Brian Johnson (22:46)
So. So if you look at the story of what it took to get marijuana legal, it, to me is a perfect case in point. And it doesn't just, you know, relate to my own personal story. It relates to the whole political story and just the story at large and the reason why there is so much distrust. So in 2010, state of California tried to be the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. This was actually a time when I was heavily involved in trafficking marijuana. One of the reasons why it didn't pass is because the growers in Northern California were like, hell no. We don't want the government, you know, to have their hands in this. Like, we like our money. So if you look at the voter distribution, there was actually a lot of people in Northern California that voted no. But the bigger reason why it didn't happen is because California voted to make it legal. It did not vote to make it code commercialized, meaning that there could be a commercial industry around it making profit off of it. So the pharmaceutical companies and the alcohol companies use their lobby and use their influence. They spent millions of dollars in the state of California to see to it that it was not passed. And guess what? It was not passed. So the gentleman in Colorado looked at it and said, okay, I'm going to operate from the position that we do not live in a democracy. We live in a lobby tocracy, and that ultimately, if I want to get this law passed in. In Colorado, I need to get a lobby behind it and get a lobby to protect it. So he wrote the law specifically so that there was a commercial interest so that tobacco companies would see it as an opportunity to replace the revenue and profit that they were losing from fewer and fewer people smoking cigarettes. So he literally wrote the law so that big tobacco lobby would literally battle the pharmaceutical lobby in the alcohol lobby. And so here's all these things going on behind the scenes. Two lobbies battling each other out, and guess what? Big tobacco won. So that is literally why we have legal marijuana. And if you look at it, 65% of the country for the longest time felt that marijuana should be legal. So we have 65% of the country. That's pretty much a mandate. They want marijuana to be illegal. Well, guess what I mean, be legal. Guess what? It's still illegal. And only when we had two lobbies battling each other and one lobby said, you know what? There's profit behind this. Let's make it legal. That's when it crossed the line and it became legal. So marijuana is a very, very good example of just how you have corporate interests and ultimately profit interest that can literally go against, you know what I mean, public interest, public opinion. Is it one of the same thing? That's a different argument. But you know, how lobbying can go against public opinion. And that, to me, is just proof of just how. How much they are capable of. Like, they are literally capable of using their money, power, and influence to see to it that a law that 65% of the country. Country. Wants pass still doesn't get passed. And that is, like, why I brought up the point where I asked Dr. Mike, you know, you're talking about accountability in the pharmaceutical industry, and you're saying that, you know, ultimately they're to be trusted because they have disclosure and all the other things that he listed. And it's like, well, hold up. They created an opioid epidemic. Nobody went to prison. And it wasn't as if the United States Attorney's office didn't say, we don't have enough evidence. Evidence. You know, I can understand that if they, you know, did a really good job at hiding their tracks and there wasn't enough evidence. And that's what the United States Attorney's office was saying. But that's not what they were saying. The United States Attorney's office was saying, we have enough. We have enough evidence to convict, and we want to convict. And the DEA was also saying that. And yet nobody went to prison. And supposedly they had to give up $7 billion, but now they're even getting out of paying the $7 billion. And it's just like, if I was a doctor, if I was anybody involved in, like, Big Pharma, I would be speaking up and I would be saying, you know what? I completely and totally understand why the public doesn't trust us. Because people can literally kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. And do it through corporate capture, do it through the manipulation of regulatory agencies like the fda. Do it through the outright manipulation of research. They can do all of that, kill people and not be held accountable. So if you really want to restore public trust, you need to show what is being done so that something like that never happens again. And if you don't acknowledge that point and if you don't go out there and say, this is what we are doing, this is a horrible and egregious problem. People need to be held accountable. But more importantly, we need to ensure that media, social, something like this never happens again. If you are not willing to do that, then guess what? You have no accountability and you have no trust because there's no. You didn't fix the system that created this in the first place. And that's where it really got personal with me. I'm not sitting there saying that I shouldn't have gone to prison. I broke the law, whatever. I'll own it. I'll accept responsibility for my actions. But the only thing I'm saying is that if you want to sit there and you want to hold me accountable for, you know, the drugs that I sold, then the only thing I'm expecting is that the other cartels, the legal cartels, the other legal drug dealers that they be held accountable to. And one of the things that I wanted to say to Dr. Mike that I didn't say is, you know what? We're actually, you know, pretty much one in the same. We're both drug dealers who have made millions of dollars. The only difference is you did it through a legal cartel, I did it through an illegal cartel. And everybody that I was involved with got held accountable. And everybody that you're involved with hasn't been held accountable. And it's not just enough to make YouTube videos about it saying, oh, you know, more should have been done, more should have been done, you know, you're out there actively campaigning for vaccines and all of these other things. I mean, like I said, if you want all of those things to go through and you want to restore public trust and all those things that you believe in, well, I'm telling you right now, holding people accountable for that opioid epidemic and saying this is where we screwed up. This is why the FDA told doctors that it was non addictive. This is how the, you know, scientific method became flawed and there was research that said that it was non addictive and all these other things, like if you don't fix that system, you are never going to restore credibility. And you can attack the skeptics all you want, but it's just you're literally doing more in the same to prove to people that it really is profit driven. And it's so profit driven and it's so. I mean, I'll be honest with you, it scares the out of me to even say this because I understand the level of power that these people have. You killed how many people and you still haven't been held accountable. Even when there was a united United States attorney that wanted to prosecute and you still weren't prosecuted. It's just people that don't have experience with the criminal justice system, especially the federal criminal justice system, don't understand how much power and influence that takes. And so that was there and nothing has been done about it. I'm sorry, but your system has no credibility until there is a day of reckoning for the opioid epidemic, until people end up in prison for that, until all of those grieving mothers who have lost their kids to opioids and all of that, until there is that day of reckoning. I'm sorry, I don't care what you say. Your system is a falsehood. Your system is built on a mountain of lies, plain and simple.