Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”
In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Berenson argues that it’s a bad move. Schedule I substances are defined as having high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule III substances, in contrast, have medical uses and are regarded as having only moderate to low potential for abuse.

Rescheduling marijuana sends the wrong signal, Berenson says: “Do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use?”

He believes the use of drugs should be stigmatized, including the use of marijuana: “In the U.S. we can’t stigmatize. And not to stigmatize in this case, as in so many cases, means we can’t be honest.”

In my interview with Berenson, he provides an overview of the dangers of marijuana use and why these have increased dramatically over the last half-century.

“Fifty years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock … that might have been 1 or 2 percent THC, so a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. … When I was growing up in the ’80s or in the ’90s, it might have been 5 percent THC. Now, if you go into a dispensary … the bud tender will sell you a product that is 20 percent to 30 percent THC, if it’s flower cannabis,” he said.

And if it’s not smoked but vaped, then “that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high,” Berenson said. “Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC, and that really is a change that has made the product a lot more dangerous.”

There is also a well-established link, Berenson says, between high-potency, frequent marijuana use, and severe mental health impacts such as psychosis and schizophrenia.

There’s even research suggesting THC causes heart damage. “There is a link to myocardial infarction, heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period,” he said.

But what about its benefits as a pain reliever? Berenson said that he was surprised to discover that placebo-controlled studies showed only small and short-term pain relief effects.

“What cannabis and THC are really good at is enhancing sensation … but if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you. … And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true,” Berenson said.

“We as a society have to … be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do,” he said.

In our wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the overprescription crisis in America, the dangers of SSRIs, psychedelics, and stimulants such as Adderall that around 10 percent of teenage boys are taking in the United States, and his thoughts on vaccine policy in America.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of  NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Alex Berenson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Jan, so good to be here.

So something remarkable happened the other day. President Trump signed an executive order moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. I don’t think most people even understand the significance of this. Some people say it means nothing. Others say it’s the legalizing of marijuana. It’s neither of those. What’s the truth?

Well, the truth is that it’s something that the industry really wanted, the cannabis industry, because it’s going to increase their profits a lot. And you can tell this because in the days after the rumor that this was actually going to happen became public, the stocks of cannabis companies, big weed, as I sometimes call it, went way up. This will give the industry more access to the financial system, and it will increase the industry’s profits by enabling them to deduct some taxes. As a practical matter, that’s really what it does. President Trump said the other day, this will improve medical research and make it possible for more research on cannabis. That’s very unlikely for a couple of reasons.

First of all, there has been a lot of research on the potential medical properties of cannabis and THC [Tetrahydrocannabinol], which is the chemical in cannabis that gets people high, and a chemical called CBD [Cannabidiol], which does not get people high, but is also in cannabis. And unfortunately, for the most part, those studies, when they’re done and done well, do not show much impact for cannabis on most of the things it’s supposed to help, much less things like cancer.

And if you actually think about it, that’s totally reasonable because why would we think one plant is some magic cure for everything? That’s not how medicine works. It’s not how our bodies work. It’s not how science works. Cannabis and THC are really good at doing one thing, getting people high. That’s what they’re good at. And when they’re tested against other conditions, they generally don’t work very well.

And do you mean like treating those conditions or the pain reduction around those conditions?

I mean both, actually. So this was surprising even to me. Seven years ago, I wrote a book called Tell Your Children. Tell Your Children, when it came out, was controversial. The core thesis, I’d say it’s gotten less controversial over that time, but the core thesis of it was, look, there’s a lot of scientific evidence that cannabis, especially when kids or young adults use it, and especially when they use it in its current high-potency form, and they use a lot of it, can have really severe mental health impacts. And specifically, this heavy use can cause a condition called psychosis.

Psychosis is a break from reality. Literally, people will wind up in the emergency room thinking that their families are going to do terrible things to them, or that the cop who’s driven by once in the last hour has actually had to get them, whatever it might be. And so I would say that when I wrote Tell Your Children, that thesis was debated in the scientific community.I think in the seven years since, we’ve gotten even more evidence that it is correct, and I think even people who are in the industry would acknowledge that there’s a risk.

But to go back to your initial question, which was about pain and pain relief, I was very surprised to find that when cannabis and THC have been studied in placebo-controlled studies, meaning you test where you give one person THC and you give another person just a pill that contains nothing, or they smoke a joint that actually has no THC in it, you don’t find lasting effects of pain relief from cannabis.

I think the reason for that is that what cannabis is really good at, what THC is really good at, is enhancing sensation. So people want to use it when they’re having a meal, when they’re listening to music, maybe if they’re having sex; those things it can enhance the sensation of. But if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you.

And so ultimately, when cannabis has been tested this way, doctors find that it doesn’t have a very good lasting impact on pain. And there was a really good study a few years ago in Australia where people who’d used it for a long period of time actually used more opioids than people who didn’t use cannabis. And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true. And I really can’t emphasize that enough because it’s been sold this way to people.

With President Trump, when I listened to his press conference the other day, I think there’s part of him that means well about this. I mean, he doesn’t use drugs. And I think he had a lot of people yapping at him about this, who do use cannabis and who like it and who want fewer restrictions on it.

But ultimately, he made a mistake. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but practically what this says is that marijuana is not as dangerous as something like heroin or these, you know, methamphetamine, whatever, like these, again, Schedule I chemicals, and that it opens up the door for a little more research potentially.

That’s the way it’s being framed. Okay. So here’s what you need to know about Schedule I. The reason a drug gets put in Schedule I actually is, apart from its dangers, whether it has any medical use. So, for example, fentanyl is in Schedule II. While heroin is in Schedule I, why is fentanyl in Schedule II? Because fentanyl is actually used to treat severe pain. You know, if you come out of a surgery where they’ve just, you know, amputated your leg or whatever, you need fentanyl. Okay. So it has a medical use.

The reason cannabis should have remained in Schedule I is that they could have, for example, done something that I don’t know if they legally could have, but a better move would have been to create something—let’s call it Schedule IR—to allow more research on smoked products. Okay, and that can’t be a medicine. Tobacco is not a medicine; it can’t be, even though there might be compounds in tobacco that actually improve brain function or whatever, right? If you have to smoke it, it should be Schedule I. Now, THC, maybe you could say, okay, Schedule II or Schedule III. So this argument about descheduling, to me, should have started and ended there, and unfortunately, it did not.

Now, am I going to tell you that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin or cocaine? Of course not; it’s not nearly as dangerous as those things. The question is, and I think we, as a society, particularly in the United States, have gotten lost about this: do we want to encourage or discourage drug use broadly? And I’m talking about alcohol, drugs that are sold illegally, and drugs that are medically prescribed. I think we have made a huge blunder in encouraging the use of drugs of abuse, whether that could be something like Adderall.

Okay, Adderall is a drug we give to children, and we say they have ADHD [Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder], which frankly is a condition that I think everyone in the world now has who has a phone. And we give them Adderall. What is Adderall? It’s essentially amphetamine. Amphetamine is an addictive and dangerous drug, and we should not be encouraging doctors to prescribe that to children.

If what we believe about cannabis is, hey, you know, it’s not that dangerous; maybe, you know, alcohol is legal, cannabis should be legal. Then let’s legalize it on that basis. I don’t agree, but that would be an intellectually honest way to do this. What we did recently, what we did with the descheduling, saying, this is medicine, and we need to research it more. To me, that’s just further going down the road of confusing people about what this is.

Fascinating. But I do want to talk a bit more about Adderall. It’s very interesting. But before we go there, I’ve had a number of people over the years on the show discussing how marijuana has changed over the last 30 years or so. And specifically that they’ve been making much more concentrated variants, and that’s often what’s sold. So what 30 years ago might not have caused psychosis very often, if ever, today it’s like a whole different game just because of the raw concentration. Can you frame that for me a little bit?

Sure. I mean, that’s absolutely correct. So 50 years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock or whatever, that might’ve been 1 or 2 percent THC. So a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. When I was growing up, you know, in the eighties or the nineties, it might’ve been 5 percent THC.

Now, if you go into a dispensary, they’re called stores, okay? The budtender will sell you a product that is 20 to 30 percent THC if it’s flower cannabis—so 20 times as much THC in this one joint as there was. But that isn’t even the real problem. The real problem is you can also, it’s not even smoking; it’s inhaling from a vape that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high.

Look, 50 years ago, if you wanted to get enough THC into your body to really get high and potentially get psychotic, you had to smoke a lot, okay? You had to use a bong; otherwise, you’re going to irritate your throat. You know, you kind of had to smoke all day. Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC. And that really is a change. That has made the product a lot more dangerous.

Okay. So just, this is interesting because on the one hand, so now these vape products, but you would probably say, right, that that’s not really marijuana now. That’s just, so that could actually be a Schedule II or III, right? Because it’s THC mostly and not marijuana.

It could be a schedule three or two to the extent that it has a medical use. So in other words, if we found that THC in its pure form actually, you know, treated condition X or Y, we could approve it for that. And THC in its pure form is actually approved. It’s called Epidiolex for treating seizures in kids. I believe that is the only medical use for which there’s an approved FDA indication. I think it’s fair to say that 99.99 percent of the cannabis consumed in the United States or THC consumed in the United States is not for that condition. So this again is a little bit of a red herring.

I’m saying that we as a society have to be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do. And when we say don’t stigmatize drug use, why wouldn’t we want to stigmatize drug use? Why wouldn’t we want to stigmatize THC use? And by the way, alcohol too, okay? Listen, I drink, okay? But am I going to claim that alcohol can’t be problematic for people?

No, of course it can be. Should we have, you know, spirits advertising on television? I don’t think so. I think that was a mistake. You know, the First Amendment may require it. Maybe there’s a way we can dial it back. But should we have higher taxes on alcohol? Sure. This is about all drugs and the way we think about them.

Something really struck me. It’s really this discussion, right? The discussion is, should we ever encourage drug use? Because this is something that I’m seeing not just in illicit drug use. I’ve just started covering, for example, the mental health space quite a bit more. And I’m shocked, for example, to discover that the chemical imbalance hypothesis of mental illness is just false, that there’s literally no evidence for it. Who would have guessed?  We all kind of believe that. We’ve all come to believe that, right? And so therefore, a drug can be a solution. Now, it’s sort of unclear how much of a solution these drugs are. But in many cases, these SSRIs [Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] are not even different from placebo in terms of effect, plus having side effects on top of it, right?

So SSRIs are an interesting discussion and debate. I think that SSRIs get a bad rap because you’re right. The trials that were done on them for the most part were pretty short term. And definitely there are people who when they try to get off them have problems getting off them. I would not classify SSRIs as drugs of abuse because they don’t produce a subjective high and they don’t have street value, and to me that’s a pretty easy way to figure out what drugs are drugs of abuse.

Nobody really wants to take Prozac, you know? They’ll take it if they’re depressed, and they may get some benefit from it. And you’re right. They might also get benefits just from going outside, from exercising, from doing non-drug things. But I do think the SSRI debate is off, at least from my point of view, to one side of this.

Okay. That’s interesting because now you’re saying there are drugs of abuse and then there are drugs that are…

Essentially, that have medical value that people aren’t taking to get high.

Or maybe there’s a third category that doesn’t have medical value, but people aren’t taking to get high.

Unfortunately, there are many drugs for which, you know, I think people would be stunned if they’d read the sort of number of studies that I’ve read, not just about SSRIs, but about medicines in general, how moderate the benefit a medicine has to provide to be approved and that a drug company can then sell, in some cases, for a massive amount of money.  Cancer drugs, for example, often, if you can show that a cancer drug, you know, prolongs someone’s life by a month or two, you can get that drug approved and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment. And, you know, that’s what most cancer drugs are. Diabetes drugs, are they valuable? Yes, they are valuable. But is exercise probably just as valuable or more valuable? Yes. And SSRIs, to me, fit in that category.

But the antidepressants and another big category of drugs called the antipsychotics—brain drugs—I don’t classify as drugs of abuse because, again, nobody wants to get put on Zyprexa, which is probably the best-known of the antipsychotics. Nobody wants to get put on Thorazine, Haloperidol, or Haldol. These are drugs that are unpleasant for people. And so should we use them cautiously? Should doctors use them cautiously? Yes. Are they drugs that are causing a societal crisis in the same way, let’s say, that opioids or amphetamines are? I don’t think so.

Here’s the thing that struck me about what you said earlier, right? There’s just this, do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use? No. Nor medical drug use. Whether it’s medical or whether it’s abuse, what do you call it? Drugs of abuse or medical drugs, or any drugs for that matter. Or should we be a society where drugs are, you know, used in certain cases when absolutely necessary? That’s a very different framing.

Yes. And I would absolutely agree with that framing. Absolutely. We, as Americans, and it’s partly because the companies are so aggressive about advertising, they’re so aggressive about marketing to doctors, they’re so good at it, they can make so much money on selling people, again, drugs that have very marginal benefits. And I think, unfortunately, you know, society, sometimes we look for a quick fix. I know with MAHA [Make America Healthy Again], right, part of that is a rebellion against that.

But I think MAHA’s leaders need to be consistent. My joke about this is that everybody hates drugs except for the drugs that they do. And so, you know, don’t tell me that you hate SSRIs, but you love ketamine or psychedelics. You know, those drugs are a lot more dangerous than SSRIs.

Oh, interesting. Why would you say that? That’s interesting.

I mean, ketamine is highly addictive.

Let’s take psilocybin because that’s an example of something that a lot of people are coming to me and telling me, Jan, you can solve all sorts of mental problems with psilocybin. It’s, of course, done with the right dosages, all that kind of stuff.

Well, ironically, I mean, antidepressants are what are in the general category called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Those will moderately increase your serotonin over time. What psilocybin does is deliver a massive serotonin hit in a matter of hours. So in some ways, it is just an SSRI, albeit a much stronger one, which is why it has these hallucinogenic effects. Look, I think there are going to be people out there who like these drugs. I personally think they’re quite dangerous in the long run.

I mean, and you think this because of your reading of the literature, right?

Yes, exactly. And because, look, when there have been efforts to use psilocybin or LSD, and those are basically very similar compounds with very similar effects, you know, people may feel really good once or twice, but the impact tends to wear off and the side effects tend to increase. And, you know, again, I think all these people who hate antidepressants and SSRIs should be aware of how similar the psychedelics are, you know, in terms of the chemical impact on your brain.

Fascinating. Okay. Going back for one more moment to marijuana. You mentioned you were shocked to discover how little of a pain relief effect it really has in the studies. What are some other things that kind of shocked you in your research when it came to marijuana, like were surprising?

So I would say there are two things that, you know, beyond the sort of psychosis connection and this sort of increased link to schizophrenia, which is a terrible disease, a disease I would not wish on, you know, my worst enemy. There’s increasing evidence in the last 10 years that cannabis and THC, and this is not from smoking. This apparently is from the effect of the chemical itself, which can cause really severe heart damage. There is a link myocardial infarction and heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong now. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period. And these are young people, right? So they’re at a very low baseline risk. But the risk is very real and increased.

And then the other is, I think a lot of people think, oh, cannabis, if you’re using it and you’re stoned, you’re just going to drive very slowly and cautiously. For whatever reason, in states that have legalized, they see a lot of high-speed car accidents with cannabis. And whether that’s because people are getting paranoid and just driving really fast, whether it’s because of the intoxication effects, this idea that when you get stoned, you just drive 10 miles an hour. And if anything, your problem is that you’re not moving at all, turns out not to be true. So that one was a surprise for me also.

Fascinating. Okay. All right. I promised we would go back to talking a bit about Adderall. That’s a very interesting one because I don’t know how many people in this country have taken Adderall, but a lot. Do you know the numbers at all?

So around 10 percent of teen boys have an Adderall prescription. I think it’s gone, actually, fortunately, it’s gone down a little bit in the last couple of years, but it’s at that level. I can tell you that on a per dose basis, the U.S. uses about, or per capita basis, the U.S. uses about 30 times as much Adderall as France, 10 times as much as Germany, so we’re just off the charts on this. And there’s a very, very good book called Dopesick, which is about OxyContin and the opioid crisis.

The writer of the book is Beth Macy. She talks about, you know, the stories of a number of young people, men and women, who became addicted to opioids in West Virginia. That’s where she was covering this, and over and over again she says this person was prescribed Adderall for ADHD as a kid, you know, this girl, same thing. And I thought to myself, does she realize what she’s saying? And she does actually realize what she’s saying because later in the book, she says it explicitly.

So I think the gateway effect is real, but I think it’s real culturally as much as biochemically. And I think it’s real on an individual level and a societal level. So again, if you give a kid a pill and say, you know, you don’t focus very well, you’re not doing well in school, you’re running around and not listening. And the solution for me is not to run you out like a puppy and make sure that you’re tired enough to sleep and you get a good night’s sleep. And for me not to let you use your phone and for me to tell you we have rules in this house. And I understand that can be hard for people, especially if you’re a single parent.

But when I say instead, I’m going to give you a pill and it’s going to help you behave. Whether or not that pill gets you high, and Adderall is a stimulant that gets people high; there’s no question about that. Okay. It is a very cocaine-like drug, whether or not it gets you high. The lesson I have taught you is this pill is the way to change and improve your behavior and make you feel better.

So when that kid, five years later, is at a party and somebody has, you know, a 10-milligram oxy and says, hey, try this. You’ll like it, his first response will not be, this might be dangerous for me. I don’t know where this is going to go. His response is going to be, hey, why not? I take Adderall all the time. And that’s where we are as individuals. And that’s where we are as a society. And that is what we really need to stand up to and say no to.

See, this is so interesting because, you know, there’s something people would describe as an over-prescription crisis, right? Whether it’s around mental health drugs or pain drugs or whatever, right? So those are the sort of the okay drugs, the ones we accept. And then there’s the drugs of abuse, the ones that we don’t accept. And in general, there’s a lot of, I don’t know how what you—

Except we do accept them. That’s what I mean.

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