Joe Rogan - Can Drugs Cause Schizophrenia?

Just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences. But I think one of the things that you're saying is I think it's very important is that this isn't for everybody and that if you have problems with normal consciousness, this is likely not for you. If you're one of those people that has schizophrenia in your family perhaps. Forget it. Yeah. And in fact, those people are screened out of this research very carefully. Schizophrenia, it's a real issue with people with psilocybin and many psychedelics, right? Yeah. What happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it, either because of inheritance, a psychedelic trip can set you off, can be the trigger for a life of it. And other things can too. A divorce. Your parents getting divorced sets people off. Go to graduate school sets people off. If you're someone who's probably going to get schizophrenia, any kind of mental trauma, if it happens at that window, which is in your early 20s and your late 20s I think, and that's why we did see some cases because that's the age people were using psychedelics in the 60s of having their first psychotic break. So yeah, so if you're at risk for that or bipolar. And marijuana as well, by the way. That's right. Oh yeah, marijuana can do it also. I think the numbers though mirror the numbers in standard populations in terms of, I think it's one out of 10. Like one out of 10 people have some form of schizophrenia and that's mirrored in marijuana use. I didn't know that. That's really interesting. Yeah, I think it's the same. I think the problem is it can exacerbate it or it can trigger it. Depending upon, I mean, everyone's biology is different and everyone's, the way they absorb these chemicals is different. Yeah. And if you are at risk, something's going to do it eventually. So we don't have any evidence of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience. It may have been the trigger, but there might have been, it was going to happen anyway. We just don't know. But in general, if you've got serious, if you have personality disorder, if you have bipolar, if you are at risk for schizophrenia, they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these drugs. Yeah. That is a real problem with it being prohibited. The prohibition has really set back research and understanding decades. We should have been studying this stuff since the 60s. We had 30 years of hiatus in the research. I don't know of another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that's just choked off. And for 30 years, nothing happened. I mean, think of what we would know if we had 30 more years of research with these drugs. It's crazy. So now we're picking up the thread and all that research is being resumed. But your point about prohibition is really important. When you have prohibition, you can't regulate something. It's a free for all. Whereas if you did legalize psilocybin, let's take as an example, you could set rules. You could say that it can only be administered by licensed guides or in a medical context or that no one under a certain age can have it. I mean, it gives you a chance to regulate. And that's why it's saner to legalize, not in a free for all kind of way, but in a very considered way than to have the system we have now where people are going to take the drug, whether they should or not, without any kind of clearance. And by the way, who knows what you're getting? You can also regulate the strength. In the case of LSD, in the 60s, there was this period where there was a lot of pure LSD around and then the mob got interested in it and they started cutting it with speed and all sorts of things. And people got into a lot of trouble.