Professor David Nutt - Drug Science

Full transcript: Professor David Nutt on London Real

8:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is our 100th episode of the show, so it’s a pleasure having you both here. Thank you very much. With us today is Mr. Patrick Vickers, who is a former derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs, who turned mixed martial arts fighter and then MMA promoter.

9:01 Patrick was a guest on the show in that chair about a year ago. If you want to learn more about him, you can watch that show. I believe Patrick might be returning to banking and I wish you lots of luck with that. Thank you very much. And our guest today is Professor David Nutt, who is a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, specializing in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, sleep, and depression.

9:27 He is a professor at Imperial College London and was the chairman of the Advisory Council on the misuse of drugs until he was controversially sacked in 2009 for public disagreement with politicians about the dangers and classifications of certain drugs. Did I get that right? Absolutely. Absolutely right. Okay.

9:45 When people ask me what the issue was, I try to boil it down to this, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, but I said, Professor Nutz said or asserted that alcohol and tobacco were in fact more dangerous than cannabis and MDMA. Is that a generalization? So let me be absolutely precise. Yes. was in the UK today, there’s much greater harm from alcohol tobacco than from any other drug.

10:11 Alcohol’s certainly the most harmful drug in the UK. OK, and that’s because the history of consumption, and just for a general person, that drug is going to hurt them more than the other drug. Right, no, let me be very explicit about this. So our analysis was quite sophisticated analysis. In simple terms, we looked at the harms of alcohol and 19 other drugs to the user and also to society.

10:35 And what is clear that to the user, the most harmful drug is actually crack cocaine, followed by crystal meth, followed by heroin, followed by cocaine. And alcohol comes about fifth most harmful to the user. But because of the vast use of alcohol in Britain today, harms the society, alcohol comes top. As a cumulative effect to everyone because it’s used so much more. So if everybody did the same amount of heroin, that would be, that would have a higher impact but because everybody has a point, you know, much more often than the scope of their consumption.

11:11 Heroin is slightly complicated though because of course a lot of the harms of heroin come from the fact it’s illegal. But suppose you framed it another way, suppose we went to a society like in China during the opium wars, where a large proportion of Chinese were smoking opium. Then how would that compare with drinking alcohol in this culture? It would probably be similar. Chronic intoxication with those drugs is not good. Although, to be honest, alcohol is almost certainly more toxic to the organ systems of the body and the brain than heroin or opium.

11:46 Right. And there’s something that we were actually talking about, Howard Marks, when he was here about, and one thing that I think a point you made to him when he interviewed you was that the percentage of the drug to kill you for some of these drugs is very close to the percentage to get you kind of high. Yeah, that’s right. So we have this index, sort of lethality index, how much would it take to kill you in comparison to getting high? So if you routinely, say, drink a bottle of wine of an evening, then the lethal dose of alcohol is usually between about three and four times that.

12:20 So people die drinking no more than about four bottles. So it’s got a ratio of about four. Which is quite… Which is very, very low. Which is very low.

12:29 Very low. Cannabis, it would be probably a hundred. Well, it might be a thousand. Might be a thousand. I don’t know if you can kill yourself with cannabis.

12:35 That’s one of the reasons we always argue that cannabis is intrinsically safer than alcohol. The first is the drug is safer. I mean, if you just give THC, the active ingredient of cannabis, I don’t you know, you’d have to take an enormous amount thousands more than the fold more than you get into smoking to kill you The second thing of course is smoking Is a is it quite a safe way of taking a drug? Paradoxically because as soon as you feel ill you stop breathing in and then no more goes in where is drinking It’s in there. And even if you suddenly think oh my god, I shouldn’t have drunk that liter of vodka There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s in your body unless you vomit and that’s difficult So that’s why an intravenous is probably even worse than that Oh intravenous is no it’s absolutely let’s be categorical about this Intravenous is something you should never do. I mean intravenous will gets the drug to the brain fastest of all and If you take something that might kill you intravenously like heroin then the or cocaine, you know, the chances of getting your heart greatest if you take it into a fantasy.

13:45 And then added on top of all that, you’ve got the fact that if you’re using it to sharing a needle, you might be getting AIDS. Right. And is that part of the reason that, first of all, this, this, this chart called the harm caused by drugs chart, which I tweeted out yesterday, is just an amazing thing just to look at, which I think has a lot of your classifications. But I wondered if the reason the heroin harm to others was so high. Was that because of the sharing of needles?

14:05 Yeah. interesting question and we haven’t systematically looked at that but we can say within the harm to others from heroin comes from not, no it will partly from needles being sort of spread out on the streets although there’s not many cases actually now of people getting infected from needles in parks and things but the harm to others comes from things like crime, people having to commit crime, systematic crime, international crime, you know, and obviously there are other health elements when people are intoxicated on heroin, there are potentially risks to other people to get through driving and things, those sorts of harms, and then the health care costs of course. Okay, well definitely check that chart out if you haven’t.

14:51 First of all, welcome to the show, it’s a real pleasure having you on. Nice to hear. Thank you. We had one of your team on here, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris a couple months ago, and he was telling me a bit about your studies with psilocybin, and I want to talk a lot about that.

15:05 But first, I want to talk about you, because you are in the news constantly, usually drug related, as far as your comments of different things. And I believe it’s a way that you try to keep the public engaged in the conversation. But I have to bring up the Telegraph that yesterday quoted you in an article that said that you claimed that the bankers taking cocaine led to the global financial crisis. And I wanted to give you a chance to comment on that. So I didn’t quite say.

15:32 I sent Patrick that article. Was I right, Patrick? No. There you go. Was he a little right?

15:37 No, I didn’t think so. OK. So it’s fascinating. So what I actually said, I was asked a question by a journalist. Do different sorts of people take different drugs?

15:47 And I said, yes, they do. I mean, kind of hippies take psychedelics and bankers take cocaine. And there’s a sort of degree of truth in that. I know that because we know if we measure the water outflow from Canary Wharf, a lot of cocaine being peed out. So we know that.

16:07 And that went from my saying that to cocaine caused the global financial crisis, which I didn’t say. It probably contributed a little bit, probably, because cocaine does encourage people to work longer, to take more risks. perhaps have to be overconfident in their abilities. But do you have to be taking it at the top to suffer from those symptoms? Or does it stay in your body?

16:31 I think both are true. I think the fact is that, you know, people go into this risky, challenging, high reward, high risk field of banking. They like the excitement. And what I was really saying was that… That’s the difference between correlation and causation there, right?

16:46 Yeah, absolutely. But the drug itself gives the same kind of response is making a big win on the stock market or something. So there’s a kind of tendency for them to be self-fueling, that’s all I was saying. But it was absolutely, this was most remarkable thing. So after I said that and it went out into the press, there were 500 press reports of this, 500.

17:10 I had, it must be at least 10 TV crews wanting to come from all over the world to interview me. They obviously thought I had sort of put my finger on something interesting. And I got bankers emailing me saying, you’re absolutely right, you know, we’re all, you know, if you go, people would say this, they’d say, you know, when at the peak, you’re obviously working for the wrong bank, at the peak of the crisis, people, you know, they were in the back rooms, they used to call it going to the North Pole, you know, you go into a room and there’d be some lines of coke.

17:35 Is that just fantasy? Anyway, people wrote to me and told me that. I’ve worked in banks for 13 years, I never witnessed it, I promise, hand on heart. I believe you haven’t witnessed it, but I believe it might’ve happened. Yeah, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but I think also people have a slight misconception of where all the risk gets taken in a bank.

17:53 If you think about, everybody thinks that the stock market and, you know, Wall Street and, you know, those type of brokers are people taking all the risk, shouting yours, you know, but it’s not, it’s like nerdy maths guys who have like, have first in engineering from MIT, who, Hey. Yeah, who are the guys taking all the risk trading derivatives and rates and it’s not necessarily the big, jumped-up, egotistical maniacs, these really smart, nerdy guys who are not guys like me, but I know lots of them like it, who are not prone to the same characteristics as you. I think we can say, Patrick, the fact that Goldman Sachs still exists maybe supports the fact that you’re right, that people weren’t using it. Maybe some of the ones that disappeared were slightly less controlled, I think.

18:45 I’m curious if you found that since you left the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, was that a good thing for you? Did it actually put you in a position where you could affect more change? Because there also was controversy around you leaving where some people said you should have gone, some people said it was ridiculous. I mean, I’m sure at the time, maybe it wasn’t pleasant. Did you find positive aspects of it?

19:06 Well, my nature is to find something positive and everything, and one of the things for For sure, I’m not the sort of person that’s going to go quietly, as you know, I mean I created quite a storm about that. And that was easy to do because the newspapers were quite divided. Some newspapers were cheering, you know, the sun called me Professor Poison, the daily mayor was glad to get rid of me. But the Independent and the Guardian thought it was outrageous that a scientist should be sacked.

19:35 It actually had a number of good things. First is they rewrote the rules about how government should interact with scientists. They almost got them right. They chickened out on the last issue, which was true independence of the chairman, but they’ve agreed that every other member of a scientific committee should be independent and allowed to say what they like. They wouldn’t quite go that far for the chair.

19:58 So essentially, anyone in my role could still be sacked for disagreeing with the government in the future. But there was some progress, and there was a proper debate about it. In that role, you were really pushing the envelope. you were like, look, this is what I think, you compared the dangers of riding horses to being more dangerous than taking MDMA, and you were really putting out a lot of press that was pushing buttons and pushing the envelope on the drugs discussion.

20:26 When I was trying to engage in this rational discussion about drugs, and the problem with drugs is- It’s not a rational topic, right? People get all emotive about it. Exactly, and what I was trying to do. In fact, the horse riding example was an attempt to allow the government to be sensible about horse riding without having to worry. They could, they should have downgraded ecstasy from A to B, like we recommended.

20:52 And they could have said, well, it’s no more harmful than horse riding, so let’s make it class B. It was a way of giving them a kind of get-out-of-jail clause, but they took it exactly the other way around. And plus, wait, horse riding is called EQUISY, is that it? Well, EQUISY stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome. So that was the kind of idea.

21:11 It was a pun I invented. Equicy, ecstasy. Exactly. And I compared the two. And in fact, what was amusing about that paper was that some of my friends in Europe were reading it.

21:20 And they got to the second page. They didn’t realize it was a spoof drug. They thought Equicy really was a drug. Which, for your argument and purposes, it was. I mean, it’s- Precisely.

21:32 And that’s the way to think about it. And this is still, despite what I’ve done, there is still this religious debate about drugs. And it should not be a religious debate, it should be a scientific debate. And that’s what I’ve tried to do all my career, put science to the forefront of the discussion. And this is people that wouldn’t actively call themselves religious, so is it just a hangover we have from the church for hundreds of years?

21:55 Oh, no, I meant religious, sorry, let me, I meant religious in not deriving from religion, but having the quality of a belief system as opposed to an evidence-based system. So people’s attitude to drugs is similar to the attitude to religion. You are the believer you do. If you believe the drugs are bad, it’s very hard to shape that because it’s not evidence based. It’s a belief system.

22:20 Drugs are bad. God is great. Yeah. And we’re caught up in this language issue we were talking about earlier, how language is everything and you can call something a drug or a medicine and I have a nine year old and I was trying to explain to her the difference between a drug and a medicine I had a hard time because I had my arm operated on and had a plate in here after a boxing accident and I looked at my general anesthesia and they put cocaine in my veins to knock me out.

22:45 What’s morphine, right? Yeah, or morphine. Yeah. And in California, for a lot of people now, but for cancer patients, they give them marijuana. So I’m trying to explain to a nine-year-old, which is a great way to start out, to try to explain to the public, I’m sure you would agree, David, what is a drug and what’s a medicine?

23:01 It’s a hard time explaining to her how that guy’s a cooking addict, but I’m using it for medicine. And I guess what’s a food? Because alcohol isn’t considered, is considered by all the industry as a food or as a beverage rather than a drug or a medicine. That’s the reason we have such an enormous problem with alcohol in our society today. The drinks industry is, it’s so clever that it’s got people thinking that the thresholds it was set in terms of number of units per week, which were originally set to, at the level of doubling your harm from dying, doubling your risk of dying. They have now persuaded people that that’s the target. That’s what we should be aspiring to drink in order to maximise the health benefits. You know, we have, it’s, it’s, it’s one of the, so you don’t believe in a glass of wine a day being beneficial. Right. So we know the evidence on that now. And the evidence is this, that for women there’s almost no amount of alcohol that’s beneficial because the cancer risk goes up linearly within consumption. But for men, there is a benefit, particularly for men in the middle to late years. But the optimal amount of alcohol for a health benefit is half a unit, so that’s a quarter of a pint. So that’s a half a small glass of wine. For a man and nothing for a woman. And that’s from 40 onwards. From about 40 onwards. Yeah. I mean people perhaps don’t understand this sort of tidal shift in the work and alcohol in the effect of

24:38 Alcohol on the health care in this country that’s happened in the last 20 years. Now, alcohol is the leading cause of death in men between the ages of 16 and 54 in this country 20% or more of all deaths of men in that age range are due to alcohol it is it has become an epidemic of killing particularly young middle-aged men and not not only in this country I mean places like like Russia it brings the average age of the men down to even the 50s even worse if you want an example that’s what people say what what’s the evidence you look at Russia. In Russia you can see that life expectancy’s been falling over the last 50 years as alcohol consumption’s gone up. And is that through attrition or is that through like you take in too much and you die in sort of a one-off situation?

25:30 It’s a big mixture of both. So three young people a week in this country just poison themselves to death just like Amy Winehouse did a single binge and they die but most of the alcohol deaths are due to the chronic effects on there’s not an organ system in the body that alcohol doesn’t affect and binge drinking versus social drinking every day is there a yeah that binge drinking is more likely to damage your brain possibly your heart chronic drinking may damage your liver more okay you mentioned Amy Winehouse and could you just talk about her and how she died people might be surprised to know how she died, and how you said recently that you thought that was a lost opportunity. Yes, so Amy Winehouse, obviously everyone knows her, brilliant, brilliant talent, used a lot of alcohol.

26:19 I’m not sure whether she used other drugs, probably did too. However, she died from drinking too much alcohol in a binge. And the sad thing about… And just that that’s been categorically proven, it’s not within doubt, that’s a fact. Well, that’s what the coroner said.

26:36 Okay. And we got the blood alcohol up on the blood alcohol levels, 450 milligrams per second. So that is, that’s five and a half times the legal level for drinking. Now the interesting thing about that level is that that would kill a non-drinker, but she was a drinker. But the problem is that Amy had stopped drinking and had been in recovery.

26:59 She’d been abstinent. She was, in some people’s mind, cured. And what happens when you’re in abstinence that your brain resets itself, so that a level of alcohol consumption which wouldn’t kill you when you are drinking because you are tolerant will then kill you, which is what happened in her case. And that could happen in a matter of weeks for her, or even a week. It could happen in about six weeks, I think.

27:22 And the resetting of alcohol tolerance is of the order of weeks to a couple of months. And it happens with other drugs. We know that people who are abstinent from heroin are more vulnerable if they relapse it’s because their tolerance has disappeared. So they can, a level of heroin, which wouldn’t kill them when they were using, would kill them when they’re tolerant. So this is one of the great risks of this concept of abstinence-based recovery, that you are vulnerable if you relapse.

27:48 And that’s part of my main research ambition at present is to find medicines that can help people not relapse, because the dangers of relapse are so profound. But in the case of ANIOS, it was such a wasted opportunity because we should have told the world that much drinking, so about a liter of vodka will kill a normal person. Alcohol is a toxic drug. Three young people a week simply die of alcohol poisoning. It’s scary to know you could go in and buy one of those for very cheap these days, kill yourself with it.

28:22 Yeah, and that’s why minimum pricing is also such a necessary change. Because minimum pricing will at least add some deterrent to the need or the desire of people to go and just buy a vast amount of work. And according to your numbers, would that actually significantly reduce things if we upped things by a few pounds? Yeah, it would. And people say, oh, well, it won’t make much difference.

28:43 Alcoholics always drink. But we know it’s not true. We know that at the high intake end, the damage from alcohol is very, very high. Let me give you an example. So if you drink 100 units a week, it increases your likelihood of dying from an alcohol-related disorder by about eightfold.

29:10 If you reduce that consumption, then if you halve your consumption, that reduces your rates of dying by about six times because it’s a non-linear thing. So anything you do at the high consumption end, even if you reduce it by 10, 15%, has has a disproportionately greater benefit because the steepness of that curve. I guess the response would be, but we’re all adults here and it’s a freedom of expression and freedom of choice, which is ironic considering those are exactly the arguments which people that want to use marijuana and other drugs try and use and then they’re not allowed to.

29:45 So you’ve got sort of like a dichotomy between what’s legal and what’s not legal. Total hypocrisy, absolutely, and it’s even worse than that. It’s hypocritical even within the legal drugs because we have systematically worked toward reducing the arms of tobacco by using the same approach, by pricing it out of the market, particularly young people. Yeah, absolutely. And then you went…

30:04 So the same government will use opposite arguments with two different drugs and that’s because alcohol is more than even… people don’t see it even as a drug, they see it as a sort of necessary part of life, it’s become a staple of our diet. And it’s quintessentially British to take an American’s perspective, it is a very British thing to do, you know, we go to the pub, you have a drink, it seems to be really ingrained in the culture and history here.

30:33 That’s true, but that’s good, that’s the way to drink. You drink in licensed premises. The reason we’ve got this massive rise in alcohol-related deaths is because we’re now drinking at home. Because it’s £4 down the pub for a pint, yeah, you can go and get it for 70p in the And that’s the cultural change. And that cultural change, which started in the 1960s, when we liberalized access to alcohol, until about, I think it was in 1964, you had to, you could only buy alcohol from a licensed premise, either a pub or an off-license, which was attached to a pub.

31:11 Then we allowed it to be sold in shops, and that, over that next decade, consumption went up by about 50%. And then in the last decade, we’ve seen this cynical marketing of very high-strength, very cheap drink. You know, the white lightning-type ciders, the 8% beers, designed, I think, deliberately to make young people addicted to alcohol. And it’s worked. In the 10, in the 40 years…

31:36 Alcopops would be the… You know, even though they’re not particularly strong, they’re pleasant tasting, it’s like a fishy drink to, you know… Gets people into alcohol. So in the 40 years since we’ve collected data from 1970 to today, if you look at heart disease in Britain, the likelihood of dying from heart disease has gone down 50%. The likelihood of dying from alcoholic liver disease has gone up 400% and that’s because of the relaxation of drinking and the way people are now drinking at home.

32:12 Wow, that is pretty shocking numbers. Howard Marks was here a couple of months ago and he said he was against the decriminalization of drugs because he thought that would actually cause more criminals to provide these drugs and he was saying that he wanted them to be completely legal so he could go to Boots and get the heroin or he’d go to this store and get this and go to this store and get that. Do you have an opinion on what the legalization scenario should look like one day in the David Nutt utopia of consumption?

32:40 But yeah, so let me make the fun thing very clear. I never endorse anyone taking any drug because all drugs are harmful and anyone can get addicted. So I’m not encouraging drug use. I would like to see a rational approach to the control of drugs. I take the view that drugs which are less harmful than alcohol should be available to people in some kind of regulated fashion, either through something like the Dutch coffee shops or through something like the US pharmacies.

33:14 I think drugs which are more harmful than alcohol, the ones I’ve already mentioned, crack, crystal meth, cocaine, heroin, and other opiates, I find it very difficult to consider having those available for recreational use ever. Obviously, I think they should be available for treatment if it’s a way of minimizing the harm of being addicted. But I think if we were to liberalize access to those, we would get considerably more people with problems with this. OK.

33:43 Do you just quickly want to touch on what you think of what the states is? I mean, they say one in four children in the states is medicated now. Obviously, they’re very liberal when it comes to prescribing antidepressants, ADHD medicines, which are kind of amphetamine derivatives. Is that true? One in four?

33:59 I don’t know. Someone tossed it out. So maybe I’m wrong. That sounds. It doesn’t sound that far, though.

34:04 One in four. I’ll double check my numbers, higher than here in the UK. I think in France, it’s, you know. But you can get growth hormone from prescription, there’s testosterone replacement therapy, which you can get, you know, it’s not just… True, no, it is the…

34:19 It’s the whole panoply of pharmaceuticals. It’s the prescription. But also, there is some drugs issues, I mean, there’s some kids issues with the attention and deficit and the Adderall abuse. Apparently, Adderall was a trending word on Twitter during finals week at university. And everyone was saying, I got my Adderall to take my finals.

34:36 Yeah, that’s back to the old Valley of the Dolls, isn’t it? You take your uppers in the day, and you’re down as at night. So that’s not medicine, though, of course. That’s use for students. Actually, I think most students probably don’t benefit very much from it at all.

34:52 I think it’s a myth. I think people now are sort of convincing themselves that they need to take it, for example. But I don’t think it makes any difference. I don’t think there’s any evidence it does. Yes, you might stay awake for a lot longer and do more work.

35:03 But then you have to sleep. But the quality of the work might diminish as well. Well, that’s also true. And there’s a very important message here. We know that if you’re taking an exam, there’s an optimal level of arousal.

35:18 And most of us produce that naturally, you know, the anxiety of the exam. Butterflies, yeah. Exactly, that gets us to where we wanna be. That’s why we have them. It’s part of the process of opt.

35:29 If you take a stimulant, it can take you over the top. And if you go over the top, then you stop, you’re actually less efficient. And, and characteristically, people start getting stereotyped. They answer the same question twice, which is not a good way of getting… Fighters have it in the fight.

35:44 They have an adrenaline dump before they actually go out, because they’re so excited that they’re about to go and get punched in the face in front of a lot of people, that when they go in, they’re absolutely exhausted because their adrenaline isn’t, isn’t running. So I guess if you’re, you know, taking a lot of caffeine or whatever it is while you’re studying, and then you go straight to an exam and, you know, you’ve got nothing left In your body absolutely that if that’s the other way if you take it the night before and then the next day you’re a crashed Yeah, yeah, so that you you’ve got to Judge yourself you will be absolute the peak of performance in either side you can it will impair you Yeah, essentially we had you know Tim Ferriss in that seat He was taking a lot of smart drugs and experimented with his body over the years and he said of all the things he took Which was small seroid cycles Modafinil, some amphetamines, he said he felt it was all a zero-sum game as in whatever benefits you paid. You know, if you drink alcohol, you’re gonna have the hangover. If you take the Adderalls, you’re gonna have a crash. You know, I actually even pushed that to psychedelics. You can have some wonderful times, but you also might have some very dark moments, and you better be prepared for both. And that was his statement. I would agree, but you have to, yes, as you say, zero-sum game. No free lunches. Absolutely no free lunches. I guess it’s

36:56 Just the timing of when you want that positive experience. Yeah, and whether you’re willing to pay for it. Yeah, absolutely. You did a really excellent interview with Vice Magazine recently, and I really enjoyed reading it, and you were talking about politicians and how they deal with drugs, which is kind of what we’re talking about here, and that’s kind of what you do, is trying to get the politicians to approve your studies, and obviously you were dealing with politics in the past, but you said that you watched someone like David Cameron when he was a younger politician, saying that I want to change the drugs landscape, and as soon as he was the prime minister, it all switched.

37:30 And I was just wondering if you could explain why that happens and will that always happen? Well, it will for him because that’s his, he switched on everything. You weren’t impressed. You weren’t impressed. You know, I mean, you know, we see everything he’s ever done, he’s changed his mind on.

37:45 So I mean, I suppose the retracting his views on ecstasy, the day he was made leader of the Tory party, it was just a sort of prelude to what’s been happening ever since. I don’t think he or all the current Tories do have any proper vision of anything. But putting that to one side, are all politicians similarly

38:04 Subject just to the whim of the electorate? The answer is no. The answer is that the Lib Dems have been consistently good. They supported me when I sacked. They opposed my sacking.

38:13 They supported the, before that, they supported the reclassification or the controlled keeping cannabis class C and reclassifying ecstasy. Lib Dems have had a very, very honest rational approach, and I would trust them to bring in a sensible drug policy. I think I can say, I mean, I think it’s almost certain that the reason that some of the, we haven’t been pursuing the conservative dream of this solely abstinence-based treatment policy in Britain is because the Lib Dems have said no.

38:43 So I think they’ve had quite a powerful influence on keeping a degree of rationality in terms of government and drug treatment. The broad disappointment has been Labour. Yeah, you said the labor’s worse than conservatives. Well, because they have, I mean, their policy seems to be just to go the Tories. They don’t seem to have any belief system themselves whatsoever in relation to drugs.

39:03 Very sad. So they do kind of the anti-Tory message as opposed to having their own. Yeah, you try to find out what the Labour Party’s view on drugs is and they’ll just give you some platitudes. So we believe in doing whatever we believe in. Yeah, sorry, what was the question?

39:19 So that’s the party we would expect progressive kind of attitude from it’s really a bit so disappointing so disappointing on an individual basis my my personal view is that as you are the higher up the greasy pole you get the more you have to try and get everybody to like you and therefore the more often you will change your views to suit the whim of the electorate and I think it’s almost almost inevitable if you have to if you’re under the constant scrutiny of reelection do you think that the public are so lacking in memory. Why would you vote for someone who has no principles? I mean I actually think it you know… Because they’re saying the right thing at the right time. Most people that I think get voted in generally push the button that most need to be pushed at the time. Yeah. So whether it’s you know down with bankers or it’s down with unions or whatever it was at the time that most you know most met the public sentiment. Yeah. It’s a reaction politics sad, isn’t it? Yeah, very much so. And that’s why we actually aren’t going very fast in the right direction, if you’re at all in the right direction, because people don’t really have any vision of the future or have any sort of principles to work right.

40:26 It’s generally the only, and you can tell me this, but in the United States, only when the President doesn’t think he has to get re-elected does he ever get anything that he actually wants to get done through the system, right? Because he’s not under fear of election, he knows he doesn’t have any, you know, he’s not going to be subject to a vote so he thinks I can actually do stuff that I want to do now, rather than have to worry about the next election four years’ time. But then of course then the Congress is worrying how they’re going to be in the next election too and how they’re going to be judged.

40:51 But at least that one individual can actually pursue his principles rather than his, you know, election worries. But fighting the drugs fight, I’m sure it’s just not the one that they choose, that they want to do. what is wrong you see because so many people have been denied access to helpful medicines by the drug laws and you’re seeing it America you’re seeing the states acting out using the state saying it is wrong to deny our patients medicinal cannabis right and they are they’re voting to have medicinal cannabis and you know you’re lucky in America in the sense that there is at least some alternative here here we’ve on the opposite way the worst thing the last Labour government did was they persuaded the law lords to take away what was called the defence and necessity. So until 2005, if you had multiple sclerosis and you had to use cannabis because it was the only thing that helped you, and you were arrested, you could say, yes, I was using it, but I had to because it was the only thing that helped me. That was embedded in English common law for 600 years. And the last Labour government took it away, only for cannabis. So you can still say, I’ve got to use the mushrooms from my headache and you can get off or I’ve got to use a crack cocaine for my muscle pains.

42:03 But for cannabis, only cannabis, you’re not allowed to use that defence. Outrageous intrusion on individual liberty and hated by magistrates because every person that is brought to them by the police with any cannabis, any amount, tiny fraction, they must be given a criminal record because there is no defence. All defences have been denied. Not to mention the racial profiling and the financial profiling that happens. Yeah because what is worse is that the police are being incentivised to take assets from drug dealers and they have a very liberal approach to what’s a dealer. So what typically happens is this is that there’s someone with multiple sclerosis in a wheelchair and they’ve got a cannabis plant. So they prosecute the ill person, the patient, for possession.

43:02 With intent to supply. And then they get the partner for intent to supply. They get the partner for supply, not intent, because the partner, if the partner goes out, if you go down the street to buy a couple of ounces of cannabis for your sick partner and you give it to them, that is supply. So that’s up to 14 years in prison and they can freeze your assets under the proceeds of prime act and they can Keep those assets until you’ve gone to court and proved you weren’t dealing and it Really messes with people’s lives because everything’s frozen. They’re back stanings are frozen. Their credit cards are frozen Yeah, it’s frozen and you don’t know it might take three months before You’re proved not to be a dealer So this there’s a horrible amount of pressure and the police can put through this kind of legislation So you’re encouraged by what’s happening? I think it’s Colorado and Washington State. Oh, I’m Thankful. Thank you. I think it’s it’s actually in a way. This must maybe the most important change in Drug policy since the UN Commission 1961, you know, it’s funny the cannabis is called a gateway drug But maybe in a way it’s your policy gateway drug Indeed, it might be.

44:13 Because if the public can support it, like in Washington or Colorado, where it’s not just mendicinal purposes, which California has been for years, where it’s a wink-wink mendicinal purpose, but basically you can get it for whatever you want, these states have actually come out and said, just buy it if you want it. Do you think that’s a way, if Britain never accepts that, to start really actually having a discussion about drugs? Absolutely. Because I think what will happen, we’ve already seen this amazing statistic out of Colorado, so it’s only just made it legal, but it’s had medicinal cannabis I think for about five years.

44:45 And very organized, very state controlled, very professionally done, they track the plants and everything in Colorado. So if you look at, I’ve argued for a long time that people want to get intoxicated, they should have a right to use something other than alcohol. A lot of people would prefer to be stoned and drunk, and a lot of partners would prefer their partners stoned and drunk because they don’t as much as violence when people do so. Any workers would probably prefer.

45:11 The police, even the police, in fact the police were completely in favor of decriminalizing cannabis until the last Labour government decided to reward them for arresting people from using cannabis and then the police just switched because they were getting paid to arrest cannabis users and that’s why we one of the reason had the riots last year because there there was this clamp down on young black kids with cannabis. And their view is quite understanding. So why should I not be allowed to use cannabis?

45:39 Well, you know, you guys use alcohol. I don’t stop you getting drunk. Why should you stop me? And so the arbitrary… There is no logical argument to that.

45:48 There isn’t, but you still get arrested. So a million, a million young people in this country have a conviction for cannabis possession. A million. A million. A million, it costs half a billion pounds a year to pursue the war on cannabis.

46:05 Half a billion pounds a year, so that’s too… Which should be used for treating the alcohol problems that are happening in the NHS. Precisely, precisely. Yeah, it’s not a fish and aleck. It is absurd the way we do it.

46:17 We have, the police have, just down the road from here in Brick Lane, they have weekends, they put up tents and they strip search people who smell of cannabis because they can argue that they might be dealers. It’s an offense to kind of human dignity the way we pursue the cannabis law here. But let me get back to the Colorado story because it’s fascinating. So Colorado gives us evidence that people actually do make rational choices about using drugs. So in the five years that Colorado has had medicinal cannabis, obviously some of that has been used recreationally.

46:57 But what we’ve seen is that the proportion of people dying on the roads with high levels of alcohol intoxication has gone down by 17%. So there you see it, making cannabis more available actually saves lives on the road through alcohol because people switch. Which makes sense, now try to convince my grandma of that. But just just for clarification, it’s you’re safer to drive using cannabis than you are alcohol. Yeah.

47:32 And the recent is a wonderful report that would just been published by the Department of Transport, which shows that the alcohol is about four times more dangerous than cannabis in relation to road traffic accidents. Interesting. Interesting. you’re optimistic about what we’re seeing from the states, but it seems like your main battlefront and the main hope here is using science to try to change people’s opinion and try to change policy, which is what you’re all about. We haven’t even got to that part, so I kind of want to talk about the studies you’re doing at Imperial, and I guess I’m just going to open it up. What are you doing there? I know you’re doing some work with with psilocybin, you’ve done some in the past.

48:14 What’s on your plate these days? So, I’m a psychopharmacologist. My whole career has been about trying to understand how drugs work. And I’ve started off trying to understand how valium benzodiazepines work, how heroin works, how antidepressants work. And, because I got a very interesting PhD student, Robin Cara Harris, who’s been on this program, he was interested in the question of whether a psychedelic trip is the same as dreaming.

48:51 And he wanted to study that, you know, he wanted to ask that question. And over the years, you know, he’s worked with me to address that question. So we, when I started thinking about it, I realized that there was nothing known about what psychedelic drugs do in the brain. I mean, everyone knows what they do in terms of the subjective experience. Right, the anecdotal evidence is subjective, but no one…

49:15 But no one has actually measured using modern technology what’s going on. I thought that’s kind of, isn’t that bizarre? Because I mean, if you’re a brain scientist, you want to know what the nature of the I mean, the psychedelic experience is one of the most, clearly the most influential, profound experiences of inhuman existence, so surely it should be the subject of neuroscientific research. And I thought, this is weird, why has no one done it? And of course the reason no one’s done it is because it’s too damn difficult, because of the law.

49:46 So we said, okay, let’s bite the bullet, let’s do it. And we did it. And we’ve done three psilocybin studies using different imaging modalities, and they’ve all shown the same thing and they’ve all shown this amazing phenomenon which is exactly the opposite of what we predicted and that’s why it shows it was so important to do the study because we assumed that if people are going to be lying in a scanner and seeing lots of kind of interesting hallucinations that their brain might be lighting up there might be more activity going on their brain but it wasn’t in fact the opposite psilocybin shuts off parts of the the brain, key parts of the brain, the integrate brain function. So the hallucinations and the experiences you see, you get under-satisfying are due to the fact that your brain is disconnected from the outside world and it’s living in its inner world. Bit like dreaming. So this was a revolution. I mean, I think it’s one of those remarkable things I’ve ever done.

50:42 I’ve actually completely turned everything on its head. And then when we started looking it, the consequences of these experiences, we found that even in normal people, normal volunteers, there was a sense of feeling better after this trip, short trip, side to side, it only lasts about half an hour. People felt better for a few weeks. And we discovered that the more the brain was switched off, particularly the frontal part of the brain was switched off, the better the sense of wellbeing later. We looked at the literature and we discovered that other treatments for depression often switch off that part of the brain. So we hell, our people are feeling better, that part of the brain switched off, let’s write a grant to see whether we could use psilocybin as a treatment. And we would never have had that idea without doing the brain imaging. So that’s an example of where pure science has led to insights which then can be translated into clinical science.

51:34 Right, I think Carl Harris said that taking the psilocybin was like taking the conductor out of the orchestra and removing that piece and then it allowed the brain to kind of in some ways that it hadn’t before, and that was kind of a surprise, as you said, opposite of what you said. But you haven’t done a study on psilocybin effects on depression yet. That’s what you’re trying to do. That’s correct. But it’s quite difficult. And how did you get around all the legal ramifications of giving people psychedelics? Yeah, there’s a difference. I don’t want to bore your viewers with this, but there’s a technical difference between doing a clinical trial and doing an experiment. Up from that, we’ve We’ve done experiments on normal people to look at the physiological effects of the drug.

52:17 When you move into a clinical trial, then you, there’s a whole nother bundle of regulations called the European Clinical Trials Directive, which everyone says has been the most destructive law ever in Europe. So you can imagine how bad that is. And it really makes doing clinical research in Europe very, very difficult because of all the extra compliance. So we’re struggling with that at present because trying to go through, you know, basically you’ve got to get a different way of making the drug which you have to find a company that can make the drug which complies with the international regulations, with the drug laws in this country and with the trials, clinical trials directive.

52:58 It’s proving very difficult to find any company that can be bothered because it’s, they’ll say, yeah, we’ll do it, but it’ll cost you so much money, you won’t be able to afford it. And that’s really very sad. And it’s a- of pounds just to get you micrograms of psilocybin, is that right? Absolutely. Absolutely.

53:14 And it could take a year and you’re saying you can’t fire your staff for a year while you wait. So these are real. This is real. These are real practical issues. But I have to say, the Medical Research Council is being sympathetic to our, you know, I mean, I don’t think anyone, no one expected this to be that difficult.

53:27 We do. When we got the grant. And I think they are being sympathetic, you know, they will be, because this is very important. This is a landmark study. We have to crack it.

53:35 I mean, we also have to change the regulations as well to make, so that if it works, we have to make it available for other doctors. And the current regulations would make it not only almost impossible for other doctors to get. There’s only three hospitals in the country that have a license to hold psilocybin. Just to hold it. Wow. And of course, you know, there’s the most no doctor has a license to use it. So we’d have to, everything would have to change. So that’s one of the other challenges for us is to try to make the whole system more rational, so that if it works, people can use it.

54:10 If I could give you a license to use any drug, any study, the most advanced MRIs, machines, and I gave you five years, do you have a wish list? Yes, absolutely. That’s very, absolutely straightforward. And I wrote a grant, I wrote a grant for this a few years ago, but it didn’t get funded. I think what we should be doing, we should be taking every drug that works in the brain or an example of every drug that works on the brain and we should be doing brain imaging like we’re doing so we can have a fingerprint in the brain of every major brain acting drug.

54:45 To my mind that is fundamental science but I can’t get it funded because people aren’t interested in drugs and they’re scared of illegal drugs but yes I want to compare amphetamine with cocaine, with heroin, with valium, with cytosybin, with cannabis, with ketamine, GHP. To my mind, that’s such a necessary and obvious thing to do, but it’s impossible to get funding from. Right. Now, Robin, when he was here, he talked about, I know in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, they’re actually doing psilocybin studies, I think, to treat depression.

55:21 Patrick, I don’t know if you know, but they’ve had some serious success with some terminally ill cancer patients as far as them accepting their death through, you know, clinical use of psilocybin. They come into a room, they have nice music, they have an attendant, and they’ve had some success there. I know they’ve been testing MDMA on some post-traumatic stress disorders. Does part of you want to move to the States? No, because I think it’s even harder in the States.

55:45 Is it? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that we, well, it certainly, I don’t think it’s not easier. No.

55:54 So those studies you described have taken many years to set up, and they’ve been done in one of two centers. And remember, the states is five times bigger than the UK, but we’ve done more psilocybin studies here than they have. Wow. And that’s why my own group, that’s all that’s being done. So no, I think the US, these international conventions are destructive across the board.

56:20 Every country signs up to them. It makes it very difficult to just go anywhere and make it work. There’s nowhere that it’s easier to do that. Netherlands is slightly more rational, but no, I mean, I think it’s important we actually bite the bullet and get things done here, because the science we can do here is pretty impressive. I just thought of this now.

56:39 Is the concept of a Class A drug the most ridiculous thing you could ever say? Because you’re saying, and here’s this substance, which we’ve never brain analyzed as a brain scanner, and we can confidently say there will never be a medical use for it. It’s ridiculous. It’s the Class A Schedule I, it’s this peculiar decision by the United Nations in 1971 to say that some drugs had no medicinal use and they put them in a class where therefore you can’t research them.

57:06 So you never find those medicinal use, you know, because they’re completely self-serving and that’s why I say it’s like a religion, they’ve been boxed in a way where you must never open the box. But what’s the difference between heroin and morphine then? So the very strange thing happened in the United Nations Convention in 1961. The US wanted heroin to be banned across the world because they thought if we ban heroin it will go away. So they banned heroin.

57:40 So in America, USA, you’re not allowed to prescribe heroin but of course they still have a massive black market of heroin. The one thing the British doctors did was to say, no, we use heroin in this country. It’s useful for a number of reasons, pain control, et cetera. We’re not going to panic. So that’s the only thing in the conventions that the British government withdrew from.

58:04 It said, no, we’re going to keep heroin as a drug. But heroin is what in this country is what’s called a Schedule II drug. OK. So I’ve spent the last 15 years giving heroin to heroin addicts as part of brain scanning studies. No license, don’t need a license, but if I want to give cannabis, I’ve got to get a license, I’ve got to be visited by the police.

58:26 So Carsec Schedule 1, can you give me an example for the more ignorant of… So all the drugs, all the drugs I’m talking about are in Schedule 1. Cannabis is Schedule 1, I need a special license, side to side, but I need a special license, LSD need a special license, MDMA need a special license, because they’re deemed both very dangerous, and because people don’t want you to work on them, and that’s the reason. There’s no logic to it at all, I think, other than it is just making life difficult for people.

58:57 Okay. How much of this is just a hangover from the LSD legislation from the 60s when it came out and then it was just completely banned to be doing any research on? Yeah. And that’s 50 years ago. Fifty years.

59:09 Well, I think… You see, of course, the legislators will say, we never stop anyone doing research, you can still do the research provided you jump through all the hoops but since no one has I think it has been bad because no one’s that one’s managed to jump through all the hoops and do it and that’s why I’m really keen I mean we have in this country we have jumped through the hoops on sinus I’ve been an MDMA and others were doing it slowly through cannabis and but what I’m saying is the hoop should be you know made bigger at least or certainly why did he taken away because they served no purpose. I mean no one in their right mind would think that cannabis is more harmful than heroin. I mean that the cannabis is the worst lie of all really because cannabis was a medicine. And then in the 1961 UN convention they said it’s not a medicine because law makers in the UN said how can they do that when it’s been a medicine for 3000 years? Because they wanted to stop use and they thought if we The more restrictions they would put on it, the more chance they were of people not using it.

1:00:16 It seems there’s been a ton of like arbitrary decisions that have been made in like the 60s or 70s which are still having ramifications. Like steroids as well, steroids were, obviously you can use them for medical reasons but I remember, is it bigger, faster, stronger? There’s a film out there about steroid use and it was decided by some senator that he was going to campaign against the use of steroids recreationally. And baseball was first, I think, and…

1:00:42 But this was, yeah, this was, so obviously you saw baseball doing it relatively recently, but this was in the 70s and they said, we’re just going to make it absolutely illegal for people to recreationally use steroids. And there have been, and there was no real science. I think they commissioned a report which actually said that there are no more, there’s no more harm to taking steroids than using alcohol or… I mean, they’re not harmless. They’re not harmless, remember that.

1:01:09 Yeah, absolutely there are side effects, but there are side effects to sort of every choice that we make. That’s right, absolutely. But they just, they made that decision and there was no real science behind it and it seemed like it’s the same thing for cannabis. Well, I think for most, all these drugs, I wasn’t there. I suspect these decisions were made by people from the foreign ministry, international convention, you know, I don’t think there’s any sensible medical dialogue at all.

1:01:38 The only country that stood up against was the Netherlands. The Netherlands said, no, you have medicinal cannabis. But why do you think now we’re so resistant? Is it just because it’s ingrained in society and it’s become a, as we’ve discussed before, it’s a religious issue. It’s a belief.

1:01:50 Look what happened when the Bolivians said, we would like to put coca leaves, take coca leaves out of these US laws, UN laws. So did you follow this story last year? The Bolivian president said coca leaves have been chewed for millennia in the Andes. It’s part of our culture. And we do not think they should be illegal.

1:02:12 So he said, I’m going to withdraw from the UN conventions, take out coca leaves, and I’m going to come back. I’ll kick book cocaine and crack them back. They sent a delegation from the United Nations in Vienna to try to persuade him not to do that, because they said, if you do that, you will destroy all the validity of the conventions. If there’s even a rational decision like that, they were so threatened that they went and they pleaded with him not to do it.

1:02:42 And he just said, no. And of course he was completely right to do. If you travel in the Andes, I mean people selling coca leaves all the time, because that’s what you need, you need to chew them to be able to cope with the altitude. But he just wanted to essentially go back to the historical position where if there’s a culturally sanctioned use of a drug, which we know is not addictive, we know it’s not harmful. And it was just controlled simply because people wanted to control everything.

1:03:07 What do you say to other people that are listening to you right now that are frustrated, British citizens, American citizens? See British people, I mean, we’re here. What can we do to help you with your research? Is it all about voting? Right, so no, you can do many things.

1:03:21 The first is you can sign up to the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, become a follower. So ISCD on the… You have a Facebook page or Twitter? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter, you can follow me on Facebook, You can support the charity, the ISCD, which is trying to bring in more rational approaches to drugs and also help support our research. You should, obviously, when it becomes appropriate right to your MP and argue that the current approach to drug laws is wrong, and that’s something, I will be starting a campaign to try to have a more rational drug law in this country over the next few months, be part of that.

1:04:03 Join in, join in the blogging, join in the tweeting, but particularly push the politicians to try to do something more rational because it’s, in the end, it’s patience. I mean, okay, neuroscientists, neuroscience has been held back, but that’s not as important the fact that the opportunity, the potential opportunities for new developments for patients has been really retarded. And that’s what’s stupid about this whole thing. You know, these are arbitrary laws which really are harming people.

1:04:30 And do you have a paper coming out soon? Do you wanna talk about that at all? as far as your scientific way of trying to get the rest of the scientific community kind of on board. So I’m thinking, yeah, I’m thinking now, if we’d spent the last few years arguing the case that the drug laws are unjust and criminalizing a million young people for cannabis possession. I can’t believe that figure, by the way.

1:04:48 It just blows my mind. Well, it’s true. Wow.

1:04:57 The drug which gives you the longest prison sentence for possession, what would you guess? If you’re caught in possession of a drug, which one do you think would give you longest prison. Heroine. No, MDMA. Why?

1:05:13 Or is there no rational structure to it? There is no way you can ask that, that’s a really interesting question. How can you, there is no provision in our current state to ask the question why? Because judges say it’s a class A drug and then they make a decision on how long they, so the median sentence for MDMA possession in prison is about five years, for heroin And it’s about two years. Is that just because they see 100 heroin people in position and they see 20 with MDMA, so therefore it’s seen as more rare?

1:05:49 Or how do they come up with their decision? No one knows. Absolutely no one. If you look at the distribution of the sentences, sir, does it 5, 1, 100? Or are they all around the same number people just say, oh look, you know, I’m a magistrate and I’ve looked through and I look through the last sentencing part, you know, and it was everybody’s, the average is seven years and they just take that or it or is it indiscriminate?

1:06:17 It’s indiscriminate but it’s not systematic. Okay. And the answer is no one, the judges themselves don’t know because they don’t get together and try to make sense of this. So there’s a man in prison in this country for 23 years for making LSD tablets, 23 years. Now no one is in prison for dealing heroin more than 10 years.

1:06:42 So you could import tons of heroin and you’d never be in prison more than 10 years. So there’s a real disconnect here on punishment. And you were sorry, you were talking about your paper or the fact that one million men in the UK or people in the UK. Sorry, so I got off the track. So we’ve taken the, you know, we’ve been arguing for a few years that the drug laws are unjust and arbitrarily penalizing people who want to take different drugs, particularly cannabis, and often young black people.

1:07:08 And that’s helped. There’s been a moral debate. I think people are now more sympathetic to that viewpoint. But I think people haven’t understood the way in which the laws have also denied science, and particularly medical science. So that’s my current campaign.

1:07:23 I want people to really wake up to the fact that the drug laws are destructive to scientific advances. And I’m going to argue that they’re the most destructive censorship of science since a Catholic church banned the telescope because he didn’t want Galileo looking out, seeing if there are other planets out there, and therefore challenging the question that the earth was a center of the universe. It’s quite an analogy. Is this in the 1500s when they banned?

1:07:49 Yeah. And I’d be very, I mean, I’d be interested. If people think I’m wrong, then share that with me, but I can’t think of a repression of research of similar magnitude. And it’s similar, and all you have to do is look at something that is out there, and you can see it, or you can ban people from even looking at it, and you’re saying that it’s quite analogous as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

1:08:15 That’s a very good point you make there, yeah. I hadn’t quite thought of it like that, but the drug laws in this country, internationally, powerful, not simply because they restrain people from doing things, but because over the last 50 years, they’ve actually succeeded in stopping people even knowing that they’re not looking. Right? And that’s why they’re so insidious. Really.

1:08:42 I look forward to that article coming out. I’ve got a few more questions for you, but for the following on Twitter, it’s at Professor David Nutt, P-R-O-F, David Nutt. And is there a separate Twitter follower for the organization? A separate Twitter? No.

1:08:55 I just follow your back and then get involved in the organization, okay. We had a few video questions from fans, actually quite a few for you, from all over the world and I just wanted to ask a couple of them but one of them asked about the placebo effect and it’s something you must deal with in your studies. There’s been some interesting studies about placebo effect but do you think the placebo effect is underestimated and how do you deal with that in your research that comes from, they always have cool names like Pirate Gimp but thanks for that question.

1:09:21 How do you deal with the placebo effect? We try to deal with it. It’s not easy to deal with it when you’re using drugs that have very profound effects on the brain. I mean, people tend to know whether they’ve had psilocybin or not. Actually, the MDMA study, the Channel 4 MDMA study, a couple of people got it wrong.

1:09:40 A couple of the volunteers got it wrong. By guessing. But when you’re looking in their brain, is it pretty easy to know? Or can they? No.

1:09:48 So the brain imaging is not quite powerful enough to say certainly for an individual that they’ve had the drug or not. I mean, I think, obviously, for a group of people, you can, if you take 10 people on side to side, with the brains are completely different to 10 people on placebo. But for an individual, because there’s a lot of noise, we’re measuring very small signal changes in a very noisy organ called the brain. We’re close to doing that. But so the answer is we do the standard approach.

1:10:16 We do randomization, blind randomization. We don’t tell people what they’re getting, but quite often they guess. Okay, yeah, they do guess. Okay, it’s tricky that way. There was one other question out there and I thought it was kind of an interesting one and the guy brought up Terrence McKenna who’s dead now but used to talk a lot about psychedelic drugs and phenomenon, I do listen to him a lot.

1:10:38 And he said the cultures were shaped by the drugs that they permit and that they deny. And this guy made, his name is Ryan Lee, made an assertion that caffeine and sugar is something that we promote in our work day. You take the coffee break, you get the coffee in the morning, you go work, and then you go home and you have your sugar and your alcohol to relax. And he was wondering if that creates a certain society and if you thought, if other drugs such as the psilocybin or cannabis were more common, that we would have a completely different society based on that.

1:11:09 I don’t think we would, I mean this was Timothy Leary’s idea that we’d all, what was it, tune in, turn on, drop out, whatever, you know, I don’t think that would happen because I don’t think most people want to do that. Where you look at societies where other drugs are very common, like say Jamaica, where effectively cannabis is legal, Jamaican society is not that different from foreign society. So I’d be very surprised if, most people actually, you know, are relatively content with work their way there. Most people don’t want to become hermits or kind of philosophers and living on mountains. Most people just want to live their life but have a more meaningful life. I think drugs, some drugs, use of other drugs might well give some people more meaning and more value.

1:11:51 Okay, so you would like people to be aware of what they’re taking such as alcohol and know the effects of it and then also be aware of some of these other things that psilocybin might be able to help in depression down the way. Yeah, I don’t think people should be denied I certainly shouldn’t be denied the therapeutic value of drug, illegal drugs, and I think also there’s no need to deny them the recreational value of a person. I don’t see any sense in that, particularly for drugs which are less harmful than alcohol.

1:12:21 So I think his point is to some extent wrong in that society isn’t made by the drugs it takes. The drugs it takes are made by society. Okay, that’s very profound. You know, a drug similar to psilocybin is DMT. I think it’s very chemically very similar.

1:12:37 I think it’s a class A or a schedule one drug according to the UN. And it’s present in the substance ayahuasca which has been used in Peru for thousands of years. Something we’re familiar with on this program, a few of us in the past have had ayahuasca journeys and it’s quite a journey. Most people would not call it a recreational drug by any means. It’s quite painful.

1:13:00 There’s a lot of purging involved And yeah, but also it’s quite a life changing event for a lot of people and they seem to get clarity. I think a lot of things Robin Carhartt was saying about psilocybin where your ego kind of reduces a little bit and you kind of get more of an understanding. But for me, it was a big effect on my life when I happened to have one of these experiences, but the fact that it’s illegal in the UK is a very frustrating thing. And I was just wondering if you thought someday we might have these spas where instead of grandma going to the spa for the weekend to get a massage, might go to a spa and have an attendant and you know have a psilocybin but we do have this we do and that happens in Britain today does it where they have mushroom experiences or what’s good or I was yeah it happens what happens illegally doesn’t it’s moot point whether it’s legal I mean I think that’s quite that’s quite a contentious issue present I mean it’s um let’s say it’s a gray area obviously it prepared DMT yeah it’s really yeah but but whether they’re eating the bark in or drinking the bark juice is illegal I think that’s still an open question because I don’t think people actually I don’t think the police could actually really be very well aware of what’s in it so I’m not sure there has been a few prosecutions of people holding large inventories of it this is true so I think I think systematic production and I just a

1:14:20 Holding is there was one thing you know important court case recently which made that illegal but I’d be surprised if there’s gonna be a systematic clamp down on ayahuasca communities and ayahuasca churches. That might be true. I guess what frustrates me sometimes is the fact that it’s not in the public and publicly available as a viable option of treating depression. Yeah, I have, of course, it frustrates me too and I can see that happening. Kind of like the cannabis law could be a gateway drug.

1:14:48 If something like this was accepted, it might change people’s mindset to where saying, wait a second, that’s a drug, not a medicine. Maybe that works for those people. Cannabis is a drug, not a medicine. Maybe that works for those people. we can. Yeah, I think more open, rational discussion about the benefits. I mean, many people say to me what you said to me that ayahuasca, ayahuasca experience was profoundly beneficial and they would not want other people denied it. I’m very sympathetic to that.

1:15:16 Do you get frustrated? I mean, you are constantly in the media, you’re attacked. Sometimes I read articles and I know they’re not very, being very fair to you. They associate you with different people and quotes like that in the telegram. Take you out of context, yeah.

1:15:28 Yeah. Do you find your job kind of frustrating as a… You must be doing something right though, I reckon. Exactly. If the system has to attack you and diminish you to that extent.

1:15:39 Absolutely, yeah. Attack me all you like because it shows that you’re… I’ve winning the argument. You kind of are the self-appointed, you know, you know, I don’t want to say like drug superhero, but you’re kind of the point man when it comes to, I don’t know, new thinking about… translate that yeah I’m trying to think I mean if I can think of one person what is appointment let me think the go-to guy has a go-to guy if I can visit come from point is that it’s a it’s the guy on point who is a in like a marine battalion yeah oh oh I see a front and if you can think of one person who’s like the point man for questioning the effects that drugs have on our in our society it’s it’s you pretty much it’s not someone well I spent let’s face it I I mean, I spent nearly 40 years researching it.

1:16:23 So I do know quite a bit. We discussed it before, though. Every person is entitled to their own opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. And the thing that has impressed me most so far is that you deal in facts, right? And so that’s why I call myself a scientist.

1:16:39 Exactly. But the problem with the newspapers and with the media is that they deal in opinions. And they try and distort things in order to undermine you as a person, rather than looking at what the actual facts that you present are, which are peer reviewed, which generally the scientific community has agreed with. But instead of, you know, they have to take those silly quotes in order to try and people focus on you, rather than people focusing on the actual work that you do.

1:17:09 That’s what, yes, so this sporting analogy is you play the man, not the bull. Yeah. And yeah, well, that’s, you know, that’s the way, either this is a for reasons you know still pretty unclear this is still very controversial area and there’s a lot of vested interests both commercial and emotional in it. Do you think the alcohol companies actively try to prevent things like psilocybin and cannabis gaining gaining ground or do you think they certainly they certainly difficult I’m not sure they actively advertised against MDMA in the rave scene but they certainly encouraged advertising to scare people off using MDMA or other stimulants because they were very worried that the rave scene was going to take people away from alcohol.

1:17:56 Okay. Not to mention the way they promote alcohol and all sorts of things. No. I mean, this is a bizarre situation. So the alcohol industry spends 80 million pounds a year advertising alcohol.

1:18:08 And what was the sort of health protection agency spends 80,000 pounds a year trying to warn people of the dangers of alcohol and they would spend more but I’m sure it’s limited by the government right now in terms of how they can advertise and where they can advertise. Well they’ve managed to keep their ability to advertise. I mean most sensible people would say you shouldn’t advertise. Countries like France they got rid of advertising alcohol ten years ago. But in this country they’ve persuaded people that they can still advertise on mainstream TV, they can still support sports clubs etc. I mean you’ve got to give credit They’re the most sophisticated group of lobbyists, probably in the history of the world, maybe the defense industry, maybe, but they’re rich and they’re clever and they’ve got really clever people working with them.

1:18:58 Right. Kind of like the tobacco lobby in the States, I would say. And they’ve learned. You see, the clever thing is they have learned from the tobacco lobby. So the tobacco lobby made some mistakes, like it lied about the fact that tobacco was addictive.

1:19:10 Drinks in, but she doesn’t. Drinks in, but she says, yes, we know it’s addictive. that’s why you should drink in moderation. What they fail to tell you, of course, is that alcohol is a drug which takes away your self-control. So drinking in moderation for many people is impossible, because alcohol dissolves the ability to stand self-control.

1:19:30 I always see those Jack Daniels ads on the Tube, and it always says, Yeah, and I’m always like, this is just lip service. I mean, It is, absolutely, totally lip service. And the really worrying thing they’re doing, this is perhaps not spoken about as much as it should be, is that they are now systematically advertising to young people on social media sites. They’re systematic. There was an amazing study done in four European countries just going to be reported in the next few weeks. It’s called the amphora study and it was a massive study looking at different aspects of alcohol but one element of the amphora study was they took four countries and they looked at the influence of alcohol advertising to 14-year-olds and they discovered that a lot of 14-year-olds know quite a lot about alcohol. They see alcohol adverts and the ones that see alcohol adverts are more likely to drink than the ones that don’t, which proves that alcohol advertising works. And social media sites were even more influential in getting young people illegally drinking than and sports promotion.

1:20:35 Scary stuff. Very, very. And they know, and it’s all illegal. You know, they’re not allowed to advertise to people under the age of 18, but they slip into these social media sites where there’s very little in the way of control. Wow.

1:20:50 Okay, you’ve got this new paper coming out in a few months that’s gonna compare, or next month. Well, next month, can I just say one thing about that? Yes, yes. Also, it’s gonna coincide with what is an exciting new development, which is that we’re having at the Hammersmith Hospital first ever neuroscience and psychedelics conference so this has been hosted with an organization called the Beckney Foundation which has also helped fund our research and it’s supporting been championing the idea of using legal drugs for brain research for some time so this is going to be the first time ever in Britain there’s been a conference on the neuroscience of psychedelics on that is on the 12th of June and if anyone wants to come they can just send me an email and if this room will let you in.

1:21:32 Fantastic, so the fact that it’s happening and happening in a hospital, is that quite, is that the… Yes. Okay, fantastic. A hospital that doesn’t have a license for the drugs, but never mind. We won’t be giving the drugs out.

1:21:44 And from the quotes from you, you’re going to pursue, you’re going to keep going and find some way of doing the study, even though right now you’re being hindered by costs and trying to find… Well, I think, absolutely, we have to get it. It’s too important, we can’t drop it. we will find a way of doing this. Okay, fantastic.

1:22:03 Good luck. Yeah, I wish you the best of luck. I’m just so happy there’s someone like you that is not afraid to step up and be the voice of this because I think it needs a voice, you know? Yeah, that’s why it’s floundered for 40 years. There hasn’t been a voice.

1:22:19 And you know, so yeah, I mean, I just, I saw the need and I’ve been fortunate because I’ve been allowed to work in this field. I give the Medical Research Council a lot of credit. They’ve continued to support my work on the nature of drugs and drug addiction. They’ve invested in me for the last 16 years and we now know a lot more about the brain mechanisms of drugs than we did 15 years ago because of their investment and that’s given me the foundation in which we can look at all drugs, not just the legal drugs.

1:22:50 It’s so rational and your arguments are so logical, it’s just a shame that they’re being obfuscated to a certain extent so that, you know, I’m sure if all the logical, rational people of Britain understood all the ramifications of the things that we’ve just discussed then there would be less of this religious fervour kind of feeling. So I must tell you it’s wonderful, I don’t think, because the average person in Britain doesn’t know this. They know that I’m talking of sense, they know the drug laws are wrong.

1:23:18 When we were arguing with the government over the reclassification of cannabis, They wanted it, they wanted it put back to Class B when it was Class C. And we wrote this report, very, very nice considered report, saying it should stay as Class C. And I went to see the drugs minister and I said, look, here’s the report. He said, yes, I’ve read it. But we can’t go with it because the public don’t want it.

1:23:44 The public want it. Class B. And I said, ah, but you need to go to Appendix 2. Because in appendix two, we had a mori poll, the poll on which political parties used to decide their decision making, and I said, look, if you read that, you’ll see that two-thirds of the population don’t want it, class B. In fact, as many people wanted it legal, they just wanted it class B. And he said, that’s the wrong kind of public. And essentially, what is the right kind of public? And of course, the right kind of public are the people that read The Daily Mail and The Sun, the people that actually, you know, the governments continually pander to in order to get reelected.

1:24:28 And those aren’t necessarily the people that vote, per se. They’re the people that talk. Daily Mail. They do. Daily Mail, middle aged women vote. Those are the people that really have this huge influence.

1:24:41 So this all comes down to a propaganda battle. Yeah, it does. And it’s fascinating to know why some newspapers are so… I think newspapers Because often some newspaper editors actually see it as a badge of honor, you know, every drug they get banned, they get an extra pip on their shoulder. I think they’re also catering to a specific audience, and when they do that, maybe they grab their mind share and grab it.

1:25:02 It’s easy. It’s an easy win, actually. Yeah, absolutely. Politicians score easy points about drugs, newspapers score easy points about drugs. Well, good.

1:25:11 I think the only way to make this change is to talk about it, have discussions like this, follow Professor David Nutt on Twitter, get involved in the organization. I would like to attend that conference if I can get a place. I will guarantee you a place. Thank you. Actually, you want to come?

1:25:24 It all depends on when it is. 12th of June. Wednesday, the 12th of June. Wednesday, okay. The day before my birthday.

1:25:30 I think I will probably be working at that time. Really? Okay, fair enough. I think I actually saw a pamphlet for it and it looks very impressive, a nice line-up of people. And I think it’s interesting that, you know, it would be great to have you there because as someone who’s experienced though Ayahuasca, you will be able to share it.

1:25:44 The first, most of it’s about the science, but at the end we’ve got someone who’s, was part of the… Baltimore study, right? The Psilocybin. That’s right. The Psilocybin for cancer studies.

1:25:54 So she’s going to share her experience as a patient and other people might want to share it. That’s what I found fascinating when I saw the brochure, is that you had actually patients talking about it. Now that’s pretty revolutionary for a… It’s yes. In front of a conference.

1:26:07 Okay. London Real’s going on tour, it sounds like. I’m happy to talk about it. I have, to be very honest, I have taken ayahuasca in three ceremonies last year in London, and I guess that’s technically, well it’s not illegal, according to Professor Nutz, since I didn’t distribute it or own it, and I just took it, but the profound experiences in my life have changed in a good way. So, yeah, I don’t know if I’ll be ready to talk, but I’ll be there if you have any questions, for sure.

1:26:31 So, thanks so much for coming on. It was- It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you. Very good discussion. Patrick, thanks for being here.

1:26:37 Thanks for having me. having you as the voice of reason, you know? But you are. Well, I’m not, I have been truly 100% convinced by what he’s having not really known any of the facts before or not really taken time to think about the facts. It’s really huge.

1:26:55 And on that note, we will call it Professor David Nutt at Professor David Nutt. You can find us at London Real, YouTube at London Real TV. If you’re on iTunes, please subscribe And I just want to thank X-Brain for promoting this episode and thank you for the construction workers for a brief respite. And that’s it. Thank you, boys.

1:27:16 Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. I mean, like, if you do Psychopath, will you have more control? I’d have some more control. And there’s a couple of things that I’d be really adamant about with Psychopath Test.

1:27:31 And one is that it doesn’t, it’s not a movie that just sort of blindly says Psychopath’s secretly ruled the world. See you later. See you later.