Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep 29 - Luke Niforatos, Smart Approaches to Marijuana - What Is Marijuana Rescheduling, And Why We Need To Crack Down On Pot
124 Plays8 days ago
On this episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, interviews Luke Niforatos, co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions about, you guessed it, pot. Marijuana. Cannabis. The ganj. (Yes, nobody's said that since 1972.) The issue of marijuana rescheduling has been in the news lately, with President Trump saying he's considering it. Luke explains what marijuana rescheduling is, and why it would be a very big deal. Then the two have a broader conversation about marijuana and marijuana policy: why it really does melt your brain, why allowing big corporations to sell it would be a disaster, the evolving science on marijuana, why it's not just a matter of personal choice, the difference between marijuana and alcohol, and more.
Subscribe to the PolicySphere Morning Briefing: https://policysphere.com/subscribe
Smart Approaches to Marijuana: https://learnaboutsam.org/
Follow Luke on X: https://x.com/LukeNiforatos
Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sphere-podcast/id1780831168
Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/48eWEcxSYDyrgjC3lO0EJZ
Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSpherePodcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Production Value Sphere podcast. This time it is not being shot from my terrorist hideout, but from my family house in the nicest place in the world, which is Northwest Burgundy.
00:00:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And I have with me an excellent guest whose name is Luke Niferatos. And I hope I got that right.
00:00:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah People get my my name.
00:00:26
Luke Niforatos
You did. Very good.
00:00:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Great. People get my name wrong all the time. So, you know, um I'm allowed to do it. ah um And you are, ah so ah remind me your your title and affiliation precisely.
00:00:44
Luke Niforatos
Certainly, i am the executive vice president at SAM, which stands for smart approaches to marijuana. We're basically the world's largest, certainly America's largest nonprofit advocacy organization that is against normalizing and commercializing marijuana.
00:00:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Very cool. ah So how how did you get into this? what what what what So what generally, what's your background?
00:01:05
Luke Niforatos
Great question.
00:01:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What got you into politics in general? And what got you into this issue in particular?
00:01:14
Luke Niforatos
Good question. I guess I'll start with the bigger picture one, which is politics, policy in general, and then I'll zero in on marijuana because it's kind of an interesting trajectory for me.
00:01:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:01:20
Luke Niforatos
But basically, I grew up in a ministry family traveling around the world doing Christian ministry work as well as um ah refugee aid and medical aid work in war-torn countries like Sudan, Africa, and Sudan and Africa and elsewhere.
00:01:34
Luke Niforatos
So actually I had a chance to go to France when I was four years old. And that was the first time I had ever ridden a horse. And i was terrified of horses until about, yeah.
00:01:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It that's not in the list of war torn countries in Africa, right?
00:01:46
Luke Niforatos
Yes, thankfully not in the list of war-torn countries. Yes, ah but I traveling across the world doing different ministry stuff and um had a chance to go to France for the when I was five.
00:01:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Not yet.
00:01:54
Luke Niforatos
And yeah, I rode a horse or my parents put me on a horse anyway, and I really didn't like it. So that was that was my memory there. But then we got to go to to Nice and Nice was lovely. And so I had a very pleasant memory of of France after after that.
00:02:06
Luke Niforatos
So that that was good. um But so that was where I started. And I think for me, and this really brought together policy and drug policy for me was that from a young age, I saw in different parts of the world, the impact of policy on people and the impact of bad governance on people, um particularly in the work that my family did in Africa.
00:02:28
Luke Niforatos
And I so I grew up
00:02:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. For sure.
00:02:31
Luke Niforatos
going to you know Uganda and Kenya and seeing the child soldiers and learning that you know the way that they ah you know ruined with these children and got them to do what they wanted them to do was by addicting them to drugs.
00:02:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:02:44
Luke Niforatos
And that was from a young age, my first interaction with seeing what drugs did to society and also just seeing the lack of of good governance control and taking care of people in some of those areas.
00:02:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:02:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:02:53
Luke Niforatos
So you know, fast forward, growing up, I really wanted to have an impact on policy that would make people's lives better that would that would help ah bring about, um in my view, virtue in society and bring about, you know, good health in society.
00:03:08
Luke Niforatos
So I naturally kind of gravitated to healthcare. care So I started out actually in healthcare, I very, you know, long story short, ended up starting a healthcare company that I sold. um And so that was kind of the space I was in, but always, I was involved in politics as a hobby. And so I was involved in um campaigns and political endeavors, you know, county party stuff, etc, in Colorado, which is where I was raised.
00:03:29
Luke Niforatos
And that's where I kind of then, you know, being in Colorado, first state to legalize marijuana recreationally and in the United States, That kind of brought it home for me in terms of that issue. So, you know, I was single when we legalized it, I voted against it.
00:03:43
Luke Niforatos
um Then I got married. Then I had my first little girl. I now have two little girls. But I had my first daughter and we're, thank you.
00:03:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Congratulations.
00:03:51
Luke Niforatos
And we're taking it for a walk in Denver and... Somebody lights up a joint as she's sleeping in her stroller in the secondhand marijuana smoke, you know, got into her stroller.
00:03:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:03:59
Luke Niforatos
She clearly breathed that in. And that was where it hit home for me that this is a bad policy choice. And nobody's really telling that story.
00:04:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:04:05
Luke Niforatos
And so for me, that's why i ended up diving into this issue. So that's but a lot of details compressed. But that's kind of my background and how I ended up here. um I had a bachelor's from the University of Denver in communications and a master's at Johns Hopkins.
00:04:16
Luke Niforatos
And currently, I'm working part time on my law degree. So that's that's the kind of part time ah personal project I'm working on.
00:04:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
very impressive
00:04:23
Luke Niforatos
Thank you.
00:04:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:04:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i i've had well we're not going to talk about that but i've had a long-standing uh hot contrarian hot take that uh getting a law degree if you want to have a career in dc is a mistake everybody tells you you should do it but i disagree but you know you've done it so it's too late i i have a
00:04:43
Luke Niforatos
yeah Well, thankfully got my career in DC first and then now I'm doing law school on the backend.
00:04:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes, yes, yes. that's That's better. That's better. ah I have a very funny story that I can't tell on air about a somewhat important Washington person who I tried to talk out of getting a law degree. And it turns out I was very, very right in very hilarious ways.
00:05:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:05:09
Luke Niforatos
Oh, I bet.
00:05:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Anyway, ah okay, that all makes sense. ah You definitely have the clean-cut Missionary Sun vibe, and you also there's also a Western vibe, ah so it all makes sense.
00:05:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, so this is in the news.
Marijuana Rescheduling and Advocacy
00:05:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
We're recording this ah August 19th.
00:05:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah There's a lot of talk about rescheduling ah marijuana as a drug. ah This is something that President Trump has said he's considering, and there's a lot of heavy lobbying, social media campaigning and so on and so forth to to get him to do that.
00:05:51
Luke Niforatos
Thank you.
00:05:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um So that's why I wanted to talk to you. We had a first interview and it was so interesting. I wanted to do a podcast, a full podcast. So explain this rescheduling, rescheduling. issue.
00:06:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What does that mean? What would that entail?
00:06:11
Luke Niforatos
Absolutely. So just to step back to just for a second about our organization. So SAM, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, you can check out our website, learnaboutsam.org. We have a science advisory board of people who research marijuana. We're basically the leading voice for cutting edge science when it comes to this drug.
00:06:26
Luke Niforatos
And the final thing I'll say is we're nonpartisan. So we have former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who's a Democrat from Rhode Island, um who was one of our co-founders, in addition to a whole bunch of Republicans and independents and people everywhere on every end of the extreme and in between. So that's where we cut our teeth.
00:06:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Good to know.
00:06:42
Luke Niforatos
And yeah, and so we are very concerned about this rescheduling decision because it has totally defied the precedence for how you deal with the drug scheduling. So to you know You asked for a little bit of the background on rescheduling. So essentially, our country, in the United States, has the Controlled Substances Act, which was passed in 1970 and signed into legislation by President Nixon.
00:07:05
Luke Niforatos
um That created a five-schedule system, one through five. they The first big myth about drug scheduling ah that most people think, and it's just a total myth, it's important to ah debunk it today, which is that a lot of people think that it is a harm index.
00:07:20
Luke Niforatos
So that schedule drugs that are Schedule one people think are the worst and drugs that are schedule five are, you know, the more harmless drugs. And that just is not true.
00:07:31
Luke Niforatos
um the The scheduling system is actually based on two, basically two criteria. The first criteria is the drugs potential for abuse So the potential for addiction, harm to your mental health, et cetera, other health issues.
00:07:44
Luke Niforatos
And then the other component is the drugs, whether or not the drug has accepted medical use, according to the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. So those the two components. And so depending on whether a drug has medical use, accepted medical use, or its harm profile, it'll end up on one of those elements of the schedule.
00:08:02
Luke Niforatos
So For example, ah marijuana Schedule 1, and we hear a lot about, oh, you know marijuana shouldn't be Schedule 1 because it's not as bad as ah you know fentanyl per se. But most people will be shocked to learn that fentanyl is Schedule 2.
00:08:14
Luke Niforatos
And it's not because fentanyl is less harmful. It's because fentanyl has an accepted medical use in a hospital setting.
00:08:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Interesting.
00:08:21
Luke Niforatos
um And by the way, mayor yeah and so marijuana as a... as ah is a raw drug is not a schedule one because you know you smoke it it has a number of harms we can get into in addition to as and as a whole raw drug it is not an approved ah medication however there are medications that have been taken from marijuana so for example The component THC has been approved by the FDA in the form of Marinol. That is Schedule II.
00:08:48
Luke Niforatos
um The component CBD has been approved in the form of Epidiolex, and that is also Schedule II. So it's a complicated picture, and so it's very oversimplified when people say, oh, you know marijuana is Schedule I. That means we'll never have it for anything, and it's the worst ever.
00:09:02
Luke Niforatos
um That's not true. It's just we're never going to have a situation, though, where the whole drug is going to be rescheduled, at least not and not in a way that makes sense with the science.
00:09:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's good to know. That's interesting. That's interesting. Right. OK, so I'm ah I'm going I'm going to skip over a bunch of procedural stuff because that's that's not the most interesting stuff I want to get into. But basically what you explained to me in our last interview was that it was actually the Biden administration that got this ball rolling.
00:09:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They wanted to they wanted to reschedule it.
00:09:27
Luke Niforatos
That's correct.
00:09:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And so they started this process. Basically, if you want to reschedule a drug, you have to like get a bunch of panels of experts, blah, blah, blah, blah. ah But, and so this got started in the Biden administration. And so it's, it's arriving on president Trump's desk now.
00:09:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so ah there's, there's this whole process, but ultimately it's the president who decides, right? Ultimately it's the president who says yes or no.
00:09:58
Luke Niforatos
Thank you.
00:09:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:10:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What would it mean in practice if marijuana was rescheduled? Because it's like, okay, like, is it, you know, Is it a line on a form? Is it a check mark? Is it just symbolism or or would it have significant implications in the real world?
00:10:19
Luke Niforatos
It's essentially everything you just said. So first of all, the symbolism, yes, it's going to send a message to the rest of the country that yeah the government had it wrong to start. It never should have been Schedule 1. It's not that bad of a drug.
00:10:30
Luke Niforatos
And so the message to the kids and to the broader public is going to be that marijuana is not that harmful. And so we're obviously very concerned about the message moving marijuana to from Schedule 1 to 3 would have. not Not the least of which, because from a policy perspective and a technical perspective, it just doesn't make sense.
00:10:46
Luke Niforatos
um But beyond the se the symbolism of it, there's also a very concrete thing that it would do. It would essentially blow the doors open on this entirely federally illegal marijuana industry by giving them a giant tax break.
00:10:59
Luke Niforatos
So right now, because they're Schedule I and they're federally illegal, they do not get access to write off their...
00:11:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
OK, explain the tax thing ah precisely because it's it's important.
00:11:04
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:11:08
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:11:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And tax stuff is always complicated.
00:11:10
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:11:12
Luke Niforatos
Yes. So there is in in in very simple terms, there's the 280E exemption. So for drugs that are Schedule there's an element of the tax code called 280E that prevents Schedule I drugs, ah companies selling Schedule I drugs from getting a write-off on their business expenses like advertising, payroll, et cetera.
00:11:32
Luke Niforatos
If marijuana moves to schedule three, it is no longer no longer subject to 280E. And therefore, the entire industry will, we we estimate, receive more than $2 billion dollars per year in tax breaks.
00:11:44
Luke Niforatos
So what that would mean is the industry would um yeah and true would jump overnight.
00:11:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's huge.
00:11:49
Luke Niforatos
I mean, that's why they're investing so much money in doing this, which we can talk about a little bit later. But that's why they care about this. it would It would keep them illegal. That's the weird thing. It would keep the industry totally federally illegal.
00:12:00
Luke Niforatos
But what it would do is it would give them a giant tax break and they would grow. They would be able to advertise these products more. They would actually receive tax write-offs for their products that are relentlessly targeting kids, the gummy bears, the candies, the ice creams that everyone's seeing right now, these extreme products that are targeting kids and hurting kids. People are being poisoned by them, et cetera.
00:12:22
Luke Niforatos
um They would actually get rewarded for that behavior through this act, which I think is what our largest concern is with the decision. And so I think there's some people that say, well, you know, this is a ah little policy lever we're pulling, it doesn't actually legalize it, maybe it's not a big deal, maybe it's a good compromise.
00:12:37
Luke Niforatos
But the problem is, when you give the industry that tax break, you're in effect, broadening and expanding the legalization of marijuana through financial incentives that you're giving the industry.
00:12:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, that's that that's fascinating. um
00:12:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. ah Let's get to the meat of... So the the the rescheduling decision is actually a big deal. like it's actually It seems like this sort of bureaucratic, symbolic...
00:13:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah But it's actually a big deal because it would essentially... So it wouldn't legalize the industry, but it would... At the same time, give it a blank check or a kind of seal of it would give them like directly a bunch of money, but it would sort of give them a seal of approval. That would mean they would have, you know, they would, it would be easier for them to raise money, find investors, do advertising, ah and so on and so forth.
00:13:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So it would be a huge boom.
00:13:41
Luke Niforatos
It essentially incentivizes all the worst things we're seeing in the news. The things that people really, everyone objectively hates, the advertising, the cartoon characters, the gummies, all that stuff totally incentivized with this this move.
00:13:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:13:52
Luke Niforatos
And in addition to it, one other thing I'll add is that we're not just talking about corporations that would be using
Legalization Complexities and Risks
00:13:58
Luke Niforatos
this. What we're learning is that in places like Maine, Oklahoma, Michigan, California, there are illegal Chinese and other foreign cartels that are actually taking full control of state regulated marijuana businesses.
00:14:11
Luke Niforatos
And I say state regulated because they're not being inspected.
00:14:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:14:14
Luke Niforatos
There's no kind of enforcement happening. We're finding out that these businesses are actually cartel fronts. And so what is in effect going to happen is that tax break is going to be used by these cartels.
00:14:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, okay, okay. So so slow down.
00:14:28
Luke Niforatos
Yeah.
00:14:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Cartel fronts. So explain this to me. ah How do we know this?
00:14:35
Luke Niforatos
So what we've seen is some testimony from the Drug Enforcement Administration before Congress, in addition to a large number of reports coming out of Maine and Oklahoma. And it's from all the major media agencies. And what they're estimating, according to law enforcement, on the ground in these states is that these what the what the the the companies that the state is licensing for medical or recreational marijuana grows or for the storefronts that are selling these products,
00:15:00
Luke Niforatos
These companies are actually being run by foreign cartels. um In fact, in Maine, the top marijuana regulator in Maine openly admitted on the record said, we know that Chinese cartels are the ones that own these operations submitting the license applications.
00:15:16
Luke Niforatos
But the policy that we have in Maine for approving these licenses does not allow us to reject them. So they're actually knowingly granting these cartels licenses to sell legally marijuana in their state, which is crazy.
00:15:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wonderful.
00:15:31
Luke Niforatos
And what we're seeing is then so once you have a cartel that has ownership of a structure like that, they then begin to launder money into the American financial system.
00:15:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:15:39
Luke Niforatos
And so what we've learned is there's fentanyl money that's being laundered.
00:15:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:15:43
Luke Niforatos
There's human trafficking money that's being laundered, all with the cover of marijuana legalization. And so I think yeah you look more broadly at the problem. When you start legalizing drugs, it doesn't matter if you think we can regulate it so well, et cetera.
00:15:57
Luke Niforatos
Crime accompanies drug use and behavior. That's why from a policy perspective, we cannot normalize drug use in our country, even if we think the drug is not that big of a deal. And what you do is you bring in cover for very bad, very nefarious actors, whether you like it or not. And that is exactly what's happening with marijuana right now.
00:16:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
we're we're We're going to get into that. So have you ever watched the show ah Tulsa King?
00:16:22
Luke Niforatos
No, I don't think I have.
00:16:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Well, you should because it's about that. i So it's it's ah Sylvester Stallone, who is now ah ah President Trump's ambassador to Hollywood, ah the People's Republic over there.
00:16:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um it's a It's a very good show and the premise, so he plays this like mobster who's New York mobster who's exiled to Tulsa ah and and he becomes a local kingpin. Anyway,
00:16:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that like there's an entire arc that's about this. There's an entire arc that's about marijuana legalization and so on and so forth. um
00:17:03
Luke Niforatos
Oh, interesting. I'll have to watch it.
00:17:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And using using it as a as a sort of money laundering. ah And, you know, spoiler alert, ah plug your ears.
00:17:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But like this is eventually what you find out, which is like the the rival who runs the marijuana farm, who he thinks is just some shady businessmen dadadada turns out to be a front for like Chinese cartels who are just extremely dangerous.
00:17:27
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, that's actually true. That's actually what's happening.
00:17:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. and So, I mean, I was... i was i I mean, I watched this and I was like, oh, that's a that's a funny, you know, that's a funny plot. Interesting premise. That's a funny plot point. And it's like, oh, actually, you know, it's true. It's it's true to life. And I'm sure that's not innocent because ah ah ah Stallone is a I'm a huge fan. He's very intelligent guy, very highly cultured. And and he's he's a conservative and he's probably seen the damages of drugs in Hollywood.
00:17:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah He's the executive producer of the show. So I now that i know it feels very intentional um so yeah so you should you should definitely watch that show and and it's a good joke um uh okay uh so let's now let's dig into the broader policy discussion uh putting aside the rescheduling thing like
00:18:09
Luke Niforatos
I'll definitely be watching it.
00:18:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What should informed citizens and policymakers think about marijuana? Give me the case for why you know we shouldn't legalize it, we shouldn't normalize it, we should ah crack down, ah and if so, to what extent that I'll ask. But like first of all, why is it bad?
00:18:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Why is it so bad?
00:18:58
Luke Niforatos
Great question. So I'm going to start off with the market capture piece of this, because I think that's the big picture concern here. And I know you're an expert on markets and using markets for good. So I'll be curious to know if you have any feedback or thoughts on this. But what I will say is that our biggest concern is not so much with ah come the drug itself.
00:19:16
Luke Niforatos
and And not to say that the drug isn't inherently harmful, because it is inherently harmful. We have 50,000 plus research studies on the drug over the last few decades that indicate that it's harmful. But more so because we look at the history of tobacco.
00:19:29
Luke Niforatos
So more than 100 years ago, you know, ah thousands of years ago, people were smoking ah pipe tobacco, and we didn't have the, you know, millions of deaths and the ah cancers and the you know the widespread public health carnage from the use of tobacco you know more than 100 years ago.
00:19:47
Luke Niforatos
What changed around 100 years ago? Well, we had the invention of the cigarette. We had a large corporate conglomerate model that took over cigarettes. We had the global supply chain. um We had the massive distribution, the advertising, the paid research, and everything else that happened with tobacco.
00:20:02
Luke Niforatos
And that's what made the cigarette the number one global killer in the world and millions of people dying from it and cancers, et cetera. So that's the key critical moment in the history of tobacco was the commercialization of tobacco. It was when it went from, you know, a localized thing that, you know, perhaps people grew and just kind of consumed occasionally, went from that to commercialized thing that's being pushed for people to use every single day, and not just every single day, but many times per day.
00:20:32
Luke Niforatos
And it's and it was it had additives and all those things happened with cigarettes. let's look at what's happening with marijuana. This is why we're very worried about marijuana legalization. Why we're very worried about any kind of drug legalization is we're seeing the exact same playbook happen with marijuana.
00:20:48
Luke Niforatos
um The tobacco industry, Altria, which is the new name for Philip Morris, they've poured more than $2 billion dollars into the marijuana industry. You have other global tobacco companies that are involved now as well.
00:20:59
Luke Niforatos
um And we know from the the master settlement up
00:21:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's sad to see such a good company with such a wholesome product get into a nasty industry like marijuana.
00:21:06
Luke Niforatos
Oh, yes. That loves the American family and has invested so much in our our well-being. Yeah. ah um Yeah, it's very sad, isn't it?
00:21:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, no that's that's that's real that's really funny. that's real Okay, ah go on
00:21:21
Luke Niforatos
So ah they're invested, big alcohol is invested. People say, oh, you know, alcohol is the alcohol industry and and we see what they're doing. And the alcohol industry is also invested. In addition to, and it's very funny, Pastel, because we get accused of, oh, you're evil big pharma. You just don't want, you know, medical marijuana to get out there.
00:21:38
Luke Niforatos
And it's like, well, actually the pharma companies are invested in this too. So all the major drug addiction ah companies are, yeah.
00:21:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, yeah. Like, the yeah, because like, I mean, if you are, you know, Pfizer or or one of the big pharma companies, your your lawyers will never let you get into marijuana sale and distribution.
00:21:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so, ah you know, you want this stuff to be legalized so you can so you can swallow up them so you can come in with your like huge financial guns and swallow up the market. So like Yeah, that that that thing.
00:22:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ands It's like, you know, it's not the 70s man anymore. like It's no longer like hippies smoking.
00:22:16
Luke Niforatos
no
00:22:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's like, oh, you're for the man. It's like, no.
00:22:23
Luke Niforatos
No, the man wants to legalize marijuana now.
00:22:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:22:25
Luke Niforatos
It's the man who's pushing this, not the not the revolution.
00:22:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes yes
00:22:28
Luke Niforatos
ah
00:22:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:22:29
Luke Niforatos
So those are the folks that are involved. And so marijuana went from a drug that was on average in a state of nature, if you know if if we're to believe that it grew in the state of nature in America somewhere, it was growing 2% to 3% potency THC max.
00:22:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Right.
00:22:45
Luke Niforatos
That's the ingredient that gets people high.
00:22:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right right
00:22:46
Luke Niforatos
Now the the plant has been modified, it's been bred to get up to now the flower, the plant itself gets up to about 30 to 35% THC. um That's something that is not natural, it's never been that way.
00:22:59
Luke Niforatos
It is much more potent. And then we're seeing concentrates now, these extracts, these chemical creations from the plant, that are up to 99% potency. So whatever we thought about marijuana back in the day, and that you were talking about hippies, they had no idea about this marijuana. This is a totally different drug. So the the harms, which, you know, interestingly enough, you look at the history, for example, like Mexico, a lot of people think America, evil, racist, we were the ones that led the charge to ban marijuana because we were racist against black and brown communities.
00:23:26
Luke Niforatos
And certainly there were some racist and intentions back in those days. But if you look at it historically, the first country in North America to um ah prohibit marijuana was Mexico. And it was because they were seeing the increase in cases of mental health crises, psychosis, crime, all the things that they saw with the expansion of marijuana use, we then followed suit. Okay. And so there was a lot of evidence then of the mental health ah connection, even at a low potency.
00:23:50
Luke Niforatos
But now, With the 99% potency products, with the very highly potent products, the link is now causal between using marijuana and mental illness.
00:23:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, what what we'll we'll talk about the health effects um because it's it's very important. like the the The evidence is just sort of like ah arriving like an avalanche. ah you know It's easier to make studies when you have lot more test subjects.
00:24:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:24:15
Luke Niforatos
Yes, unfortunately.
00:24:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah But but i just I just want to zero in on what you said about the the sort of market dynamics, because this is something that's been shown in a lot of research.
00:24:23
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:24:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And this is true in all of the quote-unquote vice industries, which is ah ah the late Mark Kleiman, who was at UCLA and then NYU, who's a very famous entrepreneur.
Addiction and Mental Health Concerns
00:24:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
academic who studied this sort of stuff. um
00:24:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Basically, you know, he sort of demonstrated that those companies business model requires or relies on creating addicts and, and this is and you see this with gambling where you know, all of the online gambling companies, they make money from so called whales.
00:25:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
who are you know not people who like you know ah gamble $20, $50 once in a while, which is fun and and and no problem, but like people who you know lose their life saving savings, lose their lives.
00:25:20
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:25:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um Beer companies, same thing, um and so on and so forth. So so so this point is ah very important because like we know that this also happens in every other industry like this. So we know it is going to happen or it is happening now if it is legalized.
00:25:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So I just wanted to ah to to to stop there. And then then we'll go into the health effects because that is also huge.
00:25:50
Luke Niforatos
Yes, I have a few points to add to that.
00:25:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, sure.
00:25:53
Luke Niforatos
So yeah, you you're getting at what we call the addiction for profit model. And Kleiman is a longtime friend of the CEO of my organization, Kevin Sabet. They didn't agree on everything, but they agreed on the industry capture being a problem.
00:26:05
Luke Niforatos
And they had this disagreement about how best to deal with that. Kleiman, in some ways, supported types of legalization, but he had the skepticism that I think we we all share about this.
00:26:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:15
Luke Niforatos
And, you know, in essence, and and it's interesting because Kleinman talked about one way to deal with the ah way to deal with the industry capture, the the addiction for profit side of things would be to um address the the biggest players and basically have enforcement.
00:26:31
Luke Niforatos
particularly in like areas where there's illegal drug markets, against the the worst perpetrators in order to scatter them um and and basically decrease the saturation of the drug's availability.
00:26:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:26:40
Luke Niforatos
And actually wrote about that in my thesis at Johns Hopkins for the mac my master's on this subject, looking at how you could actually enforce federal law in a way that makes sense against this very large marijuana industry.
00:26:50
Luke Niforatos
So it's worth looking into. But but no, ah Klein was absolutely right. There is this addiction for profit model. And it's as you were relating, these companies, you know, I don't know what their intentions are, but their incentives are very clearly, very are clearly public.
00:27:06
Luke Niforatos
They are legally ah defined. You have to return an investment to your shareholders. You have to return profits to your shareholders.
00:27:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:27:14
Luke Niforatos
That's a for profit company. And that works very well, obviously, in a free market society when you're creating innovations that help people and make things easier. um But the incentive is to make things easy to use, easy to access and delightful.
00:27:27
Luke Niforatos
um that's That's basically how the the market is supposed to work around products. And we see the beautiful benefits of that. However, there is a dark side to it. And that dark side is when drugs get into the mix, because the incentive is to take the drug and do exactly what we saw with cigarettes, make it easy to use, make it cheaper, make it um very delightful, um make it a ritual.
00:27:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:27:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:27:47
Luke Niforatos
um That's the whole idea. And so when it's an addictive drug, it's catastrophic. And we're seeing the same thing with marijuana now, where, you know, now you have the vaping devices, they can turn marijuana these oils, they they have flavors, they have new ways of consuming it.
00:27:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yep
00:28:00
Luke Niforatos
And so now,
00:28:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
this is This is marijuana, by the way. No, I'm joking.
00:28:04
Luke Niforatos
I was going to say, i have a feeling not. yeah You look you look too too sharp and with it to to be doing that.
00:28:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes, I'm i'm alert. So it can't be.
00:28:12
Luke Niforatos
Very much so. So, you know, you look at the model of profit for these folks. They are not incentivized to say, you know what? You're hitting the dab.
00:28:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. Yep. Yep.
00:28:23
Luke Niforatos
you're You're dabbing marijuana too many times per day. You've come in here three times to buy more marijuana products. You got to stop. They're not incentivized to do that.
00:28:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:28:30
Luke Niforatos
They're incentivized to keep selling it to you.
00:28:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:28:31
Luke Niforatos
And so with the alcohol industry, 10% of alcohol consumers in America make up more than 80% of the industry's profits. That's addiction for profit 101. And the same thing's playing out in legal marijuana states like Colorado, where 10% of Colorado marijuana users make up more than 70% of the consumption there too. So it's heavy, addicted users that are driving the profits for this industry.
00:28:54
Luke Niforatos
And it has no reason to stop that. And we as a country have really not figured out a way to stop that either from from from happening, because it's just the basics of supply and demand and consumption and the way that commodities work.
00:29:06
Luke Niforatos
And that is why I think our our ah you know previous generations had the foresight to say, we are going to keep drugs out of the market. out of the market Because if they are in the market, it's going to be catastrophic.
00:29:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:29:17
Luke Niforatos
And we saw that with cigarettes. We saw that with, we're seeing that with alcohol continued. And we're also seeing, we saw that with Oxycontin and opioids. And so I think we're seeing that same model play out with marijuana. And I'm i'm very concerned about it.
00:29:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
OK, so let's talk about the health effects. ah This is this is like the again, there's this avalanche of new studies that are coming in, so it's much more potent, which makes it much more addictive.
00:29:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And if you consume regularly, you have a much increased risk of schizophrenia and psychosis.
00:29:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And there's ah you could never get the you You can never get the full information in these things, but there's ah certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that many of the sort of mass shootings that we've seen in particular with young people were caused by cannabis induced psychosis.
00:30:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:30:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
OK, well, I mean, talk about that a little bit. And is there anything else we should know that's that's, you know, that's alarming that somebody who you know,
00:30:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah fell into a coma in 2005, was getting high in college in 2005, fell into a coma, woke up now, wouldn't know about a part that we now know and its impact on health.
00:30:35
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:30:42
Luke Niforatos
Yeah. the the Well, that as you said, the potency skyrocketed. It changed the harm profile of the drug. And so if anything, it's gotten more dangerous over the last decade, not less dangerous. So if you thought marijuana is harmless back in the day, it's not anymore.
00:30:56
Luke Niforatos
And um obviously, the biggest area of research that we're seeing unfold and the biggest concern that health experts have is this a the correlation with ah mental illness, schizophrenia, psychosis.
00:31:07
Luke Niforatos
People hear that and they think that's crazy. But again, you have to understand this drug is not the same drug you know it to be. It is also not a natural drug. you know, there's this movement with the RFKs of the world to say, like, you know, let's have, like, the all natural stuff, natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals.
00:31:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right. That's a good point.
00:31:23
Luke Niforatos
And it's important yeah, people understand this is not a natural alternative to pharmaceuticals.
00:31:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:31:27
Luke Niforatos
This is a genetically modified, engineered alternative now with loads of added.
00:31:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, and and by the way, the the schizophrenia and psychosis are irreversible, right?
00:31:37
Luke Niforatos
Correct. That's correct.
00:31:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So, you know, if if you're addicted to heroin and and you get off heroin, over time, your health will recover.
00:31:38
Luke Niforatos
Especially if you're starting young, it's, it's yeah.
00:31:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But if if you get schizophrenia from pot, then you will have it for the rest of your life. And you may be able to manage it with medication because now there are pretty good medications but ah for schizophrenia. but But you have it for the rest of your life.
00:32:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like Your brain is damaged for the rest of your life.
00:32:02
Luke Niforatos
In many cases, yes. Yes. And, you know, and and and I think that so the mental illness link is obviously very concerning for a wide array of reasons, not the least of which the idea that yeah we have, you know, the the largest, the the fastest increasing cohort in this country of people who are using marijuana are the people from 18 to 25.
00:32:21
Luke Niforatos
Those are the that's the the age cohort is using it the the most right now.
00:32:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:32:25
Luke Niforatos
And that is a ah cohort that their brains are still developing all the way up to 25. ah So we are seeing that that mental illness link is much ah more, ah you can see it much more demonstrated in the literature for people that are younger, and their brains are still developing.
00:32:39
Luke Niforatos
And those are the folks that are coming forward in the workplace. Those are the folks that are going to drive the future for this country. so that's very concerning when you think about that link. And so I think for folks that are out there and say well, what about alcohol? you know Alcohol is so bad for you.
00:32:52
Luke Niforatos
Alcohol is bad for you in many ways. It does not lead you into mental illness in this way. It does not have this kind of an impact on your your mental state, your ability ability to perceive reality, as well as...
00:33:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, alcohol is another good example. Like if you're an alcoholic and you get sober, like you, you know, you you fun you're fine. You're fine.
00:33:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
After a few months, physically at least you're fully recovered.
00:33:11
Luke Niforatos
so i mean, you said every girl can have lasting impacts.
00:33:14
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:33:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. but This is not true with this. It's very important.
00:33:18
Luke Niforatos
Correct.
00:33:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. So there's there's something.
00:33:19
Luke Niforatos
Correct. and And your IQ. That's the other thing. Alcohol doesn't destroy your IQ the way that marijuana does as well.
00:33:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:33:24
Luke Niforatos
So if you're a youth and you're using it, you lose your IQ.
00:33:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. So yeah I wanted to ask that, like, what do we have evidence on this and what type of evidence is it?
00:33:30
Luke Niforatos
Yes, very rock solid evidence.
00:33:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Because, the you know, Okay, well, ah get into it because I'm you know i'm a studies nerd and i you know i obviously, our sharpest and most eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed that I kind of agree with you on this topic.
00:33:34
Luke Niforatos
Go
00:33:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But you know I want to make sure that the evidence is the best evidence.
00:33:47
Luke Niforatos
ahead.
00:33:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And of course, you know you could you could get studies to make say all sorts of things. So explain this.
00:34:00
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, so there's a very large longitudinal study that was done a few decades ago that still is one of the most highly cited studies. And there's other ones that back it up. But I believe it in the Journal of Psychology or Journal the American Medical Association, one of the two.
00:34:14
Luke Niforatos
um Very large longitudinal study followed people using marijuana. And what they found was you are going to have a permanent IQ loss of four to six points if you're starting marijuana use in your youth and using it regularly.
00:34:26
Luke Niforatos
And that four to six point IQ loss is permanent. So you are going from a, you know, somebody who goes from A minus to like a C plus is that's the equivalent in terms of your intelligence. And that's permanent. And I think a lot of people think, you know, that's ridiculous. But i mean, it's just the facts of the facts. I mean, this is this is quality research that's being done on this subject. We also have a lot of research studies that are done on ah academic performance for high school and college students who are regularly using marijuana.
00:34:52
Luke Niforatos
And obviously it's not surprising. We're seeing lower test scores, lower GPA, a lower or higher absenteeism from school. Also that, ah by the way, applies in the work setting too. So people who are using marijuana and they're in their place of work have higher rates of absenteeism also. so It is a drug that impacts your overall performance, your overall intelligence.
00:35:14
Luke Niforatos
And I think that's concerning when you look at the way we're trying to compete in the global economy. um You have countries like China, for example, that completely zero tolerance. They don't want their public using any of this stuff.
00:35:26
Luke Niforatos
um They want maximum performance of their people. ah Obviously, they're an extreme case to the other side, but...
00:35:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I remember the Opium War.
00:35:31
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, they remember the opium war. And by the way, speaking of the opium wars, you can make an argument that I don't i don't know that the the government of China is paying it forward in this way, but you know I don't think it's lost on people in China that you know these Chinese cartels and other folks that are enabling the transfer of fentanyl and marijuana, et cetera, um ah pushing that in our country, that that is in a way kind of paying us back for some history there.
00:35:54
Luke Niforatos
I think that there's some people in China where that's not lost on them. They are they are returning that war um onto our country.
00:35:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.
00:36:00
Luke Niforatos
And And we we as a country are absolutely, because they saw what it did.
00:36:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's deliberate strategy.
00:36:06
Luke Niforatos
And we and we you see what it's doing to our country now.
00:36:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:36:08
Luke Niforatos
um In many ways, you could argue that a lot of people in this country, America, do not have a a good grip on reality, quite frankly, that you know they're seeking an escape.
00:36:19
Luke Niforatos
Our decadence has led us, I think, in many ways as a country to seek escape from the problems that we perceive, from things that make us feel uncomfortable. And there's a lot of isolation now in our society ah for many reasons we could get into.
00:36:31
Luke Niforatos
And I think the the pushing of these drugs is there's a number of people that are accepting them. And then it's driving problems politically, because I think there are folks in government who see that issue.
00:36:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ye Yeah.
00:36:41
Luke Niforatos
But you have now swaths of the electorate who have been yeah swept up by drug addiction. And that's something we have to to deal with, not the least of which for national security. but also for the family and I think the health of our society.
00:36:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Okay, so I have one question and then we'll talk about ah crime and then I'll ask you a few devil's advocate questions.
00:37:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah So there's a I wonder what your thoughts on this are. And if you know, you know, literature or studies on this and there's this phenomenon, it's hard to describe. So we all know a pothead, like we all know a guy who smokes too much pot and like it's clearly, you know, ah had a negative effect on his brain.
00:37:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, ah we read these studies, you know, if you if you are a heavy pot user, you're at the ah increased risk of schizophrenia and psychosis.
00:37:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, there is a type of person, ah and I know a couple examples, they're regular pot users. They're not dysfunctional.
00:37:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They have families, they have a job which they do okay at or well, and it can be like important jobs. But
00:38:04
Luke Niforatos
Thank
00:38:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's really hard to to to sort of put ah a finger on. They're a little bit slower, frankly. They're a little bit detached, but also like, you know, their projects sort of never pan out.
00:38:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There is a kind of, you know, it's like it's like it puts you on slow mode. And the problem is, These people, ah okay, maybe you could see ah like a small IQ effect, but like you know if you look at them statistically as units in statistics, ah you know they have a family, they have a job, ah they're not involved in criminality, and so on and so forth, you would say, just looking at the paper, oh, well, this is somebody who's regularly using pot and is fine.
00:38:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They're not you know mentally ill and so on and so forth, but...
00:38:56
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:38:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There is this thing and you know you can say, oh well you know if you want to like you know reduce all of your stats by 10%, that's fine. But like if you multiply that by millions of people in a country,
00:39:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um you know it's ah it's a societal disaster. ah so Do you see the phenomenon? I was talking about this with a friend and like we agreed and you know, so we even agreed on the particular individuals that we were thinking of.
00:39:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um ah a Like, do you see the phenomenon that I'm talking about? And it's so, you know, does it have a name? Have their studies been done trying to like identify this?
00:39:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Cause I I'm asking, cause you know, just, I'm curious, but also it's like, it's very perverse. Because it doesn't you know it doesn't cause the same kind of destruction that you know somebody who sells you know somebody who sells his car to buy booze or something.
00:39:58
Luke Niforatos
I agree.
00:40:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Yeah, that's my question.
00:40:06
Luke Niforatos
So I definitely have personal anecdotes and people that I knew and know currently that have that impact. And people who now are in recovery from marijuana use that acknowledge that there's a permanent impact on them where they do have that, they're a little slower to the punch.
00:40:19
Luke Niforatos
Their memory is not quite as good. they They know that that's tied to their heavy marijuana use. And so I don't know if I've seen that. I'm sure it's in the literature. I've never seen that. ah It's interesting you bring that up because I brought this that up before as well. So I'll have to do some research on that and get back to you if there's some research that's been done on that ah ah ah phenomenon specifically.
00:40:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So somebody but somebody needs to study it.
00:40:37
Luke Niforatos
Yeah.
00:40:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Somebody needs to call it like marijuana, you know, slow down, uh, reduced capacity.
00:40:42
Luke Niforatos
Right. But I think what it generally is, yeah.
00:40:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's not just slowing down because slowing down is like the most visible thing. You know, I think about it every time I watch Rogan, for example.
00:40:51
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:40:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm like, you're obviously an extremely successful person. like You're making $20 million dollars a year.
00:40:57
Luke Niforatos
right
00:40:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And you're like you're great at what you do. like He's an excellent podcast host as someone who's in the biz. ah But... but like Anyway, so it's not just but it's not just slowing down because that's the most visible.
00:41:13
Luke Niforatos
You can tell. Well, and I also, I always think of Lil Wayne also. Yeah.
00:41:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's a sort of pervasive sort of, you know, it's like it's like a player in an RPG has got stats on, you know, everything.
00:41:19
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:41:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And it's just like you take 5 to 10% down on everything.
00:41:29
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:41:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's very strange.
00:41:29
Luke Niforatos
and And what I think about that is, yeah.
00:41:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So somebody name it and study it.
00:41:32
Luke Niforatos
And what I think about that is, Pascal, is the the the population level impact of that. because there are people who will say, well, you know that's not a big deal, 10% slower.
00:41:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:41:40
Luke Niforatos
Like, I think about Lil Wayne. Lil Wayne's my example I go to because, know, he used to say he doesn't even write his lyrics. He remembers all of his songs by heart. But then and he's a heavy marijuana user among other drugs. But interestingly, he had a he had a quote just a few months ago. And here here I'm giving my my hip hop street cred. But a few months ago, he said he doesn't remember any of his songs anymore.
00:41:56
Luke Niforatos
He couldn't even tell you if a song was his or not. And so it's kind of like you wait long term to see what the impact is of heavy drug use.
00:42:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:42:02
Luke Niforatos
And then you see it, which I think is important to understand. And it's very sad in his case.
00:42:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:42:06
Luke Niforatos
But what I will say is I look at this from a population perspective. And you say, OK, we take that down 10 percent. We say, OK, you're going to lose your short term memory. you know, oh, ah no big deal, you're going to be a little bit slower to the punch, no you know, no big you're going to have all these other mental issues, you're going to have other health issues, cardiovascular issues, etc.
00:42:22
Luke Niforatos
um Not everybody's going to have extreme impacts. But maybe like you said, it's kind of um a moderate lowering of your performance.
00:42:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:42:28
Luke Niforatos
But if I look at that across, and we say we get let's say, i mean, obviously, the industry wants everybody to be using that's their whole idea.
00:42:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:42:34
Luke Niforatos
So let's say we go to the level of alcohol with marijuana. where 60% of Americans are using it on a regular basis. If you have 60% of this country regularly using a drug with these known effects that is not going to set you up to be successful in work, that is not going to set you up to be a responsible father or or mother or somebody in responsibility in in other situations, that is a very scary scenario because then you're talking about taking the overarching performance
00:42:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:42:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:42:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:42:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:43:01
Luke Niforatos
of our country, the overarching a moral fiber of our country, first of all.
00:43:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:43:06
Luke Niforatos
Second of all, the overarching economic output um and security ability of our country, you're taking it down a notch.
00:43:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:43:13
Luke Niforatos
That to me is very concerning.
00:43:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:43:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yep Yeah. Okay. So let's talk marijuana and crime, because again, this is this is something on which the evidence has come in and sort of, to my mind, decisively settled the debate.
Marijuana as a Gateway Drug
00:43:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Certainly, um you know, you look at Europe, ah Basically, the story is that it turns out it actually is a gateway drug. And so when you legalize marijuana, you leave you you increase demand not just for marijuana, but for ah for more more potent forms of marijuana that may be ah still regulated or illegal.
00:43:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Because that's the oh, we're going to legalize it. but We're going to regulate OK, well, you know, eventually the guys want the stronger stuff.
00:43:54
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:43:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um ah or just other drugs that are illegal. And so actually, like you, you create ah criminality. ah The example I'm most familiar with is the Netherlands, who was, you know, which was held up as like the the utopia of like pot coffee shops.
00:43:57
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:44:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And now they're prosecutors.
00:44:19
Luke Niforatos
Now it's totally changed.
00:44:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, they're the public prosecutor's office literally describes the country as a narco state. um And it's well known that the port of Antwerp, which is the biggest port in Europe, through which like 20% of the world's shipping or something insane like that, ah is controlled by the Moroccan mafia because all the pods sold in Europe is grown in Morocco.
00:44:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And like, I mean, there are like, colombia you know, it's like it's like reading about Colombia in the 80s, like, you know, guys guys running the customs office at the port of Antwerp, you know, being told that, you know, they'll never see their family again if they don't look the other way and so on and so forth.
00:45:02
Luke Niforatos
Right.
00:45:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and In the Netherlands, And this like magnificent, you know, borderline utopic country of beautiful architecture, nice people, ah productive, functional, and so on and so forth.
00:45:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Portugal is the other is the other example. They have a huge rash of um overdose deaths in particular because they did the safe injection thing, which is which is separate from cannabis.
00:45:21
Luke Niforatos
Yes.
00:45:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But it speaks to... This thing, and in it's really about human nature, which is that if you enable our bad traits, they get worse, which actually so it actually is makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
00:45:42
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, I think
00:45:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so you know
00:45:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah safe injection sites, they don't lead to people you know injecting the same amount, but with safe needles. They lead to people injecting more and dying of overdoses. um Yeah, and there is ah some stuff in the US.
00:46:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah My friend, ah Charles Lehman, who I would assume you know or know of at the Manhattan Institute, who's been a guest here, um did an article about studies in Oregon and Washington where same thing.
00:46:11
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, he's a very good friend.
00:46:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um I guess I don't have a question because I went on my rant.
00:46:26
Luke Niforatos
but No, I think there's anything just, yeah.
00:46:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But no, if you so it's it's it's it's important. Sorry, yeah just finishing this point because it's like the it's like the thing about schizophrenia and so on and so forth. It's like, it turns out Nancy Reagan was right.
00:46:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It turns out like now the evidence is in and pot really makes you dumb. It really is, at least for some people, addictive. And if you get addicted, it will really like actually like F up your life.
00:46:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Number one. And number two, it really is a gateway drug, which really enables like the, the much worse criminality, um ah that it does. and again, as far as I'm concerned, the evidence is in. like As far as I'm concerned, and anybody who disagrees with this is either not aware of ah the latest evidence or is lying.
00:47:15
Luke Niforatos
You're absolutely right the evidence is in. And I think just even going to the ground level, you just you talk to people and I don't think it it doesn't surprise your average person with basic intelligence that if you bring drugs into your community, it's going to increase crime.
00:47:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:47:28
Luke Niforatos
Like, I don't think that that's a shocking proposition to most people in this country. And so I think it really does have, to we we have to get back to common sense when it comes to policy. like you know You can call it legal and regulate it all you want, but if you're gonna expand recreational drug use in a neighborhood, crime's gonna go out. So the research shows that University of Colorado did a research study on every community in Colorado that allowed marijuana shops into their neighborhood, saw increases in property crime of over a thousand percent in a number of these neighborhoods that allowed them. We're seeing that reflected in other places as well. And then obviously the cartel activity that we talked about
00:48:01
Luke Niforatos
But I think, you know, I really like what you're saying about Portugal and Oregon, about this idea that if you have a permissive drug culture, that it's going to create problems from a crime perspective, from, you know light quality of life perspective, from the life of people who are addicted perspective. I mean, everyone's hurt.
00:48:17
Luke Niforatos
And I think it comes down to a philosophy, the philosophy of policy around drugs. has to start with prevention. It has to then, if you're going to, so you want to start with prevention for to prevent addiction and drug use before it starts, it's not going to be perfect. You're never going to stop every single person from using drugs, just like you're not going to stop every single person from committing crime.
00:48:37
Luke Niforatos
But the idea is to restrict it, prohibit it, discourage it, keep it as low as possible in terms of availability of these drugs. these these drugs. And then on the back end for the people who do slip through the cracks, for the people who do use marijuana or other substances is to have a philosophy of recovery for those people. So meet them where they're at, but don't leave them there, get them into recovery so that they can be free from addiction and they can achieve their their greatest potential.
00:49:01
Luke Niforatos
I think that's gotta be the philosophy. Is it, and and you can't have this philosophy like what we saw with ah Portugal and and also in Oregon where, where you had a essentially saying, okay, we're going to decriminalize the use of drugs.
00:49:14
Luke Niforatos
We're going to say that this is generally okay and with certain restrictions. Portugal, for but by the way, i mean, there's a lot of, ah there was a lot of mischaracterization of what Portugal did. You know, they they actually had a very restrictive environment within administrative state that does not exist in the United States that, you know, penalized you pretty heavily for using drugs. It just, it didn't put you in jail, but there were a lot of penalties if you were a drug user.
00:49:34
Luke Niforatos
ah in Portugal. ah But even there, even with that, you know, slight reduction in the criminal penalties, still having a restrictive state on these drugs, but that reduction, at first people said, oh, it's working out great. You know, no one's getting ODing, they're seeing great results, there's not seeing an increase in drug use.
00:49:49
Luke Niforatos
Now, though, in the last couple of years, Portugal's seeing and a total reversal of those trends. So it'll be very interesting to see in the long run. But I think we see enough from Oregon to Portugal to know that when you ah liberalize, normalize, expand,
00:50:02
Luke Niforatos
drug use, and whatever the drug is, you have problems. And a lot of that comes with crime.
00:50:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:50:06
Luke Niforatos
Because frankly, when people's mind states are altered, when they're using drugs that can cause psychosis and other things like marijuana, um you're getting you're more likely to commit crimes. I don't know any other way to put it.
00:50:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. All right. A couple devil's advocate questions. um OK, so what you see behind me is my membership diploma for a famous French wine drinking society.
00:50:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah you know Why is alcohol legal? And by the way, ah ah we can get we can skip over that one quickly because it it it annoys me so much.
00:50:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah and and and And by the way, the again, ah sitting here in Burgundy, ah the cultural aspect of is like the fact that the cultural argument is never mentioned. Like the very simple example of why alcohol should be legal and pot not is because my ancestors drank alcohol and they didn't smoke pot.
00:50:48
Luke Niforatos
It's annoying for sure.
00:51:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And there's a science there's a scientific basis to that, by the way, which is that for, you know, certainly for ah Western European populations, we have co-evolved with alcohol for millennia. Like when Native American populations got first got access to alcohol, it was a disaster because they they never encountered that substance as a population.
00:51:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um But Europeans have, you know, you could talk about the ravages of alcohol and they're very real. Of course, I'm not trying to minimize them. But, you know, while we were drinking, you know, we we we still, you know, put men on the moon and, you know, invented supersonic air. Like all those guys were drinking.
00:51:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Uh... not ah like point zero is zero They weren't drunk while doing it, although you know sometimes you wonder. ah but like point
00:52:03
Luke Niforatos
ah
00:52:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know None of them were teetotalers or 0.0001% were like Mormons or ah whatever um so clearly like that's you know clearly we we do manage it um Yeah, i again, i've I've answered my own question. But i guess the broader argument is sort of like personal response ah well personal responsibility, liberty and so on and so forth. Like, okay, like okay maybe you're right.
00:52:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Then, you know, let's let's slap warning labels. on on all the pot products saying, hey, you know, if you use this, you have an increased risk of blah, blah, blah, like we did with tobacco.
00:52:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Let's tax it. Let's so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, you know, if if somebody is a grown adult and they want to and they want to use this arguably harmful, but also a pleasant ah substance, they they should have that right.
00:53:05
Luke Niforatos
game.
00:53:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
You know, this is America. ah What's your answer to that?
00:53:12
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, my answer is a little bit of what you said, generally what you said, but adding ah a little bit to it. So yes, we made our, I would call it a deal with the devil with alcohol, you know, thousands of years ago where, you know, it, it and it it is interesting, again, this just getting into history, you know, 2000 years ago, the the wine that Jesus was drinking and he created with, the you know, for his first miracle, right?
00:53:31
Luke Niforatos
That wine was probably nothing like the wine of today. There was probably a lot less alcohol content in it, a lot less alcohol content in the alcohol beverage, beverages over history than there is now. um The, the, the,
00:53:42
Luke Niforatos
Alcohol that the average user is consuming now, I think, is a lot more potent. there's a lot more inebriation
Cultural Comparisons: Alcohol vs Marijuana
00:53:47
Luke Niforatos
that's happening. But I think the key distinction here is, A, we made a deal with the devil where the vast majority of Western civilization ah drinks, at least occasionally, that 60% of Americans drink on a regular basis.
00:53:59
Luke Niforatos
Not saying that that's good for public health. I mean, alcohol is responsible for 100,000 American deaths worldwide. a year, we're learning more about his cancer impacts. So I personally think society is better off without alcohol. But that's a battle that we're not going to fight. It's something that it's a decision we made.
00:54:13
Luke Niforatos
but But additionally, what I would say is not only is it ingrained in so Western civilization where marijuana was not, ah which I think you made interesting points on that matter. Also, you can use alcohol without getting intoxicated.
00:54:25
Luke Niforatos
um You can use alcohol with the for the purpose of pairing it with a meal, for example, where the idea is not to get intoxicated.
00:54:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:32
Luke Niforatos
The entire reason you're using marijuana is to get intoxicated.
00:54:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:35
Luke Niforatos
There's no such thing as, you know, ah smoking a tiny little bit of weed bud so that like it's in you because you love the the flavor.
00:54:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:54:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:54:43
Luke Niforatos
That is not happening.
00:54:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but
00:54:45
Luke Niforatos
You're using it to get intoxicated.
00:54:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:54:47
Luke Niforatos
And by the way, that's the the Christian argument against using marijuana as well.
00:54:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:54:51
Luke Niforatos
I have a lot of Christians that ask me, you know, what is the the Bible doesn't say anything about marijuana? Well, the Bible says don't get drunk, which I think we can infer means don't get intoxicated.
00:54:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:55:00
Luke Niforatos
And when you're using marijuana, the idea is to get intoxicated, which is exactly what the Bible warns against.
00:55:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:05
Luke Niforatos
So I think for for folks, you know, practicing, you know Christian faith, I think that answers that very quickly. and but But I think to to the to the immediate point, though, you're talking about something where with alcohol, you can have it normalized where people are not getting intoxicated.
00:55:16
Luke Niforatos
It's not having these downstream harms of intoxication. With marijuana, if you get 60% of Americans using marijuana as they do alcohol, you're going to have a lot more intoxication in society because that is the sole purpose um of using it. So I think that that distinguishes between the two substances.
00:55:31
Luke Niforatos
um And there's just really no way to regulate that. There's no way to say, ah yeah We see in this country that once you get a foothold, you become legal, you own everything.
00:55:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:55:40
Luke Niforatos
I mean, people look at tobacco and they say, this is a great example of how yeah we we regulated and dealt with the industry. No, it's not. People don't understand we had to, that Congress, there's a First Amendment right that extends to corporations.
00:55:52
Luke Niforatos
If tobacco wanted to, they could be advertising on TV today. The only reason that they're not is because of a master settlement, a lawsuit where Congress got them to blink and basically agree not to do it.
00:56:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:56:03
Luke Niforatos
There was no authority that has been vested in Congress to stop the tobacco industry from doing what it's doing.
00:56:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:56:08
Luke Niforatos
Because under the Constitution, they have every right to addict everyone they want, to advertise to everyone they want.
00:56:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:56:13
Luke Niforatos
So this idea that we can force this industry, the marijuana industry and any other addiction for profit industry, to behave the way we want them to, they have the right to behave however they want.
00:56:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and That's a very good point.
00:56:23
Luke Niforatos
And people have to die in order to get to sue them to get them to stop some of their activities. So I think it's really important we understand that history.
00:56:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so ah second devil's advocate question. ah This one is about enforcement and it sort of pairs ah with a question about prescription. And so the the The devil's advocate version is, it's kind of what you said, looks like maybe society would be better off without alcohol, but it's here, it's a part of life, it's part of culture, ah there is zero political capital for getting rid of it, so...
00:57:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's just live with it, maybe do things at the margin to sort of reduce the health impacts or or reduce consumption and so on and so forth. But fundamentally, ah let's just accept that it's part of our lives.
00:57:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And, you know, somebody could say the same thing about pot. Like it's part of the culture in America.
00:57:20
Luke Niforatos
Thank
00:57:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There's millions of people using it. um it has It's been that way for decades. um it's been rampant for decades uh there's very little political capital for you know the kind of law enforcement crackdown i think or maybe you disagree but um realistically um
00:57:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like President Trump is not going to ah send the feds to like arrest 19 year olds smoking pot, um, and send them to prison and maybe he should, but he's just not going to, um,
00:58:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So that's the devil's advocate question, which leads into naturally like, OK, like what would you like to see given and maybe your answer is like, I don't care about those political constraints because the the alternative is like, you know, ah melting the brains of every 20 year old in America. So we just got to do what we got to do. It's just fine.
00:58:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But you know what do you think is the the what would you like the policy regime, the enforcement regime to be ah given sort of realistic 2025 America constraints?
00:58:53
Luke Niforatos
Great questions.
00:58:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's a very long two-parter question.
00:58:55
Luke Niforatos
Yeah, first of all, let me with your premise of the first question. So I don't agree that it is ingrained into American culture um in a way that's comparable with alcohol. I think that ah certainly there's pop culture, a lot of marijuana references over the last couple of decades, certainly, particularly in music and things of that nature, some writings.
00:59:13
Luke Niforatos
Certainly, marijuana has obviously always been around. But what I will say is you look at the use data, that the federal surveys on you know use levels of of drugs, which there's only...
00:59:24
Luke Niforatos
data that we have on this subject, so it's all I can work with. you know We're still talking about 10 to 15% of Americans are regularly using marijuana today. So yes, that's not an insignificant number, but it's also very far from even half or a majority of this country that's using it on a regular basis.
00:59:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:59:43
Luke Niforatos
So in my mind as a policymaker, it's a totally different policy question if you come to me and say 60% of Americans are using marijuana on a regular basis. um Then it's it's a totally different policy question at that point.
00:59:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:59:53
Luke Niforatos
um But we're not there.
00:59:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:59:54
Luke Niforatos
but Where we are is that there's, you know, yes, and and there are people probably even laughing right now like, oh, I know everyone uses marijuana. Certainly 50% of people in this country have tried it. um I'm not saying that most people haven't tried it or or seen it around, but most people use it one or two or three times and then they're done.
01:00:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
01:00:11
Luke Niforatos
They don't use it ever again.
01:00:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
01:00:12
Luke Niforatos
And so I think that's a very important thing to understand. We are not at a place as a nation where we have to accept this.
01:00:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, because by the way, it sucks.
01:00:20
Luke Niforatos
Yes, most people think that. Most people think it's not good. They don't enjoy it. um That is, ah by and large, the the reaction to it. But, you know, we're talking about, you know, 30% of people who use in the last year will develop an addiction.
01:00:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:32
Luke Niforatos
So that that's the part that it we're concerned about. So that's the premise of your first question i wanted to address. Secondarily, in terms of enforcement, what we'd like to see happen, we we as an organization are not interested in criminalizing
Policy Focus: Commercialization vs Personal Use
01:00:43
Luke Niforatos
use. So somebody's small possession, somebody's use in their own home, that's something that you know we would like to see discouraged, but we don't want people going to prison for that.
01:00:52
Luke Niforatos
our Our concern is with the commercialization, the sale, the promotion, the normalization of these drugs. And I think that is where there actually is potentially some political capital to do something about it.
01:01:04
Luke Niforatos
We are actually working on two stealth projects at the state level. I can't say exactly what it is, but they're going to give voters another choice. i'll just I'll just leave it at that. And and more to come on on those announcements later.
01:01:16
Luke Niforatos
Maybe we can do another interview later about that. But um there is pushback politically at the state level on some of these in some of these states that have legalized marijuana. particularly around the smell, the smoke, the stores, the advertising, the products, um all the things that we've talked about today.
01:01:32
Luke Niforatos
And so I do think that you could have a targeted approach looking at the biggest players. And again, i mentioned my capstone I wrote for Johns Hopkins, and this is what I talk about is You start with the biggest, worst behaved, and and something Kleinman, I think, would agree with, biggest, worst behaved actors like True Leave, for example, major multi-billion dollar federally illegal marijuana company based in Florida with a lot of products they're selling, a lot of money that they have.
01:01:58
Luke Niforatos
um If you were to enforce federal law against an entity like that, that is um actively targeting youngermmer younger demographics. I mean, it's not even debatable. You look at the products and the flavors that they're selling.
01:02:09
Luke Niforatos
I think 90% of America would have zero qualms with a company that's engaged in that kind of behavior, um that's doing that kind of of work. being enforced upon in some way.
01:02:20
Luke Niforatos
And what happens is if you take out the biggest worst factors, then you start to decrease the number of products available in the market. Then the price starts to go up on these products, which then reduces the use.
01:02:31
Luke Niforatos
um So you start to pare down this industry, the magnitude of the harm. So I think that is a very smart place to start if you're looking at federal enforcement of this, where you're not targeting individual users You're not going after the cancer patients that are using the marijuana. They think it helps them with their appetite or their whatever it is.
01:02:47
Luke Niforatos
You're going after the large corporate conglomerates um with the big investors from Wall Street, from Silicon Valley. There's nobody that is, we people are going to cry crocodile tears over those guys paying for selling addictive products. So I think that actually is a place where you could get a foothold.
01:03:01
Luke Niforatos
And then certainly if you have a state that votes to repeal their law or some part of their law, um then you have a wide open door to go into a state and start doing something.
01:03:14
Luke Niforatos
I'm not hearing you, Pascal. I think you're on mute.
01:03:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah that Yes, I was on mute.
01:03:19
Luke Niforatos
yeah
01:03:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um There's... um ah There's Palladium magazine. I don't know if it's a, it's a, so yeah, it's a Silicon Valley magazine.
01:03:29
Luke Niforatos
I know of it.
01:03:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, they did a very good piece on China and drugs. And basically what, what the story they tell is in the early two thousands, you know, China was beginning to get rich. And so they were starting to have ah problems with ah it was more like, you know, party drugs, like ecstasy and so on and so forth.
01:03:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And, you know, back then, certainly, if today, but back then, certainly, they thought of themselves as this sort of like benevolent, technocratic, non-ideological sort of ruling class.
01:04:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so and they still had an inferiority complex with vis-a-vis the US. And so they they sort of looked at like American academic papers. and which said, oh, you know, you you can't ban drugs, but, you know, ah ah you have to to offer support and treatment and prevention and so on and so forth. And they tried that for a year.
01:04:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And obviously it had no results. um And so they remembered that they're Chinese communists. ah and and And they went in the opposite direction, which is that they actually enforced the law and they actually enforced it. So you had like SWAT raids and nightclubs, ah you know, people ah ah grabbed off the street and tested and so on and so forth.
01:04:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And it totally worked. ah this This is something that really, you know, It's the same thing about the border, right? It's like people pretend that it's impossible to enforce laws when literally all you have to do is and enforce the law.
01:05:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um So i just I just wanted to get that out there. OK, we're over time, but I really if if it's OK with you, I want to get to our last topic.
01:05:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um it was It was such a fascinating conversation. So one of the things that you and I both know um is that there is so there is a lot of money behind this and there is a lot of money in particular going to Republicans and so-called conservatives.
01:05:16
Luke Niforatos
Let's do it.
01:05:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And there is a very concerted, very well-funded, ah not just lobbying, but sort of broader influence operation going on by this industry to sort of ah essentially buy ah the Republican Party.
01:05:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
01:05:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Talk about that.
Politics and Financial Influence
01:05:58
Luke Niforatos
Let's definitely talk about that. So first of all, I think, you know, not a lot of people know that they're obviously, i think we've all heard that there's money in politics and money buys you power in DC and all of those things. So i think conceptually people know that, but at the nuts and bolts of how this works, it's interesting how the game has changed. So,
01:06:13
Luke Niforatos
What we essentially have happening today, and I'll just, obviously, that we're talking about marijuana. So the way that this is working right now is there's a concerted effort to leverage the Trump administration into ah rescheduling marijuana. that's That's what they want to get done. They and they they know that they're not going to legalize it, that it won't be Trump will legalize it, but they think they can get him to reschedule it, which will at least give them a windfall of cash in terms of a huge tax break.
01:06:38
Luke Niforatos
And so what they're doing is they have set up super PACs ah Super PACs are you know these entities that can spend unlimited sums of money on advertising. They can you know push and attack and promote things that they want to promote.
01:06:53
Luke Niforatos
um But they can also pay people to advocate their messages. And so what we're seeing is... We have several of the largest marijuana companies, but I'm going to pick on Trulieve.
01:07:05
Luke Niforatos
Trulieve, who I talked about earlier, is probably, they're the biggest in terms of being involved with this administration. And it's important to understand the ties. Before I talk about what they're doing, it's important to understand the ties. So Trulieve, major marijuana company from Florida, they hired a major law firm and lobbying firm in Florida.
01:07:21
Luke Niforatos
And that firm, one of the partners of that firm was Susie Wiles. And Susie Wiles, as everyone knows, is President Trump's chief of staff. And she was engaged in lobbying on behalf of Trulieve before she took the job at the Trump campaign and then became the chief of staff.
01:07:37
Luke Niforatos
So there's a connection between Susie Wiles, at least on paper, and I will not prognosticate as to anything further than that. But certainly there are dots connected between Susie Wiles and the Florida marijuana game, specifically Trulieve.
01:07:49
Luke Niforatos
Well, the CEO of Trulieve is Kim Rivers. Kim Rivers is, you know, she's one of the richest federal felons, or excuse me, who should be charged with a felony, but she's engaged in the felon felonious activity of pushing ah marijuana products right now.
01:08:02
Luke Niforatos
ah Hasn't been enforced against or or convicted of anything, but she, in my view, she should be. um She has been actively involved in the Trump administration. So she got a meeting with President Trump, which I think was courtesy of Susie Wiles, on the campaign trail to talk to Trump about supporting marijuana rescheduling, which for those who Remember, he then ended up doing a truth social message about how he would support marijuana rescheduling on the campaign trail. um And that was after this meeting with Kim Rivers.
01:08:30
Luke Niforatos
Fast forward. Now we've learned that Kim Rivers and her associated True Leave entities have given a couple million dollars to the Trump campaign and to to election campaigns. um So that's how the money's playing on the on the campaign side.
01:08:43
Luke Niforatos
Now we're learning that this super PAC that Trulieve and a couple of other major marijuana companies started and gave millions of dollars to has now paid conservative ex-influencers like Alec Brusiewicz.
01:08:56
Luke Niforatos
and his company X Strategies. They paid him $300,000 last month to promote marijuana rescheduling. So all of a sudden, this guy who's never said anything about marijuana policy, at least that I've seen, all of a sudden, he's tweeting very interesting policy tweets about how we should reschedule marijuana.
01:09:13
Luke Niforatos
and it and And oddly enough, his first tweet, he says, I have no personal stake in this debate. However, I think we should reschedule marijuana. And that was 12 days after he received $300,000 from the PAC that was designed to push marijuana rescheduling.
01:09:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:28
Luke Niforatos
And then all of a sudden, um and and it was very interesting, it was very, you know, like very focused grouped in terms of what was in his text, then all of a sudden, or in his tweets, then all of a sudden, we see several other ex influencers, conservative ex influencers doing the same thing and retweeting him.
01:09:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:09:42
Luke Niforatos
So ah Gunther Eagleman, DC Drano, Bruce Lavelle, and I think there might be one other one, but that was the main core group.
01:09:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:09:50
Luke Niforatos
And so clearly they're all being paid to say the exact same thing. And then you have Kim Rivers and the True Leave social media accounts retweeting these like, oh, interesting, like conservative influencers saying this as if they're not the ones paying for the whole thing happening, which is clearly what's going on.
01:10:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:10:05
Luke Niforatos
so and You know, there's a lot more that goes to it. There's a ways that they route dark money through LLCs, etc. And all of that happens. But I think it's important for people understand, know, that old adage, if yeah you shouldn't believe everything you read, you shouldn't believe everything you watch.
01:10:18
Luke Niforatos
Still true today as it relates to social media influencers, where you have to understand that they're not always saying things that they genuinely, authentically believe. A lot of times these folks are being paid to put what are look like organic posts um and this happens with products and everything else as well, they're being paid to push a message.
01:10:35
Luke Niforatos
um And that's absolutely what is happening. And we have the receipts. um So we actually have a whole article on it on our the drug report.org. You can go to the drug report.org. That's our new service on drugs. And we have a whole article tying this all together with the FEC receipts and all of that stuff in terms of how this is happening.
01:10:49
Luke Niforatos
ah But there is a money game that's being played. And the final thing I'll say is there is rumor out there. And again, this is pure rumor. um I have several friends very close to the industry, very close in Trulieve that I believe when they told me this, there's a rumor that the leadership of the Republican Party and Trump are being promised by Kim Rivers and Trulieve that if they let this rescheduling decision move forward, they will put $400 million dollars into the reelection campaigns.
01:11:14
Luke Niforatos
for Republicans here in the midterms. that's That's the room around the industry and with some of the industry folks. So um you know my hope is that you know the the convictions and doing the right thing will outweigh ah the purported financial benefits, but but we will see.
01:11:28
Luke Niforatos
Thank
01:11:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, i just just to clarify one thing about Suzy Wells, ah just because somebody is a partner in firm X and a company hires that firm does not mean that that person works for that company because...
01:11:44
Luke Niforatos
Correct. Well, she lobbied, we know in her disclosures, she did lobby on marijuana in Florida.
01:11:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
01:11:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
01:11:50
Luke Niforatos
So we know she was engaged. do We know that she has a relationship. But to your to your point, we don't know the extent of that relationship today. And we don't know what exactly that means.
01:11:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
01:11:59
Luke Niforatos
All I can point to is that on paper, there's a connection and that there was a meeting that was set up between the president himself and the CEO of that company. And there's really only one person in the administration that could have set up a meeting for that CEO of that company that would have that relationship.
01:12:12
Luke Niforatos
But yeah, yes, a conjecture from there forward.
01:12:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
OK. No, just because ah most of these firms work kind of like law firms, where each partner has like his clients. and you know they share like brands and offices and accountants and stuff like that. But like it's sort of siloed inside. And I just want to be careful because um Otherwise, Susie Wiles will have me shot.
01:12:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah No, but joking aside, joking aside, ah i really hate when, and I'm not saying you did this, I just want to be clear clear for the audience.
01:12:39
Luke Niforatos
Thank you.
01:12:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know I hate the game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I hate, the oh, so-and-so is the brother-in-law so-and-so was at the wedding and and so on and so forth.
01:13:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So i just wanted to make that very clear. ah ah Apart from that, Everything you you just said is 100% and I can absolutely confirm it.
01:13:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah It's disgusting. It's pay-to-play. um And it just it just goes ah completely against...
01:13:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um the values of the Republican Party and not just because it's it's because you could say, oh, well, the Republican Party, you have social conservatives, but you also have libertarians and you know, blah, blah, blah.
01:13:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, OK, but ah like it one of the bedrock values of the Republican Party that everybody is supposed to share is law and order. And it's become a
Liberty vs Societal Effects Debate
01:13:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
law and order problem.
01:13:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, that this is this is why I wanted to ask you the the devil's that advocate.
01:13:48
Luke Niforatos
Totally agree.
01:13:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
point, which is, no, it's no longer an individual liberty thing because the spillover, number one, the addiction effects, and number two, the sort of spillover effects on the broader society are too large.
01:14:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And so, you you know, yeah I don't see how you can run an election on, like, the borders and the cartels and fentanyl, like,
01:14:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and China and generally the sort of, you know, the chaos of like blue governance, which was, I think, a huge factor um and do this.
01:14:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And and ah by the way, i I think it would be bad politics exactly for the reason I've laid out, like the There are probably some Trump moderates who are like, you know, hey, you know, but I i bet there are more Trump leaning moderates who are just fed up of smelling marijuana smoke when they go out.
01:14:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um So thank you for being willing to say the truth on this.
Conclusion and Book Recommendation
01:15:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um OK, so we end every podcast with a traditional ritual question. And the question is, recommend a book.
01:15:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It can be any book, fiction, nonfiction, old, new. That's not in your area of expertise.
01:15:19
Luke Niforatos
The history of the Peloponnesian War.
01:15:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So not not drugs, not drug policy, not vice policy.
01:15:25
Luke Niforatos
So I would recommend a book, The History of the Peloponnesian War. For anyone who hasn't read it, it's fantastic. It's one of my favorites. I'm a Greek, and the way I connect with my Greek heritage is to read the ancient Greek writers that our founding forefathers gleaned all their ideas about democracy and justice and virtue from, and I take that credit even before the Romans stole what my my ancestors thought up.
01:15:45
Luke Niforatos
And so I'll leave me a little facetious there. But no, The History of the Peloponnesian War is one of my favorite books. And it It tells you a lot of things about the rules of engagement, about strategy, about right and wrong. There's a lot of things that you can pull from that book.
01:15:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh yeah.
01:15:57
Luke Niforatos
So um yeah, that's that's that's what I'd recommend.
01:15:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah It's one of the great books of the canon. Excellent, excellent selection. All right. ah Luke Neferatos, thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for going a little bit over. But as as you see, it was a fascinating discussion with enormous ground to cover.
01:16:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It was very interesting. ah Thank you. And, you know, we'll we'll keep covering this topic ah because it it it is an important topic. And there is, as we said, ah like a big bush on it.
01:16:28
Luke Niforatos
Very good. Pascal, thank you for the honor of being on here and au revoir.
01:16:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Au revoir.