Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

And this is why we need to have a sophisticated and nuanced approach.

So let me ask you all a question.

Let's say I did a meta-analysis.

In the early stages, right, so these are like FDA trials, phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials of benzodiazepines.

If I looked at Xanax, Valium, Lorazepam, Ativan, Oxycontin, opioid medication, what do y'all think?

the early trials when before this stuff hit the market and everyone started using it widely, what do you think the side effects were that were reported for these kinds of medications?

A little bit of dry mouth, a little bit of fatigue, a little bit of maybe sleepiness.

We didn't see the terrible potential for addiction with these medications, right?

So this is something that's really important to understand.

There is a huge difference between

between the side effects that we see in a trial and the side effects that we see in real life.

Because in a trial, you have someone who goes to a clinic.

They get seen by a doctor for 14 weeks in a row.

They're very carefully monitoring what is going on.

You've got therapists, if you start to feel a little bit anxious, if you have a bad trip, you have therapists there with you when you are bad tripping, and you have therapists there to help you process or metabolize or fix whatever goes wrong.

This is one of the key reasons why I think the danger, my personal opinion, is that the danger from psychedelics is far greater than what the trials suggest.

And this is true of basically all medicine, right?

So you can look at basically any clinical trial, not, I mean, not all, but a lot of clinical trials and a lot of studies and a lot of FDA approvals will show that medications are generally speaking safe.

And then we will start using them in the general population.

And it turns out, oh, it's like way worse than we thought.