Runner's High: How a Movement of Cannabis-Fueled Athletes Is Changing the Science of Sports.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, the joy of running under the influence of cannabis is really about a communing between the mind and the body. And so it becomes this neat little package of, well, that's why these people are poor, because they use drugs. Anyone who uses drugs is inherently lazy. So I think a lot of the time, cannabis can just sort of enhance whatever state you're in. If you are in a sedentary state, it can push you a little farther in that direction. But if you're already moving along, it can enhance that as well.

Help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, folks, I recently read a book, believe it or not, as I'm prone to do, and this book was pretty interesting. If you're listening this podcast at the time, when it comes out, the book is close to being released or will release quite soon, or is already released, possibly, especially if you procrastinate on your podcast downloads and you're listening to this after September. But anyways, the name of this book is Runner's High, and I was kind of confused at first because there's another book called Runner's High by a former podcast guest of mine named Dean Carnazes. But his is called A Runner's High and has to do with the Runner's High from Carnazi's standpoint, whereas this book is called Runner's High. How a Movement of Cannabis Fueled Athletes Is Changing the Science of Sport. So this is a whole new twist on the idea of high from a Runner standpoint. Although, as you'll find out during this podcast episode, when people talk about the Runner's High, they are actually talking about basically a very similar high chemically to what cannabis can cause. But we'll delve into that later. My guest on today's podcast wrote the book, which is almost like kind of a mashup between, I would say, like Michael Pollan's how to Change youe mind and Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, both excellent books as well. But what Josiah does in the book is he has this immersive, investigative look at the hidden culture of cannabis use, particularly among folks like elite athletes, exercise enthusiasts, like, not the kind of people you would expect to be, you know, Cheeto popping potheads. And so he says, you know, even in the book that pot makes exercise fun. That's kind of a controversial statement. We'll dig into that. He gets into the link between performance enhancing drug bans and cannabis, and whether it should be legalized in sport. And also his own experience with running and ultra running and endorphins and the endocannabinoid system and cannabis use in general. So we have a lot to dig into in this podcast because, I mean, we're Talking about a $20 billion, I mean, CBD alone and a lot of interesting dynamics biochemically between exercise and cannabis. So Josiah is an author, he's a journalist. I would say he's an immersive journalist. He lives in Denver, Colorado, appropriately enough, I guess, based on what this book is about. And his writing covers everything from science to crime to politics to pop culture to arts to sex to drugs. He writes for Vice, Esquire, Politico, the Guardian. So you've probably read some of his stuff before, but after about a decade of covering and experimenting with this low burn haha legalization of marijuana, he wrote the book that we're going to talk about today and we'll take a deep dive into it. So Josiah, did you get high for this podcast?

I did not. No.

You didn't. Well, you know what's funny is sometimes when I'm going to interview someone for a show, like I just did one a couple days ago for this exercise suit called the Catalyst, I'll like go do the exercise suit before the show, or if I'm interviewing somebody about cold thermogenesis, I'll do a cold soak before the show. I honestly kind of like to do that to get myself into the mindset, but alas, I did not, at 10:00am in the morning, go get high before the show. So I suppose you and I will either be way more productive or way less funny or I don't know. But I guess that's the kind of stuff we got to get into in today's discussion, huh?

Absolutely. I love getting high before running, obviously, and that's what the book is largely about. But for things where you may have to remember a lot of names and dates and timelines and scientific terms, cannabis, at least in certain doses, doesn't lend itself too well.

Yeah, yeah. Well, particularly THC to a certain extent. Although I found about a 10 to 20 microdose, if you want to call that a microdose, milligram microdose of CBD is actually pretty good for focus and in my experience seems to enhance memory and word recall a little bit. Almost like a little bit of a nootropic or a smart drug. But you certainly experimented with a lot more, more different approaches than just a 10 to 20 milligram dose of CBD in writing this book. And I really thought, Josiah, like one of the most entertaining parts of the book. The early sections was something I was totally unaware of. And that's something called the 420 games. I didn't know there was such a thing, but I was kind of chuckling reading that section of the book. And I'm curious, What were the 420 games? What those kind of have to do with your initial inspiration for writing this thing?

Yeah, well, by that time I had been using cannabis for a long time personally and had been using it as a runner for maybe about a year at that point. And as a journalist, there'd been so much to cover in terms of events or news. And so the 420 games, when it was touring around America and came through Boulder, was really just another assignment that I had. You know, I was curious about other people doing the same thing that I naively believed I discovered. And a lot of people had that story like they thought they were the only ones who liked to get high and work out. But in terms of games as competition, 420 games isn't really like. It's not comparable to, you know, the Olympics or any sort of organized sport. It's, it's, it's more of just a. An exhibition of kind of a kind. There was a 4.2 mile fun run around the Boulder Reservoir when I went there. My understanding is that they have bigger events out in LA that are a little more competitive. But it was there that I met Avery Collins, who wound up being one of the central characters of my book. He's a very accomplished ultramarathon runner here in Colorado. And he was kind of one of the celebrity athletes at the 420 games. Had come out and do the fun run and talk to people and then after the run there were a lot of tables with all of these different products. They couldn't sell any THC products, but there were a lot of non psychoactive products there. And really it was my first entry point to this side of the industry because the cannabis industry had been around for a few years by that point. And there have been loads of different types of events, but a lot of them were kind of more the high times, stoner culture type events.

Not like exercising athletes, you mean.

Right. Even though that subculture existed and you know, I don't think it was quite as cohesive because of that fact that a lot of people didn't know that there were others who were doing the same thing that they were. But when I was out there. I met a lot of people who were like, yeah, I like to smoke a joint and then go lift weights, or I like to take an edible and then go run a trail. So that was one of the early moments where I was like, this may be more than just a quirky thing that I do or that a handful of people do. It may be something that's actually quite popular and profoundly under reported. And meeting Jim McAlpine, the founder of the 420 Games, was just such a delight. He's a real character. He once took milligram edible and swam from San Francisco to Alcatraz.

100 milligrams? Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, I mean, for people who are listening, who are not familiar with. With dosage, and I'm assuming that was. That was a THC edible, that that for most people would be severe couch lock for like the next six hours at least.

Yeah. And that's another thing that I discovered in my reporting is that there's a huge variance on the dosage and the administration when it comes to cannabis. Some people will take 1mg THC and they're just fine. Some people I've met have taken, you know, 600 milligrams of THC and that's what they need to experience with it.

Right. And a lot, a lot of that is just based on, I believe, genetic activity, you know, and we know that when you consume edibles, just so folks know, you know, this 11 hydroxy THC, which is what's created, that's like the metabolic byproduct that's created as the THC in any edible, like a chocolate or something, passes through the GI tract and the liver, it's a little more potent than its progenitor thc, and can result in a more kind of intense psychoactive experience. But I think some people genetically have different. I believe it's a CYP enzyme in the liver in terms of the speed at which they process that, the efficiency with which they process it, or possibly even the extent to which it interacts with some of the cannabis or CB1 or CB2 receptors. But yeah, I do know the. The oral administration effects tend to vary widely from person to person. Yet still, I think for anybody taking 100 milligrams of an edible and then swimming. How far did you say swim?

From San Francisco to Alcatraz.

Jeez. Jeez.

Which is notorious for being, you know, next to impossible. That's why Alcatraz existed. Yeah, people swim that.

You know, I can tell you that, that I have a 32 degrees cold pool. And occasionally in the evenings I will, I will take a hit off of a vape pen or sometimes even eat an edible just, just to relax into the. Even when I do a cold pool soak in the evening, I sit in there and nearly fall asleep if I've gotten edible in my system, you know, in 32 degrees water. When normally, you know, when I'm, when I'm fully alerted and I'm not, not as de stressed as I am with that in my system, you know, I'm just in and out a little bit more quickly than that. But, but anyways, I want to delve into, of course, probably later on in our discussion about some of this science. But you said when you got to the 420 games and you even started the assignment of writing this book, this wasn't like your first time using cannabis and you had a history of using it in the past. Like, like, did you grow up with cannabis being something that was, that was part of your lifestyle?

It was around a lot. I came from a working class community in North Iowa, and my dad has been consuming it for most of his adult life. And a lot of people were secretly consuming it. I grew up in a very conservative evangelical background, but a lot of people were.

I did too, actually. I grew up conservative Evangelical Christian Reformed Baptist in Lewiston, Idaho.

Yeah. And then that's another big part of my writing career. It's really just cannabis and evangelicals is what makes up the majority of it. But people don't realize that a lot of people are closeted cannabis users in that community. And in every community, really, it's just so widely used. But I was completely sober. And until I was about 19, and I grew up as a very anxious child, I had a kind of overactive nervous system. And it made me very, it made it very difficult to do my schoolwork or to socialize or really just to feel comfortable. Things really did change for me when I discovered cannabis. I heard Seth Rogen on Fresh AIR recently talk about how the first time he used cannabis, it was sort of like putting on glasses for the first time. Like suddenly the world came into focus and it was almost overwhelming the clarity that you felt. And that was the case for me. I suddenly felt sort of security, safety in my mind and a calming of my nervous system and ironically, an ability to focus and study and learn and grow. And then years later, when I started taking edibles, I'd never exercised, at least not voluntarily, until about the age of 30. And it was edibles that I Suddenly discovered like, wow, this is so much fun. And it wasn't a case of like, oh, I need to exercise for my mental health or for my physical health or to look good. It was simply fun. It was my favorite thing to do. And I'm 38 now. I've been doing it, you know, almost daily for the last eight years. My running is constantly improved. I just did my first 50k last April and it's really the highlight of my day, taking edibles and going for a run. Really?

So you do that every day? You take an edible and go for a run?

Unless I'm busy. I mean, like today I'm doing some of these interviews and I'm gonna actually run record the audiobook for runner's high later today. So there's not always time, but it's rarely anything that I feel disciplined to do. Like, I need to keep this up. Oh, I don't want to lose my momentum. It's more like, when can I get done with all of this crap and go for a run?

Yeah, I hear you. And I think sometimes substances that we use, even pre workout supplements, you know, whether it's beetroot or thc, we often tend to associate with a positive habit, sometimes with a negative habit as well. Right. Like being lazy. Eating junk food and watching can be one way to use marijuana. Like associating, say like an edible with a run or a trip to the gym. And using that as a way to enhance the state that you enter into. Almost like this flow state that I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit during that workout can be another method. And you know, I interviewed a guy named Tim Moxie, makes these things called Moxie's Mints up in Washington state. And it's a mix of little, like herbal picks me up, pick me ups with a, I guess a small dose of THC and about 5 milligrams. And for a while I literally had like a, a bag of those in the doorway of my gym. I'd walk into the gym, grab it out of there like a candy dispenser, pop one under my tongue and work out. And typically would just, you know, the best way I can describe it is you're working out and having a wonderful workout with less discomfort and a higher rating of perceived exertion than you normally have. And you look at your watch and it feels like you've been working out 20 minutes and you've been in there an hour. And for me, just because I never like to feel, you know, kind of like Anthony Demello says in his book Awareness, you know, that I'm attached to anything. You know, I have since not been using edibles as much for exercise, and, you know, I just. I tend to be careful just to not overuse anything. But I went for a while there where I would just take 5 milligrams before workout, and it was absolutely amazing in terms of. Yeah, I mean, the reduced rating of perceived exertion, how quickly time went by and how much I got into the flow and was able to focus. And honestly, the other thing I found, and I think you talk about this in the book a little bit, is that I pretty rarely will listen to music when I work out, but the combination of music and cannabis during a workout, it absolutely elevates the efficacy of that workout. And I realize I keep saying that we're going to talk about this stuff, and we will, but I have a couple more questions before we delve into that, because there was another interesting character in your book, and it was this guy named Jerry Dunn that you describe. And this guy, from what I can understand, he's been running ultramarathons for years on. On Edibles, or I think he's called, like, America's marathon man or something like that.

Yeah, anyone who was around in the marathon or ultramarathon world in the 80s and 90s has probably come across Jerry Dunn. He was doing a lot of big feats of, like, he. He tried to run 200 marathons inside a year, where I think the year before, he did run 100 inside a year. And then for the year 2000, he aimed to run 200, but he only made it to 186. I think it was the 100th anniversary of the Boston Marathon. He ran the whole course 26 times, once a day leading up to the marathon. And so he was getting a lot of media attention, but he was closeted about his cannabis use for obvious reasons. It was very controversial at that time. I mean, that was the Reagan era of just saying no. You know, I think athletics has somewhat of a reputation, maybe misguided, but has a reputation of being very conservative. He was, you know, afraid to be open about that. But what I found most compelling about Jerry was his attitude toward running, which dovetailed very seamlessly with mine in that he wasn't that concerned, even though he was doing, like, these big sensationalistic things. He wasn't that concerned about getting a personal best time or beating anyone in a race or really even measuring his races. He said he would know retroactively how Far he ran and could do the math looking at how long it took him to see what his pace was. But he never wears a smartwatch when he runs, and he just likes to think of it as a kind of childlike, playful activity. And at one point he talked about running on the beach in Florida, which is where he spends half his time. And he'll go very early in the morning when there's no one there, and he'll run along the shore of the beach with his eyes closed and he's barefoot and so he can like, you know, feel the water right there. But he's just like sort of in a zone state, which to me, I'd never met anyone who had that approach to exercising or athletics before, where they weren't really all that focused on competition, but were more focused on the pleasureful, playful side of running. And for him, he said that combining cannabis with running was sort of what brought out that, that side of him where he could leave all the numbers behind and just be in the moment of running.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I think that might be one of the reasons why sometimes the use of cannabis, when people first hear about it related to sports, they do think of that like skinny hippie ultramarathoner who's not using it because they have a great deal of, let's say, you know, not to offend ultramarathoners, but there's not a great deal of like, like athleticism as much as there is like endurance, stubbornness, perseverance, grit, stick to itiveness, but you'd never see like an ultra runner and then compare them to, let's say an Olympian gymnast or a gymnast of any sort for that matter. And question who might be the better athlete from a kind of like a full spectrum power, strength, speed, mobility, performance, body awareness type of standpoint. And I think that because of that, often people think, well, the only folks who use cannabis are the folks who can just kind of check out while it working out, who can run 100 miles and just need to kill the pain a little bit. Kind of like how you'd use ibuprofen. And yet in reading your book, I was shocked at the percentage of pro athletes from sports like the NFL and the NBA, of course, being probably two of the biggest examples who actually use cannabis as well as this emergence of these cannabis fitness classes that aren't just like running for miles in the mountains, but involves, you know, some of the type of workouts that I was describing, like I was doing in my own home gym with A with a microdose of thc. So, first of all, I guess what I want to ask you is, have you been to one of these cannabis fitness classes? Because I never have, but I read about them in your book, and I actually didn't know they existed until I read your book.

Yeah, I've been to a handful of them here in Denver, and there's one of my favorites, the Mary Jane Fonda classes in Portland. But there's a whole lot of variables, like legalistic hoops that you have to jump through to have any kind of these events. You know, when Denver legalized, we put in the amendment to the Constitution that you can't use it in private or you can't use it in public, but you can use it in a private space. And the gray areas of that have been very, very fuzzy. Jim McAlpine tried to start a cannabis gym in San Francisco and ran into a whole lot of legal hurdles from that. And then investors are wary, putting all their money into something that they don't even know if it's legal or not. Nobody really knows. I mean, this is a new frontier of law. I mean, law is all about precedent. And if there's no precedent, then nobody is comfortable advising anyone on what the legal logistics of it would be. But, yeah, there's a lot of yoga classes. That's probably the most popular one. And I think there are no shortage of people who are, like you said, taking edibles before they go to just a normal fitness class or go to the gym. Some of the cannabis fitness classes lean in heavily to the cannabis aspect of it, and there's bongs and trippy posters and lights, but then others are much more mainstream friendly, and it has a strong touristy element to it. A lot of people come through Denver and want to consume cannabis. They want to do cannabis events.

Yeah, I think, like the, like the trippy posters and the weird lights and all that kind of stuff. I almost think that does, like, the whole. The whole fitness aspect of cannabis a little bit of a disservice because it tends to blend the idea of cannabis use with that of, you know, hallucinogenic drug use or psychoactivity or some of the things that one might be going after when they're using cannabis as escapism or to say, like, you know, journey in the same way that you might. Might, you know, position a microdose with LSD as being extremely cognitively enhancing. Yet someone who takes 100 micrograms, there's no way they're going to be, you know, effective at work. And, you know, I almost feel like there kind of needs to be a little bit of a rebranding, right. Where you walk into a fitness class and it's more like a, you know, like a CrossFit vibe where you might have a small edible on board to get you through an amazing workout, but not feel as though, you know, you're in Bob Marley land the whole time. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I think there are a lot of cultural nuances to this issue, but at the same time, I think there needs to be a variance of activity or an availability to different types of people for where they're at on a fitness level, because not everyone needs or wants to be an athlete. And exercise is something that everyone could benefit from if your body allows it to. And so I think for some people, taking even a strong dose of cannabis and going on an elliptical machine for 20 minutes may be more exercise than they've gotten in years. There may be something valuable in taking a really strong dose. And also if you're in a terrific amount of chronic pain, as one of the characters in my book, Janessa Leah, is, and she started her own cannabis gym. You know, she was taking, I think like 900 or 1,000 milligrams of THC a day. But she also had, you know, this hypermobility issue where, you know, when she first started exercising, she had to do it in a pool because she was just in such terrific pain and her body was so fragile. So I agree with you. When it comes to the cultural aspects of it, I think we really do need to leave a lot of stoner culture behind or at least acknowledge that it's not representative of all the people who consume cannabis and certainly not all the people who use it for exercise. But I do think we need to keep some room open for all sorts of different approaches to exercise and cannabis use.

Yeah. Now, how about pro sports, which I alluded to. I mean, obviously when you, in the book, you know, you're talking about some of these CBD or cannabis fitness gyms rather, and you talk about, like the Zulu warriors who would consume cannabis. You said the they smoked it, sometimes they do an enema or a steam bath with cannabis to rouse their courage before battle. But then kind of drawing a parallel to that, there's some modern day warriors, so to speak, who are using this stuff pretty regularly. And some of the statistics actually shocked me. Like, how common is this in pro sports in terms of cannabis use?

Well, I'll preface this with saying that there have been no official surveys on this, at least in pro sports, for the obvious reason that it's still banned in your career, could be threatened by being open about it. But a lot of retired athletes are confessing to their cannabis use and saying, like, it's incredibly prevalent. There's this guy, Kenyon Martin from the Denver Nuggets, who said about 85% of the NBA uses cannabis in his estimation. Martellus Bennett put that around 89% for the NFL. And people like Sean Smith from the Cowboys says he smoked two blunts before every game. David Irving says every game you ever saw me in, I was medicated. I talked to Riley Coat, who was hockey player with the Philadelphia Flyers, and he said at least half the players in the NHL are using cannabis. And if you bring it down to just CBD, he says, like, around 90% of the people in the NHL are using it. And same with WWE and MMA. There's actually this jujitsu league called High Rollers, where everyone shares a joint before they hit the mat. And then I think the winner gets like a pound of cannabis or something.

But. But you're not.

You're not.

You're not like, blitzed, right? You're just basically using this to get into almost like a flow state.

Yes. And also I think a lot of it, and I emphasize this in the book, a lot of it comes down to how familiar you are with the activity before using cannabis. If you're trying something for the first time, particularly any kind of exercise, you've never exercised or haven't in years, and then you use cannabis, you're not likely to go jump into a marathon. And I discovered that when trying to play soccer, I had never really played an organized game of soccer, but I've been running for a couple of years and using cannabis in that, and I thought, oh, I'll just take an edible before go playing soccer. And it was a nightmare. I didn't understand the rules. People were shouting these esoteric terms at me. I was kicking the ball the wrong direction. It was a big nightmare.

How much cannabis did you take for that to happen during soccer?

I think it was like 20 milligrams of THC, which was far too much.

Yeah, I was going to comment that, you know, I do think that especially for motor skill learning, that, if anyone is, I guess what I would call, you know, unconsciously uncompetent or even consciously incompetent, that it. I do get the impression, and this is based both on personal experience and some of the research I've seen, that having Having too many of those, those cannabinoid receptors triggered in the body during that period of time would actually detract from your ability to be able to learn as quickly. Yet if you know, unconsciously competent or even, you know, consciously competent, it can actually give you a little bit of an edge. But what's odd for me is that the opposite seems to take place with something like music, where if I am learning a new classical guitar, because I'm trying to do classical guitar right now and learn some classical guitar pieces, and if I take a hit on a vape pen before I go practice my classical guitar, it's amazing. Like, I question myself less, I pick up on, on some of the tactics a little bit more quickly, the music flows more easily. And that's a situation in which I'm consciously incompetent. Right. But cannabis is actually helping me in that scenario where if I were to do the same thing and go, I don't know, learn badminton or something like that, it'd be a disastrous effect. So it is kind of interesting how it kind of depends on the skill, particularly when it comes to music.

I would think with music, on the one hand, you're letting part of your emotions get out of the way. I think with learning, sometimes people get really hard on themselves when something is challenging and they have a hard time seeing themselves through the difficult part. And cannabis can help remove some of that self doubt and just get into a flow state. But also with any form of creativity, I think cannabis at certain doses is always going to be a boost. And if playing classical guitar is something you inherently enjoy and have some small amount of skill with, at least in terms of knowing the chords and knowing, you know, how to operate your hands on guitar strings, then you're going to increase your pleasure of it. And when you enjoy something, it is a lot easier to learn it. I think Malcolm Gladwell calls that capitalistic learning. I think it was in Outliers just, you know, he talked about Tiger woods and how Tiger woods was always good at some level at golf. And when you are good at something and you enjoy it more, it's easier to learn it. So I think a lot of this stuff, there isn't just like one hard and fast rule for any aspect of using cannabis with fitness or with any kind of learning. But there's a lot of nuance from person to person and plant to plant.

That's true. And I think that in the case of a lot of these professional sports, I think that a great deal of these statistics about use are centered around pain management strategies, recovery strategies and sleep strategies, and may not actually incorporate a huge percentage of use during competition itself as a performance enhancement aid. Do you think that's the case?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's this guy from the Seattle Seahawks or was with the Seahawks, Percy Harvin, and he said he got high before every game to deal with his social anxiety, which was triggered by these massive crowds. And he could just sort of like get dialed into the experience. But then. And for the most part, you're right, you do hear about it as a pain management, particularly as an alternative to opioids or just anti inflammatories, which are hard on the stomach and dehydrate you. So I think for a lot of people, it's becoming more and more popular after a big game to smoke a joint or take some edibles.

Yeah. Now, there's obviously a great deal of controversy behind cannabis use as a whole. And, you know, it's kind of odd because it is really woven into our culture. And I would like to get into how it got such a bad rap, but I mean, it goes way, way back in terms of how. Yeah, how woven it is into just like human development and culture. And you actually have a really good section in the book where you walk through, like, how far back it's been cultivated and consumed by humans and kind of just like a part of medicine and beyond. So how far back does this actually go, really?

As far back as agriculture goes. It was one of the first crops that humans started cultivating. More than, I think around 10,000 BC is around the birth of agriculture. It's been growing on the planet for around 28 million years. The oldest documentation that we have of it being used medicinally is 2700 BC in Chinese medicine. It was believed to be a remedy for gout, malaria, constipation, menstrual cramps. And then you see it, at least on the eastern half of the planet. The Hindus of India, the Egyptians, Zoroastrians, and then later the Greeks, Early Muslim cultures were using it. There was a recent archeological dig in Israel that discovered cannabis being used in Jewish rituals around 2,700 years ago. And this wasn't just non psychoactive hemp. There was THC, found this residue. The Europeans started using it around 1620. A lot of medical texts said it would work for depression or burns or irritable bowel syndrome or skin inflammation. I mean, the list goes on and on from its medical properties and then throughout American history. I mean, the early drafts of the constitution were written on Hemp paper. All the founding fathers grew hemp and some of them consumed it as well. Mary Todd Lincoln used it after the death of her husband, Abraham Lincoln. It was just like a common part of the American pharmacies for generations, really, up until the 20th century when Guy Harry Anslinger, who was the head of what would become the dea, started using it to gin up hysteria about immigrants and blacks and getting more funding for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics after prohibition had disappeared.

That was back when it emerged as kind of like the reefer madness type of moniker.

Yeah, and that's where we got the term marijuana from. Before that it was just almost exclusively called cannabis. But marijuana was something, a term that was used casually in Mexico around that time. So when you're trying to gin up fear about this new drug, you know, trying to frame it as a new drug, even though it had just been part of common household medical use, he slapped this kind of Mexican sounding term on it and that's how we got marijuana.

So is that term just made up marijuana?

It was being used, it was a slang term, it was spelled with an H at that time. Marijuana, it had some precedent and use, but it wasn't all that popular. And a lot of the legislators who voted to criminalize cannabis, if they had heard the term cannabis used in that legislation, they might have thought of it a little differently because it might have been something they were familiar with, it might have been something that was as innocuous as aspirin, but instead there's this kind of freaky, exotic Mexican sounding word. Marijuana just sounded new and dangerous and was very effective in ginning up a lot of fear.

Right. Kind of, kind of allowed these fear mongering politicians to like prey on Americans belief, you know, whether racial or cultural or economically based, you know, in that these other people were like lazy or sinful, you know, would like steal your money or corrupt your children while living on government handouts. And that was like what marijuana was. Pa. I think a big part of that was also the Nixon administration, right?

Absolutely. I mean, Nixon is famous for coining the term war on drugs and launching the war on drugs. And there was, I mean, up until that time acid was legal and marijuana was illegal. But the punishments for it became much harsher under Nixon administration. And one of his aides, John ehrlichman in the 90s in this interview admitted that this was completely, you know, that the fears about cannabis and LSD and heroin were completely fabricated in order to go after Nixon's enemies who were basically the anti war left and black people. So it was a way to have more coded language, you know, in the pursuit of dismantling a lot of these civil rights leaders or civil rights operations in a way to frame this new counterculture of hippies as people who are lazy, don't want to work, don't contribute anything to society, are going to corrupt your children. There's this really great book Dr. Carl Hart just released, Drug Use for grownups.

Oh, yeah, I heard about that one.

It's just a phenomenal book. And he's written a few that are really worth reading. But he points out that a lot, most of what came out of the war on drugs, most of the legislation, most of the hysteria was not based in. It was for the most part based in racism and political maneuvering. And I think we see that to this day, even in its prohibition in sports.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does make sense from a countercultural standpoint. Basically, if you paint or associate like hippies with marijuana or blacks with heroin, you could criminalize both marijuana and heroin pretty heavily. You could disrupt those communities, arrest their leaders, raid their homes, vilify them on the news, use and create kind of this rift that as a part of that rift, includes the use of substances that from a medicinal or for some of the other, for example, exercise or performance enhancing reasons or recovery enhancing reasons that we referred to has some benefit. You can take any of the downside of that associated with these lazy communities or criminalizing communities and then basically paint the whole thing from a countercultural standpoint in a very poor light. And I think that's why in my case, when I run into people who grew up or were going through their formative years during that era, they really, really paint marijuana in a different light. They either consume it and consider themselves to be rebels because of doing so, or they vilify it because they still associate it with that countercultural propaganda that seemed to be heavily influenced by a lot of what went on in the 60s.

Yeah. And it was incredibly effective. As you pointed out, it got into not just an anti drug campaign hysteria, but it got into pop culture. People just largely associate cannabis use with laziness, with a lack of ambition physically and mentally, to the point where I had to put a whole chapter in this book about the lazy stoner stereotype and how unfounded it is. So much of the marketing of this book, you know, people call it a noisy book. You know, it's disruptive, I think. And a lot of that comes from just battling this stereotype that we have about cannabis users and how lazy and corrupt and immoral they are. And a lot of that came from Nixon and really just a lot of conservative movements in the 20th century that just weren't really all that attached to reality and certainly are historically unprecedented because as we've been pointing out, it's been and used by cultures around the world for all sorts of things, including physical activity, like those Zulu warriors.

Yeah. Well, Reagan really had it in for weed, too, didn't he?

Absolutely. I mean, he had it in for poor people in general by sort of emphasizing in a way that the conservative movement never could before, certainly Barry Goldwater never could before, and even Nixon never could before, the idea that poor people are lazy and that America has equal opportunity for all people. And so that anyone who isn't a millionaire is not a millionaire by their own fault, because we all start at the same starting line and we all have the same abilities. And so he really effectively tied in drug use to this narrative, drug use and welfare recipients. And that's when you started seeing more of an emphasis on drug testing welfare recipients, more of this image of the stoner or the junkie as someone. Someone living on the street and can't get their life together and are just, you know, have no moral backbone. You know, he implemented a lot of legislation that bolstered the war on drugs and certainly increased our prison population. But I think the thing he was most effective at is just getting those things linked in people's minds. Poverty, welfare, and drug use. And so it becomes this kind of neat little package of like, well, that's why these people are poor, because they use drugs. And anyone who uses drugs is inherently lazy.

Yeah. And not even differentiating stuff like marijuana from hard drugs like crack or heroin. I think the Just say no campaign that I think Nancy Reagan was kind of championing during that time was kind of lumping all of these drugs into the same category.

Right. Yeah. And anyone who grew up in that time, I mean, I was born in 82, so the Reagan era was not really something I was cognizant for, but certainly alive in the 90s and went through the DARE program. And a lot of those programs were extensions of Nancy Reagan's just say no campaigns. They all kind of had this, like, catch all term of drugs. Didn't really talk about the overlap between legal drugs and illegal drugs. You know, that heroin and opioids were largely the same, or, you know, amphetamines, like I was put on as a child. Adderall, you know, is really not all that different from methamphetamine. It just kind of used the term illegal drugs. But that was what was implied is just illegal drugs. They're all the same, they all do the same and they all lead to the same place, which is just financial ruin. You're gonna ruin your family, you're gonna ruin your life. You're never gonna have a hope of any sort of achievement in life if you use drugs. A lot of people like myself came of age and tried marijuana and started meeting people who were regularly using marijuana and were high functioning and didn't really seem to, you know, fit the stereotype that we've been. We started looking around and thinking, well, what else are they lying to us about? And a lot of these campaigns, a lot of these people lost all credibility when you started educating yourself about the drugs and about their effects and just saw that these things don't seem to add up. There were things that we could have used information about, you know, hard drugs like heroin or, you know, taking too much of a psychedelic mushrooms or acid. We could have used some sort of nuanced information about that and maybe had trusted the sources a little bit more. But instead it was just sort of a blanket term drugs. And actually about marijuana and Reagan, I think one of his first speeches that he gave in his campaign in 1980, he said that marijuana was the most dangerous drug in America. Wow. I mean, just let that sit in a moment. I mean, maybe it was easy, which.

Is also, I mean, that's also crazy. When you look at big tobacco and alcohol and pharma and all these companies selling what we would deem as like socially acceptable, intoxicated, they're bankrolling at the same time with a huge number of side effects and even deaths that go way above and beyond what we would get from marijuana. But even though a lot of those private companies, if that's what you want to call them, they're pretty highly incentivized to vilify marijuana as well, right?

Absolutely. I saw an interview with Willie Nelson a few years ago where he talked about quitting smoking. And he said the thing that helped him quit smoking was cannabis. And whenever he had a craving for tobacco, he was would use some cannabis instead. And he's been off cigarettes for, I don't know, 30, 40 years. And it's the same when you look at Big Pharma. We're all pretty familiar with the opioid crisis in America and how things have changed in terms of our treatment and pain. But at the end of the day, it's a multi billion dollar industry. So a lot of people are incentivized to demonize any of their competition. Endless studies are showing us where medical or recreational cannabis is available. Opioid use plummets. And a lot of people are finding that they can get off of opioids by using cannabis both for pain management and just if you have any kind of addiction to opioids, it's part of the kind of harm reduction movement that we've seen in the last few decades. So if you're looking at this from the standpoint of business, you want to vilify the competition. But we have a lot of regulations against, you know, if Coke wanted to say that Pepsi gave you violent diarrhea, they could be sued for that. You know, Pepsi could say, like, there's no scientific basis for that. Why are you allowed to say that? But that's not the case with illegal drugs. So for generations we've had opioid manufacturers bankroll a lot of these anti marijuana campaigns and make all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about the dangers of marijuana. And they've really never been held to account for that. There's no legal maneuvering that a marijuana dealer could sue Big Pharma for making unsubstantiated claims about their products because it's illegal. And I think that's starting to change now. But the way it's changing is the opioid manufacturers are getting into the business. Ultimately they're buying patents, they're manufacturing synthetic cannabinoids. And that just kind of underscores incentive.

It's just nuts that the Partnership for Drug Free America is funded by grants from folks like Johnson and Johnson who are highly incentivized to ensure that a lot of these, what I would consider to be like alternative health remedies that would fall under the, or, you know, cannabis would fall under that umbrella, are vilified or something that are not considered to be approved or done by weird people. And you know, and there's just a huge amount of money pouring into that behind the scenes that I think so many people are unaware of. And it's kind of sad, but, but I think that gives a pretty good history, I think for a lot of people of why they might have a negative association with cannabis. It's just been woven into our culture, you know, since, since, since it's waning as an ancestral, you know, medicine and also something that can be used, you know, for some of the reasons that we just described, like enhancing a musical experience or allowing one to enter into a flow state during exercise or feel less discomfort during a workout session. It's crazy how much politics there is behind this. And I kind of want to, because I know I really want to have time to get into this. And so I think we should get into it right now because some people might be wondering, well, how, how do you actually use something like this responsibly without shooting yourself in the foot during a workout or during a training session session. So I want to kind of rapid fire a few questions to you, if I could, about how to actually use cannabis to enhance exercise, which is really what your book is largely about. So first of all, we've thrown around some dosages. Like I mentioned. I like to use 5mg for a good weight training workout in the gym. You mentioned 20 during some of your runs. Obviously we talked about 100 before that guy who swam. But what would you say based on what you've seen as far as dosing dosages and if you know anything about it, like combining it with something like cbd, for example, like THC CBD ratios, which I know is, that's something that's pretty popular, like a 2 to 1 CBD to THC or 5 to 1 CBD to THC. That's something I talked about when I interviewed Tim Moxie a while back on my show. What's a dosage range that seems to work pretty well for exercise and not to muddy the waters too much? Would that change if you're like, like, you know, long training session, endurance athlete versus like a, a quick in and out crossfit type of workout or power athlete?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. But I will assume that a majority of your audience are people who exercise semi regularly and have some experience with that. I mean, I would give very different advice to someone who hadn't exercised in years in terms of their application of thc. But then it's also the same thing if you, if you've never used THC or haven't in a very long time. There's a common phrase, actually I think it was the state of Colorado who used this in their marketing. Start low and go slow with cannabis. So find the lowest dose THC product that you can find and toy around with that a little bit outside of exercise and then start using it in small doses. For me, I like a 1 to 1 CBD to THC ratio. I find that too much CBD makes me a little bit sleepy, which makes it great. If you just had a huge workout and you want to lay down and recover. It will reduce inflammation in your body, it'll put you into a restful state, and that's fantastic. And in that case, you might want to take a large dose of cbd. I know a lot of ultramarathon runners who are big on CBD for something like that. For an endurance athlete, I think you'd want to be somewhat modest with the thc. And you've got plenty of room over the five, six, seven, eight hours that you're going to be running to space it out. So maybe start with 5mg of THC and take another dose in an hour. But with something like if you're going to be sprinting, I don't know, lifting weights or something, that you're just doing a 30 minute workout that's going to be incredibly intense. Hence, depending on your psychological state, I would think THC could be very effective in getting into a flow state. I've talked to bodybuilders or wrestlers that really enjoy getting zoned in with THC on each curl of the bicep. Everything else just sort of disappears and they're locked in on it. And also for anyone who experiences nausea in their workout, I've also heard this from bodybuilders, is you can get nauseous if you're going too hard. It's not uncommon that they throw up or, you know, they have to eat a tremendous amount of food to, you know, keep their, their body repaired, keep those muscles repaired. And so a lot of THC could, you know, stimulate your appetite.

That's also why it's, why it's, you know, commonly used for like cancer cachexia patients is just getting to eat.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, some bodybuilders, they have to eat what, like six meals a day? Some of them are getting up in the middle of the night and have to eat. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm just not hungry in the morning. And if I had to eat that much, I would definitely want some thc. But also the thing about thc, and this is just my personal experience, is it is anxiety inducing. And CBD can help modulate that anxiety if you are someone who gets anxious like I do. But also for me personally, I like a little bit of anxiety on a run. I like a little bit of fear crawling up my spine if I'm going to go run through the park at night. It sort of fuels me in a way. And that's the same thing with my writing as well. You know, I consume a lot of caffeine and that, that'll get me a little jittery, but I can use that as a fuel. But if you have to run for hours and hours, you don't want that like blast of anxiety that's gonna, you know, take you to that adrenalized level because you just can't sustain that for hours and hours.

Right.

And in the book I do get into the various terpenes that have divergent effects. If you educate yourself on that and you know what you're looking for, you can go to a dispensary and ask for something that has myrcene or linalool or alpha pinene. It's something that I kind of leave to a lot of the neurologists and botanists in the book to explain because it's somewhat complicated and a lot of the industry just isn't really there in terms of education. A lot of the edible that you take, the only information you're going to get about cannabinoids is going to be THC or cbd. In some cases they'll know something about cbn, which is something I take for sleep that's very effective. There is a lot of variation in terms of what type of workout you're doing and what type of cannabis product you want to consume. And it varies from person to person.

Yeah, it does. CBN is amazing for sleep, by the way, and I believe I read, I think this was in your book, that for someone using it for a multi hour training session, like a long run run, doing something like 5 milligrams but taking it so that it's hitting you as you're already running, like taking it like, like 10 to 20 minutes before you head out in your run, so that by the time you're putting your shoes on to start your run, because sometimes it can almost relax you a little bit unless you're already in the exercise session. So if you take like an hour before you head out, you might actually be slightly demotivated where if it's, if it's hitting you like as you're in the session, it's a little better. So for something like a long three hour run, you could like take 5mg 10 or 20 minutes prior and then take something along the lines of, I think this came from your book, like, like dosing with like another 5 milligrams per hour along with perhaps like you mentioned a little bit of CBD, you know, like 5 milligrams of THC, 5 to 10 milligrams of CBD for any inflammation or stomach cramping or anything like that you might experience during a run and, and use that for something like a multi hour training session.

That. Yeah, that was something that anecdotally came up a lot. And it has been my experience that if I take the edible long before I'm ready to go and it kicks in and I'm still laying on the couch, I'm going to want to keep laying on the couch. So I usually take my edible as I'm getting dressed for a run and I'll usually do a little warmup routine before that. And then you got your shoes and your water bottle and all the little stuff that you got to figure out before you head out the door. So that when I'm out running, it kicks in maybe like 10 minutes into the run and by that time my heart is already beating, my muscles are warmed up, and I'm just sort of in that state. So I think a lot of the time cannabis can just sort of enhance whatever state you're in. And so if you are in a sedentary state, it can, you know, push you a little farther in that direction. But if you're already moving along, then it can enhance that as well.

Yeah. And you know, for anybody who uses this during a run and gets a little bit of cottonmouth, which can sometimes be a side effect effect. And it's kind of funny because Dean Carnazes, who wrote that other book that I talked about a runner's high, he introduced me to mastic gum, which is a like a Greek chewing gum that he used when he ran the Spartan Marathon in Greece because it would keep saliva produced in his mouth and also satiate his appetite. He would chew on that for hours and hours, sometimes without drinking or eating. And I've actually found that that particular gum, which is also wonderful for things like H. Pylori and gut issues issues, it really helps to keep the mouth salivated. If you do get some kind of a cotton mouth issue from using cannabis for workouts, that's kind of a trick for folks. It's spelled M A S T I K or M I S T I C. You can get it as a capsule, but you'd want to look for like on Amazon. I'll put a link in the shownotes. By the way, for everybody listening in, the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com RunnersHigh that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com runnersHigh I'll hunt down some of that mastic gum and link to it in the show notes. And then I would assume, based on the potential for lung irritation, stuff like that, that you are preferring an edible to something like vaporizing or smoking.

Josiah for me personally, yeah, I do find that edibles have much more of a body high effect and smoking can lead to a little bit more of that cerebral pinch that is a little bit more of a head. Hi. A lot of people do talk about smoking cannabis as a bronchial dilator, and there are studies that reveal that to be the case. The joy of running under the influence of cannabis is really about a communing between the mind and the body and really enjoying tapping into all of the different activity of the body and having an awareness of the body and a pleasure of what it can do on a run. For me personally, I don't get that much out of smoking. I do smoke cannabis fairly regularly, but not before a run. Vaporizers, at least for me personally, tend to give me a bit of a sore throat, so I stay away from them. And same thing with dabs, really. Any kind of concentrates give me a sore throat. So for me, 10 to 20 milligrams of THC, maybe a little bit of CBD thrown in there is the perfect, perfect recipe for that body high.

Okay, got it. Now a couple of other things that I think is interesting. One is altitude. I forget, but I think you had mentioned altitude in the book. Is there any evidence that it would harm or help altitude performance?

I am not aware of any sort of research on that topic. I know that nausea is a big part of altitude sickness and THC is notorious for calming nausea and stimulating appetite. But disorientation is also part of altitude sickness. So if you are someone who has a sensitivity to THC and gets a little heady whenever they consume that, it could, I would think, exacerbate the problems of running at altitude or any kind of exercise at altitude.

Yeah, I guess maybe altitude sickness, if you're getting that at night when you'd gone to a place to train, you could use it in the evening for recovery and for sleep, for example, though.

Absolutely. But it has to be noted that, you know, I live in Colorado and have spent a lot of time with trail runners over the last couple of years. And you know, all of those statistics we talked about with the NBA or NFL or mma, it's at least that popular with trail running people. I mean, I don't think they regularly get altitude sickness since most of them live at elevation. So it's not really going to be all that jarring for them. Them. But I know it's incredibly popular to consume cannabis and go run trails or do mountain biking on trails. So there wouldn't be at least anecdotally, from my perspective, a lot of evidence that it's harmful in any way for working out at altitude, and a lot of anecdotal evidence that it quite enjoy joyful, if not helpful to people performance.

Yeah. And then, of course, no matter how you're using it, like we kind of talked about a little bit earlier, music can certainly enhance the effects. And I should mention to people that Josiah actually has hundreds of workout playlists he's assembled on Spotify for kind of like combining cannabis and exercise centered in that flow state or in that zone state, especially for the longer workouts. And can people just search for your name on Just. Or Josiah Hesse on Spotify and find those?

I believe so. I'll note that for me, a lot of those playlists are personal in that, like, they have this, like, personal sentimentality for me about, you know, a time in my life or something about the lyrics that will give me a sort of emotional charge when I'm running. A lot of the runners I speak with don't like listening to music when they're running trails. They really want to be absorbed in the nature, the sound of their feet. A very popular book called Chi Running, I think it is. It is what it sounds like. You're just very, very focused on the act of running and you're very present. But for me, maybe it's because I wasn't an athlete for my teens and twenties, but I was an arts reporter and I was a music freak, and still am to this day. Everything I do has a soundtrack to it pretty much throughout the day. I really enjoy running to music, and not just as a kind of seasoning of the experience, but like an integral component to the experience because I am running to the music. That's something I had to temper when training, when I really need to just run and pay attention to my heart rate and my pace. You know, all of these different numbers that go into getting stronger and faster, you know, have mixed feelings about. I'm very happy right now to not be training for a race, and I can just go out and run for fun. But when you're running to music, you at least have to. If you're going to have any sort of structure to it, you need to think about the tempo of the music that you're running to. I have music music for sprinting. I have music for long runs or short runs or for Splits. For me, there really is some effort put into getting the tempo matched with the type of run that I'm going to have. But sometimes I'm just in a really bad mood and I want to go run to Metallica or some Norwegian death metal and not care at all about what my heart rate's doing or what my pace is. I just want to sprint around the park to some very loud music and feel that emotional charge from it.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that a lot of people listening in might be like screaming through our headphones right now that this is all good and well, but it's like it's banned in a lot of sports. Like, it's a lot of, like, you know, everybody out there is doing, you know, anything from triathlon to cycling to swimming to, you know, UFC or anything else. Like, they're actually not supposed to use this stuff because it is considered to be an illegal performance enhancing aid. Do you think cannabis actually is a performance enhancing drug in that respect?

There's a lot of nuance to unpack with that term performance enhancing drug because there are so many substances that athletes use that are maybe not integral to their performance, but aid it in many ways. You know, this woman I spoke with for the book, Joanna Zeiger, she was an Ironman world champion. She has a book about mental performance, performance or mental aspects of performance. And she talks about all of these different substances that people are using, like anti anxiety medication or antidepressant medication that if you didn't have that, it would have a huge impact on your performance. And there's also sports medicine educator I spoke with, Jeff Conan, talked about cannabis as something that's going to bring the body back to balance but not push it to an unnatural state. Unlike steroids or blood, doping will take you beyond what your natural abilities are. He compares it to, if I'm going to put ice on an injury or an athlete, I'm not bringing their leg to some superhuman level of performance. I'm bringing it back to balance. And he says cannabis isn't going to take you beyond what you're naturally able to do. But when it comes to regulating competition in sports, you know, I'm not a sports journalist, so there's a lot that I don't intuitively understand about that. It's sort of similar to, I don't know, trans athletes. You know, I have a lot of strong opinions about trans rights, but when it comes to competition, I kind of leave that to the people who have great concern about competition and fairness in sports. But I do believe that a lot of the bans around cannabis and sports boards are not based on science. They're not based on how harmful it is, how much it's going to help you or harm you as an athlete. But I think a lot of it comes back to those cultural stereotypes we have about cannabis. And the World Anti Doping Agency has said as much in a lot of their statements about the ban on cannabis, that it's against the spirit of the sport, which is a very nebulous term, and that it sets a bad example for young people who look up to athletes as role models. And so it's something that I feel is antiquated on a cultural level and it's probably the source of the ban. But when it comes to whether or not it's going to make you a superhuman athlete, I don't think the science shows that it will. I'm not really a sports regulator. Yeah.

I mean for me as a guy, nutritionist, background in biochemistry and microbiology, studied some of this stuff in terms of pharmacology in college. I mean there's a lot of evidence, like steroids, for example, increase size of muscle, increase power, take you beyond your natural limits. That's a clear performance enhancer.

Right.

And your body is not making like andro on its own. When you go for a long run where it is making its own cannabinoids, this is something the body's already making. It returns you to like this state of balance after being depleted and helps you with recovery the same way as an ice bath or something like, like that. It's safer than coffee in terms of toxicity. You can die from taking 1 50th of a bag of coffee or caffeine powder rather that you could buy off Amazon today. And I think that when you look at the recovery effects of it and also the reasoning behind what is saying that they ban it. They say it causes muscle relaxation and reduces anxiety and reduced pain during recovery and might increase focus and risk taking behaviors, allowing athletes to like, forget falls or previous trauma in sports and push themselves past that in competition. It's a host of reasons that to me just seem kind of silly. I don't know if it's influenced by the whole like reefer madness thing that we talked about earlier. But ultimately, I guess as with anything, it could be overdone. But I just don't see proactive athletes getting high, getting completely irresponsible and lazy and making mistakes that put others at harm. I suppose if anything I'd say maybe WADA could put Like a dosage ceiling, like a dosage limit on it, like they did with caffeine at some time. And that seems to be a little bit more of a prudent approach than just like banning outright.

And we are seeing a lot of those reforms take place not only in wada, but in the NBA, the NFL, the mlb. WADA did change their, I don't remember the exact numbers, but they did change the level of testing for cannabis that's allowed in your system during competition, which permitted athletes to use it during training, but not in competition. They're still feeling that in competition it's going to give you an unfair competitive advantage. And that is a kind of controversial top in ultramarathon running that Avery Collins has ran into a handful of times because he's one of the few ultramarathon runners that's very public about his cannabis use. The regulations have changed even since I finished writing the book. In the NBA and the NFL, there were a lot of people who are consuming cannabis in the off seasons when everything was shut down during the coronavirus pandemic. And now people are coming back and nobody really knows what the test should be. And since then, so many states have legalized, a lot of states where these teams live have legal cannabis. And so it's just not as easy as it was in the just say no Reagan era to say it's illegal, it's banned, it's harmful, and that's the end of the conversation.

You unpack it pretty well in your book, the whole argument behind whether or not it should be a performance enhancing drug or labeled or banned as such. But you know, I think when used responsibly with the right kind of testing in the right amount, and especially when we see what it does does for keeping a lot of folks in like the NFL or the NBA from using a lot of these other opioids and more harmful constituents. I mean, I think that it would do more good than harm, especially from a recovery from a sleep, from an injury, from an anti inflammatory standpoint to keep it legal. And I mean maybe say you couldn't use it during the actual sport itself. And even then I'm kind of iffy about that. But either way, like you, you, I mean, there's so much you unpack in, in the book that we didn't get into. So I think people really should read this. They can check it out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com RunnersHigh I guess I should clarify because I always get these kind of questions. So I might as well, just address this right now because people ask me, well, Ben, you talk about cannabis like this. How much do you actually use this? Are you a stoner? Is this a crutch for you? For me, I would say that I'll have one hard workout a week, week now where I'll take about 5 milligrams of THC, typically via an edible. And usually I'll use something like those, those Moxie's Mints, for example. They've got one called peppermint that's like an energizing edible. And they're made in the state of Washington, so those are easy for me to get. I'll pop one of those before a hard workout. I have one of these vape pens. They're kind of dangerous. They're like the high THC variant that folks produce now. But I will take a hit on that vape pen typically about one or two nights of the week when I'd rather have that than say like a glass of wine to relax at the end of the day. Or I'll take a hit on that before I get a massage, or take an edible before I get a massage. You know, that's, that's really about the extent of my cannabis use. And so, you know, I think that there's a way to use it responsibly. There's also, you know, in the same way I could be hitting that vape pen every single night. And just like, like in couch lock, not handy for my family, not able to help my wife make dinner because I'm forgetful in the kitchen, I could be doing something like that every night and be using it irresponsibly. But I feel like as with anything, coffee, green tea, ibuprofen, any of those things floating around out there, you need to identify the risks and the benefits and use them responsibly. And I think you even say somewhere in the book you quote that verse from the Bible, I think in Genesis that basically God said, behold, I've given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree to you it shall be for meat. And basically this idea that God made all things good, but we humans do a good job bastardizing it and abusing it and politicizing it, and as with anything, developing addictions or attachments to it. But my take is that when used responsibly, not only can it be used to enhance musical experience, experiences or rest or relax or sex or sleep or anything like that, but can also be used as a performance enhancing aid, not in the sense that it's such a performance enhancing aid that I think it should be banned. But it can definitely help out quite a bit with running, with weight training workouts. And I think that this book is a really good guide in terms of how to do that responsibly. So it's called Runner's High, and I'm going to link to that@BenGreenfieldFitness.com RunnersHigh the author is Josiah Hess. H e s s e and if you guys have comments after listening to all this and your own stuff to add in, feel free to toss it in there and either Josiah or I will jump in and reply. And Josiah, I want to thank you for coming on the show today. We covered a lot and the book's great.

Well, thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun talking to you.

Yeah, Word. And again, we'll probably get some comments from folks and so I'll. So I'll keep you posted in terms of the discussion that ensues in the comments section over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com RunnersHigh because that's one of the cool things. For all you listening in, this is a discussion, you're able to go over to that website and leave your comments as well. So anyways, Josiah, I'll let you go. You probably got like 80 miles to run today, so I'll let you go pop your edible and strap your running shoes on.

Thanks so much. We'll actually be heading from this to go record the audiobook from Runner's Eyes, so it'll be pretty sedentary. But after that, maybe I'll go for a quick, quick run.

All right, ma'.

Am.

All right. Well, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Josiah Hess signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Runners High. Have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.