Wanting to Get High is a Natural Impulse | Joe Rogan and Johann Hari

It's that moment of getting people to see everyone involved as human, right? We're not there yet. Still the ways people are talking about addiction are repellent, right? Well, they think of people as being weak. They think of people as having poor willpower, poor character, and that's why they're addicted. Most people, I would say it's safe to venture, aren't really fully aware of what the causes, what the underlying causes of people becoming addicted to drugs in the first place are and what leads people to this great sense of despair. I mean, it's really about re-engineering our entire culture. I mean, re-engineering, not just the way we treat addiction, but the way we treat human beings, where we treat poor neighborhoods. I mean, there's so much that needs to be done that's never addressed. Totally right. And there's one part of this that's a funny, really, one thing surprises me in this debate. I have found it is actually easier in the US to make the case for compassion for people with addiction problems than to make the case for liberty for drug users who are not addicted, right? So like we were saying, even the main drug war body in the world, the UNODC, the UN Office of Drug Control, admits 90% of all currently banned drug use is what's called non-problematic, right? Our friend, Professor Carl Hart, the head of psychology at Columbia University and an extraordinary human being has done really important work explaining this to people, even with what we think of as the devil drugs like heroin, crack, the vast majority of people who use heroin and crack do not become addicted, right? Which I found really when Carl first explained that to me, I was like, what's this guy talking about? And then we looked at the scientific evidence. There was very clear evidence, right? Actually, the ratio of people who use any drug who become addicted is pretty consistently 10 to 20%. Right? Slightly higher for things like heroin, but it's pretty consistently in that zone, right? Which is not to say that there aren't other harm heroin depresses your breathing, it can cause death that way, there are other harms, but we're talking about addiction, right? So it's interesting, there's so much, I think we need to explain to people, one person here in LA who really helped me to understand this and research with a guy called Professor Ronald K. Siegel, you should totally have in your shows, very interesting guy. So he was an advisor to four American presidents, he was a WHO, a advisor to the World Health Organization, really serious scientist, but he had a sideline for 30 years where he investigated animals using drugs, right? And he's basically shown loads of species love getting intoxicated for the pleasure of it, right? Sure, elephants. Yeah, elephants like, this is an amazing example he gave in Bengal of elephants who broke into an alcohol store, got really drunk and just fucked up the whole village, right? There's a great example he gave, if you give hash to mice, what they do is they'll, they get really horny, they try to, male mice will try to mount women, but then they basically can't get it up, so they just spend hours licking their own balls and they're going cock. So anyway, loads of examples. Is what a guy, Professor Siegel, I remember he told me at one point that he'd spent three years investigating grasshoppers in cannabis fields, who just naturally live in cannabis fields, to figure out when they eat the cannabis, do they jump higher or lower? And I said, oh right, and at the end of your three years, what did you discover? And he said, it turns out they just jumped the same height as everyone, all the other grasshoppers. It wasn't a great use of your three years of life, but he also got, he had an interesting time when he was in Hawaii, he was investigating mongoose, whether mongooses like hallucinogens, psychedelics, and he, so he's like spying on these mongooses with binoculars and he gets caught by a load of drug traffickers. And they're like, who the fuck are you? And he's like, oh, don't worry, I'm just investigating whether mongooses like psychedelics. That is the worst fucking cover story we've ever heard. They held him hostage for like two days. But what he showed is something I think is really important and there's loads of other evidence for, which is it is absolutely innate to other species, but especially to humans, the desire to get intoxicated, right? There has never been a human society anywhere in the world where people didn't seek out intoxicants and enjoy using them. The only society where there were no naturally occurring intoxicants was the Inuit, the, what we used to call the Eskimos and the Arctic. And they used to just starve themselves to get a fucked up head state because that's how deep it is in human beings. If there is nothing in the environment, if you starve yourself long enough, you get a kind of fucked up head state, basically. How far? How long you gotta go for? I don't know. I don't think I looked into the details of it, but he writes about that. So it's fasting. Yeah, fasting causes an altered head state, but I've never done it. But this intoxication impulse is as deep in human beings as the sexual impulse. You even see it in small children. You know, when a little kid, everyone will remember this memory of when you're a little kid and you realize you can spin round and round and round, even though you know it will make you sick, you do it because you get an altered head space. That is one of the first expressions of the kind of intoxication impulse. A really nice example is for 2000 years, 40 miles outside of Athens, in ancient Greece, there used to be once a year people would meet at something, a place called the Temple of Eleusis. And it was basically Burning Man. They would all use a psychedelic together. We now know. Do you know what that psychedelic is? Yeah, it was a kind of, there's lots of different theories, but they think it was a kind of fungus, basically. I can't remember the name of it, but there's been research on this. Sometimes it's been so safe in Saiben or something. I don't know. I want to say it wrong. It was some kind of psychedelic. And like people like Plato and Aristotle, sometimes people say, you know, drugs are, William Bennett, the former drugs are saying, drugs are an attack on the foundations of Western civilization. You're like, no, at the actual foundations of Western civilization, the people you're holding up as the icons, like Plato and Aristotle, were literally getting fucked up in exactly the way you say it's an attack on them, right? It's this deep misunderstanding. So this is a natural human impulse. We are never going to get rid of it. We want to get rid of it. It gives people a lot of joy and pleasure. And yet the Oscar Wilde said once, I'm going to get a quote slightly wrong. He said it better than this, but he said, Puritanism is the deep, ignoring fear that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves. And there's this puritanical hatred of, of drug use. Right. Now, some of that is understandable fears about genuine harms. And that's a different thing. But a lot of it is just very deep puritanism.