The Dr. Drew Transcript – Debunking the Drug Czar (and Drew!)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 4:48 pm | By: Radical Russ
I have the entire interview from the Dr. Drew show recorded, including John Walters, Paul Armentano, and my call-in segment. Unfortunately I can’t put it here on the Stash, that would be copyright violation.
But I am going to address most of the interview points that the Drug Czar tried to float today… Join me below… in The Rest of the Entry (said in Paul Harvey voice)…
DR. DREW: I guess there’s some more studies out on marijuana and its potency.
DRUG CZAR: Uh, yeah, we’ve had the basic national lab at the University of Mississippi…
You know, the place where the government grows medical marijuana and mails it out in 300-joint tins to four federal patients every month?
DRUG CZAR: …that has been studying potency for a number of years, and again potency’s up, it’s been up quite regularly and now dramatically over the last ten years as a result of a combination of the varieties that are being bred and the way they are being cultivated to maximize the THC content, in the product, so it’s up… yeah, I think this is another case – you know this – a lot of baby boomers my age are thinking about the marijuana they and their friends were exposed to in the early eighties where the recorded THC is down in the 2, 3% maybe… we’re talking about approaching on average more than 9%, and then, of course, as you know varieties that have THC content in the 15, 16, even into the 20s are now available to young people. Unfortunately the consequences are more acute as well.
Ding! All of you playing “Drug Czar Bingo”, go ahead and black out the “Not Your Father’s Pot” square.
DR. DREW: Right, I think that’s the big issue, because of the potency of the drug, just as we increase, say… we create a… people seem to understand that when we create a drug like OxyContin with higher [?], more powerful — “Oh, OK, that’s more addictive” — but somehow the marijuana story flies under the radar, that we’re producing a drug that is increasingly powerful and thereby increasingly addictive…
Wait a minute, doctor. That does not necessarily follow. Science has created all manner of more powerful medicines that are not more addictive, and many of them are less addictive than their predecessors.
And we also know that marijuana is not addictive in the “jonesin’, gotta have a hit” sense. Earlier in his show, Drew admitted one of his pet peeves are people who say a drug is only “psychologically addicting”; Drew says he treats these people with addictions and psychological is as much “addiction” as physiological in his view. (And as the son of an alcoholic father who sweated through delirium tremens while quitting cold turkey from booze all alone in a trailer, it offends me when people compare use “addiction” to describe someone who may be “dependent” on a substance or behavior. “Addiction” is physical slavery, “dependence” is enslaving yourself.)
But even under that definition, marijuana is far less addictive than legal drugs and other illegal drugs. The National Institutes of Medicine reviewed plenty of research and found that “few marijuana users become dependent on it”, less than those who use alcohol or tobacco.
DR. DREW: …and it’s also increasingly dangerous in terms of the side effects. We’re seeing lots more problem with depression – I know you and I did a conference about that – we’re even seeing schizophreniform reactions. The one thing that I’m sort of fascinated by, you know, is that for many people there seems to be a very powerful opiate-like effect of marijuana these days in these very high potencies. Is anyone reporting anything about that?
WTF? Opium-weed?!? Look, whatever scary high-potency marijuana you think people are smoking out here, it’s marijuana that people have always been able to smoke. There have always high-potency strains of marijuana – it’s called sinsemilla, hashish, and hash oil. People would smoke a puff or two of those and get a fantastic high… Why didn’t they get depressed or go schizo?
But if you lived in a area where that was tough to get or too expensive, you got what you could get and you smoked a whole hell of a lot of it to get a decent high (and a headache).
Eventually the prohibition marketplace began to start getting the stronger strains to the buyer, as buyers who were tired of spending too much cash on poor quality marijuana demanded more potency. If you’re really concerned about potency, you regulate marijuana so a buyer can know exactly how much THC he’s getting in his baggie. In the Netherlands, where this is sort of the case, buyers prefer the “mild” and “moderate” strains, much like drinkers here prefer beer and wine over whiskey.
DRUG CZAR: Well, one of the ways that we’re seeing this change is the number of people who have reported marijuana as the reason why they come into an emergency room for acute care – in the past people would think, “Oh, you get overdoses for heroin, you get overdoses for cocaine,” but people had a view that marijuana, because it doesn’t have the same toxicity character that would have you come in for acute care, but the number of cases has gone up dramatically over the last ten years as the potency – they track almost directly with the potency. And the number of cases for people coming in reporting that they had an unexpected reaction or they’re having… sometimes they come in because they are seeing acute dependency and they want a referral to treatment. But a lot of them are having unexpected reactions or – not the same overdose toxicity as heroin – but that has been a surprising development which people almost think, “Well, that can’t happen, there must be some kind of problem.” but they’re reporting health consequences from this…
The statistics he is mentioning come from the Drug Abuse Warning Network, or DAWN. According to their own website, “[D]rugs reported to DAWN come from the [emergency room] medical record or [medical examiner's / coroner's] case file. There are many possible sources for this information: laboratory (toxicology) testing, the clinical assessment and diagnoses, as well as reports by patients, their friends, or their families.” According to their FAQ, “Although overdoses are included in the cases reported to DAWN, many other types of drug-related events are also reported. For example, some drug-related ED visits or deaths may be the result of accidents or injuries. Others may be the result of adverse reactions, drug interactions, or accidental ingestion.”
This means when you go to the E.R. because you sprained your ankle playing softball, and their blood tests show you have marijuana metabolites – that’s an emergency admission for marijuana.
If you’re in a car accident and the admitting physician asks your mom whether you use marijuana and she says, yes – that’s an emergency admission for marijuana.
And, to be fair, if you come in freaking out because some black market dealer laced your marijuana with formaldehyde and you’re really messed – that, too, is an emergency room admission for marijuana, and one that wouldn’t have been if the product was regulated and inspected for quality control.
DRUG CZAR: So the number of young people who come in for treatment, even as young people with the earlier stages of initiation. We have, as you know, the national data collection shows more teens coming in for treatment as teens for marijuana dependency than all other illegal drugs combined in the last five years and more in the last five years than for alcohol, which has always unfortunately been a big problem, young underaged drinking and alcoholism.
He’s absolutely right, because now we have a system of drug courts that sentence young offenders to drug treatment even if they aren’t dependent on marijuana. In fact, according to the government’s own figures, one-third of the people sentenced to treatment for marijuana haven’t even smoked pot in over a month. Ah, the drug so powerfully addictive people can easily go without it for a month!
DRUG CZAR: So the increased strength of this substance is also affecting the path of dependency and health consequences, as well as (you mentioned we talked about earlier) some of the mental health consequences. We’ve been even doing work with the Dutch, who are usually thought of as the opposite side of us on marijuana or cannabis, where they are talking about higher potency causing acute health problems that they are seeing in the Netherlands. So they too now have been taking steps to reduce the number of coffee houses, to treat the especially higher potency cannabis almost as a different drug in their system. So, again, I think multiple places are seeing the same thing, we have, it’s a kind of a cultural blind spot about marijuana that is unfortunately putting more kids at risk.
Well, first of all, if John Walters wants to learn a lesson from the Dutch and institute a policy of tolerance for small personal cannabis sales and use in coffee shops, I’m all for that. But he’s way off base with the characterization of the Dutch reduction in coffee houses. Coffee house numbers are down nationally from around a thousand in the nineties to around 700 today, but primarily because of the pressures of “drug tourism” from countries that do not tolerate personal soft drug use. Of course, if other countries tolerated marijuana use, there’d be no “drug tourism”. It’s not about potency; coffee houses still sell high-potency strains like White Widow that test in the 25% THC range.
DR. DREW: It’s interesting that when I treat people for multiple substances – cocaine, alcohol, and pot – the one they really miss is the pot. It creates sort of a… the euphoria from the drug creates sort of a love-type reaction – they love the drug – it’s a nurturing sort of warm feeling they can’t get any other way. And so when they are left without the drug there may be some outside withdrawal, their affect may be stabilizing, but they still miss and romanticize that feeling.
Could it be, Dr. Drew, they miss it because it had wonderfully positive effects for them and an absence of serious negative effects? No alcoholic misses puking on his shoes and the shakes when he can’t get a drink. No coke addict misses nosebleeds, a racing heart, and emptying their bank account for one more eightball. I mean, if you told me that for the rest of my life I couldn’t eat Mexican food, I’d still miss and romanticize about a nice plate of pollo en mole.
DR. DREW: It’s really interesting to me that the Dutch are sort of focusing their attention on this. How are they – well, let’s maybe take it back home here – I’m interested in sort of how they would differentiate between using one kind of pot and the other – what are we doing in this country to try and address this?
DRUG CZAR: One, we’re trying to get more of the word out about marijuana is a dangerous substance of abuse. I think when we had the conference that we did, you and I talked about the, um…
Does it bother anyone else that interviewer and interviewee are so chummy, doing conferences together talking about the evils of marijuana? Just wondering…
DRUG CZAR: One of the problems is just having people overcome the false view that marijuana is not a serious drug of abuse, that this is different. We’ve been trying to help young people see this. We get further when we have consensus. I mean, we have consensus on things like methamphetamine, like crack cocaine, like heroin. We have more to do here, but nobody goes up and says, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that, that’s only psychologically addicting, it’s not physically addicting, or it’s not a dangerous drug of abuse.” We do have that with marijuana, yet we have more people – not just teens, but nationwide – more people coming in for treatment for marijuana dependency as a primary dependency than any other drug in adults and kids combined. And yet, if you say that, people just think there’s something false in the data.
Yes, it must be monumentally difficult to convince nearly 100 million Americans who’ve tried marijuana themselves and for the most part suffered no ill effects that the bullshit you’re peddling is accurate. It must be especially hard to convince the 14 million who’ve smoked in the past month – smoking that same deadly potent marijuana you’re claiming is out there today – that it’ll drive them crazy and into the E.R. when it hasn’t had that effect on them or anyone they know.
The reason you have consensus on meth, crack, and heroin, is because those drugs are dangerous and addictive, and most everyone has seen the story of the meth-mouthed scrap-metal thief, the crackhead woman turning tricks for a rock, and the junkie wasting away in an alley. Nobody has seen that in a stoner. Nobody is too afraid of the worst case scenario (getting plastered to a sofa and eating cookie dough while watching Spongebob) because they know that after even the highest high, the vast majority of stoners return to living productive sober lives.
DRUG CZAR: So we’re trying to talk about marijuana, we’re gonna talk about the reality of young people and marijuana, we’re trying to talk about the research showing the mental health consequences as you helped us with earlier.
That’s funny, because I’ve been reading some of that research, such as Leslie Iverson’s 2005 meta-analysis that looked at most of the research in this mental health arena and concluded “A review of the literature suggests that the majority of cannabis users, who use the drug occasionally rather than on a daily basis, will not suffer any lasting physical or mental harm.” Yes, if you smoke a whole lot of marijuana, and you’re predisposed to psychosis or schizophrenia, cannabis may exacerbate that. But that’s no reason to prohibit cannabis, any more than we should ban Snickers bars because some people have peanut allergies.
DRUG CZAR: We’re also trying to help more directly cut off some of the availability of marijuana because there also has been a reluctance, I think, sometimes to take seriously the criminal marketing of marijuana, which people think it’s Cheech & Chong, not dangerous guys, but the killers and assassins in Mexico, those mafias, make the bulk of their money – the Mexicans know this, we know this – on marijuana. Yeah, they make money from cocaine and heroin, but the basic paid overhead is paid by marijuana, and that’s just one of the sources.
Oh, no, Mr. Walters, I do take very seriously the criminal marketing of marijuana. That’s why we work so hard at NORML to take the “criminal” part out of the marketing of marijuana. And how dare you bring up the border drug war in Mexico when it is your policies that have created that war and gotten brave police, judges, and civilians killed in the crossfire because you’ve criminalized Americans who like to smoke a doobie now and then. If they’re paying their bills through marijuana, why not undercut their income by legalizing the sale of weed within the US?
DRUG CZAR: Again, we’re trying to both influence supply and demand, try to influence people to work on prevention and intervention and treatment for marijuana and not ignore it. We’re also trying to, and we have stepped up some of the efforts to control the sources of supply, because when they are plentiful and powerful, we get more sick people, as well as when we look the other way and tell kids it’s an expected rite of passage, every generation does this, don’t worry…
DR. DREW: Oh, that is such an anachronism, that drives… you’ve mentioned two of my most… the two things that drive me more crazy than anything else. One was that drug use and alcohol use by teens should be anticipated as a rite of passage – that is a HORRIBLE idea, a horrible message to young people. It’s always dangerous and unhealthy. You look at every unwanted outcome, whether it’s pregnancy or STDs or accidents, you ALWAYS find drugs or alcohol, kids need to get that message. And the other thing you mentioned, which is the idea of a… whoa, we’re out of time! This is John Walters, the director of the White House Office of national Drug Policy… but the other thing is the idea of psychological dependence or addiction: things are either addictive or they are not and if they’re addictive, it’s a biological process.
Just because people with unwanted outcomes smoked pot doesn’t mean that smoking pot is going to lead to unwanted outcomes. Post hoc, ergo prompter hoc, doctor, you should know better. And in a world where we tell them “Just say no” and “marijuana is going to make you schizo”, we’re more likely to get the unwanted outcomes than if we give them accurate facts about marijuana.
After the commercial break, Dr. Drew comes back with Paul Armentano. For some reason, Drew didn’t bring up any of the points being touted by John Walters and led him into a tangential discussion about a cannabis-blocking drug being used as a weight loss agent. After that segment I was able to call in to Drew’s show and address some of the points (”why are we supposed to be afraid of this increased potency marijuana when the federal government allows the prescription of a 100% THC pill called Marinol”, “higher potency was around back in the 1960s and 1970s”, and “they say it’s the smoking that’s bad, and if it’s more potent, you smoke less of it”), and even then he tried to take me on some tangent about a book I’ve never read.
Maybe we’ll have Paul on Dr. Drew’s show again some time.
