Am fost mințiți în privința anumitor droguri | BOABE DE CUNOAȘTERE | cu Prof. David Nutt

The general rule is if you prohibit something, suppliers will come up with something that is more potent. Some drugs are already decriminalized and legalized, and they're called alcohol and tobacco. A criminal record changes your whole life forever.

People think that decriminalizing is going to lead to more consumption.

You hit the nail on the head. You have to educate your country. My country, the most harmful drug is alcohol.

Why do you think that politicians are not listening to science in this field?

That's the crunch. Politicians love to blame drug users. They've been driven because some politicians, some parties will get some advantage of it. What drives the politicians is not just votes, but money. Wherever you look, banning tends to drive more extreme, more toxic variants. And one of the problems with the black market is not that you don't know what's there, but you don't know how much is there.

What drugs are less harmful for the user than alcohol?

I can name a few. There's lots. I'll name. This.

Professor David Nat Pharmacology Imperial College London the Biotechnology awakened Life Science is the foundatorial drug science or organization independente informatic. Human is the new normal. Confidence podcast. She. Okay, professor, that was the introduction and it's a very great honor to have you here. Welcome to my podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Is your second time you, you come to Romania?

Yes, it's actually my third time. I, I came once about 25 years ago to lecture to psychiatrists, and even before that I came to ski in Puana Brasov with my children.

Okay, you just told us a very interesting story backstage about your first comic. We're gonna get there soon, but let's talk about this war on drugs because things seems to be really similar here in Romania as they are in, in uk and we can discuss about decriminalizing and legalizing drugs. And these discussions just starts to begin in Romania where the country is experiencing a major moral panic with politicians calling for harsher prison sentences for both users and traffickers. And when we talk about decriminalizing and legalizing, a lot of criminologists call it a silent revolution. Right. So what, what is. Can you tell us in a few words what means to decriminalize or legalize? And what are the, like, the strongest arguments for. For decriminalizing some drugs?

And what are those drugs? Well, some drugs are already decriminalized and legalized, and they're called alcohol and tobacco. Yeah. And. And to some extent caffeine. So those exist and they're controlled not ideally, but they are controlled through age of purchase and through taxation. When we talk about decriminalization of illegal drugs, what essentially we're talking about is not giving users a criminal record. So, okay, that's the crunch, and that is now in. Been endorsed by almost every single one of the many different UN divisions. The only one that hasn't supported decriminalization of drug possession is the Office of Drugs and Crime. But all the others, health, children, education, they all think criminalization of drug users is really the worst policy because a criminal record changes your whole life forever. In some countries, it can end your life because you can be executed and that, you know, that is disproportionate to the harms of the drugs. So the decriminalization is about making sure that people who use drugs get into treatment if they're dependent or get deterrents if they're not dependent. Yeah. Rather than getting the criminal record. So that's. That's the fundamental distinction, and that's what I think most people support.

What's the difference then with. Between decriminalization and legalization? Like legalizing drug. What was the difference between.

The legalization comes in many different forms and one from one extreme. You have the Dutch model of effectively legalizing cannabis in a coffee shop. So in. In Holland, you can only buy your cannabis in a coffee shop. You can't get coffee there, you can't get tobacco there, but you can get cannabis and you can take a small amount home. So that's. That is a con. A very contained legalization. It's a very regulated market.

You need an ID to buy yet. So they can track how much you buy, how much you consume?

Uh, no, but they. You need an ID to know that you're over 18.

Okay. Okay. But they don't track how much you.

You can only buy 5 grams.

5 grams.

Okay, but I guess you could go to the next one and buy five grams. Okay, but you could do that. You could actually, if you wanted. And some people are talking about this for other drugs, like psychedelics and mdma, they're talking about having a smart card which will give you a certain number of doses per year. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's technically possible, isn't, you know, because of modern electronic technology. So that's the controlled access, often through something like a pharmacy. You know, you could actually go into a pharmacy where you buy your paracetamol for your headache, and you might be able to then buy some MDMA or some psilocybin if up to, say, Maybe five doses a year for that to use those drugs. So that's a, that would be a very regulated, legal market. But then there's the other extreme, which is what we kind of see with alcohol in many countries and we see with cannabis now in some US States, a completely deregulated market where people can sell anything they like to anyone, and that's generally a bad thing.

And anywhere, like, you can, you can go to any supermarket and buy whatever alcohol you want and you can even like advertise it in some places, like even in a supermarket, you can advertise it. You can advertise wine.

Yeah. And that's. Yes. So the very, very open, liberal, legalized market, the free market, as in America, that where you advertise and have no constraints on how much you buy. Some countries, like South Africa, they don't really even care how old you are. So that's. That. That tends to cause more problems. Regulated markets, particularly regulated state regulated markets, tend to be the safest markets. They're better than free markets and they're better than this criminalization of users.

What would be the approach to that? Because some people are afraid, even like some professionals are afraid, that if you decriminalize, let's say, cannabis in Romania, let's say without proper education, people will think that, wait, if it's decriminalized, if it's not sentence for a penalty for, for using cannabis, it's mean it, it's not dangerous anymore, so let's consume it. I mean, people think that decriminalizing is going to lead to more consumption of it.

Well, that didn't happen in the Netherlands and it hasn't really happened in, in the US And I don't think it would happen in Britain. And that's because there is so much use, it's so much illegal use. The markets are saturated. The benefit of decriminalization is that people know what they're getting. They can get cannabis of the right mixture, the right concentration, free from contaminants, and that then leads to better health outcomes.

What should we do about, about like the large public? Because the large public in, in, in Romania, they like it when they see punishment on television. So if you see that somebody was caught with drugs and we have so bad policies here in Romania, for example, we have drug tests on the roadside.

Oh dear.

And it's not detecting a limit. It only detects the presence of a substance. So if you go to Netherlands and you smoke a joint and you come back in Romania and in five days you're driving you're completely free of drug and you get this test, you get, you are criminalized.

Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah.

And even if you drink paracetamol or ibuprofen, you can get positive test on that. And people usually like it, like a vast majority like it. When a drug addict, let's, let's say, or a drug user is getting a penalty. How can you educate people in, in this direction? How to explain them that decriminalizing is something good for everybody, not just for the user?

Well, you hit the nail on the head. You have to educate and you have to explain to them there are many different benefits. So we've just talked earlier today about the benefit to the user of decriminalization because it means they don't get a criminal record, so they can get a job, you know, thinking, go to university, etc. Because in America, I mean, people were being criminalized for cannabis possession. They couldn't even get a bank account. So you basically allow people to live a normal life. And remember, as soon as you some criminalize someone for drug use, mostly what they then can do is drug deal drugs. So you create a drug market by criminalizing drug users because they can get other jobs.

Okay, so you mean you can use drugs like recreationally. Yeah, you get a criminal record, you cannot get a job after that. And you just start to sell those.

Exactly, because that's the ease, the easiest way of making money. So that's why breaking the criminal background to drugs is, is the way you reduce the damage of drugs. And so decriminal, stopping criminalization of users is critical. I, I mean, you may have to criminalize sellers and dealers, but not users. Okay, that's the first thing. Now the second thing you've got to educate people about is the relative harms of different drugs. Yeah, I mean, you know, we know from a vast amount of research that's been done now for the last 50 years in your country. In my country, the most harmful drug is alcohol, actually. So it makes sense to get people using drugs less harmful than alcohol, or at least some drugs less harmful than alcohol, because then you'll reduce the harms of alcohol. So we need to educate people about what drugs are. And then the third thing is if you have a regulated market, you can make sure that people are getting safe versions of drugs. I mean, one of the big problems that we have in particular in America, but also in Britain, to some extent I'm not sure about here, are opiates. People, people used to use heroin, which didn't usually Kill them. Now they're moving to things like fentanyl and nitazines, which are much more toxic. And they're doing that to get away from the fact that heroin's illegal and these drugs aren't, but they're more dangerous even though they're not illegal.

What was the, was the solution with these kind of people because. Or these kind of users? Because like we have examples in Netherlands, in Canada, when you have special sites for drugs administration. Yeah. I mean, drugs, drugs, how to call it.

They call them drug consumption rooms.

Drug consumption room. So you can get even like IV drug there. Yeah.

Well, yes. So let me. There are two kinds of ways you can provide drug consumption rooms. And by the way, we're trying to change the term now because drug consumption rooms makes people think, oh, these guys are going in there and having fun. Yeah. We prefer to call them overdose prevention centers.

Okay.

And the reason they exist and the reason they're so powerful, and we know that from work in Australia and as you've mentioned Canada and also the Netherlands, is that people generally go there with their drug, they buy it on the street, but they go to the consumption room and they inject it there while someone is watching.

Okay.

And then if they collapse because they've got something like fentanyl instead of heroin, they can be resuscitated. So the first value of these rooms is to prevent overdose, which is why we call them overdose prevention centers. But they have another enormous value is that in that people who use drugs come into contact with people who can help them so they can be fed, they can be given medical care and they can get in to the process if they want of getting off drugs. So it's a virtuous circle. Eventually they'll come in enough time, then they'll start thinking, okay, maybe it's time to stop using. So they're an avenue to therapy.

You know, while we speak, I'm thinking that there's so much science about this. Yeah. There's science that telling us that, look, if you punish people at first, you think it's going to work. Yeah. You say, yeah, we're going to give you a criminal record. You're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your good life. And you think people are going to get afraid and they will not use the drug, but that's not happening. And this, here comes the science and says, look, this is not working. This is a better approach. Usually we, we listen to science. Right. If you, you said if you have a headache. Headache. Science says that Paracetamol is going to help you. So you don't going to take anything else. You're going to listen to science. Yeah. Why do you think that politicians and regulators are not listening to science in, in this field?

Well, because it's politically very convenient to blame drug users. Politicians love to blame drug users. It fits in with this public perception that you mentioned already. There's a proportion of the population that wants to see people punished. It's like sadism. That's the first thing. But politicians jump on that bandwagon because they know that drug users don't vote anyway, so they won't lose their votes, but they might get votes from the moral majority who just like to see people punished. So I, I say all the drug laws have always been politically driven. They've driven, they've been driven because some politicians, some parties will get some advantage over them.

This is like the, probably the only reason. Do you think that there is commercial reasons in the background that maybe like decriminalizing some drugs can harm other industries like alcohol industry?

Well, you're right, you're right, but yes. So what drives the politicians is not just votes. Yeah. But money. And you're quite right. The attack on drugs other than alcohol really started back in the nineteen nineteen twenties. It started with the pharmaceutical industry trying to stop competition for its synthetic versions of things like, like opium. I mean, opium, a natural product. And then a company makes a synthetic version, morphine and wants to control the markets, so it wants to stop the natural products. After alcohol prohibition in America, when that became legal again in 1933, that you had an army of American soldiers called the, we call them the Drug Enforcement Agency now. And there were 35,000 of them.

What was their role then?

Well, their role was originally to stop people drinking alcohol, but that failed. American prohibition is fascinating. Maybe we should talk a bit about that. Yeah, talk a bit about that. So the reason alcohol is prohibited in America, Sweden, Norway, Finland, because people knew that alcohol was doing a lot of damage, particularly to families and children, because the father was getting drunk, spending all the money, beating up the wife, etc. Okay, so they voted temperance movement. We're gonna ban alcohol. They banned alcohol. What happened? Well, consumption went down a bit, but it didn't disappear because it went underground. Things called speakeasies on every American street corner. Doubt it was a seller where people were serving alcohol. Illegal alcohol. Yeah, that was being provided by the mafia and other in other illegal elements. So that was the, the American prohibition led to organized crime. It also corrupted every single policeman in America because the speakeasies just bought, paid off the local police. So then the American government created and the Narcotics Control Board, now the Drug Enforcement Agency. The Untouchables.

Untouchables.

The Untouchables. So these were special policemen who were paid to fight the Mafia.

Yeah.

And become very famous. Elliot Ness, you know, the Untouchables. So there was. And it ended up there were 35,000 of these people fighting the Mafia, and they were led by a man called Harry Anslinger. And he was the second most famous man in America because every day he'd be on the TV and his men would be destroying barrels of beer. And the most famous one was Hoover, the head of the FBI. They were both more famous than the President. Then the Senate votes, okay, we're going to make alcohol legal again. And there's Harry saying, hang on, hang on, I got. What's going to happen to my job and what about all my men? So he said, oh, when you make alcohol legal, there's going to be a big problem. And that's cannabis. But it's worse than that. It's actually marijuana, which is.

Okay.

Which is Mexican cannabis. And these Mexicans are going to cross the border with their marijuana and they're going to destroy American society. So then the attack on marijuana started and subsequently that has continued because it's a business and it employs people, but also the drinks industry has been very good at making sure no one ever goes back and tries to control alcohol. No more alcohol prohibition. They're going to focus all the attention on other drugs.

Yeah, but you know, when we talk about the prohibition, we. We start, like, from the bottom and then we start to advertise alcohol and sell it everywhere. So it's like two extremes. And you know what? Like, if you talk about prohibition and you see it doesn't work like what you described now with the Prohibition, you cannot sell alcohol, but it goes underground and Mafia is producing alcohol and bribing all the policemen. That's what happens now with drugs is the same. This is the drugs prohibition, let's say.

It's fascinating, isn't it?

Yeah, it's the same thing.

It's exactly. It's identical. Identical. And when you say to politicians, as I do. So you believe in prohibition? Yes, We've got to prohibit drugs. So did. Did alcohol prohibition work? Oh, we got to prohibit drugs. Why didn't. I mean, they actively deny the evidence from alcohol prohibition. They actively deny it.

So we now are in drugs prohibition and we are in, like, massive selling of alcohol and probably we're going to. The solution is bringing both in. In, like, controlled sets.

That's what I think.

Setting of selling it.

Yes. So I have a very simple philosophy.

Yeah.

Which is a drug that is less harmful to the user.

Yeah.

Than alcohol should be available in pharmacies so that people can have a choice. Why would you make them use a more harmful drug? If there's a less harmful drug available.

Can you name those drugs? What drugs are less harmful for the user than alcohol?

I can name a few, because there's lots of names.

Cannabis, it's less dangerous than alcohol.

Cannabis, mdma, Ecstasy. Really? Yeah.

Ecstasy is less dangerous than alcohol to the user?

Yes, to the user.

I mean, you have, like, a big study, the one published in Lancet, which is probably the biggest study that.

Yes.

Studies the harms of drugs. So you took a lot of drugs and you took a lot of metrics. The damage for the user and the damage for the society. And that's when you.

You.

You've got that statement. Not you. The study got that statement that the most dangerous drug for the humankind is alcohol. Right now.

So the most harmful.

Harmful. Okay, the most harmful.

Yes.

But I was thinking that, like, let's say it. Put it this way, maybe it's the most harmful because it's sold everywhere.

Exactly.

And you cannot get ecstasy everywhere. But if you would decriminalize ecstasy, would it still be the most harmful?

Right. So, yeah. So this is a really fundamental question which I have written about. I. I've written a paper, what's called A Tale of Two E's. Ethanol versus Ecstasy.

Okay.

And which is more harmful currently to society? Of course, alcohol is more harmful because it's more used. Yeah. But the question you raise is the critical question. Suppose you could go into a pharmacy with your smart card and buy Ecstasy once a month to have a party. Would the harms of ecstasy increase? No, they go down because people will be getting the right ecstasy. That's.

That's fascinating. Yeah. Because you can go and you can, like, buy the right ecstasy and have a party once.

You could say you could only be sold 100mg instead of. Currently, the black market has driven up the strength of Ecstasy tablets, sometimes to 350 milligrams, which is. Which can be a very toxic dose. That's all because of prohibition, by the way. I mean, that's all because of the desperate attempts of the United nations to stop Ecstasy production, leading to increased production. I mean, there's a general rule. And this goes back again to American Alcohol prohibition. The general rule is this, if you prohibit something, suppliers will come up with something that is more potent because there's more money per unit. So with alcohol prohibition, they started selling things like methanol and hooch. It became the use of distilled spirits massively increased because a liter of distilled spirits has got 10 times as much alcohol as a. As a liter of beer. So they were making distilled spirits, so people were getting more drunk with cannabis. Cannabis prohibition has led to the rise of super strong cannabis called skunk. Heroin prohibition has led to the rise of super strong opiates called fentanyl nitazines. To some extent, MDMA prohibition has led to the rise of more toxic amphetamines like pma. So wherever you look, banning tends to drive more extreme, more toxic variants.

But getting back to ecstasy, Ecstasy is. This is mdma. It's the same thing.

Yeah. It's not.

There's no difference between ecstasy, mdma.

MDMA is pure.

Okay.

Who knows what's in ecstasy? It should be mdma. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's. That's the point. Sometimes ecstasy isn't mdma, sometimes it's pma.

Okay.

Phenyl methoxymphetamine, which is more toxic, or paramethoxy amphetamine. Yeah. Because in order to. When people couldn't make MDMA because of the United nations put a serious block on production of the precursor Safrol, chemists started using different precursors and made different drugs called pma, pmma, and they're much more toxic.

So ecstasy, like legal ecstasy, should be mdma.

Correct.

And black market, you don't know what was there.

Yeah. So can I just say one other thing about. Yeah. And one of the problems with the black market is not that you don't know what's there, which may be toxic and has been toxic, but you don't know how much is there. And then, so one day you take an ecstasy tablet, nothing happens. You take another two, you get an effect. Next time you think, I've got to take three to get an effect, but the next those ones you buy then are real. You take three, you know you're dead.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, that's bad. To put it in perspective, it's like going to the bar and taking a drink and one time you get like a shot, you say, I'm gonna take one more. And then you take a drink and that's. There's a liter of vodka over there in one drink.

It's a good analogy.

But you can feel it, like here. You don't feel what you. What you're swallowing. Yeah. But getting back on those drugs that are not so harmful as alcohol. You said cannabis. You said mdma, which is like ecstasy.

Oh. And then I would say drugs like lsd, lsd, psilocybin, cat.

What is cat?

Cat is a. It's a chewable caffeine. It comes from East Africa, which is used after meals to stimulate digestion, but is now illegal in many countries because, really.

Well, it has caffeine in there.

It's like caffeine. Yeah. Why? I've no idea. It's illegal because Somalians use it. And, you know, it's nice to ban things that Somalians use because they're terrorists, aren't they? You know, I mean, it's part of the. It's part of the other facet about drug policy and drug People, like, are very happy to ban drugs that are used by different cultures because, again, it doesn't affect the voters. Wait, we're gonna ban this nasty drug, Cat, which.

Yeah.

There's no harm to anyone. But it's a drug. Yeah. So it gets banned. And it's okay because Somalians use it, Kenyans use it, but we don't. So who cares if it's bad?

Yeah. So any others than. Than this?

Well, there's obviously. There's obviously tobacco.

Okay.

Which is less harmful. Less harmful generally than. Than alcohol, particularly. Tobacco, of course, kills a lot of people. Yeah. But it doesn't kill other people. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And alcohol tends to kill other people as well, through traffic accidents, violence.

Yeah.

And then you have other drugs, rarer, you know, drugs that are less widely used drugs, like some medicines, like, you know, buprenorphine, for instance. Subtext. Yeah.

Can we now go through these drugs?

Yeah.

And if. If you can explain a few words, how they work in the brain. And then in the end, I would like to. To get back to alcohol, and I would like to. To know how alcohol acts in the brain and why it's so dangerous, like why it's more harmful than these drugs.

Totally. So where should we start?

Maybe with cannabis. So how cannabis works in the brain.

Yes. So cannabis is a plant. And the cannabis plant makes hundreds of different molecules which we call cannabinoids. And the one that everyone knows about is called THC. Delta 9 THC. And that's what gets you stoned. Most people who smoke cannabis want to get stoned, and they take thc. But in most cannabis plants, when it's grown naturally, the plant also makes a thing called cannabidiol or cbd. And CBD is a sort of natural antidote to thc. So normally most the traditional cannabis has about equal amounts of THC and cbd. And that means you get stoned, but you also get relaxed because cannabidiol relaxes you, it helps you sleep and it also balances out the thc. And what's happened in the last Britain in particular in the last 20 years, is we've tried to stop cannabis use and we've done that through blocking importation from, say, Morocco or from the Lebanon. And now we have homegrown. And the homegrown has pushed the growing procedures are hydroponic under ultraviolet light, and that distorts the way the plant produces molecules and it produces a lot more of the THC and a lot less of the CBD. So you go from typically it used to be 4 or 5% THC, now it's 15% and 0 CBD. So now. So the same plant is now producing a much more powerful ingredient or much more of the powerful ingredient. So it's a bit like the old days. You might have drunk beer. In fact, for most of history, people drank beer because it was safer than water. But then you start distilling beer and you go, you get it much, much stronger. And so people end up drinking spirits and getting more harm from spirits. So. So skunk is like the spirits of. Of thc. So. So that. So that's. I think that's a classic example of prohibition, distorting the market, creating a much more toxic substance. So what does THC do in the brain? Well, your brain, amazingly. And this is one of the strangest things. Your brain is full of things we call receptors. These are proteins which. In which THC binds. It goes into the brain and sticks on these special proteins and changes brain function. And that makes you relaxed and makes you stoned. But interestingly, it can also do other things, reduce pain, it can help treat epilepsy, etc. And that's because your brain makes substances like cannabis called endocannabinoids.

Well, and what does the brain do with like his and endogen endocannabinoids?

Well, they're hugely important. We call them adaptogens. They help maintain equilibrium balance in the brain. And we know that if you change the levels, there are two main ones. One's called 2ag and one's called anandamide. And they have slightly different roles. One's more more a background tonic activity. One's more if there's a pulse of something but they control, they balance brain activity. So maybe the analogy is like this. So they're like the brake in a car. You have an accelerator, you put your foot down, car goes fast, you've got to have a break to make sure it can slow down. And the endocannabinoids, I like the brakes, they balance out, prevent too much activity in the brain.

What are the drawbacks? What are the adverse effects of using cannabinoids? Cannabis.

Cannabis, yes. So. Well, the biggest drawback is that you can get dependent on it. If you smoke an awful lot of strong thc, you will get dependent. And now, because cannabis has become quite popular, there are a lot of people are dependent. Very often they don't mind because it doesn't particularly interfere with them. But if they try to stop, it's difficult. And of course, if they get tested, the road or that, and then that can be very damaging.

Okay, let's move to the next one. MDMA or ecstasy. What, how does this MDMA affects brain? What, what it does in the brain?

So MDMA releases transmitters so that your brain is a very sophisticated computer which uses chemistry to communicate between the different cells, the neurons. And there are some very powerful neurotransmitters. Serotonin is one everyone knows about. It's a feel good transmitter. It actually makes you happy, it makes you sociable. MDMA releases serotonin, and that's really why it's called, why it produces the loved up feeling. But it also releases dopamine, which is why it gives you energy and drive. You can dance all night. It also releases noradrenaline, which also contributes to being awake. So ecstasy is a complicated drug. It works on three transmitters, but the one it works most on is serotonin. That is where you get the empathy. Okay, so remember, it's worth remembering this. When ecstasy wasn't the original name for ecstasy, when ecstasy was rediscovered by Alexander Shulgin and it was used in therapy, it was called Empathy. In fact, if the name had not been changed to increase the sales, if it's still being called Empathy, it would still be legal. It's only because the name ecstasy was a real challenge to the moral majority. It was a challenge to the media, a challenge to politicians. Our kids are having ecstasy. We got to stop that. But no one would care if they were having Empathy. In fact, empathy is a good thing. Ecstasy is a bad thing. So the name changed, which was just created by a guy selling it in a club in Texas, changed the whole attitude to ecstasy.

What are the drawbacks of using MDMA or ecstasy.

If you take a lot, you can die. Like you can if you take a lot of alcohol, which you can't with cannabis, by the way. It's very, almost impossible to overdose on cannabis. One of the reasons why it's, it has low mortality. Yeah. So you can, you can put up your blood pressure, it can put your body temperature. So if you, if you are using, if you take a big dose of ecstasy and you, you, you dance too much and you sweat a lot, you can have, you can get what we call hyperthermia, high blood temperature.

Are there any like long term changes in the brain and the way it works?

Well, people have studied that because there was a. In order to justify ecstasy being made illegal, there had to be some evidence of harm. Yeah. So the US Government funded a vast amount of research to find harms from ecstasy and they claim to have found some. It's actually very hard to know if there really are any because the experiments they did were so bad. I mean, the science of drug harms is some of the worst science has ever been. I mean, the most famous experiment was this. I mean, you just. Can I share this with you? So they wanted to get hard evidence that using ecstasy would damage your brain, because that would be why it must be illegal. Yeah. So there's this famous group in Johns Hopkins, Riccarti's group, and they published this paper and they, they gave monkeys, they say they gave monkeys ecstasy and put them in a room all night where they played the Podges music all night. So rave music all night with ecstasy. And they said, look, some of the monkeys have got brain damage. And we read this and we said, hang on, no one's coming out of clubs with brain damage. I mean, this just can't be true. And it wasn't true. It turned out that they'd given the monkeys crystal method, not ecstasy.

Okay.

Which is. So they're given an ecstasy dose of crystal meth, which is 10 times the right dose, so they damage them. But people wanted to believe that ecstasy caused that. So there were so many fears created about ecstasy. Our experience is. And modern studies show very little evidence of harm. If you're using ecstasy once, once or twice a month, it's very unlikely.

I want to make a very clear distinction here. Like what you're talking about is the pure pharmacological MDMA Ecstasy. I'm, I want to make sure that anybody that is listening to this podcast, he must be, we must be clear that if you go and you buy on illegal market access, you don't Know what you get. So there we. We don't know what are the effects on the brain. That's the problem with the illegal market. Right. I mean.

Correct. And if you. There are things that are being sold as ecstasy which we know are more toxic. Yes.

Yeah. And so we've talked. We've talked about ecstasy and you said the. The right dose. What was the right dose for exes? You said 100.

Well, in our research and therapy is. We use it. We've used ecstasy to treat alcoholism. Strangely, people think that's mad, but it's not mad because ecstasy is a very powerful treatment for trauma disorders.

Really?

Yeah, because it allows people to remember the trauma without being overwhelmed by the emotion. So there's. There's a lot of data using MDMA to treat post traumatic stress disorder just.

By taking it or taking it with therapy at the same time.

Taking it with therapy. Use. Use the. The therapy. The way you overcome a trauma is to relive it and then basically get rid of the emotion. Yeah. You can't get rid of the facts. You know, you've been blown up in Afghanistan. You'll never not remember being blown up. But the problem with PTSD is that, is that the emotion of being blown up, the fear overwhelms you every time you hear a bang. So what you have to do is you have to relive the experience and what we call extinguish the fear. And many people can't do that. And we've done work on PTSD for decades, and there were people who were either just run out the room when you say remember the event or they'll just faint. Yeah. Whereas MDMA controls the emotion and allows people to re. Engage and therefore get benefit from the therapy.

Okay, we're going to get back to the therapeutic use of psychedelics, but before we move to the next drug, is there anywhere. Can you.

Is.

Is there any country that's decriminalized MDMA when you can use MDMA or when you can. Where you can buy it in a controlled setting?

No, but Australia has made it a medicine.

Okay.

Last year, Australia made MDMA a medicine for ptsd.

Okay, so you can get PTSD treatment in post traumatic stress disorder in Australia.

Yes. And I'll tell you why they did it. Australia is one of the richest countries in the world as one of the best healthcare systems in the world. And despite that, they were finding massive suicide rates in first responders, ambulance men, policemen, paramedics, soldiers. More Australian soldiers have killed themselves than were killed in combat in the last 20 years and they're killing themselves because they've got PTSD. So the Australian government said, look, this is silly. We know that MDMA works because there's like 12 papers showing it works. And we know it's safe because people like nut has shown it's less harmful than alcohol. Let's just make it a medicine. And they did.

Okay, good. So again, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna mention that we talk about like medicine here.

Yes.

We talk about controlled dose and substances, not what can you find on the market. So I'm, I want to make sure that people don't mix these things and just listen to us and say, okay, I'm going to go and buy Ecstasy.

Now.

You don't know what you buy, what is what, what are the, how many grams and what you have in there. Let's move to lsd. What, what, what is lsd? How it works on, on the brain.

So LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide. So it was a molecule that was made by Albert Hoffman in 1943. And it's made from ergot. Yeah. Now ergot is a fungus. It's a fungus that grows on cereals like wheat and rye. In fact, if you leave cereals now growing in your fields, those cereals growing in the next month, some of them will get black pieces on them, which is actually the fungus. Now it has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks that if you take those black bits of fungus and put them into wine, you get a very interesting drink. Greeks call it the kykeon. And they use that drink to celebrate what they call the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were celebrations that took place in the autumn when the fungus grew, where they use a drink to essentially have fantastic parties. We'd call them raves, they called them mysteries. And they danced and they had theater and they had poetry and they had music. And it was part of the creative soul of ancient Greece.

That's like ancient Greece raves.

Right? Ancient Greek raves. That's right. And they lasted for 1500 years. In fact, when the Romans took over Greece, they carried on them because the Roman, this, the senior Romans knew they were good, good for everyone, and they went and did them as well. In fact, it was, it wasn't really till Christianity took over Rome that these raves were stopped. But what's interesting about them is it in that ergot there's lysergic acid.

Okay, so they were, they were drinking wine with lsd.

No, because LSD is a more, is a variant of the acid. It's a, it's much more potent than lsd. But they were getting psychedelic, it was psychedelic wine, basically. Okay. And that spread through the whole Roman Empire, by the way. The Romans took it from Greece, they probably took it here, they took it to Rome, they took it to Spain. We found traces of this special wine all over the Roman Empire. What happened then? Two things happened then for many hundreds of years, female women, women who looked after women, you know, female health care people, wise women, would use ergot for childbirth because after childbirth you can bleed a lot.

Yeah.

And if you. They would give women after childbirth ergot to stop them bleeding. So it saved lives because we do that now. I mean, we stop uterus, we contract the uterus with something called ergotomine, which is marigot. And it also, they became used for many centuries for headaches. In fact, what Hoffman was doing, Hoffman was trying to improve on ergotamine, the headaches. And then he discovered this new molecule had very different effects we call psychedelic effects. And that's because it works in a different receptor in the brain, not on the blood vessels.

So he discovered lsd.

Yes.

And how does it work in the brain? What it does in the brain to bring those hallucinations and the good feeling so strangely.

And we don't understand really why the human brain, particularly the most recently evolved parts of the human brain, the parts of the human brain that we are using now as we talk, to talk, to think and to plan and to understand and to remember, those parts of the brain which make us human, which don't exist in other primates, the most recently in frontal parts of the brain, they're stuffed full of receptors, full lsd. We don't know why they're there, but we think they must have an importance because there's more of them there than anywhere else. So LSD gets in your brain and it changes the very high level functioning of your brain. And essentially it makes you think differently, it makes you feel differently, it takes away tension because tension is created by thinking and it breaks down those thinking loops and it allows the brain to recover from any kind of deep seated rituals, deep seated ruminations or thought loops that people get locked into. It can liberate people from the feelings of anxiety and depression as well as give you hallucinations, because that's a different part of the brain.

And creativity is boosted.

Right. People get into. Yeah, well, insights, absolutely. And of course, when you see, you see what LSD did to society when LSD became used by the Creative communities in the, in the late 50s, early 60s, it changed arts. I mean the psychedelia, you know, was an enormously powerful art movement. It changed music, psychedelic music, it changed society. People thought differently. So I say LSD was banned in 1967 in America and the rest of the world followed suit quite after, soon after. LSD is the first drug to be banned because it changed the way people voted. Really? Yeah. People who took lsd. So hang on a sec. Why are we fighting a war? We want them. There was a famous, famous statement, make love, not war. Yeah. And that was so counter to the American political philosophy because at that time they were bombing illegally and secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos to pulp in the war in Vietnam. And they wanted to carry on bombing. And people said, no, we don't want war, we want peace, we want love. And the American government didn't want that. So they couldn't ban the anti war movement, but they could ban the drug. So they banned the drug associated with the anti war movement. And of course the war then ends 15 years later or so. But the ban on drug states is still illegal in every country in the world.

It's still illegal. That was my question. So LSD is illegal in any country except North Korea.

Really. But I don't think. Because Northco doesn't sign up to any international convention.

They don't vote.

They don't. They don't vote. Good point. No, they only vote for one person. Yeah. Okay, one person.

Only one choice. You can take lsd.

It doesn't matter.

You know, while you was talking about lsd, I was thinking about dmt. Is that.

Yes.

As substance that you can find in the ayahuasca or.

Correct. That's right, yeah.

And can you, is it more, do you think it's more harmful than alcohol? It's much more potent, Right. Than lsd. No, no.

So let me explain the difference. Yeah, let's give you. So I give you the bigger picture about psychedelics. So there are a whole group of what we call serotonergic psychedelics.

MDMA is a psychedelic, right? No, no.

Okay, so MDMA releases serotonin.

Okay.

LSD, DMT, Psilocybin 5, MeO, DMT, they all stimulate receptors. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, so they act like serotonin, but they're like sort of stronger than serotonin in some ways. Okay. So it's a different. And they actually work in different parts of the brain. MDMA works in the emotional centers of the brain to dampen down emotion so that people can cope with the memory of the stress. Whereas psychedelics work in the very high cognitive centers where you do your thinking. So MDMA is for feeling and psychedelics of thinking.

Okay.

Okay. Now, in terms of potency, the most potent is LSD because you use microgram quantities, 100 micrograms. Right.

Okay.

Now with DMT you use 20 milligrams, and with psilocybin we use 25 milligrams.

Okay.

And mescaline is the other one I should have mentioned. You use 300 milligrams. So. And that's because they have different stickiness. We call it affinity for the receptor. LSD is very high affinity and masculine low affinity. They all work on the same receptor. So the. But the big difference is how long they last. So LSD lasts for 12 hours. Psilocybin, 12 hours, 15 hours. Yeah, I mean, okay. Psilocybin lasts for between about four and six hours. DMT lasts for about 20 minutes. And that's because it's metabolized, it's rapidly chewed up. Now, ayahuasca is a form of DMT that you can drink. And it's a combination of two drugs. Well, it's a combination of two plants, but in those plants there's DMT and another substance called harmaline. And harmaline prevents the breakdown of dmt. So you can drink ayahuasca and the effect will last all night because the DMT is not being broken down. But if you sniff, snort DMT or you smoke DMT, the effect is much shorter, like 20 minutes. So when we do DMT research, we give it intravenously and the effect again, about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Now, the effect can seem stronger than LSD because it can come on suddenly. Okay. If you inject something, LSD comes on over the course of an hour, but the effect in the brain is the same. It's just that you get there faster with dims.

People describe like this, actually, this ayahuasca trips. There are people even here in Romania that travel to Peru to make this, this, this ayahuasca ceremonies. They all describe this spiritual awakening and they all describe a tunnel and traveling to the space and meeting with this, with these gods that seems to be themselves. They, they kind of find themselves.

Yes, indeed.

And they come back. And what's interesting is that everybody describes like kind of similar experience.

Why?

Where does it come from? Why the same experience? How can you explain that?

Well, I think it's because they get the same changes in the brain. Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, so for instance, if I gave everyone a Lot of alcohol. They'd all fall asleep. That's, you know, that's true. But.

And, but here. Yeah. I mean, it's. It changes the way you think and the way you.

The difference is it's very positive, isn't it? Why do people get so many. What is. So many people have this very powerful positive experience where they come out of it better.

Yeah.

Whereas you give everyone alcohol, they fall asleep, they just wake up with a hangover. Yeah. Why is that? Why do they feel better? And that's a great. That's what we're studying. Why does that happen? And it's because. I think it's because for almost everyone as we grow up, we're forced into ways of thinking by society, by our parents, by our schools that are good and necessary. It is important we learn the same language so that every word I use, you understand, and vice versa. But we also get made to think in a very structured way and we may not want to think like that all the time. And psychedelics break down those very high level, what you might call forced ways of thinking. And people can see things differently. And they can. Then usually they see things better. They see mistakes they've made. They get insights into behaviors that are wrong. They get insights into attitudes because you're sort of clearing out a lot of junk that's been forced into your brain by advertising, by events in your life, by traumas. All sorts of things collect in your brain and then they get burst aside. Okay.

Yeah. That's a very good explanation. I have a question for you. Because you're a scientist.

Yeah. And.

A lot of these people that have this experience, they describe a connection with something beyond them.

Yes, that's right.

Do you, what. Do you personally think that there can be a connection to something like spirit, spiritually that is beyond us or it's just happening in the brain?

Okay, okay, I see your question now. Yeah. There is no question. People get connected with things bigger than their brain.

Yes.

Bigger than what they'd ever thought before.

Yes.

Is that in the brain or outside the brain? So there are people who say it's outside the brain and absolutely convinced. You know, they take dmt, they go into another dimension.

Yeah.

They go through the wormhole. They meet entities.

Yes.

They're in a better place. It's brighter, it's nice, everything is better. They want to go there and they keep going there. Yeah. And they obviously. Sure. They're outside the brain. And the whole theories of. Of how that can happen is difficult to prove. But, you know, they think you know, they're in. They literally, they're outside the brain, they're somewhere else in the universe. My view is what these drugs do is show you the true capacity of your brain is still in the brain. But mostly we don't access that side of the brain. And the only people that really access it, apart from people who take trips, are people like Yogi, you know, who spend years meditating and controlling their brain so they can get to where they need to get to. But psychedelics are just a lot easier than spending 30 years on a mountain.

Yeah, that's such a nice answer because what you said is actually probably our brain has the capacity to go to another dimension and be there.

Well, I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it? You know, I don't, you know, I mean, I don't understand most modern maths. I don't understand most modern astrophysics and particularly subatomic physics. The concepts that are used to explain matter, you know, I mean, are just as crazy.

Yeah, that's true.

And they're probably true as well. So I don't know. Well, we have done an experiment. I mean, you'll find this amusing. We have done, we did, we have done the first DMT imaging experiment because I was really interested to know where the entities are. You know, we, we. So we were getting people when they were seeing the entities to sort of press a button. And we're going to try to see if we could find them in the brain. Okay. We haven't found them yet. So maybe they do. Maybe, maybe they're not in the brain.

That's such an interesting topic. Yeah. You know, something that is quite close to this topic is, I've read somewhere that when you have a clinical death.

Yes.

And usually people, when they get back from a clinical death, so their heart, heart stops and it's not beating for two or three minutes and then starts, it starts to beat again. So they get back to life and that's the clinical death. They all describe something similar. They describe a tunnel.

Yes.

And they get, yeah, the light. They get into like another dimension. They see an entity. This entity said something to them like, you didn't finish a job yet, and they get back to life. And everybody described the same thing. And there's, there's a supposition that our brain is. When he knows you're going to die, he is making his own dmt. And that's the effect of the tunnel. Is there any, any evidence of that? Is, is, is it just a theory?

Yeah, I mean, it's not A crazy theory, but it is a theory. So the answer. So there is no question that this subjective experience of near death is very similar to a psychedelic, particularly a rapid psychedelic experience like dmt. We've published a paper showing they're almost identical in terms of what people say about the different kinds of experiences they have. Interestingly, people who come back from the dead more than dmt, people feel very religious. They feel as they've been saved by a God.

Yeah.

Which, you know, it's. For most of them, you know, that's the only way it can make sense. You believe in God. Now, the DMT theory is an interesting. Are you suddenly releasing a lot of DMT when you're dying? And I suspect you're the only place you can really make DMT is in the pineal. And I don't think you could make enough in the pineal to get the brain affected so fast. I suspect you're getting the same effect, but you're getting it for a different reason. It's not that there's a chemical driving it, but the brain itself is changing as a result of hypoxia, probably lower levels of oxygen.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Well, okay. And can we talk about psilocybin?

Yes.

Yeah. What is that? Because it's a mushroom.

Yeah, so is. They're called magic mushrooms and there's hundreds of them, species all over. Everywhere in the world. Mushrooms grow that make psilocybin.

We have in Romanian mushrooms that I'm sure.

Of course. Yeah, absolutely, yes. I mean, I don't. There's almost nowhere where these mushrooms don't exist.

Okay.

So they grow freely, they grow free. And there's 200 species and some are big and some are little and. But not all mushrooms have it. You know, you need to. You need to know what you're doing. Now, they've been used particularly in Mexico. They would. They. The value of mushrooms for expanding your mind, but also communicating with your ancestors and dealing with personal problems. Been known for thousands of years. And it was just rediscovered or discovered. It was carried on, it was still being used. But in the 1950s, an American mushroom expert heard about these magic mushrooms and went to find them in Mexico. And he did find them. And he, but he, he. And he promised he'd never tell. So he was given a ceremony, but. And he. On the grounds he would never tell the world, but he did. He wrote an article in Time magazine and everything changed. And thousands of people went to this. These villages and they destroyed the community. So it was a very sad tale. Of sort of Western corruption. But to understand the experience, people who took it realized it was a bit like lsd. So they gave magic mushrooms to Albert Hoffman who then isolated from the mushroom psilocybin. And he said, oh, psilocybin, that looks like serotonin, it looks a bit like lsd. And, and his company called Sando, the drug company, they made both LSD and psilocybin available as medicines in the 1950s. So psilocybin is a, is, is a kind of gentle, a shorter acting than lsd, longer acting than dmt. We use it in most of our research because it's, people generally don't have problematic trips except, you know, obviously if they're depressed or whatever, they have lots to deal with. But it's a very, it's a very easy psychedelic to work with in terms of the effects and the duration of effects. And it works very similarly to LSD and mescaline and dmt. But you can give it orally.

Okay. Again, this is all substances that are used in very controlled setting. And I would not recommend anyone to buy anything from the black market and use it because it can be dangerous.

Well, yeah, I think you, I mean, there are millions of people around the world use mushrooms. I mean, so if you know what you're doing. Okay. I mean, one of the reasons we were, you might find this amusing. So 15 years ago, we wanted to study psilocybin in people with depression because our brain imaging studies suggested it could switch off the brain centers, it cause depression. And so we went to our government, our drug regulators, and said, can we study psilocybin in depression? And they said, well, where's the safety data? And I said, well, look, we're just an academic group. We don't have, not a drug company, we don't have safety. We can't afford a million dollars to do safety data on psilocybin. We're not trying to develop it as a drug. We just want to see if it might have medical value. And then I said, but we do know from your own government statistics that a million people a year use mushrooms in this country. And we know from your own statistics there's never been a death. So that seems to me that's pretty safe. And they said, yeah, okay. I mean, truly, truly. That's about the only time we've ever had a sensible response at least.

Yeah, you got a good, good answer from that. Like, yeah, okay, right, go on. Yeah, you know, I would like to talk also about dangerous drugs.

Yes.

What are those drug that's could you that you would never, let's say legalize and never would devise no one to use it in any settings.

Absolutely. So the most, the most dangerous drugs of all are the opiates, fentanyl, fentanyls and nitazines. So these are super strong opiates, much stronger than heroin. Never use, you know, never use them. They very, very likely to stop you breathing and cause death. So, yeah, it's, they have no medical, really don't really have much medical value. And certainly the ones that are being sold on the black market are very, are very dangerous. The problem is they have got into the black market. They got into the black market through the US Opiate crisis and they're being sold in other countries, I'm not sure about Romania, but they're being added to other drugs to give other drugs a bit more of a kick, but also to get people addicted. So dealers are using this so that they, you know, you're being sold maybe Ecstasy or being sold cannabis, but they'll put a bit of fentanyl in so.

You can use it without knowing you, you're using it.

And that's the danger. And that comes to a really important thing we didn't discuss earlier on, which maybe is good to talk about now, how to minimize the harms of drugs like this if you don't know what you're taking. A really important. If you can't have a regulated market, what you should do as a sort of second best is to have drug testing so that people know, oh, that's got fentanyl, I won't take that.

People have that in Netherlands. Right. And they do.

And it's worked extremely well. And the Netherlands is a fantastic model. If you want to model policy, go to the Netherlands.

So what you say is that people in the Netherlands, if, even if they buy a drug in on a black market, they can go to the authorities and test it, right?

Yes.

How, how does it happen? Where does it happen? How, how do you make sure they're not waiting with the policeman there?

Well, they're very rational. The police buy into the harm reduction theory. The police realized that it's better that people stay alive because they're going to take drugs anyway. So the police don't. The police just let it happen. So the government funds. The government funds, I think, 11 hospitals that are broadcasting and you go and you get your drug tested. And there are two huge benefits of that. The first is they can tell you whether your drug has got what you think or it's got Something more toxic. They can also give you some guidance as to how much to take. If suddenly they've just. You think this is 100 milligram ecstasy and it's a 350 milligram, they can say that's three times as strong as you think. But on top of that, the government gets to learn what's coming into the market. Okay. So it can say, hang on, we're suddenly seeing these derivatives of ecstasy, these methane metamphetamines. And then, oh, we can tell them, don't buy these pills because they've got. They're not Ecstasy, they're pma. And they almost have no deaths in the Netherlands from illegal drugs. I mean, it's a powerful evidence that that policy works.

Yeah, it's harm reduction. Harm reduction means you don't forbid that, you just reduce the harm of using that. Yes, by testing. You said about fentanyl.

The other really dangerous drugs. Well, obviously drugs like crystal meth.

What is crystal met?

Crystal meth is a strong form of methamphetamine. And then there's crack cocaine.

What is crack cocaine?

So that's a smokable form of cocaine. Generally, smoking drugs gets it into the body faster. It's not quite as fast as injecting, but it's still very fast. And the faster a drug gets in, if it's an addictive drug, the more addictive it is and more dangerous, therefore.

So these drugs should be never, like, decriminalized or legalized or.

And they should all be decriminalized.

Decriminalized.

Okay.

So you can seek help.

Exactly. Without being prosecuted. Yeah. I mean. Yes. We didn't talk. There was one other thing about decriminalization which is really important. Many people die accidentally of opiate overdoses because their friends think that if they call an ambulance, the police will come and they'll be arrested, so they run and that the person died. If you decriminalize personal possession, then that isn't going to happen. So they can then call the. Call the ambulance and police. Now, one other group. There's one other group of. And I hope you don't have them here in Romania, but we have a big problem in Britain and that's with synthetic cannabinoids, spice and many. That's why these compounds exist.

Yeah.

And we've got this absurd situation where you've got cannabis illegal.

Yeah.

When it's not harmful, then people get around it by making these synthetic cannabinoids. And they're legal until they're banned.

Yeah. They have their own Window until they get discovered.

Exactly.

What can we do about that?

Because we legalize cannabis. That's what you do. They don't. They don't have them in the Netherlands. They don't really have them in America, where cannabis is legal. Most. No one likes them. They only use them because they're legal and they're. And they're killing people in Britain. And that gets back to the point you made earlier about why are they killing people in Britain? Because we started testing prisoners for cannabis. And prisoners, if they got tested positively, and the cannabis will stay in the blood and urine for weeks and months, so the excessive positive, they basically lose their parole. Because most, on average, a prisoner only serves two thirds of the sentence if they're good. So then they were having the extra third added on if they tested positive for cannabis. So then they real. The first thing they did was then they stopped taking cannabis and they started taking heroin because it doesn't last so long. Then that became a big problem. Some people died in prisons, and then they moved to gabapentinoids. And then someone said, hang on, we can get these synthetic cannabinoids, spice, into prisons. And now prisons are full of this stuff. And some of them, some of the spice molecules are so toxic, they cause seizures, heart attacks.

You know, this. This drives my next question because we also have a problem in Romania with drug tests being promoted for parents. You can buy them in the pharmacy and so you can go back home and test your own kids for drugs. What do you think about that?

I think that's crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, what are you gonna do then?

Well, you're gonna punish them?

Gonna arrest them, are you?

Yeah, Keep him. Keep him home. Yeah.

You know, lock him up. I think. I think if every child was kept in prison all their life, they wouldn't know. I mean, that. That is absurd. I mean, that just destroys your relationship with your kids. That is just. That is. Yes, quite. The fact is, unless you can help, unless testing your kids will help them do something to. You've got kids. Kids know more about the drugs than the parents. You know, the idea that if the kid's taking a drug, you need to make sure that you can have a dialogue with them about how to stay right free from harm. And it's not about, you know, punishing your kids for taking drugs is probably going to drive them underground and make them take more in such circumstances where they're much more vulnerable, like on, you know, on the streets or in the forest or somewhere.

Or maybe that can push that kid using Other drugs that will not get positive on the test, Right, Absolutely.

I mean, things that happen exactly the same thing. No, that is.

How do you approach kids? Like, or what would you recommend for a parent? Like, let's say you're a parent and you, you find out or you suspect that your kid is using drugs. What, what, what can you do?

Well, you have a conversation with them and you find out what they know. The problem is they will know more than you. Yeah, they will know more than most. But. So the idea that a parent is training a kid or talking down to a kid about drugs, that is completely pointless. They, they will, they'll think you're stupid. They'll be embarrassed. They don't, you know, they won't engage. So you need to know, you need to actually have started a dialog before they use drugs, not after, you know, you, they, they need to know two things. They need to know that if they need help with drugs, they can come to you without you taking them to the police. And then I see, we see this all the time. We see parents who think, my kids smoking cannabis. I've taken to the police station game. I mean, what the. That's just a garret. I mean, what a stupid thing to do to ruin, you know, because it could, could ruin their lives and it's not going to stop them taking. So you need to, kids need to know they can turn to you for help, not punishment. And you need to be aware and as much as they are of drugs and drug harms and you need to be talking about which drugs to take, which drugs not to take. And this is really important. Everyone needs to know that the drug that is most likely to kill your children is alcohol. It's the leading cause of death in men under the age of 40 in Britain today. It's the leading cause of death in women under the age of 40. Alcohol is the big killer. And preaching to kids, particularly about using something like cannabis, it's just proving to your kids that you really don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Although like you describe in your book, which is called Drinks, which I highly recommend you describe the fact that at the age of 18, this is like a big party, that you finally can drink alcohol. I mean, alcohol in our society is romanticized.

Yeah.

So at what age should we talk with our kids about drugs?

Yeah.

At what age should we start? Like, I have a nine, nine years old daughter.

Yeah.

I have to talk, I have to start to talk about drugs with her.

Yes, definitely. Yeah, you do. I mean, I Think it should actually be part of the curriculum at school. I mean, 10% of your population, maybe a bit more. I've got alcohol problems and probably another 1%. 2% got harder drug problems. They've got kids. Those kids are going to school at the age of four and five. They're often going to school with the parents, drunk on the bed or on the floor, having to step over them, have to make their own lunches, etc. Those kids need to know that someone at school who will take them seriously if they talk about it rather than keep it to themselves. Hiding parents. Drug use is one of the most difficult things that kids, kids have to do and it scars them for life. So teachers should be talking about drugs as I think from five or six. As soon as they, they're capable of understanding intoxication. You've got to tell the kids the truth. I mean, it's just absurd. Not because kids, the truth is available on the Internet and if you don't, I mean, once you start to lie to them, they just, they'll just lose all respect for you and then they won't turn to you for help.

Yeah.

And you're the first protocol for help, really, as a parent.

But I love what you said that you, you have to talk with your kids about drugs and you have to be realistic and tell them if they are going to use drugs, what drugs to use and what drugs to not use. I mean, because the first thing you, it comes to your mind, you say, yeah, never use drugs. You're gonna become addicted, they're gonna kill you. And you just create this distance between you and your kid.

So there's some simple rules for the kids. If you talk to kids about drugs, you know, tell them, tell them, don't get drunk. You know, don't and don't. If you're gonna drink, don't drink vodka, don't drink spirits. That's the first rule. Second rule, okay? Never inject. Ever, ever inject a drug. Never inject. Yeah. Those two rules. Or the third rule brings the two together. The third rule is never take a drug when you're drunk. Okay, Because. Because you don't know what you're taking and you don't, you know. So those three rules will keep a lot of kids alive.

Yeah, I've noted them. What's the effect if we can get, like, if we can get back to the alcohol, what's the effect of alcohol on the brain? And we started with that. Why is it the most harmful drug?

Okay, so the way we assess drug Harms is using a technique called multi criteria decision analysis. And it's a very, it's a modern, sophisticated way that economists effectively have worked out how to make decisions in very complicated areas like global warming. You know, how do you make it? What's the right kind of policy for something that's really complicated with many different elements, economic elements, social elements, health elements. So what we did was we essentially, it was a two part process. The first was to get together a group of experts and determine what are the harms of drugs.

Yeah.

And when you look at all harms of drugs, you can boil them down into 16 different harms. There are nine harms to the person who uses a drug, nine harms to the user, and there are seven harms to society. Okay, so you've got your 16 harms, and then we took 20 drugs and some legal, some illegal, some medicine, some not, and we score them all on these 20, 16 different variables. Right. And then you do all that and then you decide which of the variables are most important because they're all different. You know, whether you drug kills you or makes you ill or makes you mad or cost society a lot of money, etc. You do what's called waiting. And then from all that out comes the fact in the way in Britain that alcohol was the most harmful drug. Now that study was so powerful that the European Department of Justice said, wow, is that true for Europe as well as Britain? So they funded us to do a similar study in Europe. Yeah. So 30 European experts, 20 different countries, and they came to almost identical conclusions. And it's now replicated in Australia and New Zealand. So in the Western world the agreement is very strong, the ranking of drug harms. And they all come up with alcohol being number one. Now alcohol is number one because of the harm to other people, to society.

Okay.

And that's because it's widely used. So the obvious response to that is if you want to reduce harms from alcohol, you reduce the availability of alcohol, you can't solve the alcohol problem, there are no antidotes. So you try to reduce the harms from alcohol. And there are many proven ways of doing that. You can reduce the drink driving limit, you can reduce availability, you can tax, etc.

So we have like zero tolerance for driving limit of alcohol.

It's zero. That's good.

Although we have the, the biggest number of deaths on, on the roadside caused by alcohol.

Right. So does that people mean people don't take any notice of the driving limit? Yes.

And like we have a lot of sold Alcohol in Romania, but also probably we have the biggest home production of alcohol in your Europe. Everybody's producing alcohol. And I, I wonder what is the solution for that for, for a society that is so used.

Yes.

I mean, if you see in the countryside a man and if you go like in the weekend to the countryside, there's no way you will not see cute drunk men walking back home, be being unable to walk and falling down and sleeping for an hour. And that's something normal. Like it's so normalized in Romania. So you just say, you just make fun of it and you, you move further. What was the solution for that?

Well, it's quite complicated. Are they actually doing their own distilling?

Yes, it's their own distilling. Yeah. That's legal.

You can do your understanding. Okay, well, maybe some tax on distilling to sort of reduce the amount of. That would be helpful. I think the other thing, and what's. What we're seeing in UK and probably here in Romania, is it if you educate the next generation, if you start educating your daughter that alcohol is bad. And it's not just bad because it actually makes a fool of you and it's not bad, but it's also bad because it will shorten your life expectancy by quite a lot. And people you know now are becoming more health conscious and there's more to live for. So try to switch people from alcohol to less harmful fun drinks and get people interested in health. And that, that would, that's one. Now that's definitely something you should do. I mean, I think there's also a role for taxation and as I said, but I think maybe you should have a license for home distilling.

Yeah, that's true. You said about fun drinks. Can you tell me more about fung drinks? Because you, you've researched a formula that should be a substitute for alcohol.

Yes. So I've been working and thinking about the harms of alcohol certainly since I started my very first day as a medical student, because that very day, that very first day, there were nine medical students in my college. And that very first night, one of them got so drunk I thought he was going to kill himself. I thought he was actively suicidal. I'd never seen a transition from normal to actively wanting to die caused by alcohol. And from that he had serious problems with alcohol all his life and one of his friends died of alcohol. So a two out of nine with serious problems. And I began to realize that alcohol actually was a big problem. And as a doctor, and you're A doctor. You see orthopedic wards. Half of all the people in our orthopedic ward are there because they've had accidents when they're drunk.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, we. Obviously in the addictions field where I work this. It's a huge issue. And for the first half of my research career, I was trying to find ways of stopping people drinking, trying to help them deal with craving, try to help them deal with withdrawal, try to try to get them away from alcohol. But alcohol is a peculiarly promiscuous drug because it affects every part of the body. It kills you because it damages your brain, it damages your heart, it damages your stomach, it damages your liver. There's no part of the body that isn't affected by alcohol. And it's not just alcohol that does it. It's also the metabolite acetaldehyde. So you've got two toxins floating through your body all the time. And I realized about 20 years ago that there was no way you could find antidotes to all the effects of alcohol. So then I thought, well, hang on. Maybe the solution. We know the solution's not banning alcohol because that was tried. It doesn't work. People like alcohol. So I thought, well, why do people like alcohol? Well, most people like alcohol because it relaxes them. It makes them more sociable. It's a social drug. And one of the things I like to say is that humans are really social creatures, but we're not good at it. You know, we want to be social, but we. But it's a problem. And alcohol makes us social. And that's why. That's why alcohol survived and actually been cultivated as a. As a drink for, you know, 40, 50,000 years. So why don't we just find a replacement for the good effects of alcohol, the sociability. And it gets rid of all the bad effects. And that's what I've been working on.

Like a drink that makes you sociable without getting you drunk.

Yeah.

What's that drink?

Well, we call it sentia. Okay. Which is a. Which is a herbal cocktail. There are three herbal cocktails, three different centers. They contain herbs which enhance a neurotransmitter in the brain called gaba. The first alcoholic drink, the one that begins to relax you, works on the GABA system, and that's why it relaxes you. So that's what we do. We mimic that. But the next alcoholic drink starts to release dopamine, and then it starts releasing door fins. And then it starts to. So alcohol, the more you Drink, the more different transmitters you engage, whereas with center, you just get a. An effect on gaba so it doesn't cause all the separate consequences that the addiction, the hangover, the toxicity of.

You can buy it in UK and in Netherlands so far.

Yes. It's now going into Europe. Now we've got a distribution center in the Netherlands, which means you can. In Romania you can get the Dutch version. At some point we'd like to have a Romanian version, but each country in Europe has its own rules about herbs, so we don't. Each country has its own label and we haven't got the money to change all the labels yet, but at some point we will have a Romanian version.

That's a good point. Yeah. We're gonna have some sentia today at the hin conference, right?

Yes.

I can't wait to try it. We're gonna have our talk about alcohol at hin conference today. Is it a good. Will it be a good practice for me to drink some sentia before we talk on stage?

Well, the good thing is you won't be outrageous. You'll be relaxed so you can try it. I often give talks. I mean, when I talk about sentia, I drink sent here. And it's. If anything, it. It does it look, it works, isn't it? You'll not get drunk on it. You'll just get chilled.

Yeah, I can't wait to try it.

I look forward to trying it with you.

Well, I have two. Two less questions. What would you say to a politician, like, we have many in Romania who propose that harsh penalties, mandatory drug testing, prison, fear mongering and stigma should be the way to go in fighting drugs. Because that's what we see on Romanian television right now. Like, we have a scandal, somebody dies with drugs, and then the minister comes and say we have to increase penalties, we have to test more, we need more dogs to detect drugs, and so on. What would you say to such politician?

I would say they're being dishonest. They're either ignorant or dishonest, and they shouldn't be either. And there's vast amounts of evidence that can direct you towards rational policies which are humane, which will work. And, and this is a really important thing. We haven't really touched on much better value for money. Punishing drug users wastes a huge amount of money. And how do we know that? Well, we know that from Portugal. So 20 years now we've had the Portuguese experiment decriminalizing possession of all drugs. In those 20 years, they've closed prisons because people don't go to prison for drugs anymore. They get treated. They've reduced the budget to the police. They've massively improved the social opportunities for people to use drugs. Portugal is a model of how you can do it and there's no reason why other countries shouldn't do the same. They should do the same.

Okay, and do you, do you believe in a distant future was where like all the drugs would be decriminalized not with commercial promotions, but just decriminalized and used in a harm reduction settings with education, with safe use?

Yes. I think what we need the most rational policy is a policy where we decriminalize. We have very effective treatments for people who are dependent or having problems with drugs. We make available in a regulated fashion drugs that are less harmful than alcohol. People, criminals who are providing drugs that are not regulated should be heavily punished. No question about that. And the emphasis should always be on harm reduction, not punishment. And that, as I say, that will save a lot of money and it will also the majority of people who use drugs are grow out of it. For most of them, as I've said before, a criminal record is way more damaging than the drug use. So criminalization is known to fail. A rational policy would actually make everyone happier. And I'm sure there'll be a net benefit in health because you'd move people away from particularly damaging drugs like alcohol to less damaging ones, particularly things like the psychedelics where you can see that they're already beginning to help people stop drinking and stop smoking and it would probably help people stop using other drugs as well.

Regarding that, and we didn't touch this, this, this topic and I feel the need to ask that because you talk about the treatment and the treatment of addiction with psychedelics. If somebody that is watching now this podcast and he feels he is addicted to a drug, is there any way you can, you can cure that addiction by yourself or you really need help, you need therapy, you need, you need like any intervention like that.

Now the first state of you insight is critical. If you know you've got a problem. If you're, you know, and you, the first thing to do is obviously talk to friends or family. Yeah. If they agree, then there are different strategies for different drugs. I mean, for, for most people, cutting down is a good place to start something like alcohol drinking, maybe just a couple of days a week rather than every day. If you find you have trouble stopping, if you get into withdrawal, then that's when you need to seek to seek help.

Well, okay, professor, thank you so much for this talk. I really enjoyed it and I learned a lot of stuff in this podcast and hopefully let's see each other again in a, in a not so distant future when things are going to be better with decriminalized drugs and with harm reduction techniques instead of this criminal records that we we see. Thank you a lot and, and I can't wait to see you again in a few hours. Yeah. At the hind conference, we're going to talk about alcohol. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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