Alex Berenson, TELL YOUR CHILDREN
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[0:49]I'm here today with Alex Berenson, an award-winning novelist,
[0:52]a number one New York Times bestselling author, and a former New York Times reporter.
[0:56]His latest book, Tell Your Children, The Truth About marijuana, mental illness and violence,
[1:00]is his second non-fiction book. His debut novel, The Faithful Spy,
[1:04]based on his time reporting in Iraq, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He's written a
[1:09]total of 12 novels and two non-fiction books. The Yale graduate, Alex currently lives in the Hudson
[1:14]Valley with his wife and children. So welcome, Alex. Thanks for coming on, mom. It's been a
[1:17]time to read books. So please, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk about Tell Your
[1:22]Children, The Truth About marijuana, mental illness, and violence, which is such an amazing
[1:27]service you're doing by collecting all this information and research about what us parents
[1:32]should know and what we need to inform our children. It's super important. So thanks for doing
[1:36]all that work. Well, thank you. I was, you know, I was reported for The New York Times and then I
[1:39]became a spin novelist and then I had some children on my wife. I had children.
[1:45]Take credit, it's all right. And you know, she really got me involved and interested in this topic
[1:50]because she's a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, which means she deals with the criminally
[1:54]mentally ill. And she, so many cases, she saw a cannabis you seem to be a factor in the person's
[2:01]mental illness. And, you know, honestly, I didn't really believe her at first. As I explained in the
[2:06]book, I, you know, I like everybody else. I heard about Reefer Madness, the movie. And I just assumed
[2:12]that, you know, cannabis really was pretty harmless. You know, I'd use it a few times growing up and
[2:17]didn't particularly like it, but didn't particularly carry their way. And so, you know, this
[2:21]went back and forth between us for, for really a couple of years. And I was, you know, I'm embarrassed
[2:27]to say mansplaining things, probably that I knew nothing about. And finally, she got tired of me
[2:31]talking about this, you know, she's the one who has the fellowship at, you know, Columbia. And
[2:36]she's the one who has all the medical training. And she's the one who sees all these people.
[2:40]And she said, you know, you really should look at what the studies say. And I did. And I thought to myself,
[2:44]you know, this is a story that is as important as any story I ever worked on at The New York Times.
[2:49]And nobody knows about it. So it became tell your children.
[2:53]So what should we tell our children?
[2:56]You tell your children summarize this intense work of brilliant research into a couple of sentences,
[3:01]please cannabis is not safer than alcohol for adolescents. It's less safe. And certainly for
[3:05]adolescents in New York City, it's less safe because the number one risk of alcohol for adolescents
[3:10]really is involves driving, right? I mean, you can, you can certainly, you can, if you really want
[3:15]to, you can kill yourself drinking alcohol. There's no question you can, you know, put yourself
[3:18]in the liver failure. But really for adolescents, the risk is drinking and driving, which is
[3:22]obviously not as big a risk in New York. For cannabis, the risks are less physical and more psychiatric.
[3:28]So cannabis is a neurotoxin. THC is a neurotoxin. And for vulnerable people, especially if they start
[3:37]using in their teens, it can not just impair memory or motivation or cognition, but it can actually
[3:44]produce psychosis. And psychosis is the medical term for a break from reality. It's, you know,
[3:50]hallucinations or delusions or severe paranoia. I mean, I think we all know that cannabis or anybody
[3:56]who's used it knows that cannabis can cause paranoia. You know, that that happened so frequently
[4:01]that, you know, in states where it's legal, people will tell you, oh, this strain is less likely
[4:05]to make you paranoid that it just for many people comes along with the high. But what people don't
[4:10]realize because there's been a really aggressive and very successful marketing and I would say
[4:15]propaganda campaign around this is that the paranoia is a symbol of some, it's a symptom of something
[4:19]much more serious, which is, you know, psychosis. Now, not everybody who uses cannabis and not
[4:25]even a majority of people who use are going to suffer psychosis. But some people are. And the younger
[4:31]you start, the greater your risk, you know, 14 is better than 12, 16 is better than 14, 18 is
[4:37]better than 16. Really, this is not a drug people should be using before their 20s if they're going
[4:42]to use it. And the other thing that parents need to know, this is true. Even if you're only in your,
[4:47]I would say, you know, late 30s, but certainly if you're older than that is that it is really true
[4:52]that the cannabis and THC products that are being used today are totally different than what you
[4:58]might have used as an adolescent or, you know, or a college or in your 20s. It is a different world.
[5:04]So cannabis in the 70s, most of it was one or two percent THC and it had a measurable amount
[5:10]of CBD. And we can talk about what THC is and what CBD is. But the, the, the short version of that
[5:15]story is CBD is non psychoactive and it helps counteract the effects of THC. That's what the science
[5:22]basically says now. These days, if you go into a dispensary and you buy cannabis, it's likely
[5:29]to be 25% THC, no CBD. But even worse than that, a lot of people prefer to use what's called wax
[5:36]or shatter or edibles. This is all just pure THC or near a pure THC that's been extracted from
[5:42]the plant. So wax and shatter are, they, and it does look like wax is that it's a sort of semi
[5:47]synthetic GUI product that gets extracted from the plant that you smoke. It's basically just smoking
[5:51]THC. And this is one reason when people say this is a natural, it's a plant that can't hurt
[5:56]I say, do you, do you know what people are actually using these days? And edibles are obviously
[6:02]edible and they get processed through your liver into a more psychoactive form of the drug.
[6:06]So, okay, this is a long background. But in two sentences, what I would say to a parent of an
[6:12]adolescent, three sentences, one, don't think that this is safer than alcohol. It's not, it's not a
[6:18]good substitute for alcohol to tell your child to delay using this. And even if you used it,
[6:26]understand that it's a different drug. And three, with the synthetics and with the edibles,
[6:32]know that the sort of classic signs of the, you know, the smell, the red eyes, they may not be there.
[6:38]So your child might be using a lot of THC. And you, you know, your thing, oh, I don't smell any
[6:44]pot in the house. No, you don't. But it doesn't mean that your child is not really hurting
[6:48]him or herself. Okay, now I'm totally terrified. As the mother who has 12 year old kids. After
[6:54]doing all this research, spanning 150 years of history and science, what do you see is the
[6:59]link between marijuana and mental illness? Because in chapter 11, you say the link between marijuana
[7:03]and mental illness is controversial, but the link between marijuana and violence isn't. So how does
[7:09]violence in this psychosis like to explain? Okay. So, so there's sort of three issues here.
[7:15]On one, the science is unequivocal. And that is cannabis can produce transient psychotic episodes.
[7:20]There's just no question about that. If you give people THC in a lab, some of them will get psychotic.
[7:25]And they won't, they won't stay psychotic forever. Okay. B, can cannabis produce permanent
[7:31]psychosis in people, permanent psychotic conditions in people who otherwise wouldn't have
[7:35]developed those. And I think we are pretty close to proving that in a tobacco-eat lung cancer way.
[7:41]In other words, we're never going to prove it through a randomized trial because you couldn't do
[7:45]that. It's illegal to, it's both on illegal and unethical to test the drug to see if it harms
[7:51]people. So you have to look at this epidemiology and all this stuff. And we're pretty, we're pretty
[7:55]close on that. Okay. There's a ton of evidence that has accumulated, especially in the last 10 years,
[8:01]that people who use, especially, again, especially if they're using when they're younger,
[8:04]especially if they're using a lot, really increase their risk for schizophrenia. So if you do
[8:09]the math, if you say, well, you're increasing your risk, well, if your risk goes from 1% to 5%,
[8:14]that means that if 100 people use, they're going to be four extra cases. So to me,
[8:18]increasing risk is the same as causing. And we can argue about that. Okay. So, so that's A and B.
[8:23]C is the most controversial part of the book. And it's really the part that I talk the least
[8:27]about because it is complicated. And I don't want the book to get, you know, pinned as a
[8:33]refer madness when there's so much else that's important to talk about here. Psychosis causes
[8:37]violence. This isn't, this is a fact. Okay. It is, it has been demonstrated in epidemiological
[8:44]study after epidemiological study. Unfortunately, our prisons and prisons all over the world
[8:49]are filled with people with schizophrenia. The best studies show that people who have schizophrenia
[8:54]are about 20 times as likely to commit homicide as healthy people. And, you know, just in New York,
[9:00]a few days ago, there was a terrible crime in Chinatown where a man who almost certainly was
[9:05]psychotic based on the, you know, what the police have been saying about him, beat four people
[9:09]to death with a metal pole. Before homeless people, yes, he was homeless. And it was, you know,
[9:14]it was random. It was incredibly aggressive. He was ranting and raving, according to the police,
[9:19]that all stinks of psychosis. Okay. Psychosis causes violence. Unfortunately, advocates for
[9:24]the mentally ill hate talking about this. So what they say is they say, people with mental
[9:30]illness are not more likely to be violent than people in the general population. That is true.
[9:35]If you include people with sort of mild depression and mild anxiety, that's half the
[9:39]country. It's literally half the country. So, so that hides the real risk. The real risk is in
[9:45]people with psychosis. Psychosis is a terrible illness. And it makes people do terrible things.
[9:51]Unfortunately, cannabis causes psychosis. It is reasonable to make a link between people becoming
[9:58]psychotic as a result of cannabis.
[10:00]use, and people becoming violent as a result of psychosis.
[10:03]But the link is actually closer than that.
[10:06]There is because the kind of psychosis that cannabis produces is so heavy on paranoia.
[10:11]And psychiatrists, they've done a lot of work about this issue because it's so important,
[10:16]right?
[10:17]If you think about modern society, one of the most important things as a modern society
[10:23]or as any society is the prevention of violence.
[10:25]So people spend a lot of time studying the causes of violence.
[10:29]I mean, even spend time studying what specific delusions or, you know, paranoid ideation
[10:36]makes people violent who have severe mental illness.
[10:40]And it's clear that paranoia is a driver of severe violence.
[10:45]So you put all of this together and then you look at the individual cases and it becomes harder
[10:49]and harder to argue that, oh, this is nonsense.
[10:53]And, you know, just I get stoned and I sit around and, you know, I just, the only thing
[10:57]I murdered is a bag of Doritos.
[10:59]Okay.
[11:00]True.
[11:01]You are not somebody who's consuming 100 milligrams of THC a day with an underlying mental
[11:06]illness.
[11:07]Okay.
[11:08]You don't have schizophrenia.
[11:10]You don't have bipolar disorder with psychosis.
[11:13]The violence is often around those, you know, unfortunately, it's around those people.
[11:18]And so this is a drug that can cause mental illness.
[11:21]It can cause paranoia and it can worsen the kind of mental illness that's likely to produce
[11:26]violence in people with mental illness.
[11:29]You put all that together.
[11:30]You have a bad combination.
[11:31]Now, the Canvas Lummy hates talking about this.
[11:34]They hate it because, well, they hate it for, they hate it because they know that if people
[11:40]really understood this, it would be bad for efforts to legalize.
[11:43]Now, by the way, you can know this and say, okay, look, in one case in a thousand or one
[11:48]case in 10,000, there's going to be something bad that happens to a regular user.
[11:52]And we could debate what the numbers might be.
[11:55]Is that like Richard Kirk?
[11:57]Yes, Richard Kirk.
[11:58]So that's a really interesting case because he didn't really have preexisting mental
[12:02]illness, but he had a vulnerability.
[12:03]And this is one of the many stories you tell about specific people that makes this book
[12:07]more narrative, not just like a fact-based frenzy, but like a very compelling narrative,
[12:13]including stories like Richard and his wife Christine and calling 911.
[12:16]So, so, yes.
[12:17]Richard Kirk is a guy.
[12:18]It's a very interesting case because he's somebody who had a transient episode of Canvas
[12:22]psychosis.
[12:23]And that, Richard, in a prison in Colorado, talked to him for several hours.
[12:27]It's interesting to talk to somebody who's killed another human being because, especially
[12:30]for a long conversation, I don't know what it would have been like to be a lawyer who
[12:33]had to represent one of these people because it's like, it's normal, it's normal, it's
[12:38]normal, and then he says something's like, you killed somebody, like you shot your
[12:43]wife in the head with your child there.
[12:45]You're actually not normal, like there's a, you've done something that almost no one
[12:51]has done.
[12:52]And, you know, but if Richard is normal, and let's just say anyone else out there who
[12:58]believes themselves to be normal, and you have an episode of psychosis caused by a drug
[13:03]that you take once, and you commit horrendous crimes.
[13:06]And then you never take the drug again, are you not normal?
[13:09]So, it's a really good question, right?
[13:13]So he has a family history of psychosis, believe he was a brother who has schizophrenia.
[13:18]He had used cannabis in the past, and he tended to make him paranoid, okay?
[13:22]So he has these sort of red flags, and he's a bit of a scammer, okay?
[13:28]He's an opiate addict, not a severe, not like he's shooting heroin, but he's got a
[13:33]problem with pills, okay?
[13:34]He's got a back problem with pills.
[13:36]He's in my withdrawal, and you know, this is all in the book, but he goes, he goes and
[13:40]he gets himself a cannabis candy, an edible, which is a more dangerous form.
[13:45]He goes, once you eat that candy, you are on the ride.
[13:48]You know, if you're smoking a joint, you get high, you get too high, maybe you just forget
[13:54]to smoke anymore among other things, but you can titrate it, is really the pharmaceutical
[13:59]term.
[14:00]With an edible, you're on the ride, and the joke about edible is nothing's happening, nothing's
[14:05]happening, I'm going to take another one, nothing's happening, take me to the emergency
[14:09]room, right?
[14:10]Like, that's really what, and that's what happened to Richard Kirk.
[14:13]So Richard Kirk is a guy, he's got family hystere psychosis, he's got this, you know, he's
[14:18]had these issues with this drug on the rare occasions when he's used it.
[14:21]He's in mild obit withdrawal, he takes an edible, and he gets extremely psychotic.
[14:27]By all accounts, he starts ranting and raving, the world is ending, he jumps out of a window
[14:32]onto his deck, he jumps back into the house, he's got three kids, and he's got a gun
[14:37]in the house, and you know, does this happen if he doesn't have a gun in the house?
[14:41]Probably not.
[14:42]He stabs his wife to death, who knows, but he has a gun in the house, he gets the gun,
[14:46]his wife is calling 911, you know, these are nice middle class people in Denver, the cops
[14:52]are not treating him as a priority, and then he walks up this wife and he shoots her in
[14:56]the head.
[14:57]He just kills her, and you know, he destroyed his life, he obviously killed her, he's
[15:02]never going to see his kids again most likely, he's in jail for 30 years, and why did he
[15:07]do that?
[15:08]Well, if he hadn't been psychotic, he wouldn't have done that.
[15:10]No, I'm not.
[15:11]Listen, maybe he would have been violent in some other way, you know, and maybe, but
[15:15]he wouldn't have done that to her that night.
[15:19]And now he, you know, now he's saying again, so in some way, so Richard in some ways
[15:24]is, he's both a good example of the dangers of cannabis and a bad example because his,
[15:31]what he did is kind of a one-off rather than somebody who had sort of long pre-existing
[15:35]mental illness that was worsened, but at the same time, you know, if we expose cannabis
[15:40]to millions of people, there's going to be more Richard Chris, and there are more Richard
[15:44]Kirk's out there.
[15:45]So, you know, it's in the book, you see these cases, they just pop up and the media doesn't
[15:50]make a big deal out of it.
[15:51]You know, usually, in part because these are not, well, I mean, the Kirk case got a lot
[15:55]of attention because again, this was a, you know, nice middle class family, but even
[15:59]in that case, there's not a lot of mystery.
[16:01]There's rarely mystery to a psychosis crime because when you're out of your mind, you don't
[16:07]really usually spend a lot of time trying to escape or hide the crime or, you know,
[16:12]or, or, I mean, maybe you run away, but often sometimes people don't even do that.
[16:16]You know, the first case, the most terrible case of all the cases in the book is the story
[16:22]that opens the book of Ryan Athay, who is a, you know, a poor woman in Australia who has
[16:28]lots of stressors in her life.
[16:29]She's got, I think nine children by, you know, six or seven men, she's a, she's a, I don't
[16:37]think she's Aboriginal.
[16:38]I don't think that's the term.
[16:39]She's what's called the Torres Strait Islander, which is a poor community, you know,
[16:43]it's a marginalized community in Australia.
[16:45]And she's all these problems.
[16:47]And she's smoking cannabis every day for more than a decade.
[16:52]And she's slowly losing her mind.
[16:54]And in the fall of 2014, she starts to recognize that things are going wrong.
[16:59]And she actually stops using now, unfortunately, that probably put her in withdrawal.
[17:03]And at this point, her illness, but she's in her mid thirties.
[17:06]This is not a woman who's ever been hospitalized before.
[17:08]I don't think she's, you know, she's got depression, she's got stress.
[17:11]But by, at some point, she became openly psychotic and started behaving in ways that
[17:16]the neighbors recognized was odd.
[17:18]She, she took all the furniture out of the house, you know, it's interesting to talk about
[17:22]the narrative in the book because the first draft of this book, I wrote it, and my editor,
[17:27]I think correctly said this was a mistake.
[17:29]He said, I wrote it from her point of view.
[17:32]So it's written from inside her head as she's losing her mind.
[17:36]And my editor was like, this is just too much.
[17:37]Like this book is going to be too controversial, too difficult to convince people to take
[17:40]it seriously.
[17:41]You cannot write it this way.
[17:42]I could be your next novel.
[17:43]I, I, my, it's hard to say, hard to see written like 57 Noah's.
[17:48]Hard to live inside these people's heads, but, but, but, but, but Reyna Thade lost her mind.
[17:55]And one night, her two older kids, and yeah, went out to, and this is a, it's Christmas
[18:02]time in Australia.
[18:03]It's summer.
[18:04]It's hot.
[18:05]It's Northern Australia.
[18:06]They call, you know, all these kids living in this little house with these three ducks.
[18:11]And two of the girls go out and they say they're going to come, they, they're going
[18:14]to them all.
[18:15]Um, this Karen's Australia, it's, you know, it's a medium sized town or in Australia.
[18:19]They don't come home.
[18:20]She freaks out.
[18:21]Finally, they come home.
[18:23]That night, she kills everyone in the house.
[18:26]She kills seven of her children and her niece.
[18:30]She slaughters them.
[18:31]It's, it's still not clear how she did this with nobody because, because the neighbors didn't
[18:35]hear anything.
[18:36]She killed the ducks and then she killed the kids.
[18:38]And, uh, and then she went outside and she tried to kill herself, although not very seriously.
[18:44]And then she waited.
[18:45]And that was it.
[18:46]I mean, she didn't.
[18:47]And, you know, eight children died and nobody knows.
[18:51]Nobody knows about this.
[18:52]And it's not just because it's Australia.
[18:54]It's because she's poor and she's marginalized and we don't want to deal with it.
[18:59]And we just want her to be in a mental hospital for the rest of her life.
[19:02]And so a lot of your stories and a lot of the research and stuff in the book is somewhat
[19:07]unpopular.
[19:08]It's going against the tide of pot is the greatest thing ever.
[19:11]I can't even call it the right thing.
[19:13]We, whatever you want to call it.
[19:14]Can't understand.
[19:15]Can't understand.
[19:16]Okay.
[19:17]Canvas is the coolest.
[19:19]There are all these cute purses coming out, like little carrying cases, Apple store like
[19:25]dispensaries everywhere.
[19:26]Like this is the thing.
[19:27]And if you're not doing it because like then you're like left out in a way.
[19:31]And your book is coming out saying, wait, hold on a second.
[19:34]This is not like the joy ride.
[19:36]This is not just like a harmless will show yourself.
[19:38]Anyway, you have a bit of an unpopular message.
[19:42]More than a bit, yes.
[19:44]So how is that affecting even the marketing of this book and how you feel do you feel even
[19:51]more compelled to get the message out?
[19:53]Do you feel silenced in part?
[19:55]Like how do you feel about it?
[19:57]I mean, I didn't expect this would become a quest.
[20:00]And it would take over my life, but it has.
[20:02]And it is partly because of what you're talking about
[20:04]with the marketing.
[20:05]Look, if this drug were being legalized on the basis of,
[20:09]this is a recreational and toxic can.
[20:10]It's for adults.
[20:12]It's got dangers, like alcohol, again, probably worse
[20:15]than alcohol in terms of psychiatric arms,
[20:17]not as dangerous in terms of the physical harms.
[20:19]We know it's gonna kill some people.
[20:21]If you use too much of it and you're intoxicated on the street,
[20:23]we're gonna arrest you.
[20:25]But we think we know a lot of people are using it,
[20:27]and we don't wanna be arresting
[20:31]eight times as many black people as white people for it.
[20:33]So we're gonna legalize it.
[20:34]I wouldn't mean favor that.
[20:36]I don't think it's a great idea,
[20:38]but that would be a totally intellectually honest
[20:40]conversation have.
[20:42]This drug has been marketed and legalized
[20:44]under basically false pretenses as medicine.
[20:47]It is not medicine.
[20:49]It's been marketed to exactly the wrong people,
[20:51]to people with anxiety disorders,
[20:52]to people with depression, to people with insomnia.
[20:55]Those are exactly the people who should not be using
[20:57]cannabis regularly.
[20:58]You know, look, if I gave you an eight ball of cocaine,
[21:02]you'd feel better for a few days,
[21:03]but cocaine's not an antidepressant.
[21:05]And a fifth of vodka might make you feel better for a week,
[21:09]but alcohol's not an antidepressant either.
[21:11]Using recreational drugs to treat psychiatric conditions
[21:14]is a big mistake.
[21:16]So I hate, I hate the way this is marketed,
[21:19]and I really hate the way it's marketed to moms.
[21:21]I really hate that.
[21:23]The statistics, and this is one of the things
[21:25]that people hate about the book more than anything else
[21:28]is that rhinothide is not, unfortunately, a unique example.
[21:32]The statistics show that if you look at child deaths
[21:34]from abuse in neglect in the United States,
[21:36]and the United States has terribly high rates of child deaths
[21:38]more than any other industrialized country by far.
[21:42]Okay, if you look at those deaths,
[21:44]and it's a one kind of death that the state's actually
[21:46]or supposed to really kind of do a root cause analysis,
[21:49]and some states are better at this than others.
[21:51]New York is actually not very good at it.
[21:52]Texas is very good at it.
[21:53]Florida is pretty good at it.
[21:55]Those states show that 30% to 40% of the deaths of children,
[21:59]and these are terrible cases.
[22:01]Come at the hands of people who are using cannabis
[22:04]at the time, or who have serious problems with cannabis,
[22:07]or both.
[22:08]That is more than alcohol by far.
[22:09]It's more than any other drug, including drugs
[22:11]like methamphetamine.
[22:12]Weirdly, actually, the opiates.
[22:14]Opiates don't make people hurt their kids.
[22:16]I mean, sometimes they make people die or pass out,
[22:19]and then terrible things have in their kids.
[22:21]When they, I mean, they're literally,
[22:22]you can find cases where people die,
[22:24]and then their children die in a crib.
[22:26]It's horrible.
[22:28]But cannabis encouraging moms to use, or dads,
[22:32]but especially moms of young children to use cannabis,
[22:35]is the worst idea in the world.
[22:36]Here's what cannabis does to you.
[22:38]It enhances your sensations.
[22:41]That's why people like it, right?
[22:42]It makes music sound better.
[22:44]It makes people like to have sex on it
[22:46]because it makes sex more exciting.
[22:48]It makes food taste better.
[22:50]It enhances sensation, but it dulls emotion.
[22:52]In that way, it's kind of the opposite of alcohol.
[22:55]Alcohol makes you emotional, weepy, and happy.
[22:59]Cannabis just puts you in a corner,
[23:01]feeling stuff yourself.
[23:04]It dissociates, right?
[23:06]Again, it's this classic stoner who doesn't want to move.
[23:09]It can make you paranoid.
[23:11]And it certainly makes you lazy.
[23:13]What do I know as the parent of three young children?
[23:15]Young children are hard, they're a ton of work,
[23:19]they, and you need to be emotionally connected to them
[23:23]to be aware of what they need.
[23:25]A drug that has the particular,
[23:27]particular aspects of cannabis
[23:29]actually couldn't be a worst drug for the parents
[23:33]of young children to use.
[23:34]And it infuriates me when I read these happy stories
[23:38]about moms using.
[23:40]I mean, yeah.
[23:42]Okay.
[23:43]I'm sorry.
[23:43]I'm not using it.
[23:44]You got me on my horse belt this, but I've read,
[23:48]I've just read too many horrible cases.
[23:50]But okay, so as parents, you have three kids.
[23:52]I have four kids.
[23:54]They are growing up.
[23:55]Yes.
[23:55]What do we tell our kids about,
[23:57]like they're going to want to go try everything?
[23:59]This is like the, okay, like do you go to a party?
[24:01]There's, what do you do?
[24:03]What do we say, don't ever try it?
[24:05]Do we say, try it, but here are the risks?
[24:08]Do we say, you might go psychotic and murder your entire family?
[24:13]Here's Alex's book, you know, this can happen.
[24:15]What do you, what are you going to say to your kids?
[24:17]I'm going to, I'm going to say these are, these are things
[24:20]that you probably shouldn't use.
[24:21]And you, and certainly, you know,
[24:23]some of them are so dangerous that you shouldn't use it
[24:25]even once.
[24:26]You know, I mean, I think, I think, you know,
[24:27]I think trying cocaine once is a mistake
[24:29]because there's just too much risk
[24:31]that you'll become addicted.
[24:32]Even if you use it once, you know, methamphetamine,
[24:34]same thing, you know, the opioids,
[24:36]look, the opioids have some medical uses, right?
[24:38]If you're in severe pain, but, but, but,
[24:40]but cannabis is, you know, cannabis is more like alcohol, right?
[24:43]It's, it's a dangerous drug.
[24:45]It's going to eat some people,
[24:46]but the risks, you know, on a population level
[24:49]are clearly lower than, you know,
[24:51]than something like cocaine.
[24:53]So please don't do this until you're in your 20s.
[24:55]You only have one mind.
[24:57]It's hard to break, but if you break it,
[24:58]you're not going to get it back.
[25:00]And look, I made a lot of mistakes growing up.
[25:03]And I, you know, I was lucky I didn't,
[25:05]I never, you know, never got arrested and everything,
[25:06]but, but, you know, you can't, you can't know.
[25:11]So be careful.
[25:12]And don't let your friends tell you what to do.
[25:14]I mean, the, the number one thing,
[25:16]I don't want to think about this book is like,
[25:18]there are people who hate me and tell me I'm not cool.
[25:21]And I don't give a shoot.
[25:23]Okay, I don't, I don't care whether I'm cool or not.
[25:26]This is, this people are dying because of this.
[25:28]And we're going to be honest about it,
[25:29]whether you like it or not.
[25:30]And I do think that's a real problem with them.
[25:32]So the media reception to this book
[25:33]has been very frustrating to me
[25:35]in that a lot of places that I feel should have written
[25:38]reviews of it didn't write reviews,
[25:39]but you hadn't heard of this book, you know,
[25:41]when I, when I contacted you,
[25:43]and you know, you're, you're in the audience
[25:44]that should have heard of this book.
[25:46]And you know, this is a book that's time to choose
[25:47]or published, I was reported for the New York Times
[25:49]for 10 years.
[25:50]People don't want to take it seriously.
[25:52]Now, in part, that's because the cannabis lobby
[25:54]has done such a good job with its message,
[25:57]but in part, it's just because there's all these middle-aged,
[26:00]it's middle-aged white guys in newsrooms who want to be cool.
[26:04]And I'm not going to say who it is,
[26:07]but I heard this interview recently with someone
[26:10]and he was talking about, you know,
[26:12]cannabis with somebody who was younger
[26:14]and she said something to him about, you know,
[26:16]basically, do you, you shouldn't exactly say it that way.
[26:18]And he giggled, like, like, and I thought to myself,
[26:22]you are an important person in American journalism.
[26:27]What are you doing?
[26:28]Like, why are you giggling about this?
[26:29]Like, you're trying to prove your cool
[26:31]to the person who works for you, who's half your age.
[26:34]There's much too much of that.
[26:36]You know, we-
[26:37]So you feel there's a peer pressure element
[26:39]that even as middle-aged people.
[26:41]But yeah, especially now that I'm middle-aged,
[26:43]I understand there's nothing sadder than, you know,
[26:45]knowing that-
[26:46]He doesn't have-
[26:47]He doesn't have that.
[26:49]You're never going to be 22 yet, you know?
[26:51]It's a, but you're not.
[26:54]He's probably grown up.
[26:55]And sometimes I truly think
[26:57]that there's three kinds of people in the world.
[26:58]People who have children, who shouldn't have children,
[27:01]whether or not they do.
[27:02]And people who are children.
[27:03]And like, those of us who are adults
[27:05]need to talk about this.
[27:06]And it doesn't mean we're going to convince people.
[27:09]But you just got it wrong.
[27:11]Well, I think if anyone was going to convince anyone,
[27:13]it would be with your book.
[27:15]You're really a brilliant writer.
[27:16]As I mentioned when you got here,
[27:17]and you make such a compelling case,
[27:19]it's hard not to listen to it.
[27:21]So I'm really feel very grateful that you wrote it.
[27:24]And I, for one, I'm taking it super seriously.
[27:27]And, you know, everybody else should too.
[27:29]And it's really important.
[27:31]And it's especially nice that you-
[27:32]you're like this very successful novelist.
[27:35]And you just took this on as a project.
[27:37]So it's, I don't know.
[27:38]Somehow that makes it even nicer.
[27:40]It's nice for me because, you know,
[27:42]the books have done, my novels have done pretty well.
[27:45]And it turns out you can actually make a pretty good living
[27:48]if you write one bestselling novel a year.
[27:50]And so I didn't need to do this, you know,
[27:53]people say I do this for the money.
[27:54]The truth is this book has sold less.
[27:56]I mean, even though it's on its fifth printing
[27:57]and it sold about 40,000 copies, you know,
[27:59]the faithful spy, which I hope you, you know,
[28:02]I hope you do read.
[28:02]I will.
[28:03]I will.
[28:04]I will.
[28:05]I will give myself a plug here.
[28:06]It's by beautiful red cover.
[28:07]Yes.
[28:09]But so that book has sold, you know,
[28:10]more than a half million copies.
[28:11]So the, you know, a successful novel,
[28:14]it sells a lot more books generally than a piece of nonfiction.
[28:17]And so I did.
[28:18]I had the opportunity to do this.
[28:20]And, you know, my wife is successful
[28:22]and makes a good living.
[28:23]And so, so I was able to do this.
[28:25]And, you know, it's always amusing to me and people say,
[28:27]oh, I'm in the pocket of the alcohol.
[28:29]I've never taken a dime from an alcohol company
[28:31]or tobacco company or cannabis company
[28:33]or an opioid company.
[28:34]You know, it's not, that's not,
[28:36]I can be independent about this.
[28:39]And that feels good.
[28:40]Well, thank you.
[28:41]Do you have any parting advice?
[28:42]I know we're like out of time.
[28:43]And I had some more questions for you.
[28:44]But having gone through all of these novels
[28:48]and this brilliant nonfiction work advice
[28:51]to aspiring authors.
[28:52]Read.
[28:53]You know, I'm sure other people have said that.
[28:56]Read.
[28:57]And right stuff that you believe in.
[28:59]You know, there's a very few people
[29:01]out there who can fake it,
[29:03]you know, who can write novels that are just kind of,
[29:07]you know, they're doing it for money, basically.
[29:09]I can't do that.
[29:10]I have to believe in the story that I'm telling.
[29:12]And I think that's true of all good novels
[29:15]or good writers fiction or not.
[29:17]I think if you're faking it,
[29:18]it will be obvious to the reader.
[29:20]Next time I need something really well-researched,
[29:23]I'm calling you.
[29:24]Well, I think you two, you write it up for me.
[29:26]I will be here and thank you for this.
[29:29]I mean, this is a real service that you're doing.
[29:31]Thank you.
[29:32]That's nice.
[29:33]Thanks.
[29:34]OK.
[29:35]Thanks, Alex.
[29:37]This episode has been sponsored by Book of the Month Club.
[29:39]Book of the Month.com and to code Zibi
[29:42]to get your first book for $5.
[29:44]Thanks for listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[29:46]You can follow me on Instagram at Moms Don't Have Time
[29:49]to Read Books.
[29:50]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[29:53]for the Sound Editing.
[29:54]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[29:56]for providing this fantastic intro and outroom music.
[29:59]Thanks for listening.
[30:00]always email me at zibi at zibiowans.com