Kind: captions
Language: en
medical cannabis is is going to be the
big revolution in over the next 20 years
if we use it properly
david nutt welcome to the show
good to be with you
i'm really excited to talk to you today
i'm super intrigued by
drugs in general by the brain by the way
that we can
manipulate our brain chemistry through
drugs
and your latest book cannabis
makes a pretty compelling case for all
of the interesting things that
marijuana can do for us and i'm curious
why do you think like when i look at the
stack of things that you talk about in
the book that
cannabis
does controls may potentially help with
in the human
body experience
it's a it's a long list why is cannabis
so
active
well
of course we discovered that in recent
years because
the brain makes its own molecules like
cannabis
it makes several of them we've
identified one called a nandomni one
called 2he and it turns out
that those chemicals work on receptors
the same receptors
as thc the active ingredient in cannabis
works on
and
and there was a mystery for 20 odd years
when we the cannabis receptors were
discovered no one had a clue what was
going on but it turns out that the brain
makes its own
um cannabis molecules and it makes them
in a very special way it makes them
from nerve membranes
so when nerves are activated
they release
some of the membranes into the fluid
around the nerve and they get converted
into these
these cannabinoid substances and they
usually go backwards
and so they
affect the nerve that's releasing the
neurotransmitter so they're a very
novel form of what we call feedback
inhibition what is feedback inhibition
right
so for instance let's put it this way if
you if a a nerf a nerve fires
and the way in each nerve communicates
one nerve to the next is not by
electricity it's by chemicals
they're called neurotransmitters
so for instance if a nerve
and most of the
large proportion of the nerves in the
brain actually releases a transmitter
called glutamate so glutamate comes out
of one nerve ending goes across the
synapse hits the other nerve ending
stimulates it the nerve starts to fire
as it starts to fire it releases
these
molecules which turn into these
endocannabinoids which come back across
the synapse and turn off the firing so
they it helps regulate like a thermostat
in a housing helps regulate the
functioning of that particular synapse
or that whole complex of sinuses
i don't know if this is connected but
one of the more interesting things that
i've heard you talk about with
psychedelics is that
part of what
you discovered or has been discovered in
the research is that when you
take a psychedelic it's not activating
areas of your brain it's actually
turning off areas of your brain
is that is that a similar kind of
function that we're seeing here where
the inhibition of something is creating
this i mean i guess depending on who you
are sort of euphoric feeling that
marijuana can bring about or is this
completely different
that's a great question and the answer
is it's complicated
one of the real paradoxes when we
discovered
that psychedelics actually turned down
brain activity
we scratched our head and then we looked
around to see what other drugs did that
and interestingly the one drug that does
not do that
is cannabis that increases brain
activity so i am uh i have used
marijuana my wife is a big fan uh i'm a
sort of
but
it feels like i'm sort of collapsing
inside of myself that i can get lost in
a single thought that that one thought
just becomes so all-consuming and not in
an unpleasant way but just that i'm i'm
lost in that thought so it feels like
less of my brain is active
so what part of the brain is actually
lighting up that gives that sort of
all-consuming sensation
well the answer is i don't think we know
because
despite the
fact that cannabis has been
both widely used for for many many
decades and also
has been a medicine in america now for
20 years there's been very few studies
on
cannabis brain imaging
but what we think is happening uh is
that
at one level it is working like
psychedelics
but not at the metabolic level but in
the circuit level so we think that the
circuits are similar
and what
what we know happens with psychedelics
and we've got less data with cannabis
but what we know happens is that
the
the normal mechanism that basically
tells your brain what to do there's a
network in your brain called the default
mode network and that that basically
drives your current thinking
and makes you well with
what you are it's where your sort of
sense of self is that gets switched off
to some extent by cannabis and by
psychedelics
and uh and that switching off that
basically detaches you from your normal
routine daily thinking the standard
we're able to upgrade works and that
allows you to then think differently
now in your case thinking differently
means that you're getting interested in
a particular topic and you get deep deep
into it
in other people it's different than
other people the mind kind of opens and
people get this sort of broader sense of
being more out there more communicating
you know more part of
about the outside world
and why there are individual variations
in this is completely unknown in
presence
it's probably got something to do with
personality with interests
with um
what you were doing with the moving
forward do you think it has anything to
do with enzymes
and i'll i'll explain the question and
then you can uh either shoot the theory
down or let me know but
uh so the first time i had no interest
in trying marijuana my wife finally
convinces me to give it a shot and i try
it and i'm like this is the worst
experience ever this sucks there is
nothing interesting about this i feel
like i just want to lay on the couch my
head felt heavy i would be like wait
we're still watching tv it was like
somebody was pressing play and pause on
my brain it was
horrible and my wife was like you know
that's interesting that you say that she
was like when i first started smoking i
had some kind of like sense like that
but she's like it's not like that for me
anymore and i remember thinking that
doesn't make sense like how could it be
different for you now than it was in the
beginning
so anyway years go by she gets me to try
it again i have the same sensation this
is lame not interesting years go by she
gets me to try it again and that time i
had a body high now that is a whole
different experience which we'll get
into later but that prompted me to
want to try it again and so then all of
a sudden because i tried it a week later
it felt completely different and i was
like oh my god she's right and so i was
thinking of it kind of like alcohol
where if i understand alcohol metabolism
correctly you get to the point where you
have the enzymes that can break the
alcohol down so you're able to get it
through your system quicker it takes
more to get you that same level of
intoxicated
and so i was like is there
something my it really feels like my
body now handles it very differently if
i smoke sort of
with only a week in between
what's happening there
well that probably is it's probably not
metabolism it's probably some kind of
adaptive changes at the level of the
receptor
interesting probably
and and this you raise you know again
really fundamental questions which is
almost unstudied often when people start
smoking cannabis they do get very weird
experiences and they often find very
unpleasant they often get very anxious
and then over time that goes away
but then over time something else
happens and people begin to get
more sensitive to it in a different way
and they get more paranoid and that's
actually one reason why
quite a lot of people
give up smoking cannabis in their 20s
and 30s because of the
paranoid feelings beginning to develop
and so they're almost certainly two
separate processes going on there's a
process
where
the receptors or the circuits begin to
adapt so they they get less less worried
in if you can use that kind of term for
a circuit
by the the change in brain function and
that then allows you
to
engage with the positives of that
function because you're not so concerned
about the change and then over time
something else happens probably in a
different circuit or different
neurotransmitter system which then
turns on probably something like the
dopamine system which then leads to
paranoia so you've got to remember you
know cannabis can affect pretty much
every other neurotransmitter system in
the brain
yeah that's in fact i want to go back to
that it seems to be impacting some sort
of master regulatory system well one i
think it would be useful your book talks
a lot about seizures
but you also and and um the role that
cannabis can play there which is pretty
extraordinary i had not heard about the
connection between cannabis and seizures
and
my first interaction the first time i
ever saw somebody smoke weed it it like
put a um
like my brain took it down is like
there's something here because this guy
was he had tremors like really bad
tremors like the amount that my hands
are shaking right now if you're watching
youtube you'll see uh if you're just
listening to this my hands are shaking a
lot and you could hear it in his voice
like he had that like if you're really
nervous and your voice is quivering he
sounded like that all the time
if he smoked like literally six minutes
later you can watch his trimmer stop and
then he could talk normally and i was
like
what just happened it was
at one point i actually thought he was
[ __ ] with me i was like
how's it possible
so
as
walk us through a few of the things that
you enumerate in the book that cannabis
does so we've got seizures
um
weight loss like there one you've got
you you talk about this in the book
you've got if people smoke they tend not
to gain too much weight smoke weed not
not even tobacco which is a whole
different thing but if they smoke weed
they tend not to gain too much weight
but they also don't lose too much weight
and it can be used on that side that's
exactly right you have that's a very
good example isn't it of an adaptogen
it cannabis helps it paradoxically when
you get the munchies you don't get
diabetes because yeah somehow things it
normalizes the biological process
relating to appetite
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when you get people that are really
pro-cannabis they make it sound like a
panacea
and
as an adaptogen that's very interesting
and i don't know if there are other
drugs that function in a similar vein
but
um
is marijuana a panacea or
are there limits like
what's your general take
medical cannabis is is going to be the
big revolution in over the next 20 years
if we use it properly
in the same way as in the last 20 years
the big revolution has been in
immunotherapy
but medical cannabis
way way cheaper than the new
immunotherapy
and potentially uh as for many disorders
as effective the big problem
and this is
particularly what it's an american and
canadian problem really is is that the
opportunities already almost been missed
because so many people are using medical
account of this but it's still illegal
under federal law that until very
recently you couldn't get federal
funding to study the medical benefits so
you've genuinely missed a huge
opportunity in the states for by
having this complete mismatch between
what the states are doing and what the
government wants you to do
but hopefully at some point that will
change and then we would start doing
very systematic analysis
on
a range of different disorders
and actually can i just tell you that's
one of the things we're doing in britain
in britain we have
we hardly use medical cannabis at all
because
we have socialized medicine
and the nhs is very is and the doctors
in the united states are resistant to
cannabis and we can't therefore go out
and buy it like you can in a minute you
know we we don't have the
that facility that because we you know
you have recreational cannabis in many
of your states
we don't have any at all
so what what my charity drug science did
was we set up a registry we we worked we
found some cannabis suppliers
we found some doctors who wanted to
prescribe outside of the nhs we brought
the price of medical cannabis down to be
equivalent to what people would buy on
the illicit market and and we've given
we've set up this
large database of people who are getting
medical cannabis privately we've got two
and a half thousand people in that
database now
of which half of them are using it for
pain so that's one-fifth of the total
number of people
in the world who've had measures of pain
taken
on cannabis
and 44
of the people who were using opioid
painkillers before they went into this
study have stopped using them 44 nearly
half
that's just absolutely transformational
so one of the interesting things we've
done uh in the last year again through
this charity of drug science is
is to evaluate different forms of
cannabis
for pain
and we and we've compared them with
other drugs like antidepressants
gabapentinoids and opiates
and also the simple painkiller called
ibuprofen
and we use the special technique called
multi-criteria decision analysis which
allows us to properly evaluate both the
the benefits in terms of pain relief and
in terms of quality of life
and also the benefits in terms of safety
and when we did that we discovered that
the best
overall
uh product for pain relief was actually
a combination of thc
and cannabidiol
and that's actually what other patients
say because we have patients involved in
this analysis as well this is more than
opioids
well much more much more
twice
twice as good as opioids is that though
just based on the danger of opioids or
is there actually
a sort of close proximity to pain
management as well
bit of both so that combination of cbd
and thc so we're looking at maybe you
know 10 to 20 30 milligrams of cbd and 5
to 10 milligrams of thc that produces
pain relief which is actually greater
than that of opioids in in chronic pain
not acute pain not not surgical pain but
with people with chronic pain opiates
aren't very good in chronic pain
because you get tolerance
and
can you can you differentiate between
the two types of pain at a nerve level
like can could i look at a scan of some
kind and say oh this is acute pain or
this is chronic pain
um
that's not
yet possible but what is
clear that chronic pain when pain starts
you know you break in you have your leg
amputated yeah you get run over our
truck your leg gets crushed
right it's a lot of pain opiates good
for that
you cut the leg the leg gets destroyed
you cut the leg off amputate what
happens then eventually the pain starts
to recite itself in the brain so this
chronic neuropathic pain becomes a brain
disorder rather than a
traditional pain disorder from the nerve
endings in the periphery and when it
gets embedded in the brain opiates don't
work particularly well because they tend
to work at the level of the spinal cord
but the cannabinoids work pretty well
they work as pretty much as well as the
antidepressants
and the gabapentinoids and they're also
better than um
the opioids but they have quite a high
side effect burden whereas cannabidiol
thc is it came out higher in our schools
because it's very well tolerated as well
as very effective
well it's really interesting so does
that tie back to what you were saying at
the beginning where you get this
quieting of the nerve signal when you're
taking in
i guess it's both thc and cbd but is
that the mechanism that you suspect is
at work
i think that's the mechanism at work for
the thc
we're still upset a bit of mystery why
cannabidiol helps there i think it it
might simply be that it makes the thc
more focused in its actions so it takes
away some of the unwanted effects of thc
it may have an effect by itself it's
almost i mean there's almost zero
almost zero research on the brain
effects of cannabidiol
it's really interesting so
you had a conversation with peter tia
that i liked very much and one of the
things that peter brought up that you
said really resonated with you is this
idea that
if you're taking a drug and you have to
like take it forever to keep getting the
benefits that's less ideal than
something that you take and it actually
creates a long lasting change what peter
called it changes your trait so i have
these obsessive thoughts i'm having to
intake
marijuana
to keep it at bay to make it manageable
but are there things that i can do in
certain circumstances like psychedelics
where i might be able to completely
disrupt that pattern
well that's what we believe in fact
we're doing a study now of
cytosimin in chronic pain trying to see
if we can
you know as you suggest
break down
those repetitive thinking processes
which have become over learned
and
so you can see
pain as a thinking habit in the same way
as twisting your hair or picking your
nails as a motor habit yeah
that study's about to start so
in a couple of years we'll be able to
answer your question
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uh
psychedelics as we talked about earlier
turning things off not on
do we have insight into what exactly it
is that they're turning off that creates
this it's like we're seeing things that
we would have seen maybe as a child an
infant
and it's sort of bringing us back to a
more primal i don't think you ever use
that word but what what are we shutting
off
so
yes it's
the way the brain works
is uh to create
hypotheses
let's take the example of vision because
that's the easiest one to explain your
brain is not a camera you're looking at
me now
but you're not your brain isn't taking
photos of me
what your brain is doing is analyzing
the lights that's coming from
from me into your eye or from your from
your computer into your eye
and then it's turning
that those different light signatures
into electrical impulses the electrical
impulses are then going into your the
back of your brain the visual cortex
which is a large chunk of brain you know
it's as big as an orange
and you're going to different parts of
those because different parts of your
brain
deal with different parts of the vision
visual system and and then over over a
period of multiple layers of analysis
you you go from
what you want the very primary
electrical impulses to you start your
brain start to construct
multiple levels uh what it ends up being
an image that you see
and
when you're a baby
it's all buzzing and
complicated and your brain isn't very
good at making
hypotheses because it's never made any
before it hasn't met things but as you
as you start to grow up you you start to
make these
ideas it's something out there you know
there's your mother there's a chair so
you might see a chair uh you know
something's sticking out you know wooden
thing and then you might touch it and
discover it oh that's right that's a
solid thing and then your brain learns
oh okay what i thought was there is
there and that process of gradually
creating a whole series of estimates of
the world and then testing them and
retesting them
is actually why the brain isn't the most
efficient computer ever known is 10
times more efficient at computing things
than and the best computers we have
today because because it it's much
cleverer it makes these estimates and
when it's worked out what something it
doesn't bother to re-update them
it doesn't bother to spend energy
repeating it it just knows it's there
and carries on now
when you take that process of building
up requires interactions in the visual
system
probably 10 billion neurons are working
to make an individual image when you
give a psychedelic the neurons in the
brain the visual system which
connect the color center to the movement
center to the darkness center
to the shape center to make an image
those neurons are disturbed by the
psychedelic uh and i don't exactly know
why they've got so many receptors for
psychedelics but they do have
and and and that when you disturb those
neurons you can't reconstruct the full
image so what you see
as these
christmas tree lights is what we call
elemental hallucinations under
psychedelics you're actually seeing the
very early
first stage processes of visual
reconstruction when the impulses from
the eye first get into the visual cortex
we know from physiological experiments
in in frogs for instance that
the way the brain works is to construct
simple shapes
squares circles spider webs
simple colors and it puts them together
so
one of the most remarkable things about
psych psychedelics are putting you back
to seeing what what you used to see when
you're a very a very young baby before
your brain learnt to make
these simple images into much more
complicated ones so i find that really
kind of appealing because it's
you obviously you can't remember singing
as children because you didn't have the
memory system but now you can you can
infer what what it's like to start
seeing things afresh
that's really intriguing so i've never
done well so i've micro dose psilocybin
but always micro so i've never had any
hallucinations or anything
but my understanding from hearing people
talk about it is
that
they will see and sometimes interact
with like a dragon or a flower comes to
life and so it isn't at least as they've
relayed it to me it isn't just like sort
of shapes and things like that it does
seem like they're
putting something on it
um
and i don't know how much you get into
you know the collective unconscious or
you know how many like are those things
that we just
are carrying with us or it's an overlay
there's some sort of reversion to
um what you how you would see as an
infant just getting sight for the first
time but there's also this sort of layer
of abstract meaning that's laid over it
like what's that interaction like a
really important question so yes so
there's much more to a star academic
trip than just seeing
christmas tree lights
i mean they're pleasant
but there's
but people often see much much more
complicated
kinds of imagery and also have a low
whole range of other experiences like
that their body might dissolve and they
might go to heaven and you know go into
another universe or different dimensions
we don't understand
why some people have different kinds of
um
of content
i think we do understand that
that the
change from normal consciousness to
psychedelic consciousness does involve
perturbations across the whole of the
brain
our imaging studies
particularly with lsd show that the
powerful
really complicated rich dreamlike
hallucinations visual hallucinations and
often beliefs that people have under lsd
when their eyes closed they're due to
the brain
becoming hyper connected so normally the
visual system is just embedded in the
visual system
but under psychedelics because
you break down the default mode network
the visual system can then connect
everywhere in the brain
and that contributes to things like
synaesthesia where you know you might
you know see sounds or it's already
connected right it's not like the
connections happen during the trip but
there's the inhibition is shut down and
so now they can actually communicate
exactly the whole point
human brain development
well why is that why do we have a brain
after you know several billion years of
evolution is it's come from
a food targeting process it wants to
get out get you out there and get food
and of course the second main role of
the brain is to find mates so you can
reproduce okay
uh
now everything else on top of that is
kind of incidental because the brain you
know brain really just wants to make
sure there's another brain in the next
baby so you get big enough to have
reproduce have a baby right so the brain
has become really efficient
at doing the things it needs to do
and and that's the problem the default
mode
in in many ways
creates that efficiency
but it also because it distorts
and it limits the capacity of for many
people to do other things i mean there
are people who don't there are people
you know who do have spontaneous visions
there are artists who see the world in a
very different way and
and can create you know completely new
ways of thinking but for most of us the
brains are pretty boring it creates a
pretty warm war because that's the most
efficient thing to do just do the same
old thing and then pass it on to the
next generation and psychedelics break
down those habitual processes which
limit our vision and limit our
vision in the sense of opportunity
rather than just seeing things
that's a really intriguing way to think
about psychedelics that it's
one the connectivity and i saw an image
that you um put up where it's like
here's what you know the normal level of
connection or communication maybe is a
better way to say it the normal level of
communication and then here and it was
like all these extra lines of
communication this is what it looks like
during psychedelics
and
as somebody who and this is your you're
really intriguing me around trying
psychedelics because i consider myself
just obsessed with hyper efficiency and
something has changed in me as i've
gotten older
and
i do
wonder
if in getting more and more and more
efficient if i'm not narrowing something
wonderful out of existence
and so yeah that's
that's a very intriguing idea that was
originally why i microdosed was i had
heard that microdosing makes you feel
more creative and so i just i wanted to
try anything that was going to make me
feel more creative tried it nothing
tried marijuana nothing they don't make
me feel more creative
marijuana does shut down my default mode
network i think that's a perfect way of
explaining it but i don't feel increased
connections now the only thing that i do
feel like does that is meditation i
refer to that state as calm and creative
where i feel like weird areas of my
brain that don't normally talk start
talking
well exactly i mean
a week after we published our first the
first paper on
the altered state of silence timing
consciousness
a group from yale a jed brewers group
who you know wrote to us and said look
that's just what happens when people go
into transcendental meditation
they're so interesting
we thought wow that is truly remarkable
the difference is of course you know
it's quite hard you know you've got to
get a lot of practice to switch off that
to get into a transcendental state with
meditation but if you do you're actually
pretty close to that uh the same status
on psychedelics
you're disabling and that's what you're
trying to do meditation you're trying to
disable that inner mind the devil mode
network you're trying to disable it
to allow you to think differently
because it doesn't want you to think
differently it just wants you to go to
work and get up and up you know i mean
and you've got you've got to fight with
it to disable it with meditation and
psychedelics do it a bit more easily
it's really really interesting talk to
me about safety so you rank drugs by
order of safety
anybody listening to this conversation
could probably um
take away that you know we don't think
there's any danger in all of this
is there danger in this is there danger
in marijuana is there danger in
psychedelics um
yeah how worried should people be
well there's danger in all drugs when we
look at the deaths from
drugs in your country in my country
tobacco cigarettes away the top of the
list
followed by alcohol
and then then
followed by opiates
and at the very bottom of the list of
psychedelics
that takes into account like the
totality so i would in fact i'm curious
if
you had the same number of people
smoking the same number of cigarettes
the same number of people smoking
marijuana the same number of people
doing opiates like then does it does it
still come out the same or
are there some that are just way more
deadly like is marijuana 10 times more
deadly it's just way fewer people smoke
it
no no no it was the other way around the
fentanyl is ten times more deadly in
terms of harm from the drug to the user
fentanyl
other strongholds like heroin
crystal meth
they are the drugs that kill the
individual
uh
lower down alcohol tobacco
and the very bottom drugs like magic
mushrooms like
lsd like mdma they have much lower rates
of harm to the individual now cannabis
is a bit between the two cannabis is
less harmful than tobacco but more
harmful than psychedelics and and that's
really because people tend to use
cannabis much more than use psychedelics
most people don't use psychedelics more
than a few times in their life and if
you try to use it a lot you get tolerant
so it doesn't work
and so it's it's no point whereas a lot
of people who use cannabis do use it
maybe for 10 or 20 or 30 years and the
more you use a drug the more chance
there is of it causing harm and what is
the mechanism of harm for cannabis
so very few deaths okay i mean older men
with cardiovascular heart disease
hypertension it does put your blood
pressure up you know and again you know
you can see that with the red eye so
there are people you know occasionally
getting very very stoned in their heart
they have a heart attack i mean they
might have had the heart attack anyway
but it's not good for people with heart
disease
um
and that that's the main harm but then
the other harms in terms of dying in
terms of the other harm says dependence
if you get dependent well it can be
really quite upsetting and quite
disabling to your life
so
over the last 10 years we've done an
enormous imaging study we've studied
over a hundred people with opiate and
cocaine addiction and alcohol addiction
and compared their brains with people
who haven't had such an addiction
and before we started my researchers
said well what we're going to do about
cannabis because everyone's known what
happens about cannabis and i said well
what we're going to do is we're going to
divide the group the drug using group up
into those who use cannabis and those
who don't so you get rid of cannabis
users you're half the number
and i said i'm going to bet you
that the cannabis users have better
brains than the non-cannabis users
and i was right interesting cannabis is
why did you bet that
well
because cannabis is an adaptogen
cannabis is an anti-convulsant cannabis
is possibly neuroprotective against
brain trauma i bet it i bet that because
i it just seemed to me that
from what i knew about cannabis ten
years ago it was likely to be probably
neuro protective and what was the the
mechanic
that you used to judge that how did we
say it's healthier
rainbow what metric brain volume right
so alcoholics shrink their the brain you
know alcoholics brain shrinks
as a result of the toxicity of alcohol
and cannabis protects against them
but
why then is weed known for like oh
you're
you forget it's bad for your memory
is that just a cliche that isn't true or
is there something there
well of course it's there's truth in
that if you're stoned all the time you
know you you're intoxicated same as
alcohol you're intoxicated all the time
it will impair memory it will impact but
it doesn't produce any enduring damage
to the brain like alcohol and alcohol is
the only brain the only drug you can say
on an x-ray look that's for a ct scan or
an mri scan that's that's a damaged
brain
even even in a cocaine in crystal don't
damage the brain the same way alcohol
does whoa
this recent study at a harvard school of
public health they looked at
people who drink alcohol and with or
without cannabis
and they look at
liver cirrhosis
the people who use both have much much
lower rates of cirrhosis of the liver
than the people who just use alcohol and
they're now doing trials it may be that
kind of cannabis can protect or treat
alcoholic liver cirrhosis it may be an
adaptogen in the liver
okay that's
uh this is where it starts to just seem
too good to be true so
if and i know that it hasn't been
studied so you're going to be guessing
here but when we think about it being an
adaptogen in the liver
what i know about cirrhosis and maybe
i'm just wrong but that it's scarring
so i'm curious as to what your guess
would be on the so we understand the in
inhibition where
um cannabis is going to trigger the
release of a signaling molecule that's
going to tell the nerve to stop firing
but
if we're
punishing our liver by drinking too much
alcohol we're running so much toxins
through it that it begins to scar
what mechanism would
the
cannabis be using to protect that's
so confusing
cirrhosis
is caused by
the production of what i call free
radicals
from the breakdown of alcohol
and
cannabis particularly cannabidiol soaks
up free radicals it's anti-inflammatory
wow
man okay so we you said at the top of
the thing that we should have been
looking at this stuff all along and that
we've missed a lot of insights make some
predictions for me knowing full well
that you're a scientist and so these are
hypotheses and you're more than happy to
see them disproven
but
where do you think like as we spend
let's say the next decade really looking
at this stuff
what are we going to find
well we're going to find that medical
cannabis is
the preferred treatment for chronic pain
for quite a few forms of anxiety for
people whose ptsd hasn't been remedied
by mdma or psychedelics
for people with chronic inflammatory gut
disease like crohn's disease other
colitis
a lot of people are using it and getting
benefits there you're probably going to
find it's also got enormous utility in
some cancers
one of the most horrible
aspects of the of these
bans on cannabis was that there was a
systematic attempt to stop the
publication of papers showing that
cannabis had anti-cancer
abilities back in 1978
to the most senior lung physician in
america
which had a study which showed that
cannabis smoking had less lung cancer
than the normal population what
i was literally going to ask you about
um
lung cancer
but didn't you say that it it seems to
have i mean if i'm inferring correctly
from what you said that it would be
protective not curative but protective
in some way and that you if you are
smoking cannabis
you fall into a cohort of people who are
less likely could be correlation but are
less likely to have lung cancer is that
true yeah that was that was that was the
that was the epidemiological data it's
never been trialled as a protective
thing but what we say or what i say in
britain in britain most people who smoke
cannabis
smoke it with tobacco i say don't do
that do what the americans do and smoke
it meat but it's it's harder for us to
get neat cannabis here because it's
illegal
so we yeah so
but
it it's to my mind it's none of this is
surprising given what we know
subsequently we didn't know then but
what we know now about the ability of
of cannabidiol etc to have this these
anti-inflammatory and and possibly
anti-cancer properties
it needs to be tested we need to be
doing lots of studies but we're not
because it's a plant product and it
doesn't fit into the current
model of pharmaceutical drug development
wow
well david you've certainly piqued my
curiosity on this and make me want to
learn even more about it your book was
phenomenal where can people
find out more about you about your
non-profit yeah what should they do to
engage
so the best thing is to just go onto the
website and look up
drugscience.org dot uk and then you'll
see my charity you'll see all the
publications there's there's lots of
publications about cannabis all i've
talked about now in terms of my research
is on there for free there's slight sets
there's podcasts of me talking about
this and yeah and then become a follower
because drug science is
you know we we tell the truth about
drugs and the very very few other places
you can get back down the truth
amazing man thank you so much for
joining me today this was a lot of fun
guys check it out this is really
intriguing our brains are neurochemical
processing plants so once you understand
that you're dealing with chemistry all
the time uh not that i'm a huge
proponent of exogenous chemicals but
there might be enough research coming
out in the near future to warrant some
further exploration so check it out
speaking of further exploration if you
haven't already be sure to subscribe and
until next time my friends be legendary
take care peace