Alex Berenson: What Teens Should Know About Cannabis and THC

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”

In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Berenson argues that it’s a bad move. Schedule I substances are defined as having high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule III substances, in contrast, have medical uses and are regarded as having only moderate to low potential for abuse.

Rescheduling marijuana sends the wrong signal, Berenson says: “Do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use?”

He believes the use of drugs should be stigmatized, including the use of marijuana: “In the U.S. we can’t stigmatize. And not to stigmatize in this case, as in so many cases, means we can’t be honest.”

In my interview with Berenson, he provides an overview of the dangers of marijuana use and why these have increased dramatically over the last half-century.

“Fifty years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock … that might have been 1 or 2 percent THC, so a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. … When I was growing up in the ’80s or in the ’90s, it might have been 5 percent THC. Now, if you go into a dispensary … the bud tender will sell you a product that is 20 percent to 30 percent THC, if it’s flower cannabis,” he said.

And if it’s not smoked but vaped, then “that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high,” Berenson said. “Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC, and that really is a change that has made the product a lot more dangerous.”

There is also a well-established link, Berenson says, between high-potency, frequent marijuana use, and severe mental health impacts such as psychosis and schizophrenia.

There’s even research suggesting THC causes heart damage. “There is a link to myocardial infarction, heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period,” he said.

But what about its benefits as a pain reliever? Berenson said that he was surprised to discover that placebo-controlled studies showed only small and short-term pain relief effects.

“What cannabis and THC are really good at is enhancing sensation … but if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you. … And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true,” Berenson said.

“We as a society have to … be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do,” he said.

In our wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the overprescription crisis in America, the dangers of SSRIs, psychedelics, and stimulants such as Adderall that around 10 percent of teenage boys are taking in the United States, and his thoughts on vaccine policy in America.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Alex Berenson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Alex Berenson:

Jan, so good to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

So something remarkable happened the other day. President Trump signed an executive order moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. I don’t think most people even understand the significance of this. Some people say it means nothing. Others say it’s the legalizing of marijuana. It’s neither of those. What’s the truth? 

Mr. Berenson:

Well, the truth is that it’s something that the industry really wanted, the cannabis industry, because it’s going to increase their profits a lot. And you can tell this because in the days after the rumor that this was actually going to happen became public, the stocks of cannabis companies, big weed, as I sometimes call it, went way up. This will give the industry more access to the financial system, and it will increase the industry’s profits by enabling them to deduct some taxes. As a practical matter, that’s really what it does. President Trump said the other day, this will improve medical research and make it possible for more research on cannabis. That’s very unlikely for a couple of reasons. 

First of all, there has been a lot of research on the potential medical properties of cannabis and THC [Tetrahydrocannabinol], which is the chemical in cannabis that gets people high, and a chemical called CBD [Cannabidiol], which does not get people high, but is also in cannabis. And unfortunately, for the most part, those studies, when they’re done and done well, do not show much impact for cannabis on most of the things it’s supposed to help, much less things like cancer. 

And if you actually think about it, that’s totally reasonable because why would we think one plant is some magic cure for everything? That’s not how medicine works. It’s not how our bodies work. It’s not how science works. Cannabis and THC are really good at doing one thing, getting people high. That’s what they’re good at. And when they’re tested against other conditions, they generally don’t work very well.

Mr. Jekielek:

And do you mean like treating those conditions or the pain reduction around those conditions?

Mr. Berenson:

I mean both, actually. So this was surprising even to me. Seven years ago, I wrote a book called Tell Your Children. Tell Your Children, when it came out, was controversial. The core thesis, I’d say it’s gotten less controversial over that time, but the core thesis of it was, look, there’s a lot of scientific evidence that cannabis, especially when kids or young adults use it, and especially when they use it in its current high-potency form, and they use a lot of it, can have really severe mental health impacts. And specifically, this heavy use can cause a condition called psychosis. 

Psychosis is a break from reality. Literally, people will wind up in the emergency room thinking that their families are going to do terrible things to them, or that the cop who’s driven by once in the last hour has actually had to get them, whatever it might be. And so I would say that when I wrote Tell Your Children, that thesis was debated in the scientific community.I think in the seven years since, we’ve gotten even more evidence that it is correct, and I think even people who are in the industry would acknowledge that there’s a risk. 

But to go back to your initial question, which was about pain and pain relief, I was very surprised to find that when cannabis and THC have been studied in placebo-controlled studies, meaning you test where you give one person THC and you give another person just a pill that contains nothing, or they smoke a joint that actually has no THC in it, you don’t find lasting effects of pain relief from cannabis.

I think the reason for that is that what cannabis is really good at, what THC is really good at, is enhancing sensation. So people want to use it when they’re having a meal, when they’re listening to music, maybe if they’re having sex; those things it can enhance the sensation of. But if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you. 

And so ultimately, when cannabis has been tested this way, doctors find that it doesn’t have a very good lasting impact on pain. And there was a really good study a few years ago in Australia where people who’d used it for a long period of time actually used more opioids than people who didn’t use cannabis. And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true. And I really can’t emphasize that enough because it’s been sold this way to people. 

With President Trump, when I listened to his press conference the other day, I think there’s part of him that means well about this. I mean, he doesn’t use drugs. And I think he had a lot of people yapping at him about this, who do use cannabis and who like it and who want fewer restrictions on it.

Mr. Jekielek:

But ultimately, he made a mistake. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but practically what this says is that marijuana is not as dangerous as something like heroin or these, you know, methamphetamine, whatever, like these, again, Schedule I chemicals, and that it opens up the door for a little more research potentially. 

Mr. Berenson:

That’s the way it’s being framed. Okay. So here’s what you need to know about Schedule I. The reason a drug gets put in Schedule I actually is, apart from its dangers, whether it has any medical use. So, for example, fentanyl is in Schedule II. While heroin is in Schedule I, why is fentanyl in Schedule II? Because fentanyl is actually used to treat severe pain. You know, if you come out of a surgery where they’ve just, you know, amputated your leg or whatever, you need fentanyl. Okay. So it has a medical use. 

The reason cannabis should have remained in Schedule I is that they could have, for example, done something that I don’t know if they legally could have, but a better move would have been to create something—let’s call it Schedule IR—to allow more research on smoked products. Okay, and that can’t be a medicine. Tobacco is not a medicine; it can’t be, even though there might be compounds in tobacco that actually improve brain function or whatever, right? If you have to smoke it, it should be Schedule I. Now, THC, maybe you could say, okay, Schedule II or Schedule III. So this argument about descheduling, to me, should have started and ended there, and unfortunately, it did not. 

Now, am I going to tell you that cannabis is as dangerous as heroin or cocaine? Of course not; it’s not nearly as dangerous as those things. The question is, and I think we, as a society, particularly in the United States, have gotten lost about this: do we want to encourage or discourage drug use broadly? And I’m talking about alcohol, drugs that are sold illegally, and drugs that are medically prescribed. I think we have made a huge blunder in encouraging the use of drugs of abuse, whether that could be something like Adderall. 

Okay, Adderall is a drug we give to children, and we say they have ADHD [Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder], which frankly is a condition that I think everyone in the world now has who has a phone. And we give them Adderall. What is Adderall? It’s essentially amphetamine. Amphetamine is an addictive and dangerous drug, and we should not be encouraging doctors to prescribe that to children. 

If what we believe about cannabis is, hey, you know, it’s not that dangerous; maybe, you know, alcohol is legal, cannabis should be legal. Then let’s legalize it on that basis. I don’t agree, but that would be an intellectually honest way to do this. What we did recently, what we did with the descheduling, saying, this is medicine, and we need to research it more. To me, that’s just further going down the road of confusing people about what this is.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. But I do want to talk a bit more about Adderall. It’s very interesting. But before we go there, I’ve had a number of people over the years on the show discussing how marijuana has changed over the last 30 years or so. And specifically that they’ve been making much more concentrated variants, and that’s often what’s sold. So what 30 years ago might not have caused psychosis very often, if ever, today it’s like a whole different game just because of the raw concentration. Can you frame that for me a little bit?

Mr. Berenson:

Sure. I mean, that’s absolutely correct. So 50 years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock or whatever, that might’ve been 1 or 2 percent THC. So a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. When I was growing up, you know, in the eighties or the nineties, it might’ve been 5 percent THC. 

Now, if you go into a dispensary, they’re called stores, okay? The budtender will sell you a product that is 20 to 30 percent THC if it’s flower cannabis—so 20 times as much THC in this one joint as there was. But that isn’t even the real problem. The real problem is you can also, it’s not even smoking; it’s inhaling from a vape that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high.

Look, 50 years ago, if you wanted to get enough THC into your body to really get high and potentially get psychotic, you had to smoke a lot, okay? You had to use a bong; otherwise, you’re going to irritate your throat. You know, you kind of had to smoke all day. Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC. And that really is a change. That has made the product a lot more dangerous. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So just, this is interesting because on the one hand, so now these vape products, but you would probably say, right, that that’s not really marijuana now. That’s just, so that could actually be a Schedule II or III, right? Because it’s THC mostly and not marijuana. 

Mr. Berenson:

It could be a schedule three or two to the extent that it has a medical use. So in other words, if we found that THC in its pure form actually, you know, treated condition X or Y, we could approve it for that. And THC in its pure form is actually approved. It’s called Epidiolex for treating seizures in kids. I believe that is the only medical use for which there’s an approved FDA indication. I think it’s fair to say that 99.99 percent of the cannabis consumed in the United States or THC consumed in the United States is not for that condition. So this again is a little bit of a red herring. 

I’m saying that we as a society have to be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do. And when we say don’t stigmatize drug use, why wouldn’t we want to stigmatize drug use? Why wouldn’t we want to stigmatize THC use? And by the way, alcohol too, okay? Listen, I drink, okay? But am I going to claim that alcohol can’t be problematic for people? 

No, of course it can be. Should we have, you know, spirits advertising on television? I don’t think so. I think that was a mistake. You know, the First Amendment may require it. Maybe there’s a way we can dial it back. But should we have higher taxes on alcohol? Sure. This is about all drugs and the way we think about them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Something really struck me. It’s really this discussion, right? The discussion is, should we ever encourage drug use? Because this is something that I’m seeing not just in illicit drug use. I’ve just started covering, for example, the mental health space quite a bit more. And I’m shocked, for example, to discover that the chemical imbalance hypothesis of mental illness is just false, that there’s literally no evidence for it. Who would have guessed?  We all kind of believe that. We’ve all come to believe that, right? And so therefore, a drug can be a solution. Now, it’s sort of unclear how much of a solution these drugs are. But in many cases, these SSRIs [Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] are not even different from placebo in terms of effect, plus having side effects on top of it, right?

Mr. Berenson:

So SSRIs are an interesting discussion and debate. I think that SSRIs get a bad rap because you’re right. The trials that were done on them for the most part were pretty short term. And definitely there are people who when they try to get off them have problems getting off them. I would not classify SSRIs as drugs of abuse because they don’t produce a subjective high and they don’t have street value, and to me that’s a pretty easy way to figure out what drugs are drugs of abuse. 

Nobody really wants to take Prozac, you know? They’ll take it if they’re depressed, and they may get some benefit from it. And you’re right. They might also get benefits just from going outside, from exercising, from doing non-drug things. But I do think the SSRI debate is off, at least from my point of view, to one side of this.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. That’s interesting because now you’re saying there are drugs of abuse and then there are drugs that are… 

Mr. Berenson:

Essentially, that have medical value that people aren’t taking to get high.

Mr. Berenson:

Or maybe there’s a third category that doesn’t have medical value, but people aren’t taking to get high. 

Mr. Berenson:

Unfortunately, there are many drugs for which, you know, I think people would be stunned if they’d read the sort of number of studies that I’ve read, not just about SSRIs, but about medicines in general, how moderate the benefit a medicine has to provide to be approved and that a drug company can then sell, in some cases, for a massive amount of money.  Cancer drugs, for example, often, if you can show that a cancer drug, you know, prolongs someone’s life by a month or two, you can get that drug approved and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment. And, you know, that’s what most cancer drugs are. Diabetes drugs, are they valuable? Yes, they are valuable. But is exercise probably just as valuable or more valuable? Yes. And SSRIs, to me, fit in that category. 

But the antidepressants and another big category of drugs called the antipsychotics—brain drugs—I don’t classify as drugs of abuse because, again, nobody wants to get put on Zyprexa, which is probably the best-known of the antipsychotics. Nobody wants to get put on Thorazine, Haloperidol, or Haldol. These are drugs that are unpleasant for people. And so should we use them cautiously? Should doctors use them cautiously? Yes. Are they drugs that are causing a societal crisis in the same way, let’s say, that opioids or amphetamines are? I don’t think so. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Here’s the thing that struck me about what you said earlier, right? There’s just this, do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use? No. Nor medical drug use. Whether it’s medical or whether it’s abuse, what do you call it? Drugs of abuse or medical drugs, or any drugs for that matter. Or should we be a society where drugs are, you know, used in certain cases when absolutely necessary? That’s a very different framing.

Mr. Berenson:

Yes. And I would absolutely agree with that framing. Absolutely. We, as Americans, and it’s partly because the companies are so aggressive about advertising, they’re so aggressive about marketing to doctors, they’re so good at it, they can make so much money on selling people, again, drugs that have very marginal benefits. And I think, unfortunately, you know, society, sometimes we look for a quick fix. I know with MAHA [Make America Healthy Again], right, part of that is a rebellion against that.

But I think MAHA’s leaders need to be consistent. My joke about this is that everybody hates drugs except for the drugs that they do. And so, you know, don’t tell me that you hate SSRIs, but you love ketamine or psychedelics. You know, those drugs are a lot more dangerous than SSRIs.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, interesting. Why would you say that? That’s interesting.

Mr. Berenson:

I mean, ketamine is highly addictive.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s take psilocybin because that’s an example of something that a lot of people are coming to me and telling me, Jan, you can solve all sorts of mental problems with psilocybin. It’s, of course, done with the right dosages, all that kind of stuff.

Mr. Berenson:

Well, ironically, I mean, antidepressants are what are in the general category called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Those will moderately increase your serotonin over time. What psilocybin does is deliver a massive serotonin hit in a matter of hours. So in some ways, it is just an SSRI, albeit a much stronger one, which is why it has these hallucinogenic effects. Look, I think there are going to be people out there who like these drugs. I personally think they’re quite dangerous in the long run.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, and you think this because of your reading of the literature, right?

Mr. Berenson:

Yes, exactly. And because, look, when there have been efforts to use psilocybin or LSD, and those are basically very similar compounds with very similar effects, you know, people may feel really good once or twice, but the impact tends to wear off and the side effects tend to increase. And, you know, again, I think all these people who hate antidepressants and SSRIs should be aware of how similar the psychedelics are, you know, in terms of the chemical impact on your brain.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. Okay. Going back for one more moment to marijuana. You mentioned you were shocked to discover how little of a pain relief effect it really has in the studies. What are some other things that kind of shocked you in your research when it came to marijuana, like were surprising? 

Mr. Berenson:

So I would say there are two things that, you know, beyond the sort of psychosis connection and this sort of increased link to schizophrenia, which is a terrible disease, a disease I would not wish on, you know, my worst enemy. There’s increasing evidence in the last 10 years that cannabis and THC, and this is not from smoking. This apparently is from the effect of the chemical itself, which can cause really severe heart damage. There is a link myocardial infarction and heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong now. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period. And these are young people, right? So they’re at a very low baseline risk. But the risk is very real and increased.

And then the other is, I think a lot of people think, oh, cannabis, if you’re using it and you’re stoned, you’re just going to drive very slowly and cautiously. For whatever reason, in states that have legalized, they see a lot of high-speed car accidents with cannabis. And whether that’s because people are getting paranoid and just driving really fast, whether it’s because of the intoxication effects, this idea that when you get stoned, you just drive 10 miles an hour. And if anything, your problem is that you’re not moving at all, turns out not to be true. So that one was a surprise for me also. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. Okay. All right. I promised we would go back to talking a bit about Adderall. That’s a very interesting one because I don’t know how many people in this country have taken Adderall, but a lot. Do you know the numbers at all? 

Mr. Berenson:

So around 10 percent of teen boys have an Adderall prescription. I think it’s gone, actually, fortunately, it’s gone down a little bit in the last couple of years, but it’s at that level. I can tell you that on a per dose basis, the U.S. uses about, or per capita basis, the U.S. uses about 30 times as much Adderall as France, 10 times as much as Germany, so we’re just off the charts on this. And there’s a very, very good book called Dopesick, which is about OxyContin and the opioid crisis. 

The writer of the book is Beth Macy. She talks about, you know, the stories of a number of young people, men and women, who became addicted to opioids in West Virginia. That’s where she was covering this, and over and over again she says this person was prescribed Adderall for ADHD as a kid, you know, this girl, same thing. And I thought to myself, does she realize what she’s saying? And she does actually realize what she’s saying because later in the book, she says it explicitly. 

So I think the gateway effect is real, but I think it’s real culturally as much as biochemically. And I think it’s real on an individual level and a societal level. So again, if you give a kid a pill and say, you know, you don’t focus very well, you’re not doing well in school, you’re running around and not listening. And the solution for me is not to run you out like a puppy and make sure that you’re tired enough to sleep and you get a good night’s sleep. And for me not to let you use your phone and for me to tell you we have rules in this house. And I understand that can be hard for people, especially if you’re a single parent. 

But when I say instead, I’m going to give you a pill and it’s going to help you behave. Whether or not that pill gets you high, and Adderall is a stimulant that gets people high; there’s no question about that. Okay. It is a very cocaine-like drug, whether or not it gets you high. The lesson I have taught you is this pill is the way to change and improve your behavior and make you feel better. 

So when that kid, five years later, is at a party and somebody has, you know, a 10-milligram oxy and says, hey, try this. You’ll like it, his first response will not be, this might be dangerous for me. I don’t know where this is going to go. His response is going to be, hey, why not? I take Adderall all the time. And that’s where we are as individuals. And that’s where we are as a society. And that is what we really need to stand up to and say no to. 

Mr. Jekielek:

See, this is so interesting because, you know, there’s something people would describe as an over-prescription crisis, right? Whether it’s around mental health drugs or pain drugs or whatever, right? So those are the sort of the okay drugs, the ones we accept. And then there’s the drugs of abuse, the ones that we don’t accept. And in general, there’s a lot of, I don’t know how what you—

Mr. Berenson:

Except we do accept them. That’s what I mean.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, right. Except that we seem to be on the path to accepting—

Mr. Berenson:

Again, you can go to a doctor and get an Adderall prescription, no problem. There’s been an amazing thing that’s happened in this country in the last five years where the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] has sort of tried to limit the amount of amphetamine that’s legally produced.And so you get these spot shortages of amphetamine where adults are driving around between pharmacies trying to get their prescriptions filled. I mean, what better proof is there that this is an addictive drug? 

But we are all over the map on this. And again, what we did recently with cannabis, what the president did just makes it worse. I am calling for sort of like a broad rethinking of this. And I understand what you’re saying that you can think about this even more broadly and say we have become too addicted to medicines as a crutch instead of trying to live our lives in healthier ways.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is the kind of thing I’m thinking as we’re speaking here. Are there any safe drugs that you came across?

Mr. Berenson:

Look, I think statins are pretty safe. I know there are actually some people who would disagree with that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, there are some people that vehemently disagree with you.

Mr. Berenson:

I know, but when you look at studies that contain thousands and thousands of people followed for years, you see a significant decrease in death. Oftentimes, these are people who’ve had a heart attack already, so you know they’re at risk. But if you can reduce cardiovascular mortality significantly in that population, they’re going to live longer. So that’s a good thing. It looks to me like the GLPs [glucagon-like peptides] are pretty safe. 

I haven’t read the data on those to the extent that I’m really comfortable saying that, but it looks to me like the GLPs are pretty safe. And look, some of the stuff that we’ve done with cancer medicines in the last few years, some of these drugs really do improve life expectancy and do so with relatively few side effects. If you’re really sick, sometimes you need medicine. I’m not a Christian Scientist. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I understand that blindness is a side effect of the GLPs at a higher rate than a lot of people are led to believe. 

Mr. Berenson:

So, look, again, this is something where I’m not like, I just don’t have the data. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s more just, it’s more like when I hear about, I hear all sorts of prescribing stories in all sorts of areas where the person wasn’t given the disclosure that, yes, you know, it’s rare, but you could be blind if you take this. And if I knew that there’s a one in 10,000 chance or whatever it is, right, I might, you know, okay, I’ll stick with being fat. You know, maybe you would make that decision if you really knew that, right? 

Mr. Berenson:

Now, listen, if it’s one in a million, you know, I mean, we all get on planes, right? You cannot say, I mean, vaccines are a good example of this. So the mRNAs, the COVID vaccines, I was vehemently against giving those to children, young adults.

Mr. Jekielek:

I remember, yes. You became very popular and unpopular at the same time. 

Mr. Berenson:

Yes, but that was because I was very, very aware that we didn’t know and didn’t have any way to know what the side effects might be.

Mr. Jekielek:

And the benefits were so limited.

Mr. Berenson:

And the benefits were so limited. Does that mean, you know, you and I were talking briefly before the start of this about your family’s experience with the rabies vaccine, helping invent the rabies vaccine. Does that mean that I don’t think people should get the rabies vaccine if they’re bitten by a potentially rabid raccoon? No, of course not. Rabies is a fatal illness. It’s fatal to almost everyone who contracts it. And, you know, even if the vaccine comes with risk, that’s a risk you have to take. You know, smallpox, same thing, right? 

So the key is that public health has sacrificed an enormous amount of credibility on this because they haven’t been willing to say honest things like that. And they’ve become so deeply in love with vaccines and with their own interventions and won’t acknowledge side effects. So that means that, you know, people get suspicious even of stuff that might have very reasonable side effects for the benefit it provides because you don’t feel like you can trust the people you should trust the most, your doctors, because I think the people in this sort of public health establishment tend to, they tend to, A, they want to prescribe as much as possible and B, they want to not be honest about who is actually at risk.

So a classic example of this very recently was the monkeypox epidemic and the monkeypox vaccine. Who was at risk for monkeypox? You know, basically, if you weren’t out there in some bathhouse having anonymous gay sex, you were at very, very, very low risk for monkeypox. And that’s what they should have said, and that’s who they should have tried to, the public health tried to be honest, you know, and get vaccinated if they wanted to get anyone vaccinated. 

Really, this was a, you know, an issue that behavioral changes, modest behavioral changes could solve. But you saw that for a period of time in 2022, the public health establishment wasn’t being honest until actually what happened. And this to some extent happened with HIV too, was the gay community said, listen, you need to, you need to like put the focus where it needs to be on this. And, and like, not because the people who need to change their behavior are not hearing the message clearly because you’re pretending that everyone’s at risk here. And so, you know, public health has done that too many times recently.

Mr. Jekielek:

And well, and a case in point, I think, is the HepB vaccine at birth. Like, I mean, it’s a sexually transmitted disease vaccine. Most of these children, why should someone get it at birth?

Mr. Berenson:

And if your parent has been tested, if your mother’s been responsible enough to get herself tested and been negative, which she’s almost certain to be, unless, again, she’s having sex with a drug user or is using drugs herself, she’s very unlikely to be positive. She gets herself tested, does the right thing, and isn’t at risk. Why are we subjecting a child, an infant, to this vaccine, even if the risk is very, very low? 

And I do think the HepB vaccine risk is very, very low when they are at zero risk, essentially, of getting hepatitis B. And the public health people don’t really have a good answer for that, right? That Europe, these other countries, they are more honest. And the reason in the U.S. is, well, we can’t stigmatize. In this case, as in so many cases, it means we can’t be honest.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. Develop that a little more for me. That is a very thoughtful construction. Explain that to me.

Mr. Berenson:

So I’m very pro-stigma. Okay. We stigmatize drinking and driving. And guess what? There’s less drinking and driving. We stigmatize domestic violence. You know, 70 years ago, if the cops showed up at your door and you slapped your wife, you didn’t get arrested. Okay, and sometimes worse than that. Okay, that is not okay anymore. Should never have been okay, but it’s not okay anymore. And that’s good. There’s, I think, less domestic violence. And there’s certainly, there’s certainly, you know, less acceptance of this as a behavior.

Okay, we stigmatized cigarette smoking. The greatest public health victory of the last 50 years was that we’re going to get people to realize that cigarettes are addictive, that the Marlboro Man, in the end, winds up dying of lung cancer or having a heart attack. You don’t want to be the Marlboro Man. And cigarette use went way down. Now, actually, because of nicotine vapes and nicotine gum, it’s starting to creep up again, or at least overall nicotine use is creeping up. 

But why aren’t we stigmatizing drug use? Why aren’t we stigmatizing, to some extent, risky sexual behaviors? A little more complicated? Because, I mean, people are definitely going to have sex. And so you do want them, if they’re going to have sex, to have it in a better way. And so I think there’s a legitimate argument about abstinence-based education versus using condoms and being healthier. But with drug use, drug use is very culturally determined. 

And here’s yet another example I think people don’t think enough about. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, China had such a problem with opioids, with opium, that its society essentially collapsed. Well, there is essentially no opioid use in China now. And that tells me that there wasn’t something inherent to the Chinese character or Chinese genetics that caused opium use to be a terrible problem. It was a cultural issue, and the culture has been corrected. 

In the U.S., we’ve gone exactly the opposite way. So we can stigmatize and discourage behavior. That doesn’t mean we’re ever going to eliminate it. There’s always going to be people who want to try drugs. But there’s a large group of people in the middle who are persuadable, and we should be trying to persuade them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Totally. And I mean, what you’re saying seems like such an obvious thing. But it’s like, in a way, our society is a little bit upside down about a whole range of issues in this vein. Like if you’re on the streets in San Francisco on drugs, there are people all around you basically saying, we can’t interfere with this person’s decision-making. That’s their right.

Mr. Berenson:

Yes, it’s your right. A, it’s your right ultimately to kill yourself on the street. I mean, I guess in some theoretical way, it is your right. The problem is that as a society, we’re not really willing to look that in the face and say, okay, you know what? You want to kill yourself? We’re not going to try to help you. So the libertarian argument breaks down for two core reasons. A; we are a compassionate society, so ultimately, with these people, their problems become our problems. And B; these folks, addicts, create problems because they cannot function. 

They are nothing more, essentially, than machines for consuming drugs. They can’t work. They can’t parent. And so they’re very, very destructive. And so even if we don’t want to be compassionate, even if I say, you know what, you created this problem, I still have to deal with the fact that you’re on the street urinating and defecating and potentially trying to hurt me or hurt my kids, that you’re breaking into cars, that you may be violent, that your behavior is completely antisocial. It’s all well and good to say, you know what, if I want to smoke heroin once, why should anybody get in the way? 

But the problem is a significant number of people who smoke heroin once will go on to become these addicts who have problems that become all our problems. And so I think as a society, and it’s very, very hard to fix addiction once it gets deep. And really, the only person who can fix it is the addict himself or herself, which is something else we have forgotten. So the solution is to stop it on the way in and to discourage drug use, penalize drug use, and criminalize drug use. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So one last, one last sort of big thought about this: we do this exactly backward. We do everything possible at the back end to save people but nothing—or not enough—at the front end to discourage them from using. We should discourage them at the beginning strongly while acknowledging this hard fact that when they become addicted, in the end, there is not much that we can do, and they must decide to stop.  See, it’s fascinating. I didn’t expect this interview was going to go in this direction, but, for example, you know, one example of legalizing drugs, which is touted often, is Portugal. Okay. And the way I, what I understand they did there, right, they legalized the drugs. 

But the other thing that they did is they put serious requirements on people, right, to basically have social support. You had, like, it was not an option to not have it. And, in fact, you know, the inference from that, that again, I’ve read and I’ve talked to a number of people about is that it’s that social support, which is the most powerful tool to have people not fall into addiction or stay out of past addiction and so forth, right? And that’s because we didn’t have that component here. People are saying, well, legalize it, let people do what they want, but they don’t have the one thing that they actually need.

Mr. Berenson:

Well, I would say it’s even more complicated than that. And I think Portugal has begun to reconsider its decriminalization. I think Portugal has begun to reconsider decriminalization because, look, you need a society that is pretty conservative, which Portugal actually used to be, even more conservative than it is now, that will sort of societally stigmatize use. And then you can say to these people, we will support you, but you have to go, as you said, you have to go into treatment. 

Unfortunately, a lot of people, as we’ve seen, as we saw in Oregon with Measure 110, which was the decriminalization, and did supposedly try to offer support in a society where there’s not a lot of pressure to get treatment, simply won’t go into treatment. I mean, amazingly, they will just walk away. And so, again, I think that libertarians don’t want to acknowledge the reality of what drug use does to users a lot. So they’ve come up with this sort of convenience, we’re going to medicalize the back end of this, we’re going to give people support. And unfortunately, it just does not work a lot of the time. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk a little bit about COVID time. Okay. Where do you stand on the COVID vaccines now? I recently had Robert Redfield, former CDC director, on the show. He wants them removed from the market. 

Mr. Berenson:

Yes. I mean, I think at this point there’s no need for them. Omicron and all the sorts of sequence variants are clearly quite mild. We don’t have any idea about the use of mRNA over a long period of time, repeated dosing for people, or whether it’s harmful. And, you know, everyone’s been exposed. So, I mean, these appear to be less effective and potentially more dangerous than flu vaccines. And flu vaccines are essentially useless. So I would say the, which is, you know, which is an unfortunate fact that people, again, in the public health establishment just don’t want to be honest about.But you can look at the data, and it’s very compelling. 

So, yes, I think there’s no more point in having these vaccines. Now, will they ever be pulled? I doubt it, because that would be an astonishing admission. You know, first of all, President Trump’s Warp Speed was his, and he views it as an achievement. I think it would raise very serious questions about the approval process and whether or not we should have encouraged boosting, or mandated, you know, people in late 2021. So I don’t see that as a practical thing ever happening.

Mr. Jekielek:

But just because too many people will get thrown under the bus?

Mr. Berenson:

Yes, I think so.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, well, not thrown under the bus. Too many people will face accountability.

Mr. Berenson:

Which I think would raise too many questions. Most Americans got the mRNAs, and most teenagers, you know, most parents got their teen kids the mRNAs, not necessarily younger kids. I think the numbers were, you know, certainly under eight, they were much lower. And so I think if you pulled these, people would say to themselves, what just happened here? You know, five years ago, you told me I had to get this. Now you’re telling me it’s too dangerous to be on the market. So what has happened instead, essentially, is that they’ve just died on the vine. The sales are just beyond weak. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I was wondering whether I was going to go here, but I think I am just for fun. So I’ve talked to a lot of COVID, let’s call it COVID-era doctors, people who treated, you know, let’s probably collectively hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people for COVID. One of the drugs that I know you weren’t a fan of, they’ve been a fan of, and I’ve done, I’ve read the literature, you know, enough of the literature to be convinced that it’s good, decent, that it’s been helpful. It’s ivermectin I’m talking about here. And I just know so many doctors that treated so many people successfully. So have you changed your thinking around ivermectin at all?

Mr. Berenson:

I have not. I mean, and I’ll say this, it’s funny. You were the one sort of arguing to me a few minutes ago, hey, we over-prescribe stuff. Most medicines don’t really work very well. I mean, I think ivermectin is essentially in that category. Listen, I think it’s a great anti-parasitic. I mean, it largely eliminated river blindness in Africa. That’s a fantastic achievement. Why people suddenly seized on it as the cure for COVID, I do not know. 

The observational data is essentially meaningless. The randomized control trials that were done—and there were a couple done—did not show it. worked, and once you get to that point, I think, and you don’t have a great mechanism of action or, you know, a thesis as to why it would work, I think that’s kind of the end of it. There’s just not a good reason to believe that ivermectin was ever that beneficial for COVID.

And now what I hear is the same people who are doing that, maybe including some of the same doctors you’ve had on your show, are talking about ivermectin as a cure for cancer. Now, this is just insanity, okay? There’s no randomized control data on this at all. There are people out there who are pushing it, who will prescribe it to people who may have a few weeks or months where, for some reason, their cancer seems to be recovering, because cancer can wax and wane even in the late stages. And then they get sick and they die. 

And by the way, they don’t tell you about the people who had a negative effect from taking their ivermectin for their cancers. They just tell you these anonymous case studies that no one is checking. So no, I do not believe in ivermectin as a drug for COVID or cancer. I believe in it as a great drug for river blindness.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Well, that’s interesting that you mention it. It was just because I worked in Madagascar, worked in a number of places where ivermectin was used for this purpose, right? I knew it was a very unusually safe drug. It’s been demonstrated to be wildly safe compared to almost any other drug. 

Mr. Berenson:

But not completely safe. People can get headaches. They can have eye problems. They can have indigestion.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, sure. I’m not saying completely. I’m just saying, compared to almost anything else out there, very safe. So anyway, I knew it was weird that they were touting it as being sort of a problem, like damaging, harming people.

Mr. Berenson:

Yes. I mean, again, that became the public health establishment sort of having a fit, right? And I believe, by the way, in 2020, when there were no other treatments, you know, no other drug treatments, that, hey, if people want to try it, that’s fine. You know, now that, again, COVID is so manageable, I don’t know why anyone would take it. I don’t think people are taking it for COVID anymore. And that’s why I think this sort of group of people who fell in love with it, and not just fell in love with it, but financially fell in love with it, are promoting it for something else. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s a, yes, I mean, I think in the end, there are probably about 20, like just by my rough count, there’s about 20 different ways to treat COVID that didn’t involve vaccination. 

Mr. Berenson:

Yes. 

Mr. Jekielek:

All of which were kind of discounted. 

Mr. Berenson:

Yes. I mean, you know, steroids. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, well, steroids are for the later stage of the disease. I’m talking about when you’re first getting it, you know, hydroxychloroquine. I don’t know what your thoughts are on hydroxychloroquine.

Mr. Berenson:

That I am more negative on, actually, because I think it can cause heart problems.

Mr. Jekielek:

Again, it has more potential side effects and so forth. So you also think hydroxychloroquine didn’t have an effect?

Mr. Berenson:

No, again, from what I saw. And that wasn’t like a… 

Mr. Jekielek:

What about fenbendazole? That was another one that was like a…

Mr. Berenson:

Why is that suddenly a treatment for cancer when three years ago it was a treatment for COVID? I just don’t understand this. So, I mean, you’re sort of proving my point that everybody hates drugs except the drugs that they like.

Mr. Jekielek:

I see what you’re saying. Yes, I mean, I think early on in the pandemic, people were just looking at things that would help people overcome the disease in the early stage, right? And that’s the most, many of the doctors that I’ve talked to just figured out, hey, there’s a high percentage of people observationally that are suddenly, you know, getting their lung capacity back or just simply not getting sick once they get this or whatever. And there were, like I said, probably about 20 different treatments ultimately that I saw had observational…

Mr. Berenson:

There was an antidepressant that they tried that had good early results and then failed. Yeah, there was a whole bunch of stuff.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what would be the process in your mind, given what we saw with COVID and the various failures of health policy? Another, some sort of pandemic arrives, whether it’s from a lab or elsewhere, right?

Mr. Berenson:

We can both agree. I think we both agree COVID came out of a lab.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, what’s the approach? Like, it seems to me the approach of looking for, you know, drugs or approaches that have, you know, some sort of plausible method of action and seeing if they’re helpful for whatever reason is probably a good idea.

Mr. Berenson:

Yes, of course, and we should try to do that quickly. I mean, the British actually were good at that with COVID. I think the National Health Service actually got people into sort of randomized trials in a way that the U.S. system, which is more fragmented and more profit-driven, didn’t do as good a job of, in part because, you know, people were willing to try repurposed, you know, off-label drugs. And, you know, the ivermectin backers are certainly correct that, you know, drug companies are not interested in helping find cheap drugs and get them to market. That I can’t dispute. 

There’s a bigger question about COVID, which is for 20 years before COVID, we had a plan. And the plan was if this is a respiratory virus with a lethality of, let’s say, 1 percent, which COVID did not have, by the way, we’re going to treat it as a medical problem. And yes, that could be a lot of deaths. It could be scary for people, but we are not going to shut society down because ultimately we are not going to be able to stop a virus anyway. And the disruption to society, the second-order disruption, is going to be worse than the virus itself. 

And when COVID happened, for whatever reason, the public health authorities threw all of that out the window, even as it became clear that COVID was only dangerous to, you know, very old or very sick people. Okay. And listen, is that a slight exaggeration? It’s a slight exaggeration, but most reasonably healthy people under 65 were at very low risk from COVID. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You shouldn’t, as an approach, destroy the global economy to deal with a medical issue of this nature.

Mr. Berenson:

That’s correct, and we knew that. And we shouldn’t destroy children’s education or scare them and make them more anxious and put them on screens even more than they are. COVID was not good for the mental health of particularly teenagers. And they are still suffering from that. And so that’s the first thing we have to remember. And why the public health establishment went that way, I believe, although I don’t know that anyone’s ever going to find the paper, the email saying this, that because Tony Fauci was concerned very early on that this had come out of a lab, he wanted control over the response. And he wanted a very aggressive response, and he hoped for a vaccine that would sort of solve this, and he hoped to be the hero and distract people from what had happened and where it had come from. 

Can I prove that? I cannot. I just believe it is consistent with some public evidence that we have and with the way they behaved, because otherwise I don’t know why they cracked the way they did. And I do think it will be, you know, listen, if the Chinese stop playing with these viruses, hopefully we won’t have another one of these for another hundred years. But if it does happen again, it will be very interesting to see if people panic again. or if they are more skeptical of a shutdown. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, I think that people in general are way more skeptical. That’s my observation in general, talking to people across a broad swath of society. But I’m not convinced that a lot of the public health bureaucracy is sufficiently skeptical.

Mr. Berenson:

They love to be in charge. They love lockdowns. They love bird flu. They are very aggressive. And they don’t seem to have learned very much. What they’ve learned is that we can’t let Republicans be in the government because they’re not going to let us do what we want.

Mr. Jekielek:

Listen, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Do you have a final thought as we finish?

Mr. Berenson:

I’m still sort of trying to articulate my views about drugs in a bigger way. I think it’s a very culturally important moment. I think the libertarian case is easy, right? Like, it should all be like alcohol. It should all be legal. That has been a disastrous failure in practice. What I’m trying to do and what I may do in a book, what I hope to do in a book, is articulate in a sort of consistent philosophical way why it is that we need to be firm about drug use, even though we’re never going to prohibit alcohol again. And that’s why stigma is a good thing. Why drug use is not societal neutral, and we need to tell people that. And that’s what I’m hoping to do in the next few months, year or two.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Alex Berenson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Berenson:

Thanks for having me.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.