 Are you ready tonight? We're debating whether or not pot should be legal and you're starting right now with Carissa's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us. Carissa, the floor is all yours. Thank you so much, James. I'm glad to be back. So from my research, I am not an ideologue on this position. I have researched it. I've looked through the data on it, and it seems to me that obviously weed needs to be decriminalized. First off, it's the first step we need to take. But one thing that we have not been able to move forward on because of the tight restrictions on weed is FDA approval. In the 1900s, the 1990s, there was some research through the FDA on weed, but that was stopped. So I think what we should do is we should move it from a section one drug to section two drug or a schedule one drug to a schedule two drug. And we need to actually do some more research because right now a lot of the research is inconclusive. There is not much to suggest that weed is very beneficial medically. And there is a lot to suggest that it is very detrimental, especially not necessarily if you're doing it every once in a while, but especially if you do it regularly. So I believe we should decriminalize it, which would mean that it would still be a misdemeanor, but there would be no criminal offenses. So that would also mean that doctors could prescribe it. But I do feel, I do believe that that should be dosed. Currently, with a lot of the medical weed that we're seeing in states that allow medical marijuana, it is not dosed. You have very large quantities that you can buy all at one time. And it's honestly just for many people use it just to get weed recreationally. So it's almost like a workaround. So I think that needs to be closed up that gap. I think if it is used medically, it should be dosed like a prescription drug, which would be allowed if we decriminalized it and we were able to prescribe. But generally speaking, I think we need to do a lot more research before we even consider full scale legalization. And even if we do legalization, I think we need to be very strategic about doing so. And we need to make sure that people understand the risks involved in especially abuse of marijuana. And that's all I have. Thank you very much, Carissa, for that opening statement. And I want to let you know, folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. And hey, if you haven't already hit that subscribe button for many more juicy debates to come. For example, you'll see at the bottom right of your screen, Alex Stein and Vegan Games will be debating veganism on trial. So you don't want to miss that one as well as many more. And with that, we'll kick it over to Tom. Thanks so much for being here. The floor is all yours. Yeah, thanks, James, as always for hosting. Thanks, Hunter Avalon for joining the Zoom call. I appreciate it. Yeah, so my position is I don't understand how anyone doesn't understand why we shouldn't legalize weed. Like there has been tons and tons of studies on weed, both long-term and short-term. It does have a negative side effect, especially depending on the age you take it. If you start taking it younger, it has more of a side effect. But it's less than caffeine, it's less than sugar, it's less than cigarettes, it's less than any of the medications that doctors give you. It essentially does less than anything. Sugar does less than sugar. This is not a huge impact at all. It has very minimal impacts, even over long-term usages compared to any normal drug. It definitely makes people relax. It's used as a pain suppressant, which we know it works as a pain suppressant, which is the only thing it's used for as a medical aid to decrease pain. And it's significantly less damaging than any other pain suppressant. So oxycodone, you can get addicted to it, and it can kill you. All of those kinds of drugs are bad, whereas marijuana is not bad. It causes not those bad things to happen. So obviously, if we're talking about for medical usages, marijuana is a obviously better choice than literally any other pain med. I mean, it does less damage than consistent Advil usage. Advil will damage your intestines and your stomach if you use it in your liver too much. Marijuana doesn't do that. So is it perfect? No, it does have some negative side effects, especially if you start taking it young and continue to take it a lot. Are they bad? Not really. I mean, like you score lower on some verbal tests. That's about it. It's not terrible outcome. It has a very significant effect at lowering pain, which is good. So I mean, I don't understand why anyone would be opposed to using this as a medical drug and talking about legalization. Is there any drugs that do less damage? Sugar, caffeine, tobacco? Anything? I don't think so. I think those are all worse, yet they're all legal. So it doesn't really make much sense to say that this should not be legalized. Just completely just go do it in your home if you want kind of a thing, because it doesn't do significant damage. Like people can drive on marijuana and are less impaired than drinking. I just don't understand why anyone would think that this is not something that should just be immediately legalized. I don't get it at all. I'll conclude there. You got it. Thank you very much, Tom, for that opening statement as well. And we're going to jump right in and open conversation, folks. We are very excited for it. Carissa and Tom, the floor is all yours. Thank you. You didn't laugh at my hunter joke. You didn't laugh. I'm just used to it. So I actually agree with a lot of what you said. So I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm anti-weed. My position is that it needs to be researched by the FDA, like every other drug. Are you familiar with the different schedules of drugs? There's different classifications of drugs, and I think it's absolutely insane that legally we cannot prescribe weed under federal law. I think that's absolutely insane. I agree with you that there are definitely cases that would make sense to prescribe weed instead of something like opioids, like you mentioned. I think that's definitely fair. Would you agree that maybe a good potential compromise would be dosing it? Dosing marijuana? Yes. Why? Like if there was some amount that you could overdose on, then yes, it would make sense to dose it, but it's literally impossible to overdose on marijuana. But it is possible to become addicted. In extremely rare cases, like it's really hard to get addicted to marijuana. That's not true. It actually, they found that 10% of those who try marijuana, or actually just maybe not try, but use marijuana and write, just I guess, blanket use marijuana, have a dependence on it, that it constitutes abuse. It's called cannabis use, I think it's called a CUD dependence, cannabis use dependence. It's very, it's funny because I think that's a very common perception that you can't get addicted, but you do. And it's actually not just psychological. You have like withdrawal effects, it changes your brain. I have a study here if you'd like to, I know this is just more like a more like a conversation, but I did, I looked into it a little bit. And from like NIH, it talks about how it does actually remodels your brain, reward circuits. And so I totally agree. Like you can get addicted to anything. I'm addicted to chess. But it's common. I think that's the point. 10% isn't common. Like the addiction rate to caffeine is 30%. The addiction rate to nicotine is 80%. Do we see a significant cognitive decline in regular caffeine drinkers? Or anything comparable to that? For nicotine, we definitely do. For alcohol, we definitely do. Alcohol is 50%. It's legal. But I feel like that's a little bit of like a pivot though. I understand. I think that's another conversation to have, but I think just talking about the dangers specifically for marijuana, do you see it as being like, do you understand that like people can actually get addicted and have like negative effects? Well, yeah, but I don't see that as a problem. Like you can get addicted to anything like caffeine or alcohol or cigarettes. But we let the fact that you can get addicted isn't the reason to make it illegal. So you're right. I think it's the negative side effects that have come along with that, that addiction. Is that right? Yeah, if there were like significant negative side effects, that would be a good reason. Like if you died, like heroin, heroin is a good thing to keep legal because you die. That's fair. I think that's fair. What about potential, there is data that suggests causal relationships between psychosis and marijuana. Do you think that's something that we should study more before making it legal? Well, I mean, we could study it more, but I think it depends on the rate. If the rate is at a such significantly small enough number that it's not really a big deal, no. I agree with you. But do you think we should study it first? The COVID vaccine will kill, yeah, we have marijuana is one of the most studied drugs because it's so prevalent and easy to produce and easy to study. And there's long-term studies because people use it for decades. So it's one of the most studied drugs. But the issue is that it's mostly longitudinal. It's very hard to have control groups because of the federal, and so like a lot of the studies are voluntary response, right? So for example, they found that people, when they respond and like talking about the side effects of marijuana, they will say that they didn't experience any cognitive decline. But the limited studies that we have conducted that have been able to be controlled, they found that even though they were self-report that way, they perform much lower on tests. So all I'm saying is that there's a big part of studies that we are not missing, that we are not able to engage in because of the federal illegalization of marijuana, right? No, I agree. It's harder to get a study on a class one drug, but we still do it. The controlled study, right? Right. But we do it. Like there's tons of controlled studies. It's not like they're like impossible to find. Like I can just google them on Google Scholar and I can find thousands of them. But do you think that those controlled studies are comparable to the rigor that an FDA approval would subject it to? Yeah, because all the FDA does is the same scientific studies that the colleges do. In fact, they just kind of pawn them off to the colleges in lots of cases. But usually it's like much more large scale, right? Because my understanding is going through them at the same time. Yeah. So going through the data from what I've been reading from doctors who have studied this, a big concern that they've had is that this isn't as studies as it should be, right? So they want to do more studies on it because so for example, they don't know if it actually the effect that it has on mental health. There's some data to suggest that it helps anxiety. There's other data to suggest that it does not, right? So I feel like those types of things or a causal relationship between schizophrenia or psychotic episodes. I think do you feel like that might need to be established before we look at making things legalized across the board? Not really because we have such an abundance of use. We have lots of cases to know if it did, if it caused a significant increase in psychosis, we would see lots and lots and lots of psychosis everywhere in the country because it's used everywhere in the country by a huge amount of the population. And it has been for decades. So if it was a serious risk of actually causing psychosis, then we would see it a lot in society, but we don't. So like we know heroin causes death because people die when we find heroin, but we don't find like a massive spike in the amount of psychosis over the past 50 years, even though there's been a massive spike in the amount of marijuana usage, which means we can say direct correlation, probably not a big thing. It's not a major contributor to psychosis because we can just look at the data. There's been a massive increase in marijuana usage, not a massive increase in psychosis cases. So I think I understand, and actually there's a study that talks about exactly what you're saying, but it says they say it's puzzling. It's a puzzling aspect of cannabis associated psychosis is that schizophrenia is not rising in incidents to reflect prevalent cannabis use, but they have been able to establish and I think they go into like a lot of detail of like the genotypes and stuff, but they say carriers of a genotype. And I think from my understanding, it's like a stress-diathesis model, right? So you have like an underlying disposition maybe for psychosis, but you like using weed is a stressor that can bring that out and is a higher risk. It's a 10 times higher risk of psychosis. It says carriers of, let me try to see here, it seems like it's like a, from the literature, it seems like it's a much higher risk of psychosis for those who use weed. Yeah. I mean, but that's the true of every drug. Every drug has some kind of strange effect on a certain population that has some genetic defect. Like even the vaccine is said to have literally killed some people because they have some bad genetic reaction to it in their immune system. Does the question isn't about can it negatively affect some group? It's, is it a large enough group of the population where this is a significant threat that it should be legal or illegal in the future? No. Right. We know it's not because it doesn't happen. There's like, like you said, like the study says, this is not a very prevalent thing. The amount of psychosis is not going up. So it does say, right, so it says here, I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt you. It says, recent meta-analysis lend further support to the hypothesis that cannabis use use causally contributes to the increased risk risk of development of schizophrenia and a comprehensive and systematic meta-analysis, more et al, determines whether cannabis use contributes causally to the development of non-substance psychiatric illness. The study was designed as much as possible. Two of the most important methodological problems, let's see here. It's found an association and I understand that you're saying that it says the author suggests the need of renewed warning about the potential heart harmful effects of cannabis. Well, one of the things you read there was a non-substance addiction. A non-substance addiction is something that is not related to the thing you're drinking. It's an action-based thing, like picking your nose or scratching the back of your neck too much or sex gambling, those kinds of things, internet games, things that are not related to the substance. Well, no, it says it's a causal, it contributes causally to the development of a non-substance psychiatric illness. So it's a causal relationship. To a non-substance psychiatric, no, no, no, non-substance psychiatric illness, such as schizophrenia or affective disorders. So they've linked it causally. Well, again, the question would be, how much? Any drug you're always going to find, this drug can lead to death if you take it. I understand that, but I think I don't know for the people to be determining whether or not the risk outweighs the benefit, because from what I'm seeing, there are substantial risks such as this one, even more so the cognitive situation, which has also, there's risk with driving too, right? And I understand it's a lot less than when you're drunk, but even when you're not high, the cognitive decline, it makes it so that you cannot react as quickly to situations, which can even impact your driving when you're not high. So to me, I'm seeing like all these negatives, but then the positives, even the positives like relaxing you can actually be associated with the negatives. The relaxing is actually like a brain, like changing your brain in like, which can contribute to the cognitive decline. So I'm just, I don't feel like there's enough benefits to justify a lot of the negatives, right? Well, if that was a significant issue, the fact that like 55 million Americans, 20, 20 something percent of Americans consistently use marijuana and are currently using marijuana. If that was a thing, we would see some kind of drastic change in intellect level, in articulation level, in increased rates of crashes. There have been, there literally have been in Colorado, there are, it's like it increased 10 times the amount of cannabis related medical incidents. It's still small because there's not. Well, obviously, if you legalize a drug, the amount of incidents related to the drug are obviously going to go up, but I want to know relative to the like to the general population. No, no, no. I mean, like, so prior to legalizing weed, the amount of crashes was X. After legalizing weed, the amount of crashes is what? Because if it's the same number, then the fact that they're doing marijuana changed nothing. The amount of crashes is the exact same both before. No, it goes, it went higher, right? So it's not, I don't think it was like super substantial, but it does increase your risk because the usage shouldn't go up incredibly much in Colorado. At least the abuse rate and rate, the CUD rate and went from like, it went up 2% percent points. Right. So the question would be is if we compare a society with no marijuana and then we legalize marijuana and there's a marijuana usage, how much does it go up? That's the question. Right. No, I understand. So I think, so my point is that it seems like there are, even if they're like a little bit more negligible, the harms don't seem to outweigh the positives. So like for the cognitive decline, people don't even know that this is a possibility. There's a narrative that weed is like not a harmful drug whatsoever, that it's like the most harmless drug out there, but people are having a cognitive decline without even realizing it. And this is like shown in like controlled studies. So it's like, so here it's like the benefits of it is that you get high and that's pretty much all, like for maybe a couple individuals, it could help with like their anxiety. And of course there are going to be legitimate and medical usages, but I'm not sure if that's the threshold that we need to legalize it. Right. Well, if it makes people feel good, then people should have the right to do it. And if they, as long as the risks are posted on the little thingy that says, oh, you could die of cancer. What about math? What a math or cocaine? Well, that puts them at risk of other people. But if something puts a significant risk that you're going to crash into other people and it increases it by a significant amount, yes, that's a problem. I looked up the study for marijuana. It's a 6% increase in injury crashes, 4% increase in fatal crashes. This is like nothing. There's like a single digit percentage. This is not like we should immediately ban marijuana because there's a 6% increase in crashes. No, I'm not saying that. I think there's a conglomeration of things that we need to be looking out for, especially when a drug is being marketed as being harmless. It's about as close to harmless as you can get and still be counted as wrong. Like again, sugar causes more caffeine, causes more increases in caffeine, cause a higher rate of increase in crashes because caffeine highs are a thing and caffeine crashes are a thing. So caffeine causes a higher increase than this. But caffeine has been studied. It's been approved by the FDA. Like literally every other drug has. What is a negative of just decriminalizing it right now and waiting until we have more studies on weed before we proceed with potentially loosening the ties for the legalization? Because we have enough, we, well, I'm not sure what the negative, with less people get to feel better for a longer period of time. That would be the negative, which is a pretty bad negative. But is our goal for people, but like long term though, so like, well, before I wanted to have a second answer. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. If we have a larger repository of evidence and data that shows that weed is less bad than caffeine in literally every way, it damages your brain less. It causes you less impairment. It's cheaper. It actually helps you to do things better. It still has, it's not perfect, does have consequences, but it's better in every way than a drug the FDA has approved. Isn't it reasonable to say it's probably going to get approved by the FDA if they do the studies? What is, what is your criticism here? So I think, so I think one of the biggest things is that the FDA will be able to pinpoint exactly what they need to be looking out for, especially when it comes to medical situations. I also don't see the negative side effects of caffeine. I think that's over, I think sometimes you can have an increased, a slight increased risk of anxiety. I have read that. But I also think it's, so I think it's, even with like alcohol, those things like we could not make them illegal. It just wouldn't happen. It's, even if they were unhealthy, it would like, of course a prohibition happened and it was a disaster that literally just would not be possible. So I feel like we're at a station with like marijuana that we can try to roll it out if we do very responsibly, right? Same with a cigarette. Question for you really quick. So if it was found that there are studies that show long-term consumption of low doses of caffeine could cause slowed damage in the hippocampus region and impaired long-term memory at the same degree as marijuana, would you be in favor of banning caffeine? Again, I feel like that's trying to put the cat back into the bag. If that's the case, I think that's, that should be talked about. And I think that should be made much more clear, but I think it's going to be a much easier and well-received measure to actually just do the studies and make sure that weed is actually, we know what to look out for with weed as the doctors have recommended as a consensus is before we make it legal. I think that's going to be much more reasonable than trying to somehow make caffeine illegal. Also, I just read this from a study that wasn't hypothetical. I'm literally just reading it off on a study from Wikipedia that shows this is a thing. So you can find these effects for pretty much any drug. Was it comparing it directly to weed? No, I'm just reading, I just googled negative effects of caffeine on study. But we don't, do you feel like there's something to be said about like a consensus of doctors being concerned about the side effects of weed? Is that something that we should be concerned about? Only if those side effects are greater than any of the other drugs that we are in New York. But do you see, like why would doctors be concerned about that? If doctors are concerned about literally everything, you can find anything imaginable doctors are concerned about. But they prescribe, they're like Adderall, they prescribe, right? Yeah, they're paying lots of money to do that. So, but you can find any study of anything, like too much sugar they're concerned about, too much sunlight they're concerned about, too much sunscreen they're compared about, too much coffee they're concerned about. Do you think there's legitimacy there? No, I think they're mostly that's their job. They realize, oh, there's lots of things that could kill you and they have a very small chance of killing you. But do you think that they are able to pinpoint some areas that we should be concerned about and that there's wisdom in the studies and the cautions that they give? Is there healthcare professionals? There's wisdom in that there are notifications that you could be aware that you have a 0.0001% chance of getting cancer if you stand in front of a microwave. Yes, we want to know that. This is good information to know. I'm glad we know it. Am I going to stop using the microwave? No. It doesn't seem like a consensus, though, from doctors, though. I think a better, so the sugar thing I think is a really good example for, because I know that I don't want to be like, oh, yeah, there's a point, because a lot of, I don't think any doctors are saying stop using microwaves, right? But I understand that a lot of doctors are concerned about sugar consumption. I'm trying to find more of a one-to-one comparison. Doctors, I feel like if there's a drug that could potentially be legalized and the consensus of doctors is saying, hey, we need to study this more, there's these cognitive things that we haven't fully nailed down and they can affect people and we don't know the full effect of these. There's potential psychosis episodes that these drugs could potentially have. Do you feel like we should consider that and try to roll it over to the FDA first, just even as a precautionary measure? No, because we have a massive history of masses of amounts of users who we can just look at and talk to and see what the effects are of people who have literally used it every day for the past 20 years. We have a huge database of people who have used it. We have a large amount of dataset to look at to show what the effects are. But they also, the thing is though, it's not just the effects of weed, it's also the effects of abuse, right? And they've actually shown that if you legalize it, the rates of abuse, just the fact that you're legalizing it, it goes up, not even just according to the population, it just goes up in general, right? By single digit percentages. There's a box article on it. All drugs have been legalized in several countries, and marijuana has been legalized in multiple states and the amount it increases is minimal. It's not like another 10% start using drugs, no. But so there's your rate, but at the same time, the abuse rates go up disproportionately to the number of new users. So studying people who, doctors typically put that up to social acceptance, right? If we are making a drug legal, there's a social acceptance that comes with that, and there's also a risk that younger people will start doing it as well. So I feel like there's multifaceted concerns here, especially with younger people and how it can, as you said, disproportionately affect them in a negative way, right? Yeah, to be clear, I'm definitely for having an age limit. But do you see how even if it's implicit, illegalization will increase marijuana abuse in younger people, teenagers? Not really, no, because that doesn't actually happen as much. It usually is the opposite. If you make it illegal, then more people use it. Like the abolition of alcohol, if you hear what it's called. The legalization or illegalization doesn't really make much of a difference at all. Like even in countries where it's always been illegal, the usage is still about the same. The usage is about the same in most cultures. So Vox actually did an article about weed illegalization and abuse. And they actually found that legalizing does increase the rate of abuse disproportionately to the number of new users. What is abuse of marijuana in this case? It's the DSM. They categorize it, and usually they have a criteria, but it usually is daily usage is constitutes abuse. But I think there's the threshold is more like if you go off of it and you cannot function without it, that type of stuff. Dependence constitutes abuse. But the DSM-5 actually goes into, they have like a screening process for what constitutes abuse. But as we talked about earlier, the rates of addiction is like 10%. Of users, which is significant. That's much lower than alcohol users. Yeah. So the maximum amount that abuse would go up is 10%. I'm sorry. That's much higher than alcohol users. Alcohol users. 50% addiction. Like what? No, alcohol users, their abuse rate is actually lower than weed users. And they actually, doctors are saying that that's partially because of the social acceptance of weed and the propagation that it is just not harmful. Yeah. It also doesn't make you sick if you drink too much. Yeah. That's also true. Fair. That's also probably why. Yeah. I wouldn't consider smoking marijuana once a day abuse. That seems ridiculous. No. I mean, do you not believe that they have like an adequate rationalization for what constitutes weed abuse in the DSM-5? Probably not, no. I mean, the DSM-5 is kind of garbage in a lot of ways, but that's a different topic. But no, I don't think, it's kind of a ridiculous standard. Why? Because we know the effects are so minimal that you should essentially be able to take as much as you want. How do they define sugar abuse or caffeine abuse? So specifically with weed abuse, if you go off of it and you can last, the withdrawal can last up to an entire month and then it can actually be depilitating. So you don't get any work done. You're in a really shitty mood. You're irritable. And that's because it rewires your blind brain and it like the dopamine levels go down your natural dopamine levels go down because it's supplemented with what the weed, the dopamine levels from the weed. So it actually is a physical addiction they found. So my question is for the DSM-5, do they classify caffeine addiction or caffeine dependency any differently in the answers? No. I'm not sure. I haven't gone into it. I just Google it. It's the same definition. Probably, yeah. So caffeine abuse is the same thing. If you have coffee every day and even knowing that you're going to have a coffee high and not go through withdrawal, you have a caffeine addiction. You're abusing the caffeine. You're abusing the caffeine. Sure. But I think the point being that you're going to have, they've found correlations between weed abuse and other negative effects in your real life. So typically, people who abuse weed report higher levels of mental illness, which could be just correlational, but there's some data to suggest is actually causational. And it might be on a case by case basis, but also we're just looking at averages. And you're looking at significant cognitive decline. When you have that amount of weed, there has to be a level of weed that they're able to measure and the effects of that. Right? Well, yeah. But again, just long-term effects of caffeine use include chronic insomnia, constant anxiety, depression, stomach problems, high blood pressure, low birth weights for babies, miscarriages, like name any other drug. You can find worse or equivalent things. So again, just because so, okay, you can take the same thing. You know how people, the anti-vaxxusers are saying that you should take the horse dewormer, right? A side effect of that could be a heart attack where a side effect of Zoloft, which is a common SSRI, could also be a heart attack. I don't think it's fair to say, oh, both of them have the same heart attack. Therefore, they're just as dangerous as each other. I think you're going to have different levels. And that's why I think that doctors are going to be able to say, hey, this one might be a little worse than that based on percentages and the potential for this to happen. Therefore, I'm going to be cautioning people about the horse dewormers and not necessarily about Zoloft, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's levels of risk for sure. Exactly. And so the question would be, what is the risk of marijuana compared to the other drugs? From every study I've seen, marijuana is not that high. No, but what you're doing though is you're just saying, oh, there's a risk for anxiety if you have caffeine and there is a risk for anxiety if you have marijuana. Therefore, it's equivocated, but that's not necessarily how it works, right? All I'm saying is that if caffeine... The damage done by caffeine is equivalent or greater to the damage done by marijuana. Okay. Can you send me that study? Sure. Because that would be interesting. I mean, I feel like if... My biggest thing is I feel like if doctors are warning, if the consensus of doctors are saying, hey, there's this recent... There's a lot of recent data that's coming on and a lot of recent studies that say that weed is not as safe as we thought it was and that the narrative that it is like just a safe benign drug is false. I feel like we should be doing more research into it, especially if it's federally. It's not possible to do it now. I think our first step needs to be to make it federally allowable to do more research and then reevaluate whether it's something that we should move up in the line of medication or if we should just make it fully legal. I think that we have enough background data on the topic to know that it's safe enough. But why do doctors disagree with you? They literally say that about everything. Doctors say that about literally everything. You find a news article that everything is dangerous one week. But doctors believe that everyone should be taking the COVA vaccine, right? Even if it wasn't FDA approved, that's not what's happening with the weed situation. What? Doctors don't think everyone should be taking weed? Oh my God, it's a problem. No, no, no, no. You're saying that they're cautionary about everything. Obviously, they're not cautionary about everything. Yes, there's doctors that are cautionary about the vaccine as well. But it's not the consensus, right? The consensus of doctors are saying that the risks outweigh the benefits. The doctors are not saying that about the weed. The doctors are all saying that there are risks to the vaccine, but the risks of not taking it are greater than the risks of taking it. So there are the consensus of doctors is that the vaccine has side effects. It's not perfect. Correct. And the consensus is that. So imagine if the vaccine had no benefits whatsoever other than just making you feel good. Do you think doctors would have a consensus that, oh, this is probably not a good thing? Yes. So okay, if the only benefit from a vaccine is to make you feel good, obviously they're going to say this is a bad idea because they're doing cost-benefit analysis, right? Similarly, if there's not enough benefit medicinally from weed and there's a lot of detriments, they're probably going to advise against taking it, right? Well, sure. But doctors are going to advise against anything that just makes you feel good at the damage of your body. But I think that's, I think that the benefits of feeling good outweigh the costs to your body. I would say that that's a definitively the case. I don't know if that's a case because doctors also say that it's okay to drink moderately, right? So a lot of doctors, from my understanding, I haven't done research into this, but the accepted consensus is that like one drink of alcohol a day or every few days is usually healthy if it's like red wine, that type of thing, or at least it's not harmful. Well, I'm sure there's a consensus about a safe amount of marijuana you can take every day too. I don't not, well, I do agree that I think there's a consensus that it's at least much better to not be smoking marijuana all the time. I think there's a fair consensus. I'm not really worried about those people. I'm not worried about the people who smoke like every once in a while. I'm more concerned about the fact that legalization increases the rate of abuse compared to the rate of users and I'm more concerned about the effects of the abuse rate. I still think we have enough of a body of research from the past to look at from the people who've taken it and for a long enough period of time say if this is the average consequence it's safe. But why do you feel like doctors are disagreeing with you? Because they're doctors and they're paid to do that. So the way I see it, I agree with you that a lot of people don't realize the effect that weed is having on them, right? So a lot of people don't know that they're gonna have much lower memory that they wouldn't be able to react very quickly. And a lot of things that happen in a day to day, they may not be able to trace back to marijuana usage. If I'm not able to react quickly in a car crash, I'm not going to trace this back to oh this is probably because I smoke. That's not what's gonna happen but it might be why. So all I'm saying is that it seems like there is more of a consensus coming out that there are potentially dangerous side effects to weed. And before we make a large step in legalizing it, I think we need to do our due diligence in researching it. Like every single other drug that's gone through that's prescribed medically or even over the counter. Well I'm for FDA doing the research but I think we should legalize it now because again we have enough data from the past to be like yeah it's safe. So you wouldn't mind. But it's not significant enough to be worried about it. What if it was shown that there's significant effects on your reaction time even when you were not high from marijuana? Would you be concerned? Because that would necessarily be affecting other people because you would be driving, you would be having passengers potentially. There's many different ways that that could affect other people. Would that be something for you that you would be concerned about? If we could look at the data and see a massive increase in the amount of crashes caused by this then yes. If we don't see it then no. If we could do a controlled study right? No I mean if we look at an area that has a large amount of marijuana usage and we see an increase in crashes by a significant margin then we go yeah okay that's that's a problem. But the issue though is that so if you don't have that much that high of a percentage of abusers right of 20% of Americans use it daily. Right and only 10% of the users are going to be abused well not only but that's a big 10% of 20% of the entire population is going to be relatively small. So what I the thing I read earlier is that like 20% of Americans use it regularly by your definition every day or in the past few days. So okay a huge amount of people are abusers by your definition. So my interesting is like 3% of the entire world's adult population are abusers that's from the like DSM-5 definition which would make sense like 10% of the people who use marijuana on a regular basis not necessarily data daily would be a percentage of the world's population you said? Of the world's adult population. And do you think in a first world country a larger percent of the population has access to drugs? I think it would depend on the country. Like America? Well yeah I mean I think Mexico I don't know if you would say that was the first world country but I think they're going to have a higher population or a percentage of I think it's going to depend on their socioeconomic situation. But I'm generally speaking generally speaking as like a statistician you can't necessarily just look at the overall population and the percentage of car crashes and try to correlate it with illegalization and try to like make a causal effect. The best thing that we could do is have a controlled study and follow like 10 people who smoke on a regular basis and 10 people who do not and then like measure or however many people and then measure their car crash rates and et cetera right? I think a better example is to actually look at countries who have legalized it and the amount of people who use it and compare it to countries where there's low access and compared to countries that have high access and we can get a pretty good accurate understanding of the effects it has on society and I think that's from a political standpoint that's better than a controlled study because we know oh these countries legalize it this is the effect it has. No but you can't isolate the so you have to isolate so the reason for a controlled study is to isolate whatever it is that you are studying right? You can't necessarily do that by like looking at an entire population. No no so like a controlled study does isolate the variable but it doesn't yes take into account how people tend to use it. So it's not it's not making say the population will use it like this this this is the amount of population that will use it this way this is the amount of population that will be addicted this is the amount of population will be affected so much that they get into a crash. No no no you won't have to do that. All of those things are accounted for when we look at a city or country that's legalized and they have a higher spectrum. Not necessarily I'm this this is like interesting to me because there could be other factors other it's not like we live in a static society where you're gonna have many things changing within your society and you don't necessarily know it could be correlational but you unless it's a controlled study you cannot prove causation. That's why we look at it in many different countries who have all legalized to many universities who have all legalized and we compare the results in all of them and we see if it's about the same every time before and after you can say yeah that's probably correct. It could so so I think there might be a marginal change but again if we're focusing on people who are addicted to weed I think you have to pinpoint that specifically to figure out exactly the percent chance of them getting in a car crash compared to someone who uses it occasionally or someone who never uses weed at all. I think that's that's like from a scientific standpoint from a mathematical standpoint that's the best way that you can go about proving whether or not weed causes that type of effect right that's just the best. That's not important at all so like we can legalize drinking bleach and bleach is legal you can go drink bleach but no one does it for some unknown reasons so what's more important than knowing the effects on the body which we do pretty well know and they're not very that bad is that how how it will impact the society at large if we legalize how many people are going to take it how many people are going to get addicted how many people are going to get in more car crashes and we can see all of this data just by looking at the places that have legalized it because they provide all of this data no I understand right and I understand what you're saying all I'm saying is that I think it's just a different way and how to measure things because I do prefer to have more of a controlled study and I think those are much easier to do when you have FDA approval and stuff I don't see a need to rush the process and I think caution is much better than just leaping into legalization if doctors are literally telling us that we don't have enough studies if we don't know enough about weed and its effect if the effect of weed isn't even recognizable by the user I think it's something we need to be much more careful about then just like a blanket legalization I'm not against legalization in the long run if it turns out that there are either I think there are two different things that I would be okay with for legalization if the effects are very good if there are many benefits to it I think that would be enough for me or if the the consequences of it are negligible but that's just not it doesn't seem like that's what the doctors are saying right it seems like they're very concerned about the effects of weed on an individual and they're also concerned about the recent like societal shift that weed is pushing the the narrative that weed is like completely harmless again I'd say that if there was a legitimate concern then we would see a significant change comparing countries that have it legal and that have it illegal I just feel like it's a little conspiratorial though for you to be like doctors are just paying to be like scaredy cats about anything medical well that's literally their job like if anything is dangerous they tell us is dangerous that's kind of what their job is I mean I'm not I'm not saying they're wrong I agree there are dangers to marijuana it's not a perfectly safe drug the question is is is the amount of danger significant enough to warrant not legalizing it and waiting for FDA approval or do we have enough past history of data from all over the world like millions and millions and millions of cases of past examples over decades to conclude that it's probably not that dangerous and it's it's fine to legalize for now and if the FDA we can lean towards it safe and if the FDA finds something dangerous then we can work on it later but we have enough body of data to say it's probably safe but do you see though how if we become too liberal with like illegalization it's going to be harder to put the cat back into the bag right no if we do studies after we legalize it it's going to be much it's the same thing with the prohibition right once everything every like the entire united states was drinking alcohol and you're like hey by the way it's illegal it didn't work right I think it's much easier to control it and have a responsible rollout if that's what we decide versus just making it legal and then doing our studies retroactively again I think that we have enough body of data to conclude it's it's definitely safe okay well I mean so my understanding and what I'm getting from you is you're saying I don't really care about the benefits I understand that there's a lot of detriments but I like I think people should be able to feel good if they have even if it has detrimental effects right if I'd say the detrimental effects have been proven to be so insignificant by comparison that the few but that's not what the doctors are saying yes that is they all they all agree on this that the the detriments of marijuana are less than that of the other drugs that are illegal we know this for a fact are they detriment sure so so first of all the other drugs are not fully legal right so stuff like um caffeine sure well okay that number one that actually has that can have positive effects right our doctors worried about the sugar consumption in america have you heard any doctors say that is there a consensus among the 100 percent definitely should we ban sugar no of course not because there's a vital um building block of our diet like we need it we need carbohydrates right I'm not seeing the difference here so I think there's a difference so okay here's the difference with weed we do not need weed in any form as humans it's not something that we absolutely need therefore we need to be careful with rolling it out with sugar is something that as humans we literally need to to survive you can have an excess amount of sugar just like you can have an excess amount of weed but we can't make sugar or legal or else we would all die right or at least go into keto I just don't know if it's necessarily one to one comparison right I I still just I don't I don't get it I think that people should have the freedom to do what they want their bodies if they want to cut their own legs off they should have the right to do that taking marijuana isn't nearly that bad but what about the right to take marijuana but so I understand what you're saying so basically what you're saying is that unless there's like a direct link between like hurting other people then pretty much anything should be legal right well more like if as long as they're not it isn't a significant increase in damage done to society to other people so it's kind of like a libertarian are you right obviously we wouldn't we wouldn't legalize heroin because the damage to yourself is also bad but it's it's just if there isn't a significant amount of damage done then it should be legal so do you think there's something to be said about about normalizing it and that effect on adolescence well yeah I think we should definitely have an age limit for sure I agree though what age limits you know how it is right yes people take drugs even though they're illegal people drink alcohol before there's 21 that doesn't make a difference here like they're going to do it one way or the other that's not the point here is that we shouldn't keep it illegal because it does very minimal damage so this is from a study I understand you're having I feel like it's a more libertarian perspective and I understand that but this is these are from multiple PhDs and their conclusion of the study is that um empirical it says empirical and clinical studies reviewed here clearly demonstrate pathological effects of cannabis smoking smoking on physical and especially mental health as well as an interface with social and occupational functioning we did not find a single method methodologically sound study to suggest that the benefits of smoking cannabis outweigh the associated risks these negative this negative data far outweighs documented benefits for a limited set of medical indications for which safe and effective alternative treatments are readily available advocacy groups are pursuing legalization or medical use of smoked cannabis largely ignoring pills containing extracted THC and other cannaboids it appears therefore that it is not the benefit of active cannabis ingredients for the route of administration a wider set of indications in the ritual of use that's being advocated based on empirical and clinical evidence reviewed here it seems safe to conclude that if there's any medical role of the cannaboid drug it lies within the chemical modified extracts not within the cannabis plant so it seems like doctors are even saying that even from a medical perspective it's not even like you don't even need weed and I think I understand that that might be a little extreme and I understand the study was saying that you can get the same results with THC by extracting it and still giving them through a pill or see um not even it's THC but also um CBD that makes that makes perfect sense if you can get the exact same results from a medical standpoint without the other parts of the drug that damage you then yes there is clearly a better result this has nothing to do with legalizing it in society this is not saying that this is great these things are so bad it should be established establishes the fact that the negatives are far outweigh any benefit that's literally from a medical treatment if there's an alternative that gives you all the positives and no negatives yeah but that doesn't mean that none of the things you read said this should not be legalized or the the benefit because they're not policymakers and I understand that but I also feel like the fact that we need I feel like we need to focus on we need to be responsible when it comes to drugs and this is what we saw with um it's interesting Portugal they recently um they decriminalized all of their drugs but they have not legalized weed they have it legalized medically they do not have it legalized um recreationally and the reason for this is because there needs to be a social stigma against just drugs because they tend to be drugs recreational drugs they do not have more benefit than they do detriments because that is that can like literally destroy your society no marijuana cannot destroy your society it why because it's legal in countries and the society is not destroyed no no I'm not saying marijuana itself but that idea of drugs being normalized just because it's your freedom to do so and it's as long as it doesn't affect anyone else that's literally promoting that's the normalization of those drugs and that encourages people right it's an implicit encouragement there are countries where every drug is legal their society is not destroyed you know what okay what country is every drug because I know Portugal had a huge drug issue and they switched to just decriminalizing it and there is like a lot of benefit that came with that right so all I'm saying is that I don't know I literally don't know if one country that has all drugs legal that is functioning well pretty much to every single country like even the Nordic countries do not have um recreational use of marijuana they just don't because they realize that it's not healthy seems to be doing just fine but they so Canada has they're being very strategic with a rollout I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens with that but there's no country that just blanket blanket has like all drugs legalized that is doing well most countries that are doing well they mostly just have them decriminalized that I don't think they actually legalized that's what I want I want all drugs decriminalized wouldn't that be wonderful yeah decriminalize them do research on them if we can and then try not to promote the drugs that are have like less because okay I feel like there's there a difference between decriminalizing all drugs and legalizing them in the sense that they promote the possible use of the drug and they accept they make it acceptable in society that's literally the whole premise of of like a certain country that that's literally what has happened if they are illegal that is actually really bad because that results in people not being able to go to rehab safely that that results in people going to jail of course that's going to be terrible but if you did decriminalize it you get a misdemeanor which is not very important at all but there's also a lot of um there's like a lot of like loopholes that if you actually go to rehab if you actually try to get help there's no consequences whatsoever and you actually can do that in a healthy way I think we should be promoting a society that prioritizes health right so Netherlands Switzerland Portugal Portugal Switzerland seem to be doing good Portugal is decriminalized say nothing is legal yeah when I said uh legalized I meant decriminalized so so these these places have all decriminalized it which means they are socially accepting the use of drugs no they're not more socially acceptable no no no that they went so Portugal literally went from making it illegal to making it criminalized but they are very very very far away from legalizing it because they want to keep they want to keep that stigma there and they have been very vocal about this the importance of keeping the stigma there with and also providing the help without the fear of punishment that's like their entire um that's like why they decriminalized it but they do not want to make it legal because they had such a bad drug problem initially they don't want to go back to that so there needs to be the stigma there but at the same time people need to be pursuing um treatment right they can't be afraid to pursue treatment that would be terrible and that's what's happening now not as much with weed but with other drugs right okay so my point was is that when you claimed that uh being accepting of drugs in the society will destroy the society that's false general drugs not I'm not talking about just marijuana but just drugs in general yeah the the being accepting of drugs does not destroy society I'm not talking accepting of drugs I'm talking about legalizing legalizing mass legalization of drugs most societies throughout human history you could smoke whatever plant you wanted to smoke they didn't have like and why do you think that's changed uh governments like to control people we also can't look at lots of things that we should be able to do do you think doctors might have been like hey this might be bad for people maybe maybe we should take some measures to protect people my point my point was was that none of their societies weren't all destroyed we kept going humanity kept going do you think the drugs were nearly as dangerous as they are now I mean the the effected like the um strength of THC has like doubled in the last decade I think it's kind of silly to say that you know drugs like a few hundred years ago I mean even the opioid crisis in China that destroyed their society right no like like opium has been a thing in lots of societies and there's been crises yeah yeah not everyone about every single society I'm not saying every single society I'm saying that the legalization of it can actually be very detrimental to societies and I'm not of course this isn't specifically about we because I understand that weed is not like an incredibly compared to all the other drugs is not a hugely dangerous drug and I understand that all I'm saying is that legalization does have um a normalizing factor and especially when it comes to younger people I think that's going to be an implicit um I I I guess if we do it in a certain way because I guess smoking I think that's gone down and I think that's largely because of the propaganda against good propaganda against smoking but generally speaking legalization seems to be um an encouragement um or at least saying hey this is okay from the government it's how it's perceived this is literally a box article did a boxed in an article on this talking about how the legalization causes increase in abuse right right so so what I'm saying is is that's fine it's totally fine to be accepting of marijuana use if every single person on the planet was totally fine with accepting of marijuana use society would not collapse do you think we should be focusing on having a healthier society no do you think government I think we should focus on a happier society not a healthier society do you think healthy typically being healthy typically equals being happier no like I used to have like a six pack I worked out no not just physical but mental there's like there's like a um there seems to be a causal relationship between need and negative psychological situations so do you think that maybe it can actually be contributing to a less mentally healthy society no I think it makes people feel better maybe in the short term but do you think that that contributes to a happier society in general I think people having the freedom to feel better when they need to feel better when they're stressed to like have something to de-stress them I think it helps do you think those are there are healthier ways to do those things right possibly but they may or may not work I think each individual should have the right to choose which method works best for them but do you think that might be something that they should do in consultation with their doctor no I think they should get to decide what makes them feel better themselves but doesn't but that opens up a I feel like with your frame of logic many many many many drugs could should be legal I think that so okay what drugs should not be legal uh I'd say heroin meth um cocaine but why meth because it'll kill you not necessarily not if you don't do it all the time isn't that your own decision right but it there's an amount the amount it takes to kill you and be addicted is significantly lower so it's very easy to get addicted but where's the line there then I could probably like actually make a number for you if you want but marijuana isn't even close to that number but do you see how that's kind of arbitrary no it's like all the doctors are saying hey this is there's like no benefits to this any benefits that could be derived from this could be taken from sources that are not necessarily medical the medical benefits feel good is still a benefit feel good is definitely a benefit okay so so what if the actual feeling good is also contributing to um worse cognitive effects that would be your choice if you prefer the feeling good to the cognitive effects that's fine but again what if so where's the line though so like what if you feel if you are if you like feeling good from methamphetamine why should anyone else decide that that should that you should not feel good even if there is a risk of you dying so like where do you see how that's a little arbitrary no it's not arbitrary at all it's based on the amount of damage that can be done to yourself by the consumption rates and the addiction rates who do you think is the best person to determine that though who who do i think is the best um voters so do you think you think people should just like vote on what drugs do they think that should be legal and what yeah should not yeah i think that's something that i think that's something to actually if people are actually informed on the data i think that's something that might actually work i think that could potentially be a solution but i think that in order to do that we need to have studies and i think that needs to go through the fda right and i think that's where i think that's where it comes down to is i think you think that we have enough studies and i'm like hey we haven't even gone through the fda here let's like do some more studies in before we let the cat out of the bag here and you know what i mean i don't think even if we did infinitely many more studies we would find anything more significant than we already know my perspective is that that doctors should be the one to determine that and if they think we need more studies we probably need more studies right i think that's where we disagree i think the doctors are the ones who should provide the information but not the ones who make the decisions here i think the people are the ones who should make but they're not though they're saying that we need to research it more before they can say whether or not it could be like beneficial in abnc way or whether or not the detriments can be are like significant right there is zero percent chance that we find any significantly extra side effects that we don't already know about but the only thing the studies could possibly do is give us more precise numbers we know everything that marijuana can possibly do to you because i don't think that's true though i mean so okay so for example the cognitive decline people didn't even realize that that could potentially be a thing until what cognitive decline right people didn't know that this was possibly give it so the first thing people always suggested that it was going to do was cognitive no but they don't no no i'm saying that people don't see that in themselves right it's very minimal no that's not why it's not it's actually significant but people just don't see it because they don't test themselves right but it's a very significant cognitive decline what do you mean by significant here i have a study here i can bring it up for you like give me the skills that you can use and the skills that you stop being able to do yes okay 100 percent the study goes through this and if you want to look it up it is cannabis using cognitive dysfunction and it's from nyh.gov we see here all right trying to find exactly where that's i was on mute that's embarrassing folks want to let you know our guests are linked to the description box highly encourage you to click on their links if you're like interesting i want to hear more well click on those links and that includes at the podcast as we also have a modern database podcast so i also want to remind you folks in the live chat want to remind you attack the arguments and not the person and folks i have said it well i'm going to say it again because i have no apologies for saying it generally in the chat there have been way more personal attacks from the side that is presumably pro legalization and some of you are like oh james how could you say that and lump us together i'm good i'm for legalization to be completely honest now my goal is to moderate this debate in the most fair way but i've got to tell you that i'm saying this to say hey if you were for legalization or if you're against i would say for both sides like don't make your side look worse by doing personal attacks like that doesn't make your side seem more credible or academic okay like it's the opposite so i do want to encourage you no matter what side you aren't but i do want i would do want to say it is true that there have been a ton and folks i actually like i said in pro legalization but i do want to let you know you make our side look worse if you're doing personal attacks so that is absolutely important and the same rule applies that if you're against legalization that your side looks worse as a result of you doing that so do want to remind you folks we're glad you are here but if that's something that you're like oh i was like i'm defensive and triggered because james said attack the arguments instead of the person the unsubscribe button is just below this video please hit it because we just you're not the kind of person we're looking for in the chat it like we we want a community that's saying hey we'll go crazy in attacking the arguments that's fun we'll have a good old time doing it but in terms of personal attacks making fun of you know tom's haircut all of that stuff please leave leave him alone so uh it wasn't really but maybe as far as we know but do remind you both guests are linked in the description and so we will uh give it over to carissa as uh if you're ready for us carissa i totally condone making fun of james hair you can do that in the chat i prove tremendous hair so basically i'm also i'm still trying to find it in the specific study but i can say with reasonably certain the reasonable certainty that um that the effects tend to be longer response times and memory and they are pretty substantial i think it's in the breathalomy study and i think i can't find it in this one but i remember looking at it and it was pretty substantial so i don't know t-jump pretty substantial how like you you can't remember a few extra letters in an iq test no i think it's like um compared to it's like 10 so i think so if i remember correctly um they would show you a video and then like ask you what like restaurants were shown in the video and people who used marijuana regularly or used marijuana um had much less memory than the people who do not um and it's significant like it was like four compared to like 15 it was like significant um so the terrible terrible effects is they couldn't remember the names of restaurants but do you see okay that translates to more really that's the point i'm more interested like i i don't taking a test like that you don't you just don't care like people not caring is totally fine but i want to know what how does that affect them in real life do they do they have lower income levels do they have yes that would be good show us show us the data that this actually has some kind of an actual impact on their life somehow so yeah so it does there is a correlation and again it's not necessarily causation um but there's a correlation with lower academic success um lower job success lower so socioeconomic level um well i need amounts because saying it's lower doesn't tell me anything it's lower by 0.001% like i know it doesn't mean anything i need to know like what is what is the actual effect that this has because i've heard no actual effects okay let me see so there is a pub med dot gov article that i defined it says for overall use we found a strong positive social gradients the lower the f s e s or the higher the frequency of use the lower the odds ratio from 0.85 to 0.52 for 10 plus uses in the past year among farmers okay for frequent use we found strong negative gradients um see the lower the f s e s category the higher the o r and likewise for cannabis use disorder and heavy use so conclusions is adolescents from affluent families are more prone to experimentation with cannabis and to use it at low levels but present lower levels of frequency heavy or problematic use than those from the s e s cat okay i don't think that's exactly farmers smoke pot no french farmers um even better i know i know i actually read something on it i should have written down exactly what it was but i will find it and i will send it to you but i do remember it being pretty significant juicy and do want to remind you folks our guests are linked in the description as well as in the podcast description folks if you haven't already checked out the podcast what are you waiting for you can pull out your phones right now and find modern a debate as we have every single debate uploaded within 24 hours of the debate being live tremendous any last points from carissa or utom yeah so i just googled some studies so this one is from science direct residual effects of cannabis use on neuropsychopathology functioning data on substance use as well as neurocognitive measures were assessed in with 804 adolescents males and females age 19 age 14 to 19 our data suggests that decision making is not impaired and cannabis is used moderation on onset occurs after the age of 15 we find no evidence to support the presumption that cannabis consumption leads to a decline in neuroactive neurocognitive ability so that's for moderate use right yep that's fair i think that's there's a difference and i think i i'm meant to make that clear between modi moderate and heavy usage right so if moderate use causes no damage and 90 percent of people are moderate and don't get addicted to it right but legalization increases that rate not significantly yes it does there's a okay i can send you there's a vox article on vox is not a science paper like no they interviewed an actual doctor and a policy expert a drug policy expert interviewed a doctor so does trump the vox news interviews doctors no but they did a okay hold on vox legalization it was actually like a specialist on this who actually was in favor of legalizing it but they thought their position was that it needed to be done very responsibly and that we should look at potential legalization similar to dc um but okay a new study found marijuana leads to more problematic use um and let me look at the study here so i found one where it says the difference um in legalization versus non-legalization is 3.4 percent which is statistically significant probably right or else they wouldn't have brought it up it's it's 11 to 15 it's not among the 11 states that have legalized marijuana the rates in 2011 prior to an immunization average 15 compared to 11 so that's pretty big right it's not so no no it's a three percent three percentage points right so that's that's moving but that's a that's a much bigger increase right so if you're moving from 11 to 15 percent that's going to be a bigger jump right this this is less than global warming numbers what okay it says association between recreational marijuana legalization in the united states changes of marijuana use in cannabis use disorder from 2008 and 2016 this is from jama psychiatry and let's see if you go down to the conclusions we believe that the study offers a novel major step forward in understanding the changes in marijuana use that may follow the legalization of recreational use in the united states the study's many strengths include large nationally representative samples across multiple years and major age groups a survey designed that produces accurate state level yada yada however um legalization of recreational marijuana has the potential to provide um try to see here how the the potential for frequent use in cud which is cannabis um usage um dependency is an important public health concern that warrants ongoing study and investment in substance use prevention and treatment to prevent unintended harm so like this is even a pro legalization what did it say anything about the amount of abuse that increases by legalization in anything you just read i can go up and i can actually look at the data and try like control f abuse so so i mean are you asking what they define as abuse no i want to know like how much does the abuse increase with legalization i think they have a problematic use that would be fine too how much this problematic use increase with legalization is it is it a single digit percentage all right to distinguish the see okay here's the data part of it um it doesn't say any i'm not finding anything any like specific data point about it but okay here there's this among respondents age 26 or older past month marijuana use um increased from 5.67 a 65 to 7.1 um two percent so was that a two percent increase uh yeah a little under um i found one too it's like legalization increased the probability of adolescent initiation of marijuana so it's not it's just any usage at all 0.32 to 0.46 oh my god so but the point being though is that's like doubling right and i increase a five to six percent increase but do you realize that like when we're looking at the effects it's that's like doubling the number of people who might be like it's a significant amount it might not be like it is 10 of that five percent so it's half a percent half a percent increase in addiction so that's but no they like literally said and again this is like a pro legalization study and they're literally saying that this is an important concern okay it's an important public so okay i understand as like so from the end yeah so like both of us just read the data on it it might just seem like a few percentage points but if it's significantly significant it's something to be concerned about right just a few percentage points it's like a pretty big difference in population right and even like the pro legalization people are like hey this is a public health concern that warrants ongoing study and an investment it's something that is concerning all i'm saying i'm not like fully against i'm literally mm-hmm i don't think you could ever find a single thing a doctor would not say this warrants further study ever so i i i understand that and i agree with that but i think if literal people who are pro legalization like doctors or statisticians who are pro legalization are saying this is pretty important this is a concern we need to figure this out i think that might be something to think about right so my point is that generally speaking i think weed isn't like an incredibly harmful drug i do not think the narrative that is harmless is accurate and i think we should be listening to doctors when they're saying hey we need to do more studies on this we need to get the FDA on this we need to decriminalize this and figure out what we want to do with it right i'm not fully against legalization i'm really not um but i feel like we need more studies on it right that's my only point and i think that's pretty fair given the fact the new developments in cognitive decline and actually seeing how it changes your brain it actually shrinking in some cases the hippocampus depending on how heavy your usage is now that's like significant use but still is something to consider and it's something that we need to do more studies on as per the doctors right world health organization now it's a scientific consensus on medical cannabis we are extremely pleased that the world health organization has finally recognized the therapeutic potential of cannabis and its derivatives is safe and effective medicine there we go it's medical i think that's that's important i'm not again i'm not as concerned about medical i think the way that we that we do and i i wonder if you would agree with this are you in a state that has medical marijuana i don't think so maybe i don't have any checks but they use a business model with it and that's something that the box article was actually talking about with the public health administer who was saying that we don't want to have a business model when it comes to drugs right we don't want to be incentivizing addiction which is basically what capitalism would do with drugs you're trying to sell people more you have sales you're trying to incentivize more more purchases right so that's kind of already what's happening in a lot of states with medical marijuana and it just doesn't seem like it's medical it just seems like you just pay a lot of money to your doctor to get a green card and then you you're able to just like purchase stuff at a store like you would recreationally so it's odd to me um but i'm not saying i absolutely believe that there are some usage uses for thc or or cvd medically all i'm saying is that we need more research so i'm unable to find anything about the consensus of doctors on recreational usage obviously it has downsides but i think anything in reference to the consensus is going to be for medical usage only reference to medical usage can you find any doctor that is like or group of doctors that is advocating for legalization for recreational doctors pro recreationalization of marijuana doctors for cannibal usage there's an entire website of them so yeah so are they is it medical or is it for recreational recreational do they like engage with any of the data or are they just like hey this is a potential pro marijuana doctors explain their support for legalization so i don't know it's interesting it seems like from the academic sources that i was looking through it seems like at least the research side of i guess the medical field isn't super pro weed um i'm not even talking about like the legalization but just generally speaking they see a lot of detriments to it but i think you're just reading into the standard work of all medical fields which is to identify the consequences and side effects and say these are dangerous we need to study these which is literally what they do for everything and then interpreting that as them being against or saying that it's dangerous enough to not warrant recreational use or something like that i don't think that's what any of the studies you've read indicate most of the studies you've read indicate that there is a better option for medical uses which is to extract the cbd and thc and use those in a drug form without having the additional risks risks with the of the plant which is fine that makes perfect sense yeah i don't think any of the things you read have any implications on the recreational usage or a comparison of regular drugs or drugs that are potentially legal or should be legal i don't think any of the things you referenced has said anything about that no i agree that nothing that i referenced actually talked about like the legalization and as you said i don't think doctors that's their main purpose their main purpose is to be like hey this is something that like we need to look at the health benefits because of course that's their focus is the health um the health perspectives on it um and i understand that but i also feel like a lot of them saying that there needs to be further research on it i think it warrants going to the fda first that's all i don't i don't think that's something any doctor would ever not say about anything ever and so i don't think that is a way to assess there's a reason for that though there's a reason for that it's because they're doctors and they realize we don't know we're thinking we should study everything because it's literally their job i don't think it's actually indicative of the fact that it's dangerous that they say we should study it more but do you see at them saying that like the fda could actually provide um provide more thorough study that would ensure that it's safe and effective in multiple components sure but again i don't think i don't think that with the amount of data we have that it's even possible for that to turn up anything new or surprising it's okay it's been it's like what most studies do is that they take we have a theory that has some um what's it figure out it's called the error level in the theory the plus or minus it could be this could be this this yeah and then we do a study to try and lower that down the fda will continue to lower down the error range but what we know now is probably correct there's probably not going to there's probably nothing new we're going to learn we're just going to lower down the margin of error to a much lower level than it is which is already really good we already have a very good understanding of what marijuana is what it does and that is just going to give us more of an understanding and we're gonna say the exact same conclusion we did already pretty much i think you might be right and i hope that that would be the case but i also think that there have been some more um advancements at least from just what i've been reading they've been saying that there's been more advancements even like in the fat past like 10 years um with studying marijuana and those same articles are saying that or those yeah the same scholarly articles are saying that we need to have fda look into it even more and have those restrictions lifted and studying um and studying it so we have are able to have more controlled um studies and i understand that there's just probably not going to be anything groundbreaking but at least people are going to have a more a better idea of um what they are doing to their bodies um that's just generally i feel like that's just the safer i think you're probably right is that there's nothing going to be groundbreaking but at the same time i think there will be um more clarity and more diligence done um if we are able to have it certified by the fda and also that could even um dosages might also be a little bit better to figure out the dosages because even for like potential medical um results i guess does that make sense well yeah i mean i your argument is perfectly reasonable that we should do more studying yeah but i given the evidence we have i i would bet all of the money i have that we're going to discover absolutely nothing that we don't already know and that we know the harms and we could pretty much just put exactly what we have now on the marijuana label and say oh do we marijuana has these side effects be warned and legalize it and that would be perfectly fine is that something you'd be down with though yes do you think we should have restrictions on the way that it's um sold marijuana sure like like alcohol i mean alcohol is legal so i'd say we legalize it just like we do alcohol do you think we should i don't know if there are are there restrictions on how much alcohol you can buy there might be in some states i don't i've never bought enough but i do would you be okay without for for marijuana is having like something that might help with the abuse of it a little bit sure i would legalize it in the exact same way we do alcohol in whatever state and live it up to the states of what they do and partially just go with the snoop dog method what's the snoop dog method smoke weed every day are you concerned at all about the no potentials that no no i still i consider myself still pretty intelligent i don't know if i've been dumbed down then i don't know i still think i'm like three james's i consider myself about three three jay three and a half james's so you're not half the man i am p jump but we are ready to go into q and a pretty quick here so i will give you a chance of either or both of you uh what a chance to draw together any final threads from this debate otherwise we'll jump right into it smoke weed every day i'm ready to get into the q and a i think that sounds good excellent and want to remind you folks our guests are linked in the description so hey if you want to hear more from carissa or tom click on those links below their links are waiting for you and so thanks so much for your question coming in from this one is azian thank you very much says the places that just decriminalize use just decriminalized use it as a pretext to search homes and cars for a smell and to find poor people and failure to pay means arrest we do that where it's illegal too i think um in portugal they've been very successful at decriminalizing so i may be for some places yeah i don't understand why would like i at first i was thought azian was saying that they decriminalize it azian are you saying they decriminalize it as a means to to search homes and cars for the smell like what but i think i think his argument is that if you decriminalize it but don't legalize it the reason you do that is so that you have an excuse for police to be able to say oh i smell this illegal substance because it's a really easy way for cops to be able to do a search without having to have a warrant and so it gives police the opportunity to execute their jobs more liberally because it's such a broad law okay i think i get it and experiments and prebiotic chemistry says thanks tom for representing my view on this great job it's my view you stole my view andrew row says tom she speaks the truth about weed addiction yeah like 10 percent like i'm addicted to video games addiction isn't really a big deal you got it and thank you very much for this question Christian Stafford says really admire the work you do james thank you so much oh as i say the online debate space is better for it that means a lot christian seriously and rosa says this dab is for you chrissa cheers is dab some sort of uh drug innuendo or no it's it's when you do this thingy with your face that's a dab is it really yes oh thank you for teaching me that tom the batman says freaking boomers always uh lifting the uh quality of conversation says t dump getting spanked again i don't know that's true hey i may or may not be into that kind of thing that's true uh nasty guy that seven says legalizing pot is a naively foolish idea everywhere in west phoenix namely marival people are smoking it and we have absolutely one of the dirtiest poorest crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city and state that's because of weed apparently and i i i don't know if that's i see what you're saying i net seven just it were you trying to imply that it like became that way after it was legalized i it wasn't clear from the but we'll give you a chance and chat if that was what your argument was i i just couldn't i feel like i'm reading into it but a spiral go ahead chrissa if you had something i just was gonna say i feel like that's a common thing that um if you legalize weed then everyone will lose their uh drive in life and that type of stuff and i don't necessarily think that's the case um i think you can use weed and you can be productive um there is some correlation between that and just unpredictability but i don't think it's so extensive that that's going to be the only thing that causes um like a community to crumble or something like that you got it and want to remind you folks if you haven't seen it it's pinned at the top of the chat don't miss it folks we next month september we're starting panels we're going to do two panels a week one is going to be on politics so virtually the same thing that dylan burns does we're doing it on a different night because we like dylan we don't want to overlap with his schedule the other one will be a religion panel that is going to be on religion atheism topics same thing we'll have two to three topics at a time and there's a sign-up sheet so if you're like ooh i like that i want to hear more well click on that google sheets link that i have pinned to the top of the chat if you put your name stance an email in there we can get you on this is a great way for us to be able to screen people it's way more efficient because this way we can kind of observe you while you're on the show and it doesn't put as much stress on you because if there's seven people it's like well you don't have to feel as much stress in terms of your first debate having you could say half the time put on you and so do want to let you know folks we are wanting new faces on modern day debate and so thanks so much for checking that out this one coming in from net seven was just clarifying this is about the neighborhoods that got nasty net seven says drugs the biggest one being weed ruined the neighborhood that's what i'm trying to say so i think they're saying came after yeah i'm betting if i just looked up the crime data i probably proved that false because i'm imagining crime data doesn't really change in a city over the past like ten years it doesn't drastically change i'm curious though if that could be if that effect is the same effect for the car crashes i think sometimes if you just look generally what happens to a neighborhood i understand that you were talking about averages over all of the places that made me legal but still like i like to have more controlled studies six percent there's a six percent increase in car crashes that's a big increase it doesn't sound like that thing but it's pretty big juicy and thanks for this one coming in from robert summers says carissa did you really think we need the quote unquote additional sugar that we see in our society not talking about natural sugars okay um so my my response to that would be that i understand what he's saying but also at the same time like cane sugar is pretty natural because it comes from plants sugar cane so i'm like generally speaking one of the reasons i think it would be easier to just decriminalize weed but not making it fully fully legal is that it is generally difficult to grow your own weed not saying that people can't do it but it's a difficult plant to grow and that's not the case everyone can access sugar um in some forms some derivatives so i just don't feel like it would be very effective you got it and john ciparini thanks for your question so said so as a weed smoker why do you believe i should be punished in parentheses which is what a misdemeanor is for smoking weed i know the effects and i still do it so generally i don't think that most people get away with smoking weed with it being decriminalized so i think the people that would be most targeted would be people who were selling it um it's a misdemeanor where i am to smoke weed but like literally no one gets like prosecuted for smoking weed um it's just not the way it is i think if you have like a huge amount of it or if you um are selling it now that's that might like change things a little bit but realistically it's not going to have that much of an effect no one's going to go after you just for using you got it and this one from azian i actually got that lorence litki thanks for your question says harissa alcohol nicotine and even caffeine also have some negative health effects should these substances also be made a misdemeanor so i think with the alcohol thing that ship has sailed it's not nothing's going to happen with that um also it's very easy for people to make alcohol and some alcohol can actually be very dangerous um if you try to make it by yourself and sell it um if you do it wrong you can like poison you um prohibition doesn't work with alcohol i think people also can use it in a healthy way and the the addiction rate is lower per user than it is for um not per yeah the rate is user is lower compared to the usage um compared to weed abuse you got so it's a little different but and made by jim bob thanks so much says james your green screen is better than nasa's amazing thanks so much made by jim bob and this one coming in from con the stoner lin says t-jump you know you can overdose on anything including vitamin c and even water right if so why imply weed is the exception and if not glad i could teach you something ha ha ha because the amount of weed you'd have to smoke to consume enough thc in order to overdose is more than it would literally kill you it literally you would have to smoke more than ten times your body weight to accomplish that edibles you can do it do you know for experience i know of a friend i smoke occasionally just to say i'm not afraid to say it but like i do know someone who ate like six or seven edibles but they also had some schizophrenia they ended up in the er and it was not good but i know that's a rarity well but that's not the same as an overdose though it was considered they i think they categorized it because they had like six weed brownies not shooting for that they didn't know it was me thank you for coming in from kill a dog he says ask carissa do indica and sativa strains of marijuana have the same effects on humans so for i think when it comes to safety i don't know if there's been much much academic study that at least i've seen or any difference in the safety or any differentiation of course they're going to affect you differently um i know they also just affect every person differently so sativa can be like can wake you up um for some people and other people just like all weed just makes you sleep so i think it's going to be a case by case basis but i don't think like academically in the literature there's been much of a differentiation you got it and this one coming in from azian thanks so much appreciate it says decriminalization doesn't mean misdemeanor it means a civil infraction and a fine misdemeanors are crimes with jail and or a fine i'm sorry can you read that again for sure they said decriminalization doesn't mean misdemeanor it means a civil infraction and a fine misdemeanors are crimes with jail and or a fine okay then so i wouldn't be that was my bad i wouldn't be advocating for a misdemeanor you got it and i think that's it for the questions that unless i missed any let me know in the chat folks this is a great opportunity for me to remind you that yeah both carissa's and tom's link are in the description and i think we've even got it so now it shows up in the twitch chat let me check i don't know like i'm still learning twitch but believe me if you are on twitch and you can't find their link migrate over to youtube as we've got them linked in the description there and we really do appreciate our guests always want to encourage you folks in the comments left on this debate want to encourage you to not attack the person want to encourage you to attack the argument and one last time i want to say thanks so much carissa and tom for being with us thanks for having us on appreciate it thanks you thanks for hunter clearly hunter avalon for joining us today no problem excellent thanks everybody we will be i'll be back in a moment with some updates on the upcoming panels in september as well as upcoming debates is going to be juicy so