YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Hart

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68
first
2021-10-23
most recent
2021-10-23
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “For sustaining human life. But we never talk about that because it's not as sexy as this nonsense that people write about, like addiction. Addiction has almost nothing to do with the drugs themselves. And I make that comment because the vast majority abuser for any drug never become addicted. And so if the vast majority of users don't become addicted, then you have to move beyond the drug when you're talking about the phenomena of interest. In this case, addiction. And so when we think about addiction, it has much more to do with our psychosocial environment than a drug itself. But that's not sexy.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's constipation. So if people are using heroin on a regular basis and then they have a sort of slowing up their gut motility, they're likely to increase constipation. And that's not good. I mean, for your general health, but we never talk about that in this society. And that's probably the most important thing aside from the fact that people get contaminated street drugs and that sort of stuff and increase the likelihood of maybe dying from some contaminant or people who are inexperienced and they're mixing heroin with other sedatives. That's not good. But the constipation is a huge one. And then other sort of drugs negative effects like the amphetamines, all of the amphetamines, they disrupt sleep, food intake, all of these things are so critical.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, those are certain kind of questions we certainly have asked because, like, something like cry cocaine versus alcohol or heroin when it comes to withdrawal or physical dependence. Like cocaine has a very limited sort of withdrawal symptoms. I mean, it's hard to see. Same is true with methamphetamine, but with heroin, you certainly can see a withdrawal syndrome that's unpleasant. But with alcohol, that withdrawal can actually kill you. So heroin is unpleasant and not lovely. But with alcohol withdrawal, that's the one. That's the most dangerous. I mean, all of these kind of questions we want to know answers to. And so when we think about heroin or some other drugs and you say like, what kind of negative effects? Negative effects, we don't talk about much in the society. The main thing that really concerns me about like heroin use really.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, so we did these kind of experiments with alcohol, nicotine, all these drugs, in order to have an empirical database to tell people exactly what these drugs do and what they don't do, the conditions under which the drugs will produce positive effects, the conditions under which the drugs were more likely to produce negative effects. All of this information is important for a society to know, and we do know. And that's why we're collecting the data. We're collecting the data to help us with treatment if someone is having problems with these data. Hopefully we'll understand more about how to help them deal with their problems based on some of the research that we're doing.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I talk about those kind of things, and other people talk about these things. The problem is, is that we're getting our education from bullshit sources, from people who believe in this kind of pinocchio thing. And it just does not fit with the evidence. And the evidence we all publish in the scientific literature, all these things that I'm saying, it's there in the literature. I mean, a place like Columbia, we give these drugs thousands of doses every year. Do you think we would be doing this? And we do this with research grants, that's funded by the public, taxpayers, dollars. Do you think we would be allowed to do this if these drugs were so dangerous? It's just nonsense. I mean, and the drugs we're talking about, they are all Approved for medical use somewhere in the world.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's some bullshit we tell children. Come on That's exactly right. You're exactly right. These fairy tales, these cautionary tales that we tell people, we have to grow up. That's what the book is about. Drug use for grown-ups. You know, we tell people Pinocchio, if you lie, your nose grow. Who believes that? Who believes that there are fairy tales? But that's exactly what these stories are. They're in the same vein as those kind of stories, as Pinocchio. You know, like you said, when you were learning about alcohol, you were told what to do, what not to do, so forth. The same can be true with MDMA, with cocaine, with heroin. The same is true because there are sometimes when there are some potential dangers that you should avoid. And I wrote about some of them, certainly in my work just throughout all of my writings.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “All of these things that can be potentially harmful but extremely beneficial if you are responsible enough to handle them. You want people to be mature. So that's a good thing.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think fear people are afraid that they will be belittled, dismissed all of these things as a drug addict or some negative thing. But cannabis is lightweight. Come on. You can admit cannabis these days. And the fact that I don't know when Joe started, but if he did start later in life, that's cool. I mean, you are mature, developed. You have developed some responsibility skills. All of these kind of things. This is a good thing. You don't want people to engage in any kind of behaviors when they're young and immature that might put them in harm's way. And so we want people to be developed at least. I mean, whether it's being in a relationship with a partner or whether it's driving an automobile.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “This character actually made us sympathetic for him when he is besmirching and denigrating his nephew Christopher for using a drug. And we feel sympathy for Tony, the character, who just killed somebody, who is a horrible person, but being a drug user is a worse person. That's what the show wants us to believe. Tony's a racist murderer. All of these things, but we feel sympathy for him. But we don't feel sympathy for anyone who uses drugs. That's some crazy shit. I mean, and the American public buys into it. That is, that's wild to me and that we all bought into this crap. And that's what we do. Indamn it everything that's in film, on television. And it's like, what's wrong with you people?”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, you can say the stupidest things about drugs and be believed. You can write a movie and you don't even have to develop your character if you throw drugs into the mix. You say, oh, he's a drug dealer. You don't have to say anything about that person's background or about that person being developed as a character because the population think they know. And the writer is lazy and does not do any sort of development. Just think about any. Let's think about the sopranos, for example. They have a new program coming out. So let's think about them for a second. The Sopranos is a show in which the lead character, Tony, kills people for a living. That's what he does, right?”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “People get contaminated drug because people are combining sedatives and they don't know that this enhances the respiratory depressing effects of drugs. They don't know. But when you read these newspaper articles, they don't say this. They don't say how to keep people safe. All they do is frighten the population. There's money in that. And then we think about people who write TV shows, the people who write movies. Most of the stuff written about drugs is just I think about, I love going to watch comedians and the comedians when they talk about drugs. Again, most of the things that they say about drugs.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Anxiety is critical. It's huge. Many of the negative effects that we see with drugs have to do with anxiety and not necessarily anxiety because the drug induced it. It's the anxiety that the situation induced a lot of times. And then you ask like, well, why does this sound counterintuitive? Why does the media report differently? Well, because there's money in reporting the negative effects almost exclusively. Think about writing a newspaper article. It's really easy to get the population all ginned up about something like an opioid crisis, overdoses, and you don't even have to tell people how to keep people safe if you're talking about overdose. You don't even have to say why people are dying from overdoses. Like overdoses in our country happen largely because”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, so your first question was how do we harness the positive effects? How do we increase the likelihood of getting the positive effects? Again, like I said, we want to make sure that people are responsible and they've handled their responsibilities, make sure they eat well, sleep well, exercise, all of those sorts of things play an important role. And also, if they know exactly what they're getting and then they're not paranoid about, oh, is something contaminated in some adultery in my drug? So you want to make sure you know exactly what you have. Once you satisfy those kind of things, you understand the dose and potency. You understand all of those things to decrease any sort of anxiety you might have about the substance itself in increases the likelihood that you will have a better time.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The time. You know what I'm saying? But if I haven't slept, if I haven't worked out, if I don't feel good, it won't be a good time. But I try and be responsible and take care of my eating habits, sleeping habits. Make sure my responsibilities are taken care of. And so when I'm in that moment, I just enjoy that moment. I'm there. I'm not thinking about a build that I didn't pay. I'm not thinking about, oh, I forgot to do this for my kid. I'm not thinking about that because all of those things are taken care of. If they're not taken care of, it will impact the experience and it may negatively impact the experience.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Right on. So, all of those things are important, but you know, like if someone had trauma in childhood and they did the work and they dealt with it, that's not so important in this case. But if they didn't deal with it and that trauma is being triggered in that event, in that moment, then it's important. But let's just take somebody like me. I'm 54 years old. I'll be 55 this month, actually. You know, I've done a lot of work in terms of figuring out who I am. And I'm comfortable with myself. And I know how to set limits for whatever it is I'm doing. And so I know I need to work out. I know I need to eat well. I know I need to sleep well. I know I need to be in an environment with people with whom I trust. And then if all of those things I met, oh, it's likely to be a good.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And we kind of do that in this country with this fascination with neuroscience. And that's an inappropriate kind of fascination in the way we talk about it. So we can talk about opioids and then we can talk about endogenous opioid system in the brain. We can talk about dopamine and other sort of monoamine transmitters and what opioids are doing to them. And we can do the same thing with MDMA. And we won't be any closer to understanding the sort of experience that is induced by these drugs. Certainly the experience that we all seek. You know what I'm saying?”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, see, this is a mistake that people make all the time. They try to act as if biology is the only determinant of drug effects, and that's just not how it works. You need the environment. You need the cage, as they say. If you don't have the cage, you don't get the full extent of the effects. And so like you can take MDMA and have an awful time. You can have a time in which you get paranoid and so forth. And then you can take that drug under the right conditions and it just be like one of the best moments you've ever had. It certainly enhanced a number of my relationships. But I've also had some times with MDMA that haven't been so lovely when the people who you are hanging out with, you don't know them, you're distrustful and all of those kind of things. So it's important to put context in it. Now we can talk about drugs at a biochemical level, at a biological level.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, I take MDMA, cannabis, and all the rest of these drugs, too. I've tried those drugs. The experience in the body and the mind, I don't really know what people want to know in that regard. It's like saying, what is the experience of having an orgasm in the body and the mind or some other sort of event that you really enjoy? So I don't really know what people.”

    2021-10-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #233 – Carl Hart: Heroin, Cocaine, MDMA, Alcohol & the Role of Drugs in Society · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source