Joe Rogan - Why Kratom is Illegal

Worst environment. I was on this discussion about Kratom. Are you familiar with this? I'm on it right now. Oh wow. Yeah, I just took some. I fucked my knee up the other day. I did something and it's been stiff and painful, so I iced it before I came here and then I just took six of them. See what happens. Wow. It took 10 once. Oof. 10 one-gram capsules? Yeah. I don't know how much it was for. I don't know. Can you grab that? I'll tell you exactly what's in it. But now I get why people might think it's a drug. What is a drug? Yeah, for sure. But when I took four, I was like, well, I took two for the first time I took it, I took two and a couple of times I took two and I'm like, this is like a mild stimulant. But then when you get into the range of eight to 10 pills, it's like, oh, this will fuck you up. This stuff. The stuff I take is Urban Ice Organics and see, it says, it says take two. It doesn't say the amount of material in the capsule. What does it say there? 750 milligrams. Okay. So not quite a gram. Not quite a gram. All right. It seems like a reasonable amount, but they always construct these things in these ridiculous dramatic oppositions. Like it was me versus a woman whose son had died of some kratom-associated overdose and it turns into a thing like, well, what do you have to say to this woman whose son died? It's like, I don't know. You know, there are people that die from caffeine overdoses as well. It's tragic that this happens. Have people died from this? Yes. They have. How much do you have to take? An enormous amount. I mean, I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs where they, if they like a drug, they want to say it's impossible for it to kill anyone. It's impossible. There's no possible way. If you set that as your standard, it'll always fail because people will die doing absolutely everything. Running, having sex, defecating. Aspirin. Aspirin. Absolutely. There's nothing in this world that can't find its way into a human death. So if people want to say, and even, you know, cannabis, obviously people say you can't overdose on cannabis and essentially you can't, but if you look in the medical literature, there are a number of these cannabis-associated fatalities. You know, you can debate them endlessly, but the point is once a drug enters a large enough population, there'll be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die. It doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous. It means that it's unrealistic to set a standard where if anything bad happens to anyone, we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned. Yeah, I agree. I mean, look, water kills people. There's a lot of these hazing things where the fraternity kids will be asked to drink a shit ton of water and people have died from it. A woman died in San Jose a few years back from a contest to drink water to get her son like an Xbox or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that are lethal, but the LD50 for cannabis is like, I mean, you literally have to smoke your body weight or something, right? It's something crazy. It would be very difficult. Yeah, but it doesn't mean that you couldn't get so high that you did something really stupid and wind up dying. Right. Especially dependent upon the person and the biological variability. Right, right. Exactly. And I think it's also just a bad road to go down. People always want to emphasize the safety of things, but in my opinion, safety isn't the point. It doesn't ultimately matter to me whether or not something is safe. I think we should have the freedom to do dangerous things if we choose. We're allowed to ride motorcycles. We're allowed to shoot guns. You're allowed to go skydiving and bungee jumping. All those things carry risks, but it's assumed that any adult that does them is aware of those risks. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's also who is, if the society that we live in was just you and I, we were the only two people alive. Who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell you what you can do? It's ridiculous. And so when you have grown adults, telling a grown adult who's informed what they can and can't do, then it becomes a question of children. Well, then it becomes an education issue and it becomes a parental issue. I mean, you can't lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs because then they're not going to believe you about the really actual, the actual dangerous ones. Right. And this is of course reflected in the so-called opioid epidemic. Yes. Right now. Yes. There's endless finger pointing. Everyone wants to find a culprit that's behind all of it. And the easiest person to blame, of course, are pharmaceutical companies because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies, so why not blame them? Right. But, you know, and I'm not pro-pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm also not anti-pharmaceutical either. And when you look at the way, for example, The New York Times is covering the opioid epidemic, it's always in this tone of like documents were uncovered that show that executives at Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive as early as 1999. It's like, well, of course, of course they were aware. People have known that morphine is addictive for hundreds of years. This is old news. And this whole idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that oxycontin isn't addictive is absurd. These are all morphine derivatives. Any adult, especially a medically trained adult should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule, if it's structurally and pharmacologically and qualitatively similar to morphine, of course it's going to be addictive. And that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing. It should be okay to give people addictive drugs as well, as long as everyone's aware of the risks. As long as they understand a protocol to get off of it. There's so many people that get on these things and then wind up taking them far longer than they're supposed to, because it's easy to get hooked. We need to at least have some sort of responsible direction that these people need to go to, to get off of them once they're on them. Because people that get back operations, anything where they prescribe you high doses of opiates, it's a huge problem. I know many, many people that have gotten hooked because of it. And in fact, I should tell you that my good friend Justin Ren, his wife found out about Kratum because of you. Because of your show, he had a problem with his shoulder, got shoulder surgery. They put him on oxycontin. He was fucked up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad. And Kratum is the only thing that got him off of it. Right. And that's not surprising. I mean, this has been known for a very long time in Thailand. And that was actually the reason that it was originally prohibited. I don't know if you're aware of that, but because the government taxed opium and people started using Kratum, then they made Kratum illegal. Is that the right way to say it? Because people say Kratum. You're the only one I've heard say Kratum. It's a Thai word. People in Thailand call it Kratum. Oh, okay. So people in the US call it Kratum. It's also they have, you know, it's like maybe it's like Kratum. So they're not going to go that far. But Kratum is closer. If you did, it would be weird. But I feel as you know, yeah. Like American people that say Ecuador, Argentina. But it is Kratum. Yeah. Kratum. Okay. So we'll try to call it Kratum. Or something close to that. It's closer to that than Kratum. Right. And so the reason why it was made illegal was because of the fact that it was pinching some of the profits off of the opium trade. Yes. Wow. Yeah, that's fucked up. And so this has been known for a long time that it helps people get off more addictive opioids. And how does it do that? Well, it's an opioid itself. And a lot of people don't want to admit or acknowledge that. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad or opioids are inherently bad, just because the ones that we're aware of have a lot of problems. You know, in some sense, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology and all this are still in a very primitive state. And there's so much to be learned. So we're mostly giving people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for 100 years. And there are better things. We're going to continuously discover less addictive treatments for pain. And I think that the alkaloids in Kratum are a step in that direction. And which is so tragic that they're trying to now make it illegal. Because this is something that, as far as I can tell, has genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids. Well, one of the things that I felt, I mean, and again, my dose was not extremely high. But when I was on it, I was very coherent. I was clear. It was clear to me that I was affected by something. But it felt kind of good. It didn't feel bad. It felt a little a little uneasy, like a little like, whoa, this world feels a little weird right now. But it did not feel like I was impaired. Like, I know a lot of people who take it in exercise. Like, I have a friend, he'll take 10 pills and exercise. Just seems kind of fucking crazy. Yes. But he says he has a great workout. Right. By taking that stuff before he works out. Yeah. I mean, it seems to lend itself to a lot of different applications. In Thailand, it's used almost exclusively for that sort of purpose in the south. It's a drug that laborers use so they can, you know, collect the latex from rubber trees and just get their job done. That's what it's about. I mean, that's what opioids are about for a lot of the world, both in the United States and in Africa and in Thailand is, you know, people live hard lives and manual labor is painful and repetitive and difficult and anything that makes that a little bit more manageable is a very important tool for humans. I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or something like that were on a very short road to death. That was my perception when I was a kid. And then I had a friend who was a longshoreman. They worked on the docks, they would bring fish in and fillet the fish for the market. And he worked with a guy that every day at lunch, the guy would go cop, he would get his heroin, he would shoot it up in his car, and then he'd go back to work. And I was like, he'd go back to work. And you're like, yep, he worked every day. Like every day he shot up and every day he worked. Like, yeah, he was never late. Nope, just did his work. Like, wow. Well, I didn't think you could do that. I thought you did heroin. The next thing you know, you'd just be on the floor in a fetal position in your own urine and you just would fall apart and die. Right. Yeah. There's this idea that people sometimes refer to as pharmacological determinism, that a certain drug has to do a certain thing. So alcohol has to sedate and disinhibit you. Heroin has to addict you and make you a slave to it and kill you. Cocaine has to be a euphoric thing that's done at parties. It's also very addictive. PCP has to make you strip nude and run around fighting cops and punching holes in wooden fences. But when you look at this, you know, anthropologists have looked at certain drugs that are used cross-culturally like alcohol. And what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed. Drugs behave differently in different cultures, depending on the set and setting of the user. And so you find all sorts of instances that are major exceptions to these rules that we've set up for these various drugs. For example, PCP, which is arguably one of the most ubiquitously maligned drugs in the world. I mean, no one can imagine that PCP is medicinal, but even to this day, PCP is in schedule two, not schedule one like cannabis and LSD schedule two. It can still be prescribed actually. And that's because it had a history of medicinal use. There was even PCP psychotherapy in the UK in the 50s. So this is something that most people wouldn't believe, but to those patients that were taking it then, there was none of this cultural association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes you strip nude. It was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober. Well, we're seeing that now with MDMA, right? I mean, and also ketamine. Ketamine being used as an actual tool for psychotherapy, particularly for people with depression, it's having really good results. My friend, excuse me, Neil Brennan, who's a hilarious comedian, he's had struggles with depression. He got great relief from taking ketamine. Right. And what I think is really interesting is, you know, this is often packaged as a sort of psychedelic renaissance, but I think in a larger context, it's a drug facilitated psychotherapy renaissance because this was not just limited to psychedelics. People did something called narcoanalysis where they would give people sedatives like propofol, the drug that killed Michael Jackson or various barbiturates or various other drugs. And the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist. And it was considered very effective. Now this idea of a psychiatrist injecting you with a drug in order to help you talk about your problems is it's unheard of. I don't think anyone does it anymore, but it used to be very common. And I think a return to that is going to be really beneficial.