This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. We're back. Let me welcome Don Calloway back in, my partner in Power This Wellness Wednesday,

and the author of Drug Use for Grown-ups, Columbia University Professor Back in the House house Dr. Carl Hart. Welcome back.

Uh-oh, on mute.

Thank you for having me Karen I'm sorry about that.

No problem, Don acted like we were in a poetry slam.

He started snapping. I don't know what that was about, but yeah, he's like, let's get it.

Hi, you're you're back and I appreciate you

well I do the same for you and Don as well because you know it was you two who actually kind of got the truth out

so I really appreciate the opportunity to be back and also to appreciate it their original opportunity. So thank you so much.

Well, listen, then you can't, you went on our brother Clay Kane, who's show was right before mine, and that was even better in my opinion because Clay read your book. So he came in, he came in chapter and verse ready and you know really I think allow for you to have a conversation that I thought was important.

You're back because I think we need to continue to have this conversation especially in light of the demonization of our brother George Floyd for having opioids in his system. So I thought it would be, and I didn't know this was, we were going to be in

a miss of this Derek Chauvin trial when we invited you back, but look at God. So here we are.

Talk a little bit about your assessment of this trial in the bringing in of the drug use of George Floyd as a defense for what Derek Chauvin did.

Well, I don't know if you know, but I wrote an op-ed back in June or July in the New York Times on this very issue.

And the title was, is it's like, we know it killed George Floyd and it wasn't drugs. I did that because my book details how police and the state use drugs or scapegoat drugs whenever a black person is killed or whenever someone who is a blow status is killed, they go to this sort of drugrazed Negro defense.

It was the drug that did it, not the nine minutes

of this guy's knee on George Floyd's neck.

And so what I did was I went and got the toxicology of George Floyd to see exactly what was in his blood and he certainly he had THC which is the chemical for marijuana.

He had fentanyl, he had methamphetamine in his blood.

But what's in the blood does not tell you

about the person's behavior and the levels of drugs that were in his blood you can't tell

because you know nothing about the person's level of tolerance so like one dose that will

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