest. Now, is that an extreme example? You look at sometimes.

22:54 Well, Russia’s a fantastic example, because we’ve got data going back to the Second World War. Russia, it must be the only, maybe the only country outside Africa where life expectancy has gone down since so in Britain, in most of Europe, men’s life expectancy has gone up by about 12 years since the Second World War. I mean, more than women. So you know, we’re healthier. We know more.

23:19 We’ve got better health, better health care. We eat better, with less pollution. Russians go down, because, and it’s all due to our goal, but you know, in Russia they don’t consider beer alcohol. Beer is just, looks like lemonade. They don’t count beer.

23:34 They don’t count how much they, we don’t know how much they drink. Beer, they drink, they don’t count it, but they do, the, the drink they drink is vodka. All the vodka in Russia is made by the state. So 20 odd years ago, um, Gorbachev was horrified by the death rates from alcohol, so he did. He just said, okay, next year, half the production of vodka, just half the production.

23:59 So basically people drank less because it was less available, and you saw that, as you know, within a year life expectancy had gone up by like two years, and it went up for the next two, next year, and then, but the people revolted, and you know, I mean, Russia is quite a difficult place to live, and it’s then, it’s worse, and now it’s still, it’s a pretty miserable place, and alcohol is the opium of the masses there, and they rebelled, and he had to, he was forced to make it more available, so life expectancy went up, and then he made it more available, it crashed, and the same thing happened about 10 years later, I think, with the old scene. So we’ve, we’ve seen through government policies that this life, this terrible poor life expectancy, is all driven by the availability of alcohol.

24:45 Right. Um, and you think that ultimately, by showing the cost benefits, that might get some change in this country? I mean, we’re always talking about the NHS and how much it’s costing, you know, I hope so. I mean, it, how about, look, we can tell, we’ve been pointing out for decades that, you know, as I say, every family in Britain knows someone that’s been damaged by alcohol. But, and this is an important point in the book, people don’t do very much because they enjoy alcohol.

25:19 So how can you get people then to be more rational? And I think, I think the financial argument is this, is what I’m going to try, because, because, you know, people, people do, under, you know, people concerned about money, so if you could see that they would actually be better off if they, if we all drank less, and if we, you’d have to drink a lot less, you just have to reorganize your drinking in society so that the people who are most harmed are less harmed, and we all benefit. Now, what’s the reaction normally when you give people these stats and tell people what’s going on?

25:49 They don’t want to hear it. No, no, I mean, it’s, well, I mean, the people that come to my lectures tend to, I mean, they tend to be believers. They tend to be interested, and they turn. The problem is that the people who don’t come to my lectures are in the bar and the pub, drinking. Is getting that message out to people that we should get.

26:08 So it’s got to be taught at schools. One of the real problems, I mean, the last government has been very remiss. It is essentially not made education about drugs and alcohol compulsory in schools, and I just think that’s outrageous, because every family in Britain is affected by alcohol. So the ten percent of the kids going to school have got drunk parents. They need to know what that’s about.

26:32 They need to know how they can seek help. There are kids, 8, 9, 10, 11, who go home and have to look after their parents because they’re drunk. It’s a devastating situation to be in, but we don’t allow the children to talk about it, because we don’t talk about alcohol and drugs at school. Right, so we need to have more of a conversation and talk about what’s happening. A remarkable thing, that perhaps the most remarkable thing I ever did was I think about a year, 18 months ago, I did it on the Radio 4 program called You and Yours.

27:04 And it was a phone-in for people who had, as children, had had their lives negatively affected by a drinking parent. They got more phone calls on that program than any other, this is a consumer affairs program that You and Yours ever had. Most of them, and I was listening for the 45 minutes. Most of them were people over the age of 50 who were still traumatized by the damage they’d experienced as a child from their drunken parents. It had never left them, and that was just so moving and so chilling.

27:47 You know, if you’re, you know, if you can’t forget that kind of treatment as a child, it’s a kind of abuse. It’s not necessarily, it can be active, but it can be just passive, but having to, you know, worry if your mother’s going to come home, and your mother’s going to be dead or falling on the floor. You know, it’s very disturbing to the children. Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and I think that’s why I got so many comments and views on this vlog, because I think it’s something that’s affected so many people, their own drinking, other people’s drinking, and something they can’t necessarily control, and it’s, and they don’t have a drug problem, so it’s okay because everyone’s doing it.

28:22 Well, this is why it’s such an interesting drug, right? Because apart from caffeine, actually it may be more popular than coffee, I don’t know, but it’s the only really psychoactive drug that changes the way you think and feel that pretty much everyone has experienced, so it, and that’s for me as a scientist, it’s very interesting. So I, when I give lectures, I do this. I give lectures often about addiction to psychiatrists, and I say, you know, I’m gonna, let’s look at, let’s look at the nature of addiction.

28:56 Right? Let’s look at, let’s think about addiction. So how many of you drink? Sixty, seventy percent, with their hands up. How many of you are alcoholic?

29:05 No one puts her hand up. And I say, well, that isn’t interesting. Some of you are lying, but never mind. But beyond more than that, it tells you that, because we know that 10 percent of drinkers are, they’re different. So we have a legal drug the government endorses, and some people drink safely and some people don’t, so that must be a difference in the person.

29:31 It’s not about will. It’s about the fact that their body responds differently to the drug. And again, there’s a lot about that in the book, trying to understand the vulnerabilities that people have, why some people actually lose control when they drink and others drink excessively to deal with problems like stress. And what are some of those facts? Um, I mean, you talk about having a drink diary in there.

29:52 You talk about understanding how alcohol affects different people’s genetics and different cultures. And like, what are some of the things you want people to understand? Well, the first thing is I want people to understand that being having a problem with alcohol is not your fault, because not everyone has it, so how can it be your fault? I mean, it’s, you’re encouraged to drink. The government allows advertising.

30:21 You know, it wants you to drink. You have a problem with drink. It’s definitely not your fault. So the question then is, the first important thing is then can you recognize you’ve got a problem? That’s where you know drink diaries are quite useful, uh, because sometimes it’s difficult to.

30:39 So if you ask people, you’ve got a problem, you know, they sometimes, they won’t. They’ll be embarrassed to tell you. Well, you might get angry with them, and they might be scared you’ll get angry. So, but keeping a drink diary is at least a way of beginning to get some sort of insight into what you’re drinking. And actually, one of the great things about a drink diary is that you can then kind of give a score as to what the value of that drink was, you know.

31:04 Did that a really good drink? Did you get a great deal of pleasure? Don’t know. Did you have a really good dinner party, or were you just drinking it because everyone else was drinking? You were bored.

31:13 So that way you can potentially eliminate some of the drinking which isn’t giving you the pleasure that you want. That’s the first thing. Okay, but the other thing is to make, is to really be very clear. Are you drinking to deal with something else? Because my view is the drink is a great social drug.

31:32 You know, it’s probably the most socially sorry, of the legal drugs, it’s the most socially enabling by far. Yeah, and that’s, you know, I think is how we should use it. We use it to facilitate social interaction and interchange and pleasure. But if you’re not using it for those purposes, then almost by definition you’ve got a problem with it. And that was my story.

31:55 I would drink alone. I would drink to get away from, I think, my own inner critic. I think that’s what I was getting away from, because I just needed a break from all the pressure I was putting on myself. So I would drink alone, and I would see people that could drink and have one drink and then go home. How do you even do that?

32:14 Or drink once a week or once a month? And I was like, wow, that’s amazing, because I couldn’t. Yeah, so, so you just then stopped. Did you? Well, I’ll be really honest, David.

32:27 When I started this show, I think a lot of alcoholics are isolated as well, and so that was a lot of me. I just felt isolated from the rest of the world, and this show got me really connected to the rest of the world and made me feel included and loved and also depended on, and I was an example of, and by doing that repeatedly I started needing the alcohol less and less and less, until finally I was like, you know what, I don’t need you anymore, and I’m going to make a distinct choice that I’m not going to use it, even as a minor crutch here and there. So that was kind of my evolution.

33:02 But that whole thing, it’s not your fault. I remember going to buy a bottle of vodka from the corner shop guy, and he would be looking at me like, here you are again, and I’d be like, I hate myself, right now, I hate how I’m being judged, I hate judging myself, but I still need to buy this thing, and that was hard. And that’s, well, it’s what you know, it’s great you’re sharing, and it’s a very classic example of how the problem builds up. And you know what, drinking alone is almost always a problem.

33:37 So you know that’s one of the things. If we just said to people what’s the best way of reducing your harms? Never drink alone. Never. You know, if you can just, if you could do that, it’s difficult, and that’s the other thing.

33:48 So why is it difficult? This is where alcohol is a really clever drug. Alcohol is a very promiscuous drug. It gets into the brain and it changes all the good neurotransmitters that you want to change, you know, a bit of endorphins, with serotonin, a bit of GABA. You know, it’s a really clever drug, and gradually it sort of eats, it worms its way into you, so eventually it kind of takes over, and you get to the situation like you’ve described.

34:13 And you know, I’ve had patients of mine who said they just find themselves, they don’t even intend to drink. They’re just suddenly there drinking. They don’t know how they got there. They don’t want to do it. They don’t even enjoy it very much, but they can’t stop.

34:25 It becomes a compulsion. And you give yourself the celebratory drink. I had a hard day at work, I’m gonna have a scotch. You know, we we got married, let’s have some champagne. We won.

34:36 It’s just all ingrained in the culture, and then you get there and you’re like, why am I drinking this? You don’t know why sometimes you’re doing it anymore, because it becomes, see, this is one of the interesting things, and this is true of other addictions as well, but alcohol is the kind of the biggest problem because it’s the most used drug. But it’s that your brain is a really efficient organ. Your brain tries to make as much of what you do habitual as possible.

35:05 You don’t want to be thinking about everything, you know, because thinking’s hard work. You want to just be, you know, imagine if you had to think every time you made a sentence. You know, you had to write it down before you, you know, you go mad. So your brain, it becomes, it learns to be very, very efficient, and when you, when you, you know, you start drinking, it just learns to take over and to stop it being conscious and make it a habit. And once it becomes a habit, it’s like biting your nails.

35:33 Habits are really hard to break. They’re in a different part of the brain. You know, actually it’s very hard to unload. Once you’ve learned something to a habit level, it’s very hard to unlearn it, and that’s why, so many people relapse. Right?

35:45 And you see an old buddy, and you’re always having a beer with him at the end of a long day, and that’s just, it’s already there. It’s, or even just talking about it, you know, you begin to salivate for my next beer. I’m thinking, a long day for me, I really could, you know, be lovely to have a big cold beer now, chatting with you, because it’s very conditioned. Yeah, and that’s why I love, uh, about you David, because you have a wine bar and healing, so you’re, you know, I think that’s actually makes this even more interesting, because you’re not going out and saying everyone should be a teetotaler, everyone should stop drinking.

36:15 You want people just to understand it as a drug and a substance and to use it in an optimal way. Absolutely. Optimize your drinking, and drinking the best times we all have, we’re drinking are when we do it socially. It’s the ultimate social drug, legal drug. So let’s drink socially.

36:40 That’s how we tended to drink. We tended to drink in pubs in England or bars and other countries. We drank with family around the table, drink socially, ideally outside the home. One of the reasons we’ve got such a big increase in alcohol consumption in Britain in the last 40 years is because we have brought alcohol into our homes. We didn’t used to.

37:04 When I was a kid, you know, we didn’t have alcohol. We didn’t drink, with me, well, maybe on a Sunday lunchtime we might have a sherry. Now it’s almost the norm that everyone drinks at home with almost every meal, and that’s, that is not thought, that’s just what you do. It’s become a habit, a kind of cultural habit as opposed to a personal habit. So I think I have a wine bar because, I, the wine bar in Indiana is designed to do two things.

37:27 It’s actually my daughter’s wine bar, and I’m just sort of supporting her financially with it, but her vision is, it’s very hard for women to find anywhere to drink where they’re not going to be pestered by drunk men. They don’t want to go to pubs. There’s just soccer playing, and there’s, you know, men falling over them and pouring beer. So this is a, this is a kind of little haven where women can go and have quality wine. So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s mostly organic, it’s high quality, so you deflate, you taste it, you enjoy it.

37:56 You can’t slurp it back because it’s too expensive. So it’s about being part of the experience rather than just getting drunk. Right, and that was the plan for it. That was right. Absolutely, and it’s worked, and that was her plans.

38:08 You know, give women enough somewhere to go. You know, again, women are well off now. They want to socialize with their friends, and they won’t have a drink because it’s fun, but there’s very few places for them to do it. Yeah, certainly. And it’s funny how you say that.

38:23 I mean, if I talked about the optimal times where I was drinking, it was probably in a social situation at a low dose, and the other times is when it wasn’t optimal, on the 20th tequila shot. That’s not optimal. I don’t even know what’s happening. I’m doing bad things. You know, alone it’s not happening, but there was that there was probably a time, which, like, I think Brad Pitt came out recently and said, I’ve had my alcohol privileges revoked.

38:49 That’s what Brad Pitt said, and that’s what I’ve done to myself. For me, I’m just, I’ve revoked them from me, because I, I just, I’m just gonna, I don’t think I can handle it, and I’m okay with that, and I’m going to do all these other things. The other thing is, you’ve got a lot of things to fill in the gap. Yes, yeah, and that’s great. I mean, and that’s of course one of the things we, for people who’ve got alcohol problems, we do try to find other things that can interest them and relax them, or deal with the stress, but also just to give them something to do, because that’s the problem, you know.

39:20 If you do spend two or three nights a week with your mates drinking, and then you don’t want to drink, it’s quite difficult to spend the time with your mates, because sometimes they’re suspicious of you, sometimes they’re critical, you know, sometimes it’s quite boring when you’re sober. Yeah, it’s funny, when you also, when you tell someone you don’t drink, a lot of times it makes them uncomfortable, very much, because they know that they have a habit, and indeed I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of that. Or yeah, yeah.

39:49 And what I always say is that the only time I ever really think about drinking is when I’m in a social situation I don’t necessarily want to be at. Like, a lot of people say, I’m going home for Christmas and I’m going to have to drink because I can’t handle my parents, or whatever it is, and I always say, well, just don’t go to those situations. Yes, because you shouldn’t have to use alcohol to get through something. Just make another choice. But you, that’s, but you see, isn’t that, in, but that is, it is the, that’s the power of alcohol, that you go to a social situation that you don’t want to go to.

40:19 A party you don’t want to be at, out, you don’t know anyone, and alcohol can just make it bearable. It is a, it is a good drug in that sense. It’s just the legacy of it. It can be quite damaging. Yeah, and in a way maybe it’s a bad drug, because it doesn’t show you you need other choices as well.

40:36 Uh, maybe find something you enjoy doing. Um, yeah, but it’s difficult, I mean, you know, you’re not going to go into a party and start doing your press-ups. Are you maybe not? Well, maybe that’s the point. I want you, such a clever drug.

40:47 Why do we, you know, look, you got an airplane, right? 30 percent of the people on the airplane are terrified of flying. That’s why, as soon as they start pushing the trolley around, people are getting the drinks down, because it is, it does relax people. There’s no question. Yeah, no, it definitely works.

41:02 Um, what else should we know about alcohol itself? I mean, you actually, I mean, the book is great because you walk it through. It is a depressant. It can make you go to sleep, but it’s also this kind of a weird short-term sleep, and when you wake up your brain is now kind of hyperactivated, which is why people with hangovers think everything’s a little loud and the world’s a little bit too much, and what’s lovely about, what, I mean, we understand all that now.

41:26 You know, we we know what’s going on. We know the pharmacology of our colony in the brain and how it does that. It’s, we can explain an enormous amount of what’s going on with alcohol, right? I mean, to me I find that quite exciting, because, you know, it’s, as a brain scientist that’s what I want to understand. I understand the brain, and alcohol is a very interesting probe of different brain systems and the changes we see that underpin the effects of alcohol.

41:52 You know, they are irrelevant to all sorts of disorders, they’re relevant, disorders like sleep disorders, irrelevant, epilepsy, relevant to anxiety, depression. And the hangover, in its very pure form, is a withdrawal of alcohol. But it’s interesting, but it’s not everyone, doesn’t get hangovers. Okay, this is one of the, one of the reasons I used to run the alcohol research ward at NIH in America for two years. I lived in America in Bethesda, went to work at NIH for two years, and we used to admit people and alcoholics and detoxify them, get them through there, and I’d interviewed every single patient that went through that ward in two years, and I would always ask some standard set of questions, and one of them was, did you get hangovers?

42:40 And the majority said no, and that’s of course one of the reasons they drank so much, because yeah, I mean, you’ve had a hangover, I presume? Oh yeah, and I’ve had hangovers, and I don’t, you always say never again. Oh yeah, you always say never again, and sometimes actually depends on the, I mean, I remember once having the most disgusting I, it’s not in the book, but I’ll share with you. So I drank a bottle of Pernod you know, 750ml on an overnight ferry from Portsmouth to the Harvard one when I was a student.

43:16 Uh, halfway across I started throwing up and I couldn’t smell aniseed without wanting to throw up for like 10 years. I was so sensitized to that experience of vomiting on aniseed. So yeah, so yeah, I mean, very enduring memories too. And so, but some people don’t have the hangovers, which means they’re more of a propensity. Absolutely.

43:38 I don’t have that reminder. And why that is, they still withdraw. I mean, that’s why we were admitting them to treat them. I mean, you know, they were were shaking away, they’re having delirium, but they don’t have anger. So hangover is a complex mixture.

43:50 It’s not just withdrawal from alcohol, but it’s also some effect of the alcohol on the brain or the body. And we’re doing research on this at present, though, which actually there’s almost no research, I mean, hangovers must be one of the commonest experiences that people have, in terms of pain and distress, and there’s almost no research on the brain because of hangover. And we’re discovering, actually, the inflammation seems to be quite an important part.

44:19 Alcohol can turn on the immune system. The alcohol is broken down to acetaldehyde, that can turn on the immune system, and we can look now in the brains. We’re doing studies on mice and rats, and we can see inflammatory markers go up in the brains as well. So it may be that the person’s immune system is quite, is one of the predictors of whether you get hangovers. Is it true that young people are drinking less?

44:40 A group of young people are drinking less. Okay, and that’s more true in London than elsewhere. So there are these under-24-year-olds, 25-year-olds, who are sort of, they’re rather low or no and they’re doing it for reasons of, you know, they’re doing it because, you know, they’re they’re your followers. They’re into fitness, they’re into health. Uh, they don’t want to be like their parents, right?

45:02 Uh, they’re, you know, it’s, uh, they made an active choice, and that’s ever, but the ones who haven’t are drinking as much, if not more. Okay, because the actual net consumption has not gone down. Okay, so we’re not anywhere near out of the no clear. I have this wonderful conversation a few years ago, when I, usually they used to wheel me out as a sort of contrarian in, you know, press meetings, where they’d have the drinks industry and the pro-drinks lobbyists and all that, and I remember one of them said to me, when the drinks guy said to me, well, look, David, David, he said, you’re going on about this alcohol problem.

45:35 Yeah, okay, so it’s gone up, you know, fivefold in the last 20 years, but at least it’s flattened out now. Isn’t that a good thing? And I thought, no, no, it’s not a good thing, because if you say it’s flattened and it’s a good thing, then we don’t have to worry about the fact it’s still five times higher than it should be. But that’s the kind of way the drinks industry, very, very clever. Well, you know, it’s not going up anymore, so it’s all right.

45:57 If it’s not rising, it’s all right. And to which my response in the book is, well, actually, it’s risen by this much. Deaths have risen by threefold, fourfold, in terms of liver, so it’s not all right. And look at France, look at France. If you reduced it to where it was before, you will reduce deaths.

46:19 So no, it’s not all right. How does the rest of Europe compare to, say, Britain, when it comes to drinking, binge drinking? Oh, it’s very interesting, differences across Europe. So there’s obviously the Mediterranean culture of, um, opportunities to drink wine with meals rather than, so, binge. We did a really interesting survey a few years ago.

46:40 There’s a big European project, it was called ALICE RAP, and it was looking at all sorts of drug use in Europe, but it looks at alcohol as well, and we looked at the incidence of drunkenness in different countries. We asked people, what, you know, how often do you get drunk? And the country that had the highest frequency of drunkenness was Lithuania. She said, listen, you guys are crazy, you can’t, you know, you’re going out, you know, like 25 percent of you say you drink to get drunk, and they say, yeah, well, that’s the purpose of drinking, is to get drunk.

47:11 Okay, you get in Italy, like two percent of Italians will admit to being drunk, because being drunk in Italy is a sign you can’t take your alcohol. You could be drunk but you never admit to it. So there are a couple big cultural differences, but actually in younger people you’re seeing more of a normalization. So a couple of years ago, for the first time, they had to stop drinking on the streets of Florence, because young people were doing, the Brits were going there and teaching the young Italians to get drunk and binge.

47:38 So that, so the binge culture has begun, you know, sort of permeated through most of Europe now in young people but not in the elderly. Okay, if anyone’s watching this and wants to go deeper on their own drinking habits, what do you suggest they do? Read the book. Read the book. You’ve got to read the book, and be really honest with yourself.

47:56 If you’ve got good, apparently, you know, you haven’t had rows with about it, then and if you haven’t got, you know, you’ve got a partner, isn’t themselves also alcohol problem, then sit down and ask them, you know, ask yourself the questions. Have you, you know, there’s some very fundamental questions. You know, has anyone ever criticized your drinking? If the answer is yes, well, they were probably right. You know, so there’s, there’s, you know, just, just be very very honest.

48:24 You know, um, have you ever got into trouble through your drinking, you know? Okay, well then analyze it, and if you’re persisting, do something about it. And if you can’t regulate your drinking through diaries and things, then, you know, maybe you’re gonna go and seek some help. You know, maybe you’ve got to do something more to stop your drinking, like medicine, other forms of therapy. If alcohol was created today for the very first time, what would be the reaction of the government?

48:54 Absolutely. So this is one of the other things that we’ve discovered in this big European project. So a German guy called Latvia decided to ask that question. Yes, a question: if we discovered alcohol today and we wanted to put it in as, say, a food additive, suppose you wanted to make a really nice tasting trifle at Christmas. You put, we’re going to put some alcohol, some, you know, some sherry, into the jelly.

49:18 Okay, then get it licensed. You know, Dave’s jelly sherry. Then you’d have to go through food safety testing, though. If you put alcohol through food safety testing, and you use it, it’s a risk of cancer, because alcohol is involved in at least six, maybe more, cancers if you did that. The amount, you would, the maximum recommended allowed amount per year is a glass of wine.

49:50 If you take a different threshold, which is, if you say, what’s the threshold for not getting any liver problems, which you wouldn’t be allowed to for a food additive, but just, but, but, as a sort of, as another kind of level of threshold for sensible drinking, then it’s about half a glass of wine a day. But if you really restrict on the cancer, you, it will be almost nothing. It would be never allowed to be anywhere near something you eat. In food, the recommendation would be, you did.

50:19 Yeah, I mean, they couldn’t stop you, but, right, because you could, you know, but the recommendation, but you’d have to put on it you know, do not consume more than this in a year. So we have, it’s very, you know, what I would call blinkered, or, um, preferential view of our girl, and that’s not just because it’s been around for a long time, but it is because we do enjoy it. You know, don’t make, you know, you know, there’s, don’t pretend we don’t. Yeah, most, most of us enjoy the relatively little alcohol we do drink.

50:47 Yeah, well, I mean, human beings have always enjoyed perturbing their consciousness, right? It’s something we probably always will, but not just humans. Our alcohol is interesting, because it’s one of the few drugs which we know animals like, because, you know, if pigs get into an orchard where the fruit’s rotting, they roll around and get drunk. There’s some great pictures. Um, um, elephants get drunk on the fruit.

51:10 Of the, yeah, that’s right, fruit. That’s right, and you can see chimpanzees getting it. So, uh, so, and, it, they’re not seeking, I don’t think. Well, maybe they are, but I don’t think they’re actively seeking different consciousness for insights as we might. I think they just enjoy the experience.

51:28 Right, right. It relaxes you, it reduces endorphins, it makes you feel kind of calm and tranquil, and for a bit, anyway. For me, I think, as when I look back on it, I think I was using it to avoid dealing with pain and painful moments, and the problem with that is, it just pushes it down the road. You have to deal with it at some point. Indeed, and so for me, and it gets worse.

51:52 It does get worse, because when you, you know, if you wake up at five in the morning with your terrible hangover, and then you start to think of the stress of work. Yeah, and that’s another really important point, really important to emphasize this: if you drink in the morning to overcome your hangovers, stop. That’s a really strong pointer that you’ve got a problem. That is a dangerous, dangerous you’re on the slippery slope. Then yeah, I remember when I was in the City, I used to have these horrible days where a lot of my clients would, like, yell down over these boxes, with, like, massive verbal abuse all day long for like 10 hours, and I remember coming home at night, sometimes thinking, I’m not going to have a drink.

52:32 This is my alcoholic self, because tomorrow is going to be so much worse. If I have drinks tonight, I just want the minimum, worse, and so that I did that a few times. I think that’s, that actually is a, and actually in my book I suggest, if people say to you, why aren’t you drinking, quite a good repost is to say, because I’ve got a really busy day tomorrow, I’ve got a lot of stress, so I don’t want to aggravate it by not having a good night’s sleep, and having a better hangover.

52:59 Yeah, and one thing I will say is that I, I mean, okay, the first year there were times where I was like, okay, I might want to drink water, and drink there, but now it’s amazing how I just don’t even need it. And the last few years I was drinking, it was just this crutch. It was just like, oh, I guess I’ll have a glass. I guess I’ll have a glass. I’ll have a glass, but I don’t really need it.

53:18 So this is a really important point. Can I, I want to, I love what you’ve just said, and the message that I’m trying to get out is absolutely on that point. You were not thinking about drinking, you were just drinking. And my message is, think about drink. Every drink you take should be thought about in the same way, as I hope if you were going to take another drug you think about that.

53:52 You wouldn’t take it without thinking, why, what dose, what the expectation is, will you be safe? Right, and think about that for each drink. Think about that, for example, and then I would also finally say, you know, there’s so many ways you can change your state as a human, whether it means meditation, or training, or watching a video, or laughing out loud, or whatever it is. That it’s, for me I always thought was my only option, and it’s just, it’s not.

54:20 Now, yeah, the thing about drink is, it’s, it’s it’s very accessible, and it’s very, it’s almost immediate, and this is one of the reasons I think we’ve got to change our social attitudes or approach to drink in terms of availability. It is far too easy. You shouldn’t be able to get 24/7 booze, because you know, if you’ve made a decision not to drink that evening and then you begin to waver. Well, you can go and get it, whereas we can order it on a bloody phone, but if you couldn’t, and that’s why I quite like the Swedish model.

54:55 The Swedish, the Swedes have a basis, and some American states do too. They have controlled access to alcohol. The state basically runs the shops, and they determine the time you can go and get it. Yeah, and if you basically, if you, if it’s closed, the shop closes at six, you can’t go and buy lots of booze. You’ve got to go to a bar.

55:15 Now you can go to a bar, but at least there you’ve got, there’s people to talk to, so you’re getting some reinforcements. You’re not just, it’s not just a drink you’re relying on to numb you. You’re getting some interchange, and if you’re really drunk, someone can say no. Whereas the scariest thing of all, I had, I had a patient once, uh, a young kid, he’s in his 30s, and he was dying. He was 30.

55:37 He had neuropathy, alcoholic neuropathy, and he came to me because he had extraordinary levels of attention deficit and also anxiety, and we were talking, and I discovered that he was a drinker. I didn’t realize, he came to me for psychiatric doses, not because he was the diagnosis, not because he was a drinker, and I discovered what he’s doing. What he would do was this: he’d get up in the morning, again, about 10 or 11, and he said, I’d get a taxi to the local supermarket.

56:15 I’ll buy two litres of strong cheap cider for two quid, get a taxi home, because he was too scared to be aggravated, and I’ll just sit in front of the TV all day and drink this. And that was it. That was what he did, day in day out. And you know, he was already destroying his, um, his nerves with it, and he’s gonna be dead in five or ten years. And, uh, you know, what if he, well, at the very least, if he couldn’t buy all that [expletive] cider, which was twice or three times, because one of the paradoxes here, by the way, just in Britain, we have this special privilege for cider.

56:52 You can buy eight, but the tax on eight percent cider is a third of the tax on 10 percent wine. So if you want to get drunk, cheap cider is a way to drink, and that’s completely wrong. We have, yeah, we should try to constrain. There used to be a time when people understood that alcohol was a drug, like, and you had to go to a licensed premises to get the drug. You know, like you got a pharmacist to get those drugs, and then opening it up to supermarkets basically took away any kind of regulation or control, and we should try to bring that back.

57:26 Right, okay, very well said. Um, I want to talk about all the other research you do, but I want to also talk about how do we talk to our children about this stuff. Yes, and, um, you know, when I did publish this movie last year, and I’ll send you a copy of this movie about my my triathlon, my Ironman, but I had to finally come clean about this addiction I had. I hadn’t told my wife in 16 years. I hadn’t told my stepdaughter.

57:51 I hadn’t told anybody. Really, there were about four people in New York that knew me at the time, that knew that I had had like two heroin overdoses. I used to get the powdered form. I used to snort it when I was still a CFO of a dot-com startup, still hanging out with Wall Street people, but it was a drug that got into me, and it’s a dangerous drug. Oh, it’s really dangerous.

58:12 It is. Um, and so, I, the hardest thing for me, David, was to tell my wife, but the even hardest thing was for me to tell my stepdaughter. She was 13 or 14. She looked up to me for so long, but at the same time I wanted to be intelligent. I wanted to say, I’m not going to come in and say never touch drugs, because that’s not realistic, and that’s not what Dad did.

58:33 So I said, first of all, I want you to be able to talk to me about any drugs, and I want you to understand what these drugs do, and the dosage of these drugs, the harmfulness, and to understand what’s going on, and to also know what happened to me. Um, and I want you to ask more questions, and for us to talk about it. That’s very mature, the right thing. So my other book, Drugs Without the Hot Air, has got a whole chapter on how to talk to your kids about drugs.

59:01 Absolutely. The key message is, there’s absolutely no point in lying to your kids about drugs, because that just undermines any confidence. Yeah, right. They know, it’s quite likely they know more than you think, so, like, and, you know, and there’s no point in being dictatorial about it, because they might just rebel. You might make it worse.

59:23 You’ve got to give them the confidence that if they get into problems, they can come to you as someone who can help them. They must see you as their ally, not as their punisher, or the punisher. Right. And, um, yeah, I talked about it realistically, because over the course of their life they are gonna see these drugs. They’re probably gonna try these drugs, and what you don’t want is, you don’t want them to die from these drugs, or for them to really harm them.

59:47 Precisely, precisely. Exactly. There’s this, um, have you heard of this charity called Anyone’s Child? Set up by this lady who’s his daughter. She’s a wonderful woman, a fantastic woman.

1:00:00 She talks about her daughter, she was her only daughter, she died when she was 16 of ecstasy. She took a huge dose, not knowing anything. You know, she just took a bag of ecstasy, thinking that’s what you did. Yeah, and the mother says, if only, you know, she could have bought a tablet, she wouldn’t have died. Of course she wouldn’t, you know, if it was, she really knew what she was doing, but because everything’s hidden and you don’t talk about it, and the black market wants to, you know, can sell stuff which is, you know, potentially not even ecstasy, and more dangerous.

1:00:30 That’s why I’m a strong believer in drug testing, and, but also some kind of regulated market for drugs that kids want to take, which aren’t going to be very harmful, like ecstasy. Right, and maybe we start there, and then get into the research, like a lot of people when they have you on the BBC shows, and, um, they go after you and say, well, you want to legalize everything and, uh, we should just sell it on the corners with everybody. And I don’t think that’s how you feel.

1:00:53 So, no, no, not on the corners. No, no. I’ve watched The Wire. We don’t want the corners selling drugs. No, that’s bad.

1:01:00 Great show, fascinating show about humanity and contraband and addiction and conscious altering. I mean, it really is a study. So I was on train, I went. My brother-in-law lives in Washington, so we go and stay with him for a week a year, you know, and I was going up to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, to give a talk at UPenn, and I got the train from Washington and it goes to Wilmington, Delaware. It’s very pleasant.

1:01:31 It goes to Baltimore, and when the train pulls out, going north out of Baltimore, you’re there. You are in The Wire, and it’s a wasteland. Complete wasteland. I mean, I, it’s like a bomb had hit it. I just couldn’t believe that a city could, have been allowed to degenerate to a point where there’s nothing but people doing drugs.

1:01:52 Absolutely. I thought it was really quite disturbing, and you could see that from the train, you could hear it from the train. I mean, it’s the real, the reality is worse than The Wire, really. It’s, I mean, it is a wasteland. I mean, it’s almost none of the houses are habitable.

1:02:05 Reminded me of Hiroshima, you know. So just the wasteland. Anyway, sorry, we’re getting, and when you watch The Wire, what do you see? I’m curious, David. Uh, oh, I see the inevitability.

1:02:19 If you don’t, the one of the underpinning themes of The Wire was that if you’re in that environment, drugs are a kind of rational solution to a problem of there’s nothing else. You know, if that’s the one way you can make a living, it’s the one way you can be part of a group, then you do the drugs. You know, as the woman said, you know, even the mothers were, rather, their kids were soldiers, and dead, than nothing, because that’s all there is. You know, you can get some status, you can get some income, you know, it might not live very long, but you should, you know, it’s, it’s better than doing nothing, because there’s nothing else to do, and also making it illegal is pointless.

1:02:58 Well, the other really interesting thing about the world was, you know, when they, uh, Hamsterdam, when they try to bring in the, the, the rational, you know, the, the safe place, and it worked. It worked until, so the media, and until all the other, you know, the ex, the people that don’t like, you know, the prohibitionists and the media decided to destroy it. Right? They said, uh, basically they had an unwritten rule that you can sell the drugs over here and stay out of these other, you know, neighborhoods where people were living.

1:03:28 And when they did that, it dropped the crime in those areas, and until the media got a hold of it and said, oh my gosh, we can’t do this, because it’s not what we’re about in this country, or it’s not legal. And I know, it’s, yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, it’s, there’s a particular problem in the States, where you have this, this really weird kind of privatization of prisons and things, so there’s almost an incentive to punish people. In Britain, I think we just, like, we’ll just say this, we just like to punish drug users, because they’re easy to punish, and no one’s defending them.

1:04:01 That’s right. That was, yeah. Vicarious pleasure. He could suffer even more. He had a s***ty upbringing.

1:04:06 Well, we don’t care about that, because he should have put himself together, you know, and, you know, he’s taking drugs. He’s got, either he’s a wastrel and an incompetent, and then we’re going to put him in prison, or we’re going to keep him in prison as long as possible to make him suffer, because somehow that makes us feel better. It’s infantile. And the other thing you see in the war, maybe, is that the economic situation is so bad that turning to drugs is something that is more natural, to just find some pleasure in your day.

1:04:33 Well, yeah, what else is there? What’s, you know, the heavy industry’s gone. That’s right. I mean, what else is? And this is, this is, this is the, firstly it’s the foundation of the problem, and secondly it’s the fuel.

1:04:49 I mean, once you, this is one of the reasons I’ve argued so strongly to reform drug policy in Britain, and the kind of, our cannabis policy, criminal. We criminalize a million young people for cannabis possession in Britain. A lot of those criminal records will stop people getting jobs in the police, certainly, teaching, civil service. They’re really, they’re very exclusionary, and if you exclude people from most jobs, then, well, they’re offered a chance to deal drugs, they do drugs.

1:05:18 So we created the market by criminalizing people, and so it’s, you know, it’s a double whammy. They’re deprived, and that’s what they’ve got, and then when they do it, there’s no escape. Then you locked them in once you’ve given a criminal record. Right, yeah. We, um, we cooked at Thanksgiving dinner over here for the people at Spitalfields Crypt Trust, um, for about a hundred homeless people in November, and my whole team went over, and we served them, and we’re talking to the people there, and they were explaining how, you know, about 90 percent of the people on the street suffer from an alcohol or drug addiction, and it’s intertwined with, um, usually economic problems, childhood trauma, and homelessness, and it’s hard to know where one stops and the other finishes.

1:06:00 And, you know, a lot of the reality was, you’re on the street, you’ve got nowhere to live, your self-esteem is low, you’ve got also nothing to do all day. What are you going to do? Have a drink and have some drugs, oh, quiet, numb your pain? Yeah, it’s actually interesting you should say so. When I’m working, one of my colleagues is a guy called Ben Sessa, that’s Ben Sessa.

1:06:18 He’s a, yeah, he’s a psychiatrist, and he was a child psychiatrist, in fact. He was the guy that about 15 years ago goaded me into starting research on psychedelics. And he wrote an article for the British Journal of Psychiatry saying we ought to think about psychedelics, and I’ve long thought about psychedelics, but I thought, well, this is quite interesting, so there’s someone out there, and the College of Psychiatrists, they, they, uh, they said to me, would I read this article?

1:06:48 And because, yeah, it’s about pharmacology, and we’re like, you know, check, it’s all right. So I read it. I thought, that’s just interesting, you know, it’s a bit hyperbolic, but I mean, it’s kind of, there’s some sense in it. And so I rang him up and I said, you know what, what are you doing? And he’s, you know, what’s this all about?

1:07:02 He said, well, I uh, I’m interested in, you know, the therapeutic potential of these drugs, and we talked about that, and, um, and since then he moved from being a child psychiatrist to being an adult psychiatrist, and we’re working together on the treatment of alcoholism with them, using MDMA. But he says this, he says this amazing thing, which is really, makes you think. He said, when, as a child psychiatrist, you see all these abused kids, and you try to nurture them, and make good the deficits and the missed opportunities and all the things that have gone wrong, so they don’t become adults, you put me in prison, you know, I mean, it’s their fault.

1:07:44 Then as soon as it becomes, you know, just as they get older, it becomes their fault. And I think she’s absolutely right. You know, we don’t, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve set up this trial we’re doing with MDMA for alcoholism. Because the majority of adults who drink alcohol to excess, or not the majority, but a lot of them, are drinking to suppress the memories of trauma. So let’s try to use MDMA, which is now MAPS are using in the States as an anti-trauma agent.

1:08:11 Let’s try to use that to get rid of the alcoholic’s trauma. Maybe they’ll stop drinking, you know, cut off the reason for the drinking. So we’ve been doing that study. Yeah, and that’s fascinating, and I want to get into all the research you’re doing, which I didn’t even realize you were doing. Um, just to conclude, what do we do about drugs?

1:08:27 Do we decriminalize them? Do we try to get standards for drugs? How do you, yep? So we decriminalize. That’s the first thing.

1:08:34 We break decriminalization breaks the cycle of criminal behavior, and the Portuguese model is a it was, the Portuguese experiment was one of the greatest social experiments in the history of humanity. It’s a bit like building the NHS here. You know, the government decided it had to do something couldn’t afford to keep on putting people in prison for using drugs. Decriminalize personal possessions. You still get punished, but instead of going to prison you get to do things like sweep the streets.

1:09:10 You know, it’s a civil sanction. That’s the first thing. Second thing, that’s what the Portuguese did was, basically, anyone who was caught with a drug habit that was treatable, they treated them. So that was a powerful way of stopping the black market. In Britain, they, heroin addicts on the streets, how do they feed their habit?

1:09:32 They either steal, prostitute themselves, or make other people addicts. They become dealers, dealers. You’ve got to have about 25 clients to supply your own habit. So that means, you know, each of those 25 then becomes their own user dealer, so that’s why we have hundreds of thousands of people using heroin in Portugal now. You know, if you get caught, you get treated, you get prescribed heroin, or you get, you know, so you don’t, there’s you’re removed from the criminal cycle.

1:10:04 You don’t become part of that criminal cycle or have the record that forces you to have criminal careers. Exactly. Now, what has happened there? There was a very nice paper published just last year looking at the first 15 years of Portugal. In Portugal, deaths from heroin have fallen to a third of what they were 15 years ago.

1:10:30 What’s happened in Britain over the same time? I plotted this out. In the same time, in Britain, deaths from heroin have increased by two-thirds to reach all-time highs, year-on-year all-time highs. You know, that you don’t need to say anymore, do you? That kind of proves that we’re getting it wrong and they’re getting it right.

1:10:49 Okay, that’s the decriminalization. What about, and why not legalization? And then how does this play into standardization, right? So legalization is, what does legalization mean? Well, I guess most of us would not want a completely legal market, nor drugs.

1:11:08 You don’t want a corner shop selling fentanyl, narrowing, do you? No, you don’t want that. No, because then my daughter will go buy it. Exactly. So what, you, so I think what most people think of when they say, they probably think of some kind of regulated market, uh, with, a step with appropriate standards.

1:11:24 Exactly. So if you’re gonna, I think we should have. My view is actually quite straightforward. I mean, I formulated it over the last 10 years, and, but the logical way to deal with drugs which are less harmful to the user than alcohol, not so, drugs like mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, is to make them available in pharmacists, under some regulated base. You can have a card, a smart card, you can buy 10 doses a year, or something.

1:11:54 You get what you get, it’s pharmaceutical grade. You get, you know, the dose. You get advice. The pharmacist can do as it does. The pharmacists can ask you all sorts of questions.

1:12:00 About, you know, there are things you want. If you want to buy 32 paracetamol, they’ll ask you how, you know, so the pharmacists can actually then have some sort of mentoring or some sort of selection, uh, to make sure you’re not going to kill yourself or you’re not mentally ill or something. That is not what I think we should do for, for, and the drugs that people actually are not so harmful with, alcohol. And that would serve a number of purposes: stop the accidental deaths from ecstasy if people get the wrong dose, break the black market, but also it would give peop I think it’s morally wrong that the only drug we can take to be more sociable is alcohol, if there are less harmful ones to take.

1:12:36 So they would be morally right, but also it would actually make economic sense, if they’re less harmful than alcohol, then they’ll be less harmless to everyone. Right, and where does cannabis fit in there in the ideal Nutt world? Oh, it’s definitely a regulated market. Okay, so that’s the kind of model that they have in sort of the Netherlands, in Uruguay. I’m a bit worried about the Colorado model, which is, you know, I think gummy bears with like 30 milligrams of THC, they’re a bit over the top, so it’s gone a little far.

1:13:07 Yeah, I mean, I did have half a gummy bar a couple of years ago when I was over there, and it was, yeah, you get really stoned. Really, I mean, that’s a lot of THC. I think so. I think they’ve got, they’ve pushed it too far. Actually, I, I prefer a more regulated market.

1:13:21 It’s too easily accessible, and so people are now having experiences they didn’t plan on having. Yes, right, yeah, I can see that. All right, so, uh, all right, so somewhere in between, and this would actually be a great way of getting people comfortable with these bad drugs and just weaving them more into the normalcy of the society, and there would not be these drug users over here. There’d be, well, that guy got his three doses from the pharmacy, and he’s, oh, where is he this weekend?

1:13:50 He’s having his ecstasy weekend, just having a psilocybin weekend, and we’re going to be doing some drinking, or we’re going to be sober this weekend, and weave that into the fabric. This is going to take generations, though. I don’t think it will really. I don’t think so. Well, I mean, America has shown the way.

1:14:06 I mean, you’ve got, what have you got, 30 odd states now that have got medical marijuana. You’ve got more than a dozen states of recreational marijuana, and it’s proven that it hasn’t increased the number of people consuming in some states. Right? I mean, this is, you know, there’s a black, you know, often breaking the law is a little bit, you know, it gives you a little bit of an edge, you know, when you’re a kid, or I’m doing something everywhere. My dad’s stoned all the time.

1:14:29 I can’t be asked, you know. Right, so no, it hasn’t. America hasn’t ended as a result of this. In fact, there’s, there have almost certainly been some benefits in terms of reduced damage from alcohol. Okay, now, what we’ve seen recently, we’ve seen, um, Denver and Oakland go to the situation where Britain was in 2004, which is mushrooms legal.

1:14:53 So I think it, I think it’s once a principle has been established, then people start to see where you could, you know, while other drugs should be subject to the same kind of principles. Right, so I think it’s pretty likely that mushrooms would become you know, well, a bit of, you know, truffles have been available in the Netherlands for forever, and, you know, again, the Dutch do quite well in life, right? And so it’s kind of following into your chart. You’re taking those drugs that are less harmful than alcohol, and those are now popping up with decriminalized, executive status in certain places.

1:15:28 We’re not seeing that happen with crack cocaine or heroin. We wouldn’t want to see it happen with crack. Right, I mean, I really wouldn’t, and people say, well, you know, so you’re getting, you’re not going to get rid of the heroin problem. Well, no, we’re not going to get rid of the heroin problem, but if people have a choice, a choice of what other things to take than heroin, they might take that choice. But more than that, and this is a really important message here, and this is more important: now perhaps it even was them, but why did the Dutch go to the coffee shop model for cannabis?

1:16:02 It wasn’t that they thought cannabis was great. It wasn’t that they thought kids should have cannabis. It was because they knew kids would take cannabis, but they wanted their kids to get the cannabis from a safe place, not a dealer, because they knew the dealers in the Netherlands, like here, will always be trying to get you on harder drugs, either cocaine or heroin. So they wanted to split the market. Utterly successful.

1:16:30 They split the market. Kids use cannabis in the coffee shops, and the Dutch had a really, really low level of heroin using young people, whereas we had a much higher level. So it works. You give, if you give people safe places to take drugs, avoiding backstreet dealers, they’re not going to come across heroin, they’re not going to come across crack very much. Fascinating how the social structures, and even the physical placements of where you consume, and all the aspects around it, combine in to success or failure.

1:17:02 You know, yeah, well, absolutely. There’s a, it’s this is one of the reasons I like being in the field of addiction, because it isn’t just about the drug, and it’s not just about that person, and it’s not, it’s just about society. It’s all the three. Addiction sits in the sort of triangle between social factors and personal factors and drug factors. It’s a, it’s a, you know, it’s a very complex equation, but it’s fun, because you can see different parts of the world, different alterations in the different weightings of each of these, and see different outcomes.

1:17:34 Right, now, I would just say we could stop now, and this could be a fascinating episode, but what people probably need to know is the incredible work you’ve been doing for the past 15 years at Imperial College, and the fact that you actually created the Center for Psychedelic Research, the fact that you could actually name an institution like that in the middle of Imperial College, as of a few years ago, in itself I found extremely impressive. I was at the Royal Society when you presented your LSD research four years ago, um, and in my opinion you are, you know, one of the pioneers of this research, David, and it’s been amazing to watch what you’ve done, the studies that you’ve done, and how it’s just inspired so many other institutions around the world to follow suit.

1:18:18 Now, I am technically an American originally. Now I’m both, but I always was impressed that, in my opinion, Imperial College was ahead of the Americans, and a lot of the research you were doing. Now I know lately there’s been some endowments, and more is coming, obviously Johns Hopkins is doing good stuff, but the things you’ve been doing the last 10, 15 years are incredible. For people that don’t know about it, how would you describe what you’ve been doing, and why you’ve been doing it?

1:18:45 Okay, so, um, you accept those compliments, by the way. Well, thank you, but it’s not all my work, particularly Robin, Robin Carhart-Harris has been the major driver. And I mean, if I guess if he hadn’t come to me you know, 15 years ago wanting to work in this field, I may not have done it. And the same with Ben Sessa with his MDMA work. You know, they’ve kind of they’ve beaten the drum, and I’ve managed to sort of turn it into a tune, I suppose, and I started off raising the money, but now Robin has done a great job in raising his own money, so it’s very satisfying to see them coming, you know, taking up the responsibilities.

1:19:20 Why do we do it? Well, we did it. I was, I’ve been interested in these drugs really, because I mean I you know, I grew up in the ’60s. I saw flower power. I, you know, I saw the Vietnam War.

1:19:29 I saw the way the music industry changed. I saw the way fashion, everything changed. So I, dead exchange, everything, the most powerful influence in art and culture and music there’s probably ever been. I mean, so you know, that was fascinating to me. Is, you know, why, why is that happening?

1:19:46 You know, isn’t that interesting? But, um, and then I actually did this work with LSD, you know, when I started doing my PhD, it’s trying to understand the nature of the serotonin receptor that they work on. So I’m a psychopharmacologist. My real claim to fame is that I have probably given more different drugs, different kinds of drugs, to human beings than any person alive outside the CIA. I mean, there’s almost no class of drug that I haven’t administered to human beings, and often taken myself, as part of my studies of the pharmacology of the brain.

1:20:28 Okay, now, one of the, the probably the last drugs I came to to work with were the psychedelics, because they were the most difficult to get, the most, you know, legal, the most censored. But a long, long time before, a lot, you know, back in the nineteen just after I did my PhD I was able to study the receptors they work on. They work on a special, a very special receptor in the brain called the 5-HT, the serotonin 2A receptor. And this is a really remarkable receptor, because there’s more of them in your brain, a human brain, than any other species, and they’re the greatest density, these receptors are in the parts of the brain where you do your most human things, like your thinking, your feeling, your, uh, insight.

1:21:21 And there are people like McKenna who believe that actually these receptors made the brain evolve. That there’s so many of them in these highly evolved parts of our brain that they actually drove brain evolution, and it’s, it’s not implausible. I mean, you can’t prove it, but it’s not, it’s not crazy. So they’re there for a purpose. Why are they there?

1:21:39 Well, we don’t know why they’re there, and we still don’t really know why they’re there, but back in the 1980s, we, someone invented a drug to block them, and it was invented possibly to be a treatment of schizophrenia. The idea has been, if psychedelics stimulate these receptors and people have funny experiences, like, bit like being psychotic, maybe if you blocked the receptors, people would stop being psychotic. So they made this drug called ritanserin, which is a good blocker, and and they came to us and they said, well, we want to know what it does.

1:22:08 You know, your psychopharmacology is, if we give it to people, because we’ve got it, will you measure what it does? And we should, yeah, sure, we measure what it does. Yeah, so we did studies and the only thing it did, amazingly, the only thing it did was when we did sleep recordings. It produced deep, synchronized sleep, increased slow-wave sleep, good sleep, restorative sleep, positive sleep, you know, that’s where the growth hormones are released. But that’s all it did.

1:22:35 In the daytime, you know, I took it for two weeks, and it didn’t really do very much, but it did have this effect to synchronize brain activity. Now hold that in your head, because it turns out very relevant subsequently. So when I was, 30 years down the line, we start giving the agonists, the psilocybin, the LSD, the DMT, the drugs that stimulate those receptors. What do they do in the brain? They completely desynchronize the brain.

1:23:03 Absolutely opposite. So that’s fascinating. So these receptors are somehow involved in orchestrating how the brain works, you know, at a quite a global level. And it was those insights that we got from these mushrooms and then the LSD, how it fragments brain functioning, that made us think, well, maybe these could be used in disorders where you’ve got aberrant brain thinking, like depression, and supporting that idea was the fact that, you know, even when you take normal volunteers, who, even if they’re experienced, they’ve all had some experience of psychedelics, even when you give them psychedelics in a scanner, they often feel better.

1:23:48 There’s a sense, there’s a well-being, a connectedness to nature that is improved by these drugs. You know, there’s a small amount, but it’s measurable and statistically significant. So there are positive effects of these drugs, even when you give them to people who aren’t mentally ill. And Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins, he’s a sort of American pioneer. He’d done a very nice study back in the mid- 2000s, where he took people, you know, middle-aged people, not sure what the purpose of life was, you know, not really that content with what’s going on, dissatisfied, single dose of psilocybin produced mystical experiences that have very powerful positive effects, and many of them still say, well, it was one of the best things they ever did.

1:24:30 So we thought, well, maybe we can disrupt circuits of depression. There’s well-being as a result. Let’s see what happens if we give it to people who are depressed, who cannot get better from other forms of antidepressants. So that was the impetus to do the study. It was a really difficult study to do.

1:24:46 Actually, getting the money was the only time you ever got any money from the government, and that was because depression’s such a huge problem. There’s so many people depressed, and treatments aren’t that good. Well, we got the money, and then we had to get ethical permission, that was near impossible. Then we had to get the drug. That took 32 months of a 36-month grant to actually get the stuff ready to use, because all the bureaucracy, because it’s all illegal.

1:25:11 You know, I mean, this is absurdity. I’m, you know, I want to bring some psilocybin into my laboratory for the study, and I have to have a special safe for the psilocybin. I said, why can’t I put it with the heroin? Oh no, no, no, you know, this is a class schedule one drug, and class, and this is a schedule two drug. They say, but if anyone breaks in they’ll take the heroin, not the, ah, no, no, it’s just schedule one drug.

1:25:38 Anyway, it cost about 1,500 pounds a dose because of all the bureaucracy and all that. Wow. And I said to, you know, he said, Home Office, look, I’m not, even if I went to Chelsea I’m not going to get 1,500 doses of psilocybin. I’m not gonna be selling this on the street. Don’t be so stupid.

1:25:55 No, no, no, you never know. It’s just, I think it’s a scam. It’s a money-making scam for the Home Office, but that’s another story anyway. We got the money, we got the study, we did a study, and it was amazing. People, a lot of people with severe depression, many of them had been depressed for decades, and they’d failed on multiple treatments.

1:26:13 They’d all failed on what we call CBT, called cognitive behavior therapy, and they, many of them got better for weeks or months. It was remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. And what we think is going on is that we are actually disrupting. We think in depression people get locked into it.

1:26:36 Let me have some water there too, as well. And so I’ll just reiterate some of the things you were saying. So the synchronous brain function is what’s, and even when you’re in depression you’re in that pattern, and you keep revisiting the same pattern. So you actually need to shake it up. Exactly.

1:26:51 Okay. Yeah, that’s right. Robin has this idea, it’s like the snow globe. You shake it up and then it settles down in a different place. Yeah, um, Mendel Kaelen, who was one of, uh, I mean, Mendel’s an auditory researcher.

1:27:05 He’s interested in music and psychedelic drugs, and using music to change the mind. He has a lovely analogy, which is, something, a better analogy. His analogy is that when people get into disorders like depression, it’s like when you’re skiing, and people have all skied, and that you skied the same path repeatedly, so you’re in a rut. You know what it’s like when you ski and you can’t, and it’s quite terrifying, because you’re gonna be going really fast, but the rut is too deep, you can’t get your skis out.

1:27:35 Yeah, and then his analogy is, the psychedelic, sexy, just, they’re a new snowfall. You know, everything’s replaced by nice smooth virgin snow, in there, you can make your own way down. Appropriately, maybe you can’t see the rut anymore. Exactly. Well, that’s, and actually I think it’s a really interesting analogy, because one of the things we discovered, and this is the most disappointing thing, is that although the effect was powerful, and in some cases very long lasting, in many cases it didn’t last more than a few weeks.

1:28:05 It’s as if the snow was melting and then the rut’s coming. You know, you’re exposing the rut again, and that I find intellectually fascinating and emotionally challenging, because it’s very sad for the people whose depression isn’t kind of permanently erased. It tells me, I think, intellectually, as a psychiatrist, it tells me something very important, which is that depression is a very deep-seated, maybe it’s an immutable aspect of some people’s brains.

1:28:37 And why that should be, well, maybe, I mean, you know, you can perhaps imagine in childhood that individuals are abused and maltreated and don’t have any positive reinforcement or guidance, and they just learn, you know, all they’ve ever been is depressed, so they don’t know how to be happy. And, you know, so maybe you can hide it for a bit, but it’s that sort of dominant position in their brain. It just keeps coming back and forcing them, uh, to think that way.

1:29:04 So that’s a real challenge for us, I mean, because yeah, we have brilliant effects, but they’re not, you know, we’d like them to last longer. So what we’re doing now is running a study where we’re giving two doses of psilocybin three weeks apart, to see if we can get a longer lasting effect. And we’re also comparing it with a standard treatment called escitalopram, which are an SSRI. Okay, and you’ve been doing these now for seven years, eight years more, yes, eight years.

1:29:34 We got the first grant in 2012. Yeah, okay. It’s hard work, and you use those fMRI scanners so you can get real-time looks at the brain. Yes, that’s right, so we can look at this connectivity. So, psychedelics really disrupt.

1:29:49 They disrupt synchronicity in the brain. They produce a state, which some people call entropy. It’s much more fragmented, but that is a much more flexible state, so during that state your brain can make connections. So we can see this, we can visualize these connections. They can make connections it didn’t, it hasn’t made before, or not for a long time.

1:30:10 It’s almost like putting the brain back to the state of a child, where you know everything’s possible, and you know, they haven’t learned to, to do everything. Right? You know, they can get things mixed up, but they can also be very positive and enthusiastic, and so it’s like, you know, it’s like pushing you back for 30, 40 years into childhood, and then hopefully some of the connections that can be made, some of the insights that people get during those, the trips, can be then translated into altered thinking patterns.

1:30:46 And I think that, you know, that’s quite one of the things. One of the, I think, one of the reasons we have so many of these receptors in our brain, and why we’re so clever, is because they actually do, they’re involved in big decisions. I think they’re there to help you solve the big problems in life. You know, when you were, you know, where the water hole is, you don’t want to forget that. You want to remember how you got it.

1:31:12 How do you, how do you solve this problem? How do you crack a nut with a humans were learning to be different. I think those acquired skills may be driven through those kinds of, these, these, very, these receptors, which basically are fundamental to brain learning. Okay, and now you’ve pushed on to look at psychedelics in, um, well, addiction, depression, anorexia. I mean, you’re really looking at all sorts of things.

1:31:40 Yeah, and they all share the same phenomenon in terms of, uh, what you might call a psychiatric, psychiatric diagnosis, in that they’re all disorders where people get locked into a behavior or a thinking that they don’t want. Right? So it’s, they’re all what we call internalizing disorders. They’re all about people doing things. You know, an addict is thinking about the alcohol, he’s thinking about the heroin, and anorexic, he’s thinking about the food.

1:32:12 We’re also trying to study OCD, where they’re thinking about the germs, the disorders where people’s thoughts get, there’s more, there’s more of them, or they’re just more, more constrained. They’re more more locked in, and maybe, again, so theoretically if you disrupt them they can break through. Okay, and you primarily use DMT, psilocin, which comes from the psilocybin mushrooms, and LSD. Now, all our research in patients is with psilocybin. Okay, because, uh, well, it’s, it’s worked well.

1:32:44 We’ve got most experience with it. It’s worked well in depression. We can get it in a formulation which is, uh, made to what you call pharmaceutical standards. No one in the world makes pharmaceutical LSD or DMT. LSD, the trip lasts a long time, so it’s actually quite difficult, because you know you might have to keep people in hospital overnight.

1:33:07 And DMT, the effects are very short-lived, so you’ve already got to give repeated doses. I mean, it would, we are thinking about doing an infusion of DMT. I’ve heard, to see if that would, that will prolong the effect. I’m pretty sure, and that might be therapeutic as well. I don’t know.

1:33:27 I mean, DMT is interesting in this end, you know, because some people say, well, maybe you don’t need to have that long trip and get all the insights. Maybe you just, maybe just shake the globe for 10 minutes. And everything’s, I think I said, I suspect that will have some impact, but I don’t think it’d be as good as giving people a chance to really try to make sense of why they’re depressed, because our patients often, once they’ve gone through these trips, which are usually unpleasant and difficult and stressful, they relive traumas, but they often come out having made sense of the trauma, and got new insights, and realized that actually that was the problem.

1:34:01 A lot of people don’t know why they’re depressed, right? They’ve suppressed the trauma. Right, yeah, and uh, I mean, on my sample study of one, which I won’t infect with your research, but with me, the DMT itself, you know, it shows me another reality that I would never imagine existed, but I never get any lessons, the solutions or insights from it, yet when I take the orally active DMT in the ayahuasca, I really, even more so than a high dose psilocybin, I get some real lessons.

1:34:34 I mean, I really piece things together. I revisit childhood trauma when I was seven, regularly, um, very challenging experiences for me. I get taken to the woodshed, usually, um, and massively insightful for me, and for me it’s by far the most powerful psychedelic compound for me, improving my life. Um, whereas the others, I, I don’t get as much from it. Interesting.

1:35:00 I mean, there’s almost no research done as to why that should be. Yeah, it doesn’t. I mean, you know, I mean, it’s perfectly plausible, you know, if for you that’s a fact, and it’d be interesting to know why that should be. It may, that, yeah, well, it’s, we just don’t, we know so little about these drugs in terms of what their downstream mechanisms are. We know they all work through the receptor, but they might even work in slightly different ways on the same receptor, so there’s a lot left.

1:35:24 You know, there’s plenty of research after I’ve gone. And what do you want to do with psychedelic research? What would be the holy grail? What would be the study you would love to do? Or addiction.

1:35:34 I want to do an addiction study. Okay, we’re teeing up to do a heroin addiction study in Bristol. Wow. I’d like to see if we can get people to stop being, to stop craving heroin or opiates, and that’s a big one for you, because it’s, it’s the holy grail, it’s something that seems, it’s so powerful, it’s so hard to quit. Absolutely.

1:35:53 And we, our treatments are so s*** right. Yeah, they’re methadone, or, yeah, well, they’re either keeping people addicted or they’re, um, watching them die. Yeah, yeah, we’ve got nothing to help her, an addict, stay abstinent without, you know, without being addicted. Right, and that’s so sad, because, you know, You know, a lot of them, well, I mean, we don’t know why, as I said. People, you know, same with, we don’t exactly know why not everyone who takes heroin becomes addicted, but some do.

1:36:28 And why? You know, it is a very destructive drug. Yeah, it really creeps up on you, I think. Um, you know, Keith Richards talked about it as well. It just kind of sinks its hooks into you and works in a kind of a long time span, to where you, again, back to that habit issue.

1:36:44 It gets to be this habit. Obviously you get conditioned to the dose as well, and it just becomes part of your life, and then you’re not able to really see what it’s doing to you, whereas maybe with alcohol you might get that feedback sooner, but maybe you wouldn’t. Um, I think the hangover does help. Yeah, I think it does. And then with the heroin, the danger is, you know, you’ll stop breathing, which is pretty much what I did in New York City in 2001.

1:37:09 I stopped breathing. I happened to not be alone, or I would be dead. Um, luckily, although not for her at the time, my girlfriend found me and called the ambulance, but that’s why I’m still alive. And this, David, is before any fentanyl derivatives were on the market. If those were on the market I might be dead, because that makes it even more dangerous.

1:37:29 So fentanyls are so, so scary, and general, want to know why they’re there? A lot of people don’t know this, but the fentanyl story is, in part, it’s most people assume it’s part of the opioid crisis, overprescribing, blah blah, but actually that’s far too simplistic. One of the big drivers for the fentanyl crisis was that, was, by with the UN thinking, in its absurd way, that we could begin to control the heroin use, the chronic use of heroin, by reducing the production of opium.

1:38:15 So the UN has this idea that if we basically constrain the availability of opium to make heroin, then, to make morphine, or to make any of the opiates which you use, we will reduce the black market. Now that’s absurd, because the production of heroin that is used to make morphine is completely tightly controlled. It’s a pharmaceutical production. It doesn’t. Most of the heroin that’s used is grown elsewhere, but because the only approach that most governments in the United Nations use to drugs is constriction, banning, punishment, they decided to do this experiment: let’s reduce the availability of medical heroin to stop people using heroin.

1:39:00 Well, actually, at one level they were right. At one level it had an impact. There was obviously some diversion of medical heroin, to medical opium, to heroin in Mexico, but it did exactly the wrong thing, because the response of the black market was completely predictable. They didn’t say, oh, not enough opium today, boys, let’s make some MDMA. No, they said, what the hell else can we make that looks like heroin?

1:39:28 And then someone said, oh, there’s this stuff called fentanyl. Oh my god, look at this, it’s a one-step synthesis, as opposed to heroin being three. The precursor is a third the price. Wow, we can buy it, you know, drums. Wow, and it’s 50 times more potent.

1:39:50 So 50 times more potent, third the price. Wow, we’re going to increase our profits 150-fold. So then the Mexican gang started making fentanyl instead of heroin, because it’s so much more profitable. So then they started flogging in America, and then of course the whole field completely blew apart, because then the others started saying, well, how they’re making fentanyl, but look, hang on, oh my god. There are hundreds of fentanyls, hundreds.

1:40:22 I mean, in Britain last year we detected eight zero eighty different fentanyls, different chemical fentanyls. You can make hundreds of them, and some of them are so potent you can’t even weigh them out. There’s the one called carfentanil, which we actually use. It’s so potent we can give it radiolabelled to humans, you know, in tiny, tiny doses, and we have to use tiny doses so it doesn’t stop you breathing. And, um, it’s the, years, she used to bring that elephants and rhinos in the wild.

1:40:54 You know, it’s so potent. If you, you know, accidental, if vets use it, their vets are not allowed to use it. They have to have another vet with them, in case they accidentally fall and stab themselves. Anyway, so now we’ve got this drug, which is a thousand times more potent than heroin, being sold mixed with heroin, mixed with extra, symptoms, with anything. It’s because it’s strong and cheap, and we had 20-odd deaths.

1:41:15 Our friends in the States had hundreds of deaths. So we’ve created this monster of the fentanyls, say, to some extent, because we tried to stop people using heroin, and it’s, we just, and the history of drug control, you go back, you go back a whole century. Every time we try to prohibit a drug, the market has made a more dangerous alternative. We try to ban the Chinese from smoking opium down in Limehouse, so what they do, they start injecting. Great Americans ban alcohol, what they do, start drinking hooch, methanol, you know.

1:41:51 Yeah, you ban cocaine, you get crack. You ban methamphetamine, you get crystal. You ban cannabis, you get spice. You know, you ban ecstasy, you get BMK. You ban mephedrone, you get monkey.

1:42:04 You know, it’s the market, it wants it. The black market will always go for the most potent and the best profit, so you just create more and more dangerous drugs. You’re gonna get me depressed here, David. You gotta have testing. We gotta, that’s the fentanyl.

1:42:22 Fentanyl is the great danger. Now we’ve gotta have testing, and we’ve got our antidotes. We’ve got other locks, lots of unlocks, and we’ve got to have safe injecting rooms. We’ve got to allow people to inject whatever they’ve got in a place where, if they do fall over, they can be resuscitated. We don’t want them dying in the, you know, gutters.

1:42:43 They’re testing that in Scotland, I heard, in Edinburgh. They’re not allowed to do it. They want to do it, right? The Scottish government want it. The police commissioner wants it, but the British government won’t allow it, because Scotland is still subject to the drug laws, still run by London.

1:43:01 Okay, so they’ve been fighting to get it for years, and again, if you look at the statistics and the numbers, I mean, people might say, oh, that’s horrible, you’re encouraging people to inject on site, but if you look at the numbers, it’s actually much more harmful from a cost standpoint, and all these other stats, if you let them do it on their own, the tax, you know, all, but if you actually give them a site, it’s actually a really good alternative. Well, the first thing is it keeps them alive. But I mean, I think there are politicians, actually, and there are members of the public who would rather they would actually think that drug users should die, you know, because that gets rid of them.

1:43:34 But, you know, any sane person would want to keep them alive. The second thing, and I, I, I got quite strong links with Vancouver. We’ve done research together, and I was over there recently and looking at their injection room. Their injection room is amazing. I mean, it’s a a cinema, an old cinema, which they’ve converted, and they have, I think, uh, like 16 booths.

1:43:57 Each booth has got a you know, a great, a mirror, so you sit at the booth, a little table, make up your stuff, inject, and there’s a mirror, and there’s two guys sitting in here looking at all these 16 booths, and if anyone collapses, they run over and inject them. And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s absolutely remarkable. So no, people don’t die on the streets of Vancouver, because they come in there to, it yet, but, but much, much more important, in a way, is, when they’re there, you can feed them, right?

1:44:23 You can treat their abscesses, and if they want, you know, you can offer them some psychotherapy. You can obviously occupy you, know, you can begin to get them back into society. So it’s a kind of win at every level. Yeah, yeah, and when we, we did this Thanksgiving dinner with the homeless. The guy Gary over there, Gary David, he’s really good, he was explaining.

1:44:43 He said, Brian, this is how we have a conversation with these people. And he said, sometimes it took us months to even get their first name. We’re building rapport. He said, sometimes it takes us a year with them before they admit they might have a problem with alcohol and drugs. So again, they might not even be aware of the problem that’s in front of them, and then that can lead to, like you said, discussion some treatment.

1:45:07 Yes, I mean, that’s what we try to do in this country. In America, we dehumanize people who use drugs, unless our politicians, of course, in which case they just apologize and go. But we, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like it’s such a distorted, bizarre way of thinking. It’s all human beings. It’s bizarre when you also look at the behavior of all the members in your family, where, you know, grandma’s probably popping, you know, opioids from the medicine cabinet, and grandpa is an alcoholic, and the kid is smoking this, and the kid is smoking that, and yet and the Christmas picture, everyone’s smiling, and I don’t see any drug addicts, but in fact they’re everywhere.

1:45:44 And, you know, I had this conversation with Amanda Feilding, and she said, and you just described this mad war on drugs policy that’s actually now creating stronger drugs that’s killing people. And it’s almost like it’s a reflection of who we are as humans. We look in the mirror and we don’t want to admit what we are, and so we mask all these things and put these laws, and we’re going to fight the drugs. We’re just lying to ourselves about our own tendencies and our own desires.

1:46:14 It’s really, I mean, it wasn’t, there’s this great quote from John Ehrlichman, who he was the brains behind Nixon and the war on drugs. So in 1968, Nixon’s coming up for re-election. Things are grim. The Vietnam War is going really badly. He’s gonna lose.

1:46:33 He’s gonna lose. Everyone says he’s gonna lose, and only one says, okay, well, we gotta find a war we can win, so they create the war on drugs, and only when this quote, I’ll paraphrase it, but Ehrlichman says, well, he said, we, what we really wanted to get at, we wanted to get out the hippies and the blacks, but we couldn’t make it illegal for hippies and blacks not to vote. So we had to think of something else. So what did we do? Well, we started associating the hippies with cannabis and the blacks with heroin, and then we started to vilify them night after night on the evening news as drug users, with the war on drugs, and that gave us the authority to disrupt their meetings, to, you know, damage their leaders.

1:47:25 And it was a remarkable success. He won every state except Maine, because they convinced the world there was a problem. You know, everyone hates hippies and blacks, so, you know, let’s vote for Nixon, because, you know, we don’t like him, and then Ehrlichman says, well, and did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. It was just a scam to get reelected.

1:47:50 I mean, just, and it’s carried on, the reverberations of that war on drugs. It’s, it’s even though everyone knows, everyone can read, that everyone knows it’s a scam, but we carry on doing what we were told to do in ’68. Right. And it, in the beauty, in the twisted way of that war on drugs, is that it doesn’t have to ever end. Right?

1:48:09 No. It’s almost like the war on terror. You know, yes, quite. It, you know, can it be right? It can be stirred up every now and then, you know, exactly, you know, whenever you need some sort of, you know, bit of political traction.

1:48:22 Oh, let, you know, let’s find, you know, let’s test prisoners for cannabis, you know, let’s put people in, let’s give them three strikes, and they’re in prison for life, because they don’t, you know, they’re drug users. As a matter of fact, even though, imagine that the cost of the imprisonment of Americans with cannabis is absurd. If they’re imprisoned forever, it’s kind of mad, but people believe in it, because they’ve been brainwashed to think that drug users are somehow bad people.

1:48:49 Yeah, I think I’m sure you know Dr Carhart-Harris has a great TED talk, which is titled “Let’s stop abusing drug users.” And it’s just a great conversation. About, you know, I’m just a remarkable man. Okay, because I think his is his brother. His brother died, I think, of, uh, drug use.

1:49:08 Yeah, he’s, I think his son is also in trouble, you know. He’s a, and he gets vilified. I mean, he’s because he’s got all the wrong attributes, you know. He’s a, he’s a, he’s black and intelligent, dangerous, and he puts it out there. Well, yeah, you two are similar in the fact that you just take the direct heat from the media and everyone, because you’re out saying the opposite of what everyone is saying, and what the puritan slant is in America, and what the traditional relationship with alcohol is over here.

1:49:37 And you two are the favorite punching bags, or he’s a hero of mine, and I think I’m the hero of his. Yeah, I like him a lot. Um, other studies you’re doing, because I had no idea you were doing MDMA research and cannabis research. You came in today, he’s telling me everything you’re doing. I, I was like, I thought you were, semi-retired, but you’re not.

1:49:55 Obviously, what else is going on? Well, I think what we’re most excited about, in terms of research, is the MDMA alcohol studies, trying to help people overcome their alcoholism by putting them through this. We use the MAPS protocol basically, which is that two Uh, MDMA sessions, and long sessions, and last four or five hours, when people go through their trauma and try to get over the emotional aspects of it. And that’s embedded in a 12-week program of trying to keep people sober.

1:50:24 We’re just analyzing the data now, but it looks like, you know, we’re getting about twice as good an outcome as we get from our traditional psychotherapy. So that’s, that’s actually pretty impressive. And I’ve had Rick Doblin on many times, and I think the way he described it to me was this: well, first of all, I think they tried to do the MDMA studies on vets and firemen and people like that, which, first of all, is very easy to sell politically, which is intelligent, because how can you not try to have some compassion for these people that gave their lives for your country and your safety?

1:50:55 And then I think some of the thinking is that some of these events are so traumatic that when you’re approaching it from an MDMA side you can actually process some of this trauma without being pulled back into the vortex of absolutely the emotion. And this is another example of where our brain imaging, right? We did this, but not because of MAPS. Much as I love Rick, we did this because the brain imaging study showed that it’s MDMA. It’s not like, not at all like psychedelics.

1:51:25 MDMA suppresses activity in the emotional centers. We thought, well, that’s great, and we also did a clever thing in that study where we got people to relive negative and positive memories. And as expected, when you think of a positive memory under MDMA, it’s more positive, but we showed it dampened down the negative memories. So we had a sort of a scientific basis for going ahead and trying. And yeah, and now that crazy David Nutt is taking an illegal drug and trying to fix alcoholism with it.

1:51:59 The optics on that are crazy. Well, quite. It’s, yes, Alice in Wonderland. But that being said, though, I would, I would argue, tell me if I’m wrong, that the British public, if you could quantify their opinion overall, I mean, the long game has shown that a lot of your ideas and research from back in the day is on point, right? And it’s getting us to a result.

1:52:21 Would you say that you are understood more than, say, 10 years ago? Yes, two, yes, couple of things. Well, you know, I mean, getting on programs like yours, you know, we’re having, there’s a discourse which there wasn’t, right? I mean, actually, that’s a really important point. There wasn’t a proper, ten years ago there wasn’t.

1:52:39 There were activists and there was the rest, but there wasn’t a sort of rational, intellectual discourse like we were having about drugs. You know, you’re either for them or against them, but there was no nuance. Now, you know, we’re having two hours, we’re talking rationally about all sorts of aspects of drugs, and we’re talking about alcohol as a drug, and we’re talking about you know, when I, one of the reasons I got sacked actually was because I noticed that the experts, that the people, the press, were using up to that point, would never say that ecstasy was less harmful than anything.

1:53:18 If they were asked the question, how harmful is it, they always avoid it. So there wasn’t the debates, because people didn’t know what the facts were, and that’s why I said it. And now people do know the facts, and now they know the facts, they want to talk about it, because they realize it’s actually, you know, there are things you can discuss rather than, no, it’s too dangerous. So, so yeah, the debate has become public and in science, which is great, and that’s the first thing.

1:53:41 The second thing is there is some science. There wasn’t science. There’s, you know, there’s not a lot of science, but there’s definitely more science than there was before, and when you have science it’s really difficult for people to say we don’t, you know, there’s no reason. Well, there’s no sense in what he’s doing, because there is sense. I can show you a brain scan that shows sense, so people can’t just say, oh, he’s just an activist, because I’m a scientist, and that’s, you know, that’s, I think, that’s where we’ve moved on in the last 10 years, because back then it would be like some smear article in The Sun, or four minutes on a news channel, where someone’s barking over you, or you’re trying to make a point and you can’t make a nuanced point, and then it’s, it’s, that’s it.

1:54:24 Yeah, and then it’s the optics of the situation, and David’s got to go. Yeah, right, frustrating. Huh. Yeah, but, well, I mean, I’m just glad I live long enough to see it. And we’re still a long way to go.

1:54:36 I mean, don’t never assume that the war is over until it’s over. You know, I mean, because you could say to me, well, that’s all great, David, so things have moved on, in terms of, you know, obviously you’ve got some psychedelic, a few psychedelic studies, the MDMA study, but they’re still illegal. Yeah, and actually drug policy in Britain has gone backwards. You know, we’ve got more deaths, so it’s not as if I’ve solved the problem. You know, I’ve chipped away at one or two of the more, you know, areas where there’s most opportunity therapeutically, but that bigger issue about drug policy and harm is still not being resolved, right?

1:55:10 Because these drugs are still illegal. They’re not decriminalized, and we don’t have access to things like cannabis. Well, cannabis is now legal in Britain as a medicine. In the, if, in the 14 months it’s been in medicine, there have been two prescriptions on the NHS. Two, two, two.

1:55:30 I mean, it’s absurd. I mean, it’s, I think it’s disgusting. I think it’s absolutely obscene that there are a million people in Britain using illegal cannabis for a range of disorders, because no one will prescribe it on the NHS, even though it’s legal. Outrageous. And that’s because it’s doctors who don’t want to do it.

1:55:50 They have their own preconceived notions. They don’t want the baggage, the liability. They don’t want to be involved. The government has made it very difficult for them to prescribe. Okay, so they gave it with one hand, took it away.

1:56:00 They put a whole series of very difficult hurdles in the way of doctors. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I think doctors don’t like the fact that patients know that more than them, and patients are driving this. It’s not a medical driven discovery, it’s a patient driven discovery. I find that so sad as a doctor.

1:56:18 I mean, if patients come to me with solutions, I’d welcome them, but there’s all of the medical establishment, it’s very, very traditional and old-fashioned. It’s also because you haven’t got the trials. We, the medical profession, has been completely seduced into the idea that unless you’ve got a double-blind controlled trial done by a pharmaceutical company, it’s not, it’s not medicine. It’s ridiculous. I mean, most medicine, from most of the history of medicine, medicine has been done by doctors using intuition, knowledge, experience.

1:56:48 You know, it’s only, we, you know, we can’t give up on all that and just be told by pharma companies what to give, because the fiber companies will never develop cannabis, because you can’t patent it. So, so to wait for it, the traditional truth to come means we’ll never do anything. Right, and that’s, it’s painful, because it takes years to try to get these studies that are double-blind, to prove to people, and it’s worse than that. It takes years, and it costs so much that then NICE says it’s too expensive.

1:57:16 That’s what they did with, that’s what they did with, it, kind of, a trial study for epilepsy. They insisted it was done. It was done, and then he said it’s too expensive to use, and then we, there was a hysteria from people like me and the patients who said, that’s outrageous, these kids are dying, or they’re, there are tons of kids whose parents are going to Holland, spending a thousand pounds a month getting medical cannabis, a thousand or more, sometimes three thousand pounds.

1:57:45 There’s a woman recently, she’s sold a house and moved into a flat so she can afford to treat her daughter, who is institutionalized, in Charleston, Charles, which is the epilepsy center, so she got an institutionalized child who she’s buying the cannabis to treat, because the NHS won’t treat her, even though they know that the child is doing really well on the cannabis, because the child can now go out at weekends with her parents, whereas before she couldn’t. But they won’t give it to her, because, because there’s so many reasons, so easy to say no at many levels. I know, I think it’s quite, it’s actually, it’s a, it’s heartbreaking to see the fact that people thought they were there and they’re not, and so you’re spending your time trying to educate the new breed of doctors.

1:58:31 So I’m educating doctors. I was lecturing today. Uh, we’ve set up a training scheme, a training module in medical cannabis for medical students, so that they because they’re not going to get that training from their consultants, and they’re going to get it from us, and I was giving, starting the first lecture series today, so hopefully they will then be ambitious enough and persuade their bosses to start taking it seriously, because I think it’s going to be one of the great inventions in medicine.

1:59:03 I think there’s so many uh, active ingredients. And okay, it’s going to be, I think it’s a very exciting time. What do you think of the CBD craze, and is that kind of an element of what one of those could do for the world, or not? Are you dubious? Well, we have shown in brain scanning that CBD does something, but it only, it does something to mitigate the more excessive effects of THC.

1:59:27 I mean, I think CBD in high doses is going to be a bit anxiolytic, it’s, it’s kind of certainly anticompulsive. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, of course it’s, you know, but whether it’s going to be useful for the rest of us in lower doses as a sort of well-being agent, or I don’t know, I’m open-minded. I’m not, I’m not, I certainly couldn’t say it will, but I mean, if it did, I wouldn’t be so surprised. It’s a bit like microdosing psychedelics. You know, we can’t prove they work, but a lot of people find them valuable, and they’re not going to be harmful, so I’m not against you trying, right?

1:59:58 Anything else you’re working on that we should know about? Uh, well, we are. That’s one other thing we are trying, which is to get this question of can we find something to help people not relapse when they’ve come out of, um, of opioid addiction. Tried to find something. One of the things we’ve, we know, we know why people relapse.

2:00:19 We know that there are three main reasons people, if you get someone to stop taking any drug, really, uh, get them clean, and then they relapse. There are three drivers. The biggest driver is stress, and then there’s also, uh, craving, the wanting, the pleasure, and some people just impulsive. They just can’t stop doing things that, you know, even though they want to. But the biggest driver is stress, and we’re looking at possible ways of non-addictive drugs that may moderate the stress response, to see if they could help people overcome periods of stress when they might relapse.

2:00:57 Okay, the Center for Psychedelic Research was a big deal. To have that name inside Imperial College, was that difficult to do? Uh, though I’m purely being pretty receptive, actually, because I mean, because the research is good. Look, you know, Imperial College is a research led university. As long as we’re producing high quality research in the top journals, no, they were pleased, and you know, and we, you know, we are, and, um, and hopefully we’ll carry on doing it for, well, as long as I’m working there, which, hopefully, a few more years.

2:01:28 Here, in your lifetime, are we going to see um, are we going to see, in the UK, places where I can go for the weekend and have a guided psilocybin experience? Oh, they’re there now, they are. Okay, I just can’t name them. Okay, no, what would they be? Legal?

2:01:46 Yeah, I hope so. I do hope so. I mean, there is, there is no need for them to be under, I mean, it would be not, I think, I would, I would, you know, I would I very much hope so. Okay, and you’re encouraged by what you see happening in the States when it comes to the psychedelics being decriminalized in these communities, Denver and Oakland? Absolutely, and that will probably continue, a bigger wave of these less dangerous drugs, at least less than alcohol, being decriminalized.

2:02:15 I believe so. That’s right, which, and then, and do it, because we will get then data, not on the, on the kind of, we know it, we know psilocybin, we know mushrooms are safe, because, you know, before they were made illegal, well, there’s still a million people, a million kids a year still taking the mushrooms, but we can’t collect data on them because they’re illegal. But once they become illegal in places like Denver, then we will collate data, data will be collected, which will then strengthen our argument.

2:02:41 I’m sure that we should reverse the law here. Okay, and you are, you, I mean, you say you’re semi-retired, but I don’t see that from your actions, but you are, I want to have, pay, perhaps that’s a better way. So you’ve designed your life now to where you can have some time to yourself and continue to push this research forward, and you are enjoying that period of your life now. I think I’m probably as content and as, uh, pleased with my quality of life as I’ve ever been.

2:03:09 Yeah, I’ve, yeah, and I’ve even got time to write books. That’s incredible, right? And do you constantly stay in communication with institutions in the States, and you go to conferences, or do you just kind of Do your own thing. Yeah, but I notice, so I let that, I let the youngsters go to the, uh, the big conferences and the psychedelic conferences. My main role is to educate psychiatrists and other doctors about what I’m doing.

2:03:35 Okay, because, you know, I mean, I am the sort of lead psychiatrist in our research, and I want to, you know, I want to get psychiatrists on board, and it’s, they’re slowly coming. The younger generation is coming. Do you worry about, um, the pharmaceutical industry and the way we treat depression right now, and SSRIs, and do you think this is going to a dangerous place? No, no, I don’t. No, I’ve done a lot of research in SSRIs, and they don’t, they work in a very different way to psychedelics, but for some people they’re, you know, they’re effective.

2:04:11 We’ll find out. We’ve got the comparative study now coming out. We’ll find out, um, a lot more about, not only the effectiveness of escitalopram versus psychedelics, but also the tolerability and side effects. But we can certainly, you know, plenty of people who don’t respond to exercise, or everyone in our trial, the first depression trial, had failed an SSRI. So clearly, you know, they’re not a panacea, but they’re not, they’re not as bad as some people make out.

2:04:36 Right? One of my viewers wanted me to ask you about nitrous oxide. Yes, because I, I was told that around here at night, I’m no longer going out around here, but, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a drug that’s being consumed quite a bit. Um, and I know it gets a lot of called hippy crack and government bans and things like that. What do you see as a scientist when you look at that drug?

2:04:56 Oh, I see more government lies. So I was very, very angry when The Sun decided to change the name to hippie crack, because you could see what was going to happen. So the Sun, five years ago, six years ago, decided to set out to get a nitrous oxide ban, and the lever they used was footballers. They got pictures of footballers, and the most famous one was Raheem Sterling inhaling a bag of nitrous oxide, and then they created hysteria about it. Look, this, hundred thousand pounds a week footballer is using this gas.

2:05:47 But they realized they couldn’t say Raheem Sterling is using laughing gas, because everyone just laughed at them. Oh great. Well, you know, granny used laughing gas when she had a baby. You know, I mean, I, you know, I took it when I broke my, you know, everyone knows that laughing gas is trivial, so they change the name. But you know, and that’s, you see that, you know, all the time.

2:06:07 You know, you’ve changed the name of something. You know, instead of being a protester, you’re a terrorist. Oh, we could do something about him now. And, uh, so they changed the names. Laughing gas, and I protested, and, you know, the hippie crack, hippie crack.

2:06:21 It’s nothing like crack, and hippies. You know, it’s nothing to do with hippies. I mean, it’s just, it’s just an intoxicant that young people use. So the question is, why do young people use it, and, why, acting, perhaps more importantly, why did a footballer choose it? Well, footballers use it because they can go to a product, get a bit high, they can get high for three or four minutes, and then it’s worn off.

2:06:43 It’s not going to affect their performance the next day. If they were to get drunk and get high, it would affect their performance the next day. So this is a completely rational choice of a transient intoxicant for people who’ve got to work the next day. Why are young people using it? They’re using it for the same reason.

2:07:03 It gets them. It blows their mind. They have a really interesting experience, but it’s fine, they’re not going to fall over, they’re not going to be at risk of assault. You’re back together so fast, and it’s a kind of rational alternative to alcohol if you don’t want to hang over and you want to drive home. So the banning of nitrous oxide was just this example of political parties jumping on a bandwagon.

2:07:28 It started with The Sun, and then these puritanical think tanks started to roll nitrous oxide into legal highs, into new psychiatric substances, into spice. You know, started saying, hey, they’re all dangerous, in the 2015 election, every party, the three main parties, all said we’re going to do something about new psychoactive substances, and the nitrous oxide got sucked in, and there was no proper debate. In the debate in Parliament there was no sensible discussion about when the nitrous oxide was actually harmful.

2:08:00 At all, the government’s own advisory group said it doesn’t need to be made illegal, but the, but the fact that there was a decision to ban legal highs. They banned everything, because they couldn’t be asked to think about which ones they should ban and which ones they shouldn’t. So it’s outrageous, and it’s an example of, you know, why actually we’ve gone backwards politically in the last 10 years in terms of drug regulation, because we, we, we still, it’s knee-jerk, it’s not thought-driven, right?

2:08:30 Again, it’s political. It all gets thrown into one thing. Absolutely. Forward against it. Can it get me re-elected or not, and go with it?

2:08:38 Yeah. Um, tell me about you, David. If I was to ask five of your close friends, what is David’s superpower? How are you able to do everything you do, to write the books, to bounce back from, beginning sex, to do everything at Imperial College? What would they say it is?

2:08:58 How are you able to do all this stuff? I got this. I know what I would say. I would say two things, I suppose. One is that for some reason, which I’m grateful for, I don’t get headaches.

2:09:13 So stress doesn’t give me a headache, because I, you know, I know, you know, I’ve loved plenty of people. My wife, you know, she was very stressed. You get headaches, and that disabled, so I don’t get headache, of me, grain, so I’m kind of fortunate in that, and I don’t get problems with my head when I’m doing a lot. Um, I, well, of course the real answer is, I have bloody good people working for me. I choose very good people and nurture them and look after them.

2:09:36 Um, what else? I suppose, yeah, I can wake up quite fast. I can get moving quite quickly, so I mean, a lot of my books I write well, my wife said, in bed in the morning, I get out, you know, her, right from six till nine, while she’s still sleeping, so I can. Um, so that’s quite, I’m quite fortunate, and I can turn on quite quickly. Uh, how do you lead?

2:10:00 How do I lead? Yeah, um. Uh, I, I don’t really. I mean, I kind of facilitate. I am, so I’m always available, you know, phone, email, person, and never criticize, always trying to help solve problems, and if they can’t do it, you can’t do it with them, not, you know, might think, like, grants and things with them, but and always be enthusiastic and, you know, positive, and you’re not afraid of putting yourself out there to take the hits when necessary.

2:10:36 Oh no, you have to take responsibility. If it goes wrong, it’s your, it’s my fault. If it goes right, it’s their success. When you got sacked from the government, was that a low for you? Was that a difficult time?

2:10:47 Yeah, it was hell. Is he angry? You’re angry? I was really, really angry, and, uh, but I mean, you know, there are two kinds of models of response to injustice, aren’t there? You know, there’s active engagement, fighting back, which I did, or there’s a sort of the passive kind, curl up and hopefully all blows over.

2:11:06 But I’m very much an active person, so I just fought back and fought back and fought back. And you know, it was uh, well, it was pretty effective, at the very least. As I say, the debate happened right, in a big way, in a big, big way. And when someone reads that out, in like an intro, do you have a smile that comes on your face? Or how do you remember?

2:11:24 Yeah, I often, people say to me, sometimes I often reflect myself, if I had, should I have, if I could have avoided it, should I have? The answer is I couldn’t have avoided it, because I could not have lied. But could it, would that, would the situation be better if I’d somehow stayed? If they hadn’t sacked me, if I stayed in post? And that’s quite a difficult one.

2:11:48 I mean, I hope, I mean, you kind of think, well, maybe I could have stopped some of the more stupid excesses, like the Psychoactive Substances Act, but then I see that they just trammelled over the ACMD anyway, so I don’t think you can stop political stupidity. I think so. In hindsight, I think, you know, what happened, perhaps, you know, maybe it was meant to be. It was. Now we have a proper open, independent discussion about drugs.

2:12:13 People aren’t scared to talk about it as they were before, because you put that, because it’s out there. Except, you know, the truth is out there. People can make their own minds up. Now there’s a proper dialogue, which there never was before. Yeah, I don’t know, for me it seems like a perfect calling card for you.

2:12:29 I mean, it defines who you are as a person. Exactly. Exact. Drugs are, that’s right. That’s fine, the sack dresser, but it’s interesting, someone hears that and they’re like, well, tell me more about that, and then you go into the details, and then, without them knowing it, five minutes in, they’ve already kind of bought on to your premises, which is Drug Science, right?

2:12:49 Of your website. Let’s look at the science. Let’s look at the reality of it, and then it’s like, oh, I never realized that, and people pulled the string, and pulled the string, so absolutely. I think it was a brilliant move. Um, I didn’t set out to achieve it, but it wasn’t difficult.

2:13:04 And then I, I googled Equity before this interview, and I didn’t realize you made that word up. I made it up. Yeah, um, for people that don’t know, will you just quickly tell what that means? Accuracy. Equity stands for equine addiction syndrome, which means being addicted to horse riding.

2:13:23 And I created this as a pseudo drug. It was a thought piece. It was my most, my, it is my most downloaded ever publication, and I wrote it just before we were doing the review of ecstasy, the long-awaited 30-year-old review of ecstasy, which actually has been made illegal and never been reviewed, and eventually we got permission from the government to do it, even though they said they didn’t want it. The Home Secretary said the review was unwelcome. The drugs minister said it doesn’t matter what they do, and still, we’re going to keep it class A anyway.

2:13:59 We did it, but that’s, paradoxically, I mean, surprisingly, coincidentally, during the period, the review, which is the most systematic review of ecstasy ever done, we actually got NICE, one of those NICE review groups, to do a systematic assessment of all the claims of harms of ecstasy. So we actually, we took more hundreds of papers, and they did what they would do for a pharmaceutical drug. They looked at all the harms, and showed there were virtually none, and, um, and the ones they were, were trivial.

2:14:35 And anyway, but we knew there was going to be a problem. We knew, when we were pretty certain, that we were going to recommend downgrading to class B or class C, and we knew the government weren’t going to fight back. And, um, weirdly, in my clinic about a month before the report was coming out, I saw this woman who had destroyed a lot, a chunk of her brain, falling off a horse. And she’d become very disinhibited. Personality change.

2:15:03 Lost her husband, had left her, kids left, had lost her job. You know, she was in a very bad way, and it got me interested in the harm, the brain damage from horse riding. I did when I started reading around it. I started, discovered firstly horse riding is dangerous, particularly jump, which was scary to me, because my daughters were riding. So I had conversations with them.

2:15:25 You know, hope you don’t fall off. Oh yeah, fall off all the time. Perhaps we should, would you like to do something else? You’re like, a motorbike, perhaps. Anyway, so my daughter, I sort of, you know, became much more knowledgeable about the harms of horse riding, and then I also discovered that many people get addicted to horse riding, and there’s this, um, this very well-known columnist in The Times, called, uh, what’s her name, Melanie?

2:15:50 I can’t remember a second. There, she fell off a horse and she broke a neck in her back. But she now rides in a frame, because she’s addicted to horse racing. I can’t not, you know, the smell of the horse, that touches the horse. It’s a drug.

2:16:04 So I thought, well, so this is a harmful activity. Let’s invent a let’s pretend it’s a drug, Equity, and I wrote the paper. It was actually a really successful paper, not because colleagues in Europe, they said, damn you, David, I got to the second page before I realized it wasn’t a drug. It was a horse. Anyway, it’s, I did it to kind of compare to well-known, well, certainly everyone knows about horse riding, let’s compare ecstasy to equity, and I just thought it would help.

2:16:33 I thought it would help justify a rational decision about the harm, you know, where we classify, um, ecstasy. And it had exactly the opposite reaction, because the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, went absolutely ape, completely ape, and she rang me out one day, in the very same room as where I’ve been seeing the woman with the brain damage, and she said, you can’t do that. You can’t make a comparison between an illegal activity and a legal one. I see. What, if you can’t, you know, ecstasy is illegal and horse riding is legal, how can you compare the two?

2:17:10 I said, well, if you don’t compare relative harms, how can you possibly justify making a drug illegal? No, you can’t. You can’t compare a legal activity with a legal, whatever, this is madness. So I, you know, anyway, she, and that turned out, two interesting things turned out there. One is that that was she, she then talked.

2:17:32 She went to Parliament an hour later and she denounced me, and it was very obvious that she was doing that to avoid being asked questions about her. She was flipping her home. She was claiming her sister’s flat as her main home so she could get more mortgage relief on a big house in Birmingham. So she was trying to obfuscate what was the, um, torture being shown on her. But anyway, that was why she did it.

2:17:56 But the other interesting thing happened as I, I, I, I rang up the one MP I really knew and trusted. He was a doctor, that doesn’t there are no doctor MPs anymore. Evan Harris. I said, haven’t, look, I just had this really weird conversation with the, um, with the Home Secretary. She says she can’t compare legal and illegal things.

2:18:14 And he said, yeah, David, you know, sadly most of them think like that. And I then realized that therefore you should be really careful about making things illegal, because once they’re illegal, people stop thinking about them. Right? And that really was, I found that quite chilling. And that, uh, you know, that sort of, that’s, it’s, you know, we make it illegal, we ban it, and then job done.

2:18:40 I mean, actually we’re seeing this recently, didn’t it? You heard about the horrible rapist in Manchester with GHB? Yeah, yeah. What’s the response? The response is we might have to review its classification.

2:18:49 What I mean, currently, you know, he could go to prison for possession for 14 years. Do you think making it Class A is going to make any difference? The classification doesn’t make any difference. What makes a difference is people knowing what’s going on, having testing, warning, you know. I mean, but the big problem we have with drug laws in Britain is that the laws are invested in the Home Office.

2:19:12 The Home Office is about policing, and policing is about punishment and prohibition, and until we get it out of that we can’t have a rational discussion about more sensible approaches. Right, and the reason they actually went over is because you ultimately concluded that equity was more dangerous than ecstasy. Sorry, I should have pointed. Yes, yes, exactly. We just horse riding, particularly jump, is more dangerous than taking ecstasy, and they went absolutely ape, because you know it’s I got a wonderful letter from Horse & Hound saying, did I not know that horse riding cured diabetes?

2:19:46 No, I didn’t. It touched a nerve, which perhaps, maybe America too. You know how many people die horse riding in America? Are you no? Oh, it’s about two and a half thousand, way more than dive ecstasy.

2:20:00 And of course a lot of horses died as well. Um, but it was, it was touched a nerve. You know, that you’d actually had someone have the goal to challenge this British tradition of horse riding. But it changed something, though, because people started asking how dangerous horse riding was. Is he so wrong?

2:20:17 He’s not completely wrong, and then they start looking at the data. There’s, uh, the British, um, there’s a journal of events, the president of eventing, the people who do really see horse riding, read, and they stopped publishing the list of people who died each year, because they used to have, yeah, the December issue. You know, there was always like 30 or 40. In fact, do this experiment. When you know someone in horse riding, ask them if they know somebody who’s died.

2:20:47 A lot of people who ride horses know people who’ve died horse riding. Yeah, not many people who take ecstasy know people who died. And that’s why I thought it was a brilliant paper. That’s why you should have been a politician, David, because you used words and images and ideas to blatantly show, and make a point, enough to get people mad at you, and yelling about you in Parliament. But I mean, it plainly shows that people bring baggage to this one thing and no baggage to the other, thing, because I’ve heard this story and it’s illegal, and I trust our government, so it must be bad, versus this thing which is part of British history, and it can’t be bad, but it actually is more dangerous.

2:21:26 And it clearly made the point, and I think was a brilliant thought piece. Yeah. In a country’s act, um, what scares you, David, these days? Anything? Scares me, yeah.

2:21:39 Well, Brexit politicians. I mean, the intellectual quality is going down and down and down. The, you know, the level of debate is disappearing. You know, there’s not a single politician. I don’t, I believe, before the December election, there wasn’t a single person of the 650 MPs who had a PhD.

2:22:01 There was one who was a doctor, she’s now gotten, she lost a seat. So I think this is the kind of intellectual rigor, and, um, the diversity of politics in Britain is actually worryingly limited. Then, the level of, uh, drugs. I think that, you know, fentanyl, you know, we should be doing everything in our power to try to minimize the rise of it. And you know, we are, two years, year on year, in the last two years we’ve had more deaths, and more deaths from heroin than ever in our history.

2:22:35 That’s a worry. Why don’t we do something about it? I think because governments think they’re just all going to die off. But I don’t think that’s true, especially economics. I mean, economics is going to be more polarized economically.

2:22:45 There’s going to be more poor people. There’s going to be more people on the streets. There’s going to be more spice and more heroin. There’s going to be more deaths. So that’s what really does, that’s what, that’s what worries me, particularly because I can see it.

2:22:57 You can almost sense it, it’s on, it’s coming. Yeah, and we’re going to start to hear the stories of someone’s daughter or someone’s son, and that’s when it really starts to hit home. Uh, what gives you hope? Well, I get, what gives me hope is that they’re the young people. You know, the younger generation doesn’t buy the b******t.

2:23:17 The problem, and this is the big problem, is that they don’t also buy into voting, and they don’t realize that if they don’t vote they won’t get rid of the b******t. But at least, you know, there’s a sensible discourse now about many things, and they’ve got access to the facts as well, which they didn’t have before. Okay. And, uh, finally, like, dream project that you would love to work on? Oh, no, no, more synthetic alcohol.

2:23:47 Oh yes, of course. Tell me about that. So yes, so, you know, I’ve come to the conclusion that however good my book, however much I can educate people, however much they can rate their you can’t get rid of the fact that alcohol can be a harmful drug. And I’ve realized that actually it’s possible to replicate its effects with what we believe will be much less harmful substances. We know from experience that they are.

2:24:16 So what I want to do is to make one of those an ingredient in a new series of drinks, cocktails, or maybe even beers. Find an ingredient that can replace ethanol, because of course none of us drink pure ethanol. I mean, I hope you, you know, pure ethanol stings your tongue. It’s disgusting. You usually get drunk, but no one drinks it.

2:24:36 We always put something in it, hops, or, you know, wine, skin, or in the case of something like, you know, vodka, we put rum, you know, we put Coke with it, or something. So we all flavor our alcohol to get rid of the horrible taste, so we could, we could, if we could find something that had a positive impact like alcohol, social ability, time, without the liver toxicity and the brain toxicity, then it would potentially be a lifesaver for millions of people. Is that possible?

2:25:07 Yeah, we’ve done it. We tested it. I know it works, I’ve tried it. The challenge is to get two challenges. The first challenge is to get the optimal substance, which involves chemistry, designing new compounds, and that’s expensive, and the second is to then take it through food safety testing, which is extremely fast, extremely expensive.

2:25:35 That’s three years, millions of pounds. So we’re in the process now of building our portfolio for investors. We go out to the public, hopefully, sort of March, April, when we’ve got, I think we want to have about four or five patented compounds to give us backups. Yeah, so I’m, I am, you know, I’m, that’s my main project outside of Imperial, present. That’s something I’m doing on the side.

2:25:57 That’s exciting. It is, it’s very exciting. It actually, just making new chemicals is exciting. Actually, painting things with the industry, hate you or welcome that, potentially. Well, you’re probably better able than I am to judge that.

2:26:12 What will happen is this: we know the industry is paying us attention, because we’ve had conversations with drinks companies. We believe they have to pay us attention, because it could destroy, I mean, it could be one of the great uh disruptive technologies, uh, like vaping for e-cigarettes, or vaping food. So they have to pay us attention, and they have to make sure that if we, you know, we do leap forward they can run with us. We are happy to talk to them, but what we have said, what we don’t want is to be bought and destroyed.

2:26:46 Yeah, we don’t want us to pre-emptive strike. So we said that we’re not going to get into bed with any one uh drinks company. We’d be, but we’d be happy to make an ingredient that any of them could use, make their own flavorings, make their own advertising. Okay, that’d be very interesting. If you look at what happens, like Juul, one of the big vaping companies.

2:27:02 I think, I think Philip Morris has bought like a 35 stake originally, so they kind of would, Juul, if we could be successful, we would be very happy. Yeah, because that would give us enormous resources to do what we wanted, although I think now they’re struggling with regulation, aren’t they? Banned, but I don’t know if that’s hurting. It’s going to hurt them in the long run, but flavors are banned. I think it’s a difficult yeah, the whole, that’s a whole other story.

2:27:27 That’s actually a very interesting and and scientifically very unsatisfying, too. I think the, the anti-vaping well, let me just reframe this. How do you feel about vaping, and what’s the science of it? Totally in support of it. Absolutely, vaping is going to be one of the great revolutions in health care.

2:27:47 There’s no question, no question at all. No, not at all, but because it takes away the combustibility, which is where all the carcinogens come, and all the danger. My charity did the first systematic analysis of the harms of vaping compared with cigarettes, and we concluded they were, you know, 25 times less harmful, and others have done similar analysis and confirmed that. But the problem, the problem is this: and Public Health England has endorsed it.

2:28:18 Public Health England support what we’ve said. They’ve used our data. In Wales they can you can prescribe e-cigarettes for people with chronic bronchitis, stop them smoking, because it can produce their lung function, but the problem is in America, and America is, as you probably know, it’s a country of, you know, opposites, and you’ve got some brilliant scientists, uh, but you’ve got an awful lot of people in America who are still of the puritan disposition, and a lot of them have received vast amounts of money from governments to attack tobacco.

2:28:58 So there’s a tobacco anti-tobacco lobby, which is full of, getting intelligent people who’ve fought for decades to try to bring the tobacco companies, cigarette companies, to the table to get retribution for the harms, of course. And they were partially successful. They did. I mean, I think the companies managed, had to pay out vast amounts of money to every state, for the home, but that settlement had a sting in its tail, because the settlement effectively stops any further attack on cigarettes.

2:29:40 They pay their dues, and there are some constraints, to some extent, about advertising, and but they, you cannot, no, you can no longer sue them for ill health. So you’ve got all these people, this, these, these, this army of anti-tobacco people, the campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, etc., and these are businesses. I mean, these are huge research businesses, and they’ve got to attack something, because that’s what they do. So they turned on vaping, because it’s easy, you know, small companies, not much, not a lot of science, and then, so they’ve started creating this, and I think the Juul, to some extent, were party to this, and I think I don’t like the way, I don’t like the way vaping began to be advertised as sexy and fashionable for young people.

2:30:34 I think Juul fought there, that was a mistake. Yeah, but but the attack on vaping is way beyond that, and it’s, um, it’s become now a religion. You know, I actually, I’ve, I had literally yesterday I had two extra, in exchange for The Economist, in exchange with the Sunday Times, because there are a group of people in America, most of whom aren’t even sort of scientists, that’s, you know, they’re not, they don’t know anything about pathology, who are campaigning bitterly against vaping, and saying, oh, that our evidence is wrong, because we’re wrong, you know, because and they’re doing it, I think, because they believe that vaping will lead to young people smoking, but all the evidence shows that vaping leads to young people not smoking.

2:31:29 So you can see, as vaping in America has gone up, young people smoking has gone down. So it’s kind of almost implausible that vaping leads to smoking. My fear is this: if vaping gets banned, that actually If just flavors get banned, I bet what you’re going to see is this: you’re going to see vaping go down and cigarettes making go up. I bet that’s what you’re going to see. And, uh, I’ll be very sad if that happens, but I suspect that will happen.

2:32:03 Interesting. I appreciate your assessment. It’s interesting, because every time I hear some article in the States about the bad vaping, it always seems like one case somewhere that hurts someone’s lungs. It just seems like a few of these taste things, then all of a sudden everything’s getting banned because of it, because there’s hysteria. Yeah, exactly, and because people, well, because the American approach to drugs is the same as the British.

2:32:28 It’s about banning, right? And but then there’s also this sort of conspiracy theories. One of the tobacco companies were quite hard to get them banned anyway, but not now, now they bought Juul, so it’s a, it’s a really interesting in terms of the sort of the politics and the anthropology of science and health. The vaping thing is an amazing story, but the problem is, because America is so powerful, that the American lobbyists control the WHO. So there are countries in the world now where you cannot sell vapes but you can advertise cigarettes.

2:33:07 Now there’s no way in which anyone could ever say that vaping was worse than cigarettes, but in India people are imprisoned for selling vapes, but you can advertise cigarettes. Many countries, about five or six, now have ban vaping even though they completely allow cigarettes. The WHO yesterday, this is where I’ve been in the dialogue. The WHO yesterday put out a paper, and this is outrageous, outrageous. They put out a report with the title, is vaping more harmful than cigarettes?

2:33:39 Question mark. I mean, that is designed, and the answer, their answer is, we don’t know, but we do know, but their answer is we don’t, but that, that question is designed to make people think it. I mean, it’s disgusting. Clickbait’s in papers now. Absolutely, absolutely.

2:33:58 Yeah, and it’s been very political in America, where, you know, Trump bans and this governor bans, and they get a political boost. Yes, and it’s, and the Democrats want to ban, and yet, it will, more people will turn back to smoking. And what they’ve, the worst thing of all, and this is actually, actually, this is really active this week, because today it’s on the way here. I saw that the CDC in America has at last come out and said the episode of lung problems was not due to e-cigarettes.

2:34:29 They’ve just come out and said that we knew it couldn’t be. You know, we knew it. It was almost always going to be THC, and we knew that the ones that weren’t THC were in states where it was illegal to smoke THC, so that people wouldn’t admit to smoking THC. And the CDC have dragged their heels, because they, I think they’ve been pressured by by, you know, the Senate, but eventually they’ve come out and said, no, that episode, that peak of those people with lung problems, it was all smoking THC, that was put into something called vitamin E acetate.

2:34:59 It was all, it was all illegal. It was all black market. Yeah. And, you know, and they want to ban vaping. We like saying, oh, we’re going to ban paracetamol because people are dying of black market fentanyl.

2:35:11 I mean, yeah, there you go. Welcome to the machine. Uh, David, how can people donate to Imperial College? How can people help you with your research? All of that.

2:35:22 What’s the best way to do it? Well, you can, um, yeah, if you want to donate, we’ll always be happy to take support. For every, you can go on the website. You can send me an email. We will be very grateful to have support.

2:35:33 Good. And I know also Robin is doing some studies where they’re looking for people to fill out surveys about, yes, it’s a very important point. Those of you who are interested in, sort of, in self-experimentation, in, you know, personal growth, if you’re going to a ceremony in Britain or overseas, log on to the website, fill out your forms beforehand, because we’re looking, just, we never do, never do systematic experiments on people. Uh, uh, so many people take, doing these, um, trips.

2:36:00 But if you can fill out the scores before and after, it helps us get insights into what’s happening. Yeah, and this is so they can just have some really broad statistical feedback from people without having to have like specific experiments. So you can get a lot of data. We can get a lot of data very quickly, and that’s been very helpful. Actually, one of the reasons we’re confident in going into the psychiatric disorders we’re thinking of going into is because we do get these anecdotal reports from these questionnaires that people actually do have found them beneficial.

2:36:31 Okay, good. We’ll put the link below. Go fill those out, donate to Imperial. We made a donation last year, very specifically for the Center for Psychedelic Research. Thank you, because you it was late coming, but you know, we had to make our business work first.

2:36:46 Um, and, uh, you guys are doing amazing work, so we want to support you with that. Robin’s one of our ambassadors. We’re also trying to promote the studies you’re doing every, every month on our social as well. Thank you. So it’s really powerful stuff, David.

2:36:57 I just want to finish with the advice question. Um, and I’m curious what you will tell me. But if you could pick up a phone and call up the 20-year-old David Nutt at Cambridge and give that young man a bit of advice after he was traumatized by that night of drinking, but in general, based on everything you know now, what would you advise the 20-year-old Really good advice. I went to one of those climate change protests.

2:37:48 Uh, it was powerful to see those kids there. Yeah, it was fascinating. I mean, I remember I was in Bristol, you know, a few months ago, going to the university there one Friday, and, you know, the streets were full of kids protesting. Bloody good. Good.

2:38:00 Yeah, really good. When I was 10, I was I was, um, first thing I ever did in terms of sort of activism, I was collecting jumble for a jumble sale to raise money for Biafra, and I thought, it took me right back. You know, these kids are out there on the streets doing something to change the world. Which is, oh, that’s great. Yeah, young ones too.

2:38:21 Yeah, absolutely. Great. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And, uh, if anybody wants to watch more about my adventures with my ayahuasca experiences, our movie Reconnect is going to be on our website very soon, so you can watch that. The book is “Drinking?”

2:38:36 By Professor David Nutt, and, uh, your previous book, Drugs Without the Hot Air, that’s just been reissued. It’s the second edition. Okay, bigger, fatter chapters on all sorts of new things, like spice, monkey dust, the opioid crisis. So you have to be up to date. You’ve got to get the new one, and your website’s still Drug Science excellence.

2:38:56 Yes. Okay, uh, David, I said it earlier, I’m gonna say it again because I feel this way. Uh, thank you so much for everything you’ve done. Um, I’m sure you don’t like to hear compliments, but I’m giving to you anyways. But the stuff you’ve been doing and the team you have is incredible.

2:39:09 They’re all great communicators. I love the fact you took a stand. I’m, I’m a scientist. I’ve always been a scientist by nature, and so I really appreciate the numbers. I appreciate the facts, and I abhor things for political reasons, or things that are just going to hurt us, um, in the long run, and I really appreciate what you’re doing.

2:39:28 So, um, thanks so much for that, and if we can help out in any way, let me know. Well, you’re certainly giving us a lot of publicity. Thank you. Good. Well, that’s the plan.

2:39:37 And, uh, yeah, thanks for this time, really enjoyed this. There’s two more of these. If anybody ever wants to go back and, uh, see you slightly younger, both of us, uh, but again, you haven’t changed. Yeah, always great discussions, and, uh, stay in touch and come see us again sometime. I’d be pleased to.

2:39:53 Thank you very much. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.