The significant differences between opioids and cannabis in terms of addiction and mortality rates. He shares personal experiences of using cannabis for pain management and highlights its benefits for various conditions, including anxiety and chronic pain. Also addresses the ongoing efforts to decriminalize cannabis in Dallas, emphasizing the potential advantages for veterans, first responders, and others. Advocates for personal freedom regarding body autonomy and encourages support for the decriminalization initiative, underscoring the importance of education and proper dosing.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:05 – Introduction and Background on Opioids vs. Cannabis
01:30 – Personal Experiences with Cannabis for Pain Management
02:41 – Benefits of Cannabis for Various Conditions
04:04 – Decriminalization of Cannabis in Dallas
05:07 – Cannabis as an Alternative to Alcohol
05:59 – Advocacy for Personal Freedom and Government Control
08:20 – Encouragement to Support Decriminalization
09:22 – Conclusion and Call to Action

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:05] for those of you who don’t know, I did a Ted talk on replacing, opioids and cannabis. As far as pushing back against the opioid epidemic. The the addiction between cannabis and, opioids is extremely, extremely vast. The difference, I should say, and, over is extremely, addicting. And they’re extremely, extremely deadly. You can watch the Ted talk. I did just Google Ted talk, Doctor Chalmers cannabis, and you’ll find it. You get the stats from back then. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of people a year, like, 100 and 2040 thousand people a year. To addiction, death, from fentanyl, an opioid overdose. So. The option was that we should use cannabis. Instead, because cannabis is, blocks pain from, from all sorts of things, up to about 64% of the time we can replace our opioids with, with cannabis. I’ve used it for in the clinic quite a bit. We used to like that. My mom broke her sternum, couldn’t breathe. Because if you break your sternum, your ribs, your ribs are actually the reason you breathe. Because your ribs, the muscles pull your ribs apart, creates a vacuum. Air comes out. So your lungs are basically a bellows. And when your ribs are broken, it’s real hard to breathe because it hurts really bad. And it causes all sorts of problems.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:30] So my 70 year old mom broken ribs in a car wreck, and that’s what we use for her. And she was old. And, I talked about this in a Ted talk. My son had surgery and had a plate and six screws removed from his arm and had an inch of skin by about four inches of skin removed. It was a scar from the last surgery you had, put all back together. They had to chip the bone off of the plate to get it back to the bone and growing over it. When he came home, all he all I gave him for some of our cannabis strips. We have a sublingual strip. I hold it up in the Ted talk, that I have some. These these little strips. They can be doused. You can cut them down so you never get high, but you can actually get the benefit. Cannabis is really big on those as all supplements, drugs, water, everything is dose dependent. Water will kill you if you consume too much of your dose of water is too high, you’ll die. So dose is important on everything. Just sometimes doses get so big it doesn’t matter. So you can actually block anxiety. There’s all sorts of things you can do with cannabis. Canvas is fantastic for pain, for anxiety. We’re using CBD on all sorts of things.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:41] So the reason I bring this up is because it was brought to my attention that we have enough signatures in Dallas to actually bring, decriminalization of cannabis on the ballot for this November. I want to make sure we touch on this because what a lot of people think of as people just sitting around smoking giant, joints and getting so high they can’t move. That is a part of it. And if you’re against that, I understand that’s not fantastic what you are getting. Carson Drive. However, I would offer you the the argument that, people don’t usually get in fights when they get when they use cannabis, that’s usually an alcohol thing. And people usually calm down. So while they shouldn’t drive on cannabis, if someone’s going to have some cannabis or have a bunch of alcohol in drive, I would probably pick the cannabis because they’re going to drive slower. You know what? Either way, you should not drive under any influence of any type effect. But the reason why I want to make sure that we bring this up is because there’s a lot of people who are using this for pain. We have a lot of veterans, a lot of first responders. We have a lot of people, ex-football players, athletes. I have moms. I’ve got all sorts of people who’ve been using these things to better themselves, whether they have pain in that self move or whether they need something to help calm the anxiety down. And this helps them. It’s been fantastic.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:04] I actually have a lot of moms who are using our strips, instead of alcohol. Like they’re like, well, I’ll have 2 or 3 glasses of wine during the day while I watch the kids. But sometimes, you know, I get a little sloppy in my, you know, my speech. It’s all slurred. So they don’t like that. Plus wine mixed because there’s high sugar content. It’s not good for a lot of people’s diets. And we’ve been learning more and more about alcohol and how highly toxic it is. So the proper dose of cannabis has been able to help these guys a lot, because they’ll take a small cut of the strip and they’ll be like, that just kind of relaxes me and chills me out. And we’re good times, calming anxiety down, and I can deal with everybody a lot better. That option is important. The the main reason that I think that we need to lean all that harder into decriminalization, is because the government doesn’t own your body. And I think that every time we get a chance to tell the government that the government doesn’t run our body and we can put whatever in our body we want to put in our body, I think we should take that chance to say yes. Yes, we own our body, not you guys.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:07] So, when it comes up on the ballot, and I’ll talk about this a little bit more as it comes up, I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of reasons why it’s going to destroy society and all this sort of things, all the reefer madness. If you guys wanna have some fun, Google Reefer Madness and all the things that the government has told us that cannabis will make you do. It’s it’s pretty funny. The government is very, very, very against cannabis for a long time. But, you know, look at some of these veteran groups, look at some of the pain that this is helping to calm down and reduce. We can use the cannabis instead of the opioids. You watch my Ted talk, get a little bit, you know, a little bit more informed about it. Talk to your friends. Because if you’re not using it, I guarantee you have friends who are. Whether they talk about it or not, I guarantee you they do. Because when they come in here, they talk to me. It’s there’s so many people who come in, they’re like, yeah.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:59] So I’ve been using who’s cannabis for this. It’s really been helping. I’m like, great. I’m like, oh man, I’m so afraid to talk to my doctor about it. And I’m like, tell your doctor the reason that a lot of the doctors don’t know how great it is, because no one talk tells them, no one is like, hey, I quit taking the oxy. Hey, I quit taking this. I’m using cannabis. It’s a whole lot better. Like, I can function, I can get things done. I’m relaxing. Chill pains have gone fantastic. So like our strips, we. I was at a conference and, everybody knows who I am. So at the conference, one of the ladies forgot her oxy. She had a she had all sorts of accidents and surgeries, and she was on ten minutes of oxy, you know, a couple of times a day, which is a lot, in case you’re wondering. And so they got Ahold of me and they got some strips over to her, and she told me she was like, I’m going to start using this instead because the opioids always made her constipated. And I gave her enough strips for that the whole time she was there. And she was like, my pain’s gone. She’s like, after the third or fourth day, she’s like, I actually start my battles are talking about her, which is I think that’s very, very common.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:02] Opioids are extremely well known for blocking, the body’s ability to, for causing constipation, which causes all sorts of other issues. If you’ve ever had really, really bad constipation. I mean, it’s it’s really terrible. Like, it’s it’s horrible. So, I just another big thing that that the cannabis is beneficial for. So, there’s obviously a dose in it where you’re going to be useless. And I don’t recommend going that high unless you’re really, really, I have sitting on the couch and just don’t want to move five, you know, two inch there. However, it’s it’s something I think was very beneficial and we should at least allow the option for, you know, we’ve been using cannabis for cancer for a long time. We’ve been using it for all kinds of things, for skin issues and also stuff like the CBD oils and something that could decrease inflammation like that. So sore muscles, stuff like that. But it’s a, it’s a fantastic, adjunct. It has a little bit of a psychedelic properties, so you can use it for, mental work and things like that. We can use that quite a bit. That’s one of the things the Native Americans were using the psychedelic functions where they were using for, but it’s it’s a very, very beneficial plant.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:20] And if you guys have questions, please ask. I, you know, during the Ted talk, being part of the campus world, being a doctor, cannabis talking a while, I’m doing a magazine, I have access to all sorts of doctors and research and all sorts of stuff on it. And the research is really, really, really solid. So, you know, it’s a very beneficial thing outside of the medical piece. Like I said, I’m a big fan of telling the government that I own my body, I own my time, I own my mind. This is, this is mine, and I can do whatever I want to it. So them telling me that, like, you know, I can’t use specific plants to help, you know, fix things or alter things. I’m not a huge fan of. But that’s kind of the if you like the government telling you what you have to put in your body, what you can’t put in your body, and, you know, dictating that left and right. And I guess that’s you. But, when it comes up on the ballot, just kind of think about, you know, where we are and the freedoms that we’re trying to get, and that sort of thing, that the thing is that you don’t want to use it and it’s decriminalized.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:22] That’s the next step. So we can ship this stuff across the U.S., we can get these strips of people so that they can actually use these instead of, you know, all the other damaging medications they’re on. So as it starts coming up, you guys start hearing about it. You guys have questions? Yeah. Look at look into the stuff we’re talking about. Because this can be really beneficial for a lot of people. So. The, when it comes up. That’s what’s going on. I’ll talk about a little bit more. Like I says, things come up, but watch the Ted talk. You ask the questions. I want to get as much information as we can on this one. The problem is, I don’t know where where we are as far as education goes on this, because I’ve been reading about it for years. So if you guys have any questions, please ask questions at John as well as like, dropping the comments. But, there’s a good chance that campus is going to be criminalized here in Dallas. They’ve already come out and told everybody the, the I talked to the cops and they were like, if we if we ticket or arrest people who have, you know, personal use of 4 or 5 joints on them, like they get they get yelled at. So we’re already pretty much there. We just need to make it official. So, thank you for your time. Talk to you guys later.

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