Joe Rogan on People Getting Drug Tested for Work

Sure, and this fundamental idea that sobriety is good. Yes. You look on Instagram, people post a selfie and say, six months sober, guys. Thank you so much. And tons of congratulations. Because it's a virtue. Because you accomplished something. You're not using drugs. Yeah. Whereas in other cultures, that would not be the case. People would just say, oh, you've decided not to work with a certain medicine. That's an interesting choice, not an accomplishment necessarily. Who was it saying, was it Kyle Kingsbury that was saying that, how much he hates the term plant medicine, or was it Dennis? I think it was Kyle. You don't like the term plant medicine, do you? I don't. Well. It's a weird sort of pretentious. Yes, yes, I know. Well, people call ayahuasca the medicine or things like that. Yeah, or toad medicine. I mean, I wouldn't. You don't hate it. A lot of these more flowery terms, like entheogen, I just don't use them myself. But I don't hate it. Well, I think people like you are very important, and I'm a big fan. But I think one of the reasons why you're important is you are a cognizante of real drugs. You understand what they actually do. You could explain them to the layman, or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor, perhaps, that wanted to talk about the dangers of them. And you understand all the various aspects of it. And I think there's a tremendous amount of ignorance when it comes to drugs, drug consumption. What is a drug? I mean, how many times have you seen a person with a beer in their hand smoking a cigarette saying they don't do drugs? It is so fucking stupid, but it's so common. There is this very, very, very common aspect of being a person, which is the desire to change your mental state. And we've done it throughout history with various substances. But there's so much stigma attached to it. And one of the things I've been doing lately on stage, I'll ask people, how many people get piss tested at work? It's fucking stunning. It's stunning. It's like more than 10% of the audience were raised in their hand. One out of 10 people gets their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there, they're not putting anything in their body that's prohibited. Which is such a horrible invasion of privacy that became so popular that in the 80s, during one presidential election, all the candidates voluntarily had their urine tested to prove that they were sober. I mean, this is like truly considered a virtue. And it's immensely invasive. I say this as someone who's analyzed my own urine in a laboratory before. And it's like a strange portal into your own life that you're showing to a stranger. Everything that you've consumed is then apparent there. And it's incredibly, it's a huge invasion of privacy that we've just decided is acceptable. And you have to be very careful about these things. Yeah. No, I agree. And of course, the synthetic cannabinoid epidemic, if you want to call it that, I actually don't want to call it that because I hate even the idea of a drug epidemic, but the popularity of synthetic cannabinoids is largely driven by the fact that they didn't show up on these urine tests. So initially it was in the military. Then it was people who are on parole or probation. People who were living hard lives, wanted to get high, couldn't get high. This was a way that they could do it. And so they've incentivized, people that just wanted to smoke weed using completely untested synthetic cannabinoids instead as a direct result of these urine tests. Well, it's also just a complete misunderstanding when it comes to the actual effects and how long they last. You're not even testing a person's conscious state. You're testing whether or not a person has altered their state of consciousness outside of their working time. It's not like you show up and they could scan your hand and realize that you're high on marijuana right now. It's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they're testing you for something that could linger in your body for weeks after these psychoactive effects have long since gone. Oh yeah, or even be the result of passive exposure. There was a great scientific article that came out a couple of years ago where they found that just passive exposure to cannabis smoke contaminates your hair with THC. So that all these people who had hair tests, who actually had not smoked cannabis, it sounds like an excuse, I was just in the room, someone else was doing it, just being in contact with someone who'd smoked cannabis could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive. So these tests aren't even necessarily reliable. This is the same problem. There was a kind of trend a little while ago. I don't know if you saw about this where people would get their urine tested for different, to quantify the levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in their urine. And this was supposed to be like a fingerprint of your mood. So they'd quantify the level of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then they'd say, oh, you're a little low on serotonin. You're pretty depressed actually. You need to supplement with some five HTP or something like that. It's a very reductive way of thinking about consciousness. But the main issue is that you're not testing in your brain. You're testing your urine. And a lot of these neurotransmitters are biosynthesized in the periphery. So just because you have these neurotransmitters in your urine doesn't mean they were ever in your brain. It doesn't say anything about anything. So it's just, it's so juvenile in a way. It's just such a piss poor way of maintaining order, checking people's consciousness. And what you should do is judge people based on their productivity. If I have some guy and he shows up for work and he kicks ass every day, I'm like, dude, what's your secret? You're like, I get high, get high before work. It's great. I feel good having a good time at work. Zippity doo da zippity day. I'm putting everything in order. And it just feels good. I'm like, keep doing what you're doing. Good.