CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Reversing His Medical Marijuana Stance

I wanted to have you on first of all because I really respected that you made this change of opinion publicly when you were first talking about marijuana. You were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit and it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful. Is that an assessment that you agree with? Yeah, I think it certainly didn't seem to have any medicinal benefit. Right. And upon further examination, you publicly changed your position and in doing so, you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed to, for many people with diseases, many people that are on chemotherapy, many people with some serious ailments, marijuana can be very beneficial and you talked about that and I really admired that because that takes a lot of courage because a lot of people, when they have an idea and they proclaim it publicly, they double down and they just use confirmation bias and whatever echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm their initial position and you didn't do that and I thought that's a real thinking person who is trying to honestly figure out what's going on instead of just working on being right. Well, look, I appreciate that and it was very illuminating for me because I think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society, I think sometimes surprises people. I do think, and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going on now, but the thing is that when you looked at the, so if you were just to look at the evidence around cannabis and I'm talking, I wrote this Time Magazine article back, this is probably 12, 13 years ago and I looked at the bulk of evidence and you say, okay, I'm going to just look at the 400 most recent papers, I'm going to read the abstracts, I'm going to dig in deep on some of them and 94% of them were basically the hypothesis was, where's the harm here? Show me the harm, right? The hypothesis was not show me the benefit. That was only true for about 6%. So right away you're dealing with a sort of very biased sort of set of data and that's one stream up. Now, if you're just looking at papers, like, well, this one potential lung harm, this one possible addiction, this one gateway, you're seeing all those individual studies, but at a broader level, one step upstream, you realize that most of the studies that are getting funded are designed to look for harm, right? So when I saw that, that was the first time I thought, well, why are the studies that are getting out there? Why are they all designed to look for harm? Then I started looking at other countries and some really good research out of places like Israel in particular, a guy named Raph Mashulam, who's 91 years old now, he was the first guy to ever isolate THC and then synthesize it. He's been doing this work forever. He may get the Nobel Prize before he dies for his work in this. They were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments, including the use of cannabis in the first few months, including refractory seizures in kids. That really got to me for a couple of reasons. One is that I think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain, it's hard. It's a subjective thing, right? So you think, how do you really have conclusive proof that this is working the way that you think it is? Someone says their pain is better and that's important, but how do you measure that? A little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures is a much more specific sort of metric. It seemed to work really well in kids who did not respond to existing seizure drugs, which was kind of amazing to me. I think I told you when we've spoken before that to me in some ways that wasn't just a medical issue at that point. It was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids and they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications for them. These parents are in their kitchen sinks stirring up cannabis, trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put underneath the kid's tongue. It was working. I did stories on these kids and they were emblematic of thousands of more kids. These weren't just anecdotal stories. That's when I said, there's something here. But I got to tell you, when I wrote the article saying I changed my mind on this, you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and I work at a university. I'm a practicing physician. I live in that world. Part of me did wonder what is the response going to be? I felt very comfortable with what I had written. What I did not know was how it would be received. That's always a challenge, I think. How was it received? I think, well, I'm still employed, so that part of it was good. I didn't know if my chairman would say, hey, look, I may agree or not agree with you. That's beside the point. You shouldn't have done this or whatever. I had no idea how they were going to respond. I think it was received well, Joe. I think that it added to the knowledge tree of how we advance as a society. It's a sign of the times, I think. I think if you had done that a couple of decades ago, maybe there'd been a lot more pushback. I think people are coming to much more of an understanding and also the logical aspect of it. When people look at all the things that human beings are allowed to consume, including this thing you gave me here, this looks pretty spectacular. I'm pretty proud of my gift that I've given you here. Some serious bourbon here, but thank you for that. For the man who has everything. This is legal. We can enjoy a glass. It's normal. It's a normal thing. We all agree to that. It's a long-standing tradition for people to drink alcohol socially. Marijuana, for whatever reasons, and we could go into that if you want, but it's been demonized unfairly and people know that. It's not like heroin or crack or things that you've seen people's lives fall apart on a regular basis. I think most people are aware of that now. In the era that you publish that, people have come to an understanding that it's not one of the hard drugs. It's not the most dangerous thing in the world. It's not good for kids. It's not good for some people. It's not good for some people maybe with possible schizophrenic tendencies. I think there's a real concern there. You raise a really important point. One thing I tried to stay away from whenever I wrote about this was I felt like it was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things. I think things should just stand on their own two feet. Well, it's better than this. What you're saying is true. I feel like alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain. I really do. If you think about the way alcohol affects the brain, very different than the way cannabis affects the brain. That part of it is true. The idea that it could be a medicine in particular, I think that that is really quite striking. It's a plant. There's all these things. Like I said, I listen to your podcast. I listen to Brett and I listen to others. I get the points that they're making about that in terms of can you look to the earth to heal? Oftentimes you can. We've been given a lot of things. I think that with cannabis in particular, the evidence ... I'm not the first to say this, obviously. People have been saying this for a long time. Maybe the timing was right, but two decades ago people were saying this. Three decades ago people were saying this. This was on the formulary in the United States in the 1940s, post-Rever madness, which I think was like 1936 or something like that. People were already saying, hey, wait a second. This could be used to treat addiction. This could be used to treat even Parkinsonian-like symptoms. There was all these things that they were putting out there. Then it went through this cultural assassination for a while, which was wild to reflect on historically. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.