YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Johnson

lines on the record: 250
first: 2020-12-14
most recent: 2020-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, it's Hopkins, so. You know, they're thinking that sounds like it's safe enough. So, like, what the hell? Let's give it a shot. Like, most of them were in that category, which I really I appreciate because it's more of a test, you know, of. Yeah, just like a better model of what if these are approved as medicines, like what you're going to have the average participant be like.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the recruitment, I really like this fact. It wasn't people that largely were, we were honest about what we were studying, but for most people, it was, they were in the category of like, you know, not particularly interested in psychedelics, but more of like. Want to quit smoking, they've tried everything but the kitchen sink. This sounds like the kitchen sink, you know, and it's like”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who's smoking weed every day, they might take five milligrams and kind of hardly feel anything. And they might, they may really need something like 30, 40, 50 milligrams to have a strong effect. But yeah, so they've evolved in terms of the rules about like, okay, what constitutes a dose? You know, which is why you see less big candy bars and more, or if you is, if it is a whole candy bar, you're only getting a smaller dose like 10 milligrams. Or yeah, because that is where people get in trouble more often with edibles.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For someone, and it's like, you know, a lot of these people, it's like, oh, I used to smoke a little weed in college. They might say they're visiting Denver for a business trip. And they're like, why not? Let's give it a shot. And they're like, oh, I don't want to smoke something because it's going to, so I'm going to be safer with this edible. I consume this massive.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, but most they've gone that direction in states that didn't initially have these rules have now have them. So it was like you'll get, I think, I think five or 10 milligrams of THC. being a common. And like, and this is an important thing, like where they've moved from not being allowed to say have a whole candy bar and have each of the eight or ten squares on the candy bar being 10 milligrams, but it's like, no, the whole thing because like, you know, somebody gets a candy bar, they're eating the freaking candy bar. And it's like, unless you're a daily cannabis user, if you take 100 milligrams, it's like. That's what could lead to a bad trip.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's interesting. Now, I'm not the caveat, I'm not encouraging anything illicit, but just theoretically, my first question as a behavioral pharmacologist is like, you know, increase the dose. You see the full dose. I'm not telling him, Jamie, to do that, but like. Okay, like, you know, you're taking the same amount that friends might be taking, but yeah, but he was all.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Very out of hundreds of volunteers over the years, we've only seen a couple of people where there was a mild effect of the 30 milligrams. And who knows that person's their serotonin, they might have lesser density of serotonin two-way receptors or something. We don't know. But it's extremely rare for most people. This is like something interesting is going to happen”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. They're like, holy shit, I didn't know the orbit would be that far out, you know, like, or I escaped the orbit. I was in interplanetary space there.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know this is not hanging out with your friends, going to the concert again. So, this is a real deal dose, even to people that like really, you know, just even to psychonauts. And even we've even had numbers.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have some data based on that data we're actually moving into like getting away from the body weight, adjusting of the dose and just giving an absolute dose. It seems like there's no justification for the body weight-based dosing. But I digress. Generally, 30, 40 milligrams, it's a high dose. And based on average, even though as you alluded to, there's variability, which gets people into some trouble in terms of mushrooms, like saloosophy cubensis, which is the most common species in the illicit market in the US. This is about equivalent to five dried grams, which is right at about where, right where McKenna and others, they call it a heroic dose.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So, in our studies, we use the pure compound psilocybin. So it's a single molecule, you know, a bunch of molecules. And we give them a capsule with that in it. And so it's just a little capsule they swallow. When psilocybin is used outside of research, it's always in the context of mushrooms. Because they're so easy to grow, there's no market for synthetic psilocybin. There's no reason for that to pop up that. The high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams body weight adjusted. So if you're a heavier person, it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So the drug we're using is psilocybin, and we're using moderately high and high doses of psilocybin. And I should say this about most of our work. These are not kind of museum-level doses. In other words, nothing even big fans of psychedelics want to take and go to a concert or go to the museum. If someone's at Burning Man on this type of dose, they're probably going to want to find their way back to their tent and zip up and hunker down for not be around strangers.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like now we're getting like to me, that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of like therapeutics. It's like, can we really shift behavior? And since in so much as we talked about my other scientific work outside of psychedelics is about understanding addiction. And drug use, so it's like, you know, looking at addiction, it's a no brainer, and smoking is just a great example. And so back to your question, like we've had really high success rates. I mean, it really, it rivals anything that's been published in the scientific literature. The caveat is that that's based on our initial trial of only 15 people, but extremely high long-term success rates. 80% at six months were smoke-free.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's real behavior change. You know what I mean? It's quantifiable. It's like, okay, you've been smoking for 30 years. That's a real thing. And you've tried a dozen times seriously to quit and you haven't been able to long term like, okay. And if you quit, like we'll ask you and I'll believe you, but I don't trust everyone reading the paper to believe you. So we're going to have you pee in a cup and we'll test that and we'll have you blow into this little machine that measures carbon monoxide and we'll test that. So multiple levels of biological verification.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, like really change it, not just people saying, which again is interesting. I'm not dismissing it, but folks that say my life has turned around. I feel this has completely changed me. It's like, yep, that's good. All right, let's see if we can harness that and test that into something that it's.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think of the work with using psilocybin to help people quit smoking. I mean, we've talked about smoking being such a serious addiction. And so that's what inspired me to get into that was just kind of having like behavioral psychology as my primary lens, sort of a. This sort of like A kind of radical empirical basis of I'm really interested in the mystical experience and all of these reports. Very interested. But at the same time, I'm like, okay, let's get down to some behavior change and something that we can record, like quantitatively verify biologically.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I'll send it to you. There was one headline from some publicity on the work that said horny cocaine users don't use condoms or something like that. I wouldn't have put it that way, but like, yeah, that's, I guess.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Under double blind conditions and showed that, like, yeah, when people are on Coke. Their ratings of sexual desire, even though they're not in a sexual situation, yeah, you show them some pictures, but they're just saying they're horny. Like you get subjective ratings of like how sex, how much sexual desire are you feeling right now? People get horny when they're on stimulants.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not It's a different aspect of their decision. Yeah, on the reward side. I think on the alcohol, it works more through disinhibition. It's like alcohol is really good at reducing the ability of a delayed punisher to have an effect on current behavior. In other words, there's this bad thing that's going to happen tomorrow or a week from now or 20 years from now. Being drunk is a really good way. And you see this in like rats making decisions. A high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive to those consequences. So I think that's the lever that's being hit with alcohol. And it's the more just the increasing the rewarding value of sex by the psychostimulants on that side. We actually found that it, and it was amazing because like hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, and there's much more to study with this, but I think the biggie there is that the stimulants, they create risky sex by really increasing the rewarding value of sex. Like if you talk to people that are really, especially that are hooked on stimulants, one of the biggies is like sex on Coke or Meth is so much better than sex without. And that's a big part of why they have trouble quitting because it's so tied to their sex life.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read about in Austin where they don't know where it's at now or where they outlawed Uber for a while, you know, because of the whole taxicab union type thing and how just, yeah, there were like hordes of drunk people that were used to Uber that now didn't have a cheap alternative.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their car, in your car. So that you can, I mean, I think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks. It's gonna be more than a regular Uber. It's like it's going to be done. I got the money. I already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight. Just get the damn thing done. Tomorrow, I'm done with it. I wake up, my car is in front of my house I think that would be, I think someone could. I'm not going to open that business. So, like, if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that, like, I think it could help a lot of people.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've thought about it not with condoms, but a very similar line of thinking that you're going into in terms of Uber and people getting drunk, they enter the bar plan to have one or two. They end up having five or six. And it's like. Okay, yeah, you could take the cab home, the Uber home. But you've left your car there. It might get towed. You might like, there's also the hassle of just, you know, you want to wake up tomorrow with your hangover and forget about it and move on. And I think a lot of people in this situation, they're like, screw it. Going to take the risk, just get it, you know. What if you had an Uber service where two, you know, you have a A car come out with two drivers And one of them, two sober drivers, obviously, and the person, the one driver drops off the other that then drives you home.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can be that powerful for something like stopping cocaine use how powerful for that could that be for shaping up just carrying a condom? Because the primary, unlike cocaine use, here we're not saying you can't have the main reward. Like you could still have sex and you can even have sex in the way that you tell yourself you'd rather do it if econom is available. relatively speaking, it's way easier than like not using cocaine if you like using cocaine. It's just basically getting in the habit of carrying a condom. So that's just one idea of like what the...”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's, you know, they occasionally have unprotected sex, like training those people. Like, what if you got a text message, you know, once every few days saying, ah, if you show me, send back a photo of a condom within a minute, you get a reward of five dollars, you could shape that up like that, it's a process called continuity management, it's basically just straight up operant reinforcement. You could shape that up with no problem. I mean, those procedures of contingency management giving people systematic rewards is like, for example, the most powerful way to reduce cocaine use in addicted people. By saying if you show me a negative urine for cocaine. I'm going to give you a monetary award. And like that has huge effects in terms of decreasing cocaine use”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, although those interact. So it's like, in one sense, if you're especially going to be drinking or using another substance that is associated with, you know, a stimulant, alcohol and stimulants go along with risky sex. Good to be aware that you might make decisions just to tell yourself you might make a decision that it's going to make in your sober state. And so, hey, throwing a condom in the purse and the pocket might be a good idea. I think at the environmental level, just more condom of it. I mean, it highlights what we know about just making condoms widely. Available. Something that I'd like to do is like, you know, reinforcing condom use. Just getting people used to carrying a condom everywhere they go. Because it's such a once it's in someone's habit. If they are say like a young single person and”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this to me, it's like, unless we delve into this and understand this, these suboptimal conditions, we're not going to fully address the problem. There's plenty of people that say, yep, condom use is good. I use it a lot of the time. It's like, where is that failing? And it's under these suboptimal conditions, which in frank, if you think about it, it's like most of the case. Action is unfolding. Things are getting hot and heavy. Someone's like, do you got a condom? No. It's like, do they break the action? and take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store or whatever. Maybe everything's closed. Maybe they got to wait till tomorrow.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things, you know, and like we did one survey with men who have sex with men and found that 25% of them, 24%, about a quarter, reported in the last six months that they had unprotected anal intercourse, which is the most risky in terms of sexually transmitted infection. In the last six months, in a situation where they would have used a compound.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and that's the way most of this research outside of behavioral economics that's just looked at condom use decisions, very little of which has ever actually administered the drugs, which is another unique aspect, but they usually just look at like assuming the condom is there. But this is more using behavioral economics to delve in and model something that, and I've done survey research on this, modeling what actually happens. You meet someone at a laundry mat. Like you weren't planning on like, you know, and it's like one thing leads to another. They live around the corner, you know.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that's a big effect, and we see that. And interestingly, we do not see with those different drugs, we don't see an effect if we just look at that zero delay condition. In other words, the condoms right there waiting to be used, would you how likely are to use it? You don't see it. I mean, people are by and large going to use the condom.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting people drunk. And I thought to myself, Are you telling me that getting someone, that people being drunk to make To choose what's good for them in the short term at the expense of what's good for them in the long term. It's like, you know, bullshit. But in what context does that happen? So that's something that inspired me to go in this direction of like a risky sexual decisions is something they do when they're drunk. They don't necessarily go home and even though some people have gambling problems and alcohol interacts with that, the most typical thing is not for people to go home. Log on and change their allocation and their retirement account or something like that.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I love to get people loaded in a safe context, but to really, it started like there was some early research with alcohol. I mean, the psychedelics are the most interesting, but it's like all of these drugs are fascinating. The fact that all these are keys that unlock a certain like psychological experience in the head. And so there was this work with alcohol that showed that it didn't affect those monetary.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can get people loaded on any number of drugs like cocaine, alcohol, methamphetamine are the three that I've done and published on. And it's interesting that”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which would normally be the larger later reward, like the $10 versus the nine. It's like the $10, which is counterintuitive if you just think about the physical pleasure.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in general, a warts, et cetera, all the lovely ones. And we've actually done research saying where we gauge the probability of these individual different SDIs. And it's like, what's the heavy hitter in terms of what people are using to judge, to evaluate whether they're going to use a condom?”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A condom. Not everybody, and that we know that's the case. It's like that some people don't like condom, some people say, yeah, I want to use a condom, but a quarter of the time ended up not because I just get lost in the passion of the moment. So for the people, I mean, the only reason that people, so behaviorally speaking, at least for a large number of people in many circumstances, condom use is a reinforcer just because people do it. Like, you know. Why are they doing it? Not because it makes the sex feel better, but because it makes that it allows for at least the same general reward, even if actually even if it feels a little bit not as good with the condom. Nonetheless, they get most of the benefit without the concurrent My gosh, there's this risk of either unwanted pregnancy or getting HIV or way more likely than HIV.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's really based on, I mean, yeah, yeah, presumably that's the case that it's measured by really that first question where there is no delay, most people say they would be at the higher end scale a lot of times 100%. They said they would definitely use.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so we do get at that through some individual measures, and this task is more of a face valid task where there's a lot underneath the hood. So for most people, sex with the condom is the better reward. But underneath the hood of that is just that the purely physical level, they'd rather have sex without the condom. It's going to feel better.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making questions of what I've done is ask Percy Reed a vignette. This person wants to have sex with you now. You've met them, you get along casual sex scenario, like a one-night stand with a condoms available. Just rate your likelihood from one to 100 on this kind of scale. Would you use it? But then you can change your scenario to say, okay, now imagine you had to wait five minutes to use a condom. So the choices now, instead of using condom versus not in terms of your likelihood scale, now it ranges from have sex now without a condom versus on the other end of the scale is wait five minutes to have sex with a condom so you rate your likelihood of where your behavior would be along that continuum. And then you could say, okay, well, what about now or what about three hours? What about, you know, what about 24 hours?”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not quite a questionnaire, but it's a behavioral task requiring them to respond. So you show pictures of a bunch of individuals. And it's kind of like one of these fun behavioral, like a lot of them, you get numbers of boring, but it's like, okay, hot or not. Like, which of these 60 people would you have a one-night stand with? Men, women, so pick whatever you like. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, whatever you're into, it's all variety there. Out of that group, you pick some subsets of people who do you think is the one you most want to have sex with the least, who you think's most likely to have an STI or least likely a sexually transmitted disease by STI. And then you could do certain decision.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so this is using hypothetical decision making, but I've published some studies looking at showing a tight correspondence to self-reported in correlational studies to self-reported behavior.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're really sure you're not looking to quit, hey, use a couple times in the lab with us so we can at least learn something. And part of what we learn is maybe to help people not use and it'll reduce the harms of cocaine. So there's hoops to jump through with the sexual decision making. I looked at the main thing I looked at was this model of I applied delayed discounting to what we talked about earlier, the now versus later that kind of decision making that goes along with addiction. I applied that to condom use decisions and I've done”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sex and drugs too. I'm just missing the rock and roll. It's the two controversial. Rock and roll isn't very controversial anymore. Yeah, so the cocaine, you know, lots of hoops to jump through. You got to have a lot of medical support. You got to be at a basically an institution, a research unit like I'm at that has a long history and the ability to do that and get ethics approval, get FDA approval, but it's possible. And whenever you're dealing with something like cocaine, you would never want to give that to someone who hasn't already used cocaine and you want to make sure you're not giving it to someone who's an active user who wants to quit. So the idea is like, okay, if you're using this type of drug anyway and you're”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decrease the increase of black market calls all of the harms, like every other drug we're moving away from the prohibition model slowly, but the big barred ship is like making a very slow turn. Okay, we really had to step back and question if we went with nicotine, tobacco, or are we moving into that direction?”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's not like alcohol prohibition where like, you know, you couldn't create the duels, the near beer is not going to have alcohol. And so people are like, here you do have the possibility of giving another medium, the ability to deliver the drug, which still aren't to a lot of people isn't preferred to the tobacco, but nonetheless, again, if you over-regulate those and make them less attractive, like if you aren't thoughtful about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything and if you overtax them, you're actually decreasing the ability to compete with the more dangerous product. So I feel that like there is a potential path forward, but I don't have a lot of confidence that that's going to be done in a thoughtful analytical way. And I'm afraid that it could”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference here, the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine is by and large not what causes the harm. It's the aromatic hydrocarbons, it's the carcinogens and tobacco. It's burning tobacco smoke. It's not the nicotine.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Caused in Staten Island, the police to approach was it Eric Garland who was selling loose cigarettes and he got choked out. I mean, the thing that caused that police contact was he was selling, well, I think report it to sell individual cigarettes for like, you know, you could sell them for quarter. It happens in Baltimore. And it's like, that's technically illegal. You know, are you not going to have massive boats of supplies coming over from China and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes if you ban the sale of nicotine? It's obviously going to happen. And you have to weigh that against.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, that path would only make sense in very good conjunction with e-cigarettes, which once they're fully regulated, can be a safer, not safe, but much safer alternative. And if we don't, if we tax the hell out of e-cigarettes and ban every attractive feature like flavors and everything, then that's going to push people to a black market if they can't get the real thing from real cigarettes. Like some people will just quit straight out. But I think what the regulators and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco like myself, it's a big part still of what I study, they're not used to thinking about the tobacco really as a drug, largely speaking, in terms of, you know, for example, the history of prohibition. And I think of like, we already know there's an illicit market, a black market for tobacco to get around taxes. I mean, and for selling even loose cigarettes, that's what initially.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you didn't ask about mortality or deaths. You asked about addiction. But that really is hard to evaluate. It gets into those nuances I spoke of before about there's not a unidimensional way to measure reinforcement. It kind of depends on the situation and what measure we're looking at. More people have access to tobacco. And I'm not advocating that we make it an illegal drug. I think that was a horrible mistake. Although there is a very credible push to mandate the reduction of nicotine. Cigarettes, which I have most scientists that study it or for it, I think. Some real dangers there because I see that in the broader history of drug use. It's like when has drug prohibition worked, broadly speaking? And it's”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like terrorism versus swimming pools. I remember that being back in the. After the war on terror started, it's like, yeah, there's not even comparison.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source