Fentanyl and the Opioid Epidemic
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All right. Let me be the stand in for the, uh, somebody that knows nothing about these subjects, which I largely don't except for what I read in your books. Um, what's a rave. That's just a big concert with tons of people bouncing around and having fun. Yeah. You know, it's like, um, electronic dance music is what the type of music you hear at a rave. So it's like, often there's not a lot of lyrics. It's just like a big pulsing beat. And, um,

People are wearing, you know, all sorts of crazy tutus and bikinis and, you know, furry boots. And most everyone is on drugs. And a lot of people make a whole lifestyle out of it. You mean they do it like every weekend kind of thing? Yeah. I see. And what are they usually taking or what did they used to take before fentanyl infiltrated it?

LSD and ecstasy have been kind of the most common drugs on the rave scene. And, you know, the ironic thing is LSD is one of the most safe things you can take. You know, you hear stories about people losing their minds and jumping off a building, probably apocryphal. But

But really, no one's ever overdosed on LSD. And ecstasy was similarly fairly safe. But this new era, fentanyl, is adulterating just about every drug out there, at least any drug that's sold as a pill or a powder. And so it's a completely different landscape than when I was in my 20s and just taking whatever. And it's very scary for young people.

Yeah, for us boomers, LSD was like the worst possible thing you could do, except for possible heroin overdose or something like that. It's funny how these things change over the generations. I thought ecstasy was like a sex drug or something. Does it just enhance all kinds of tactile and sensory stimulation?

I think so. Yeah, it's just basically it's like taking a rocket ship to happiness. You know, you could be. Yeah, I mean, sex would feel great. But like, you know, doing your taxes would feel great, too. You know what I mean? Great. I don't want it to feel good. Doesn't really matter what you're doing. That's funny. OK.

All right. So you started encountering this and started poking around a little bit and find yourself in China. What was that pathway? How'd you get there? I pretended to be a drug dealer. I created a fake online profile and it was very easy to find all these companies selling fentanyl and fentanyl products because it was still legal at the time. I would just Google buy fentanyl in China and all these labs popped up. And so I said,

I started developing a rapport with these salespeople and we would talk on Skype. I would get up at four in the morning when, you know, the labs were closing down in China. And eventually we developed a rapport and I said, well, if I were to come to China, could you show me the lab?

And some of them said yes. So I went over there. I went to Wuhan and I went to Shanghai. And it wasn't that strange for them. They deal with

you know, Westerners all the time. And I don't think I look like a drug dealer, but they, to them, you know, I was just like, you know, maybe all, all white guys look the same. I don't know. That's good to say, Ben, you look like a Midwestern mid middle-class white guy. That's not what I picture. You know, I bet there's more of, more of us, you know, doing these shady deals than you think. Um,

But but so I ended up going inside a lab in Shanghai and they were making these types of fentanyl called analogs. And they were basically every time the government banned one form of fentanyl, these chemists would just slightly tweak the chemical structure. So all of a sudden they'd have a new form that was totally legal.

And so this lab I went to specialized in kind of this narrow window of legality. And they also made stuff that's known as synthetic cannabinoids. They're like spice and K2, another like really deadly, really gnarly, super potent synthetic chemical.

And, you know, the guy met me at the train station. He spent most of the morning vetting me. He asked me several times if I was a journalist. And I had to really, you know, act like I had no idea what he was talking about. But finally, he decided I passed muster. You know, he had a strong financial incentive to believe me and took me to his lab. It was way on the outskirts of Shanghai. And, yeah.

And, you know, it was kind of like high school chemistry lab, really. It was like...

the black lab tables, the Bunsen burners, the glassware. And it was kind of a small lab, maybe five employees, but they were producing huge volumes of these drugs. I mean, when you consider that just like a tip of a pencil is enough fentanyl to overdose on, and they were sending one kilo bags all over the world.

And, um, you know, I, I, um, surveyed the place. We talked some more. I said, I actually said that I wasn't the drug dealer, but my friend was in that. I just happened to be in China. And I would, if I thought the lab passed muster, I would recommend that my friend make a big purchase here. And so I said, at the end, I said, I would go back and tell my friend and, um,

And we left it at that and I got out of there by the end of my teeth. You're like an agent. I'm his agent. Yeah, exactly. Now, on your end, did you tell anybody? I mean, like the local FBI or your family or something like if you don't hear from me by this date, this is where I am.

Well, I had a translator who was with me and I, you know, I couldn't even use my own cell phone because they don't work in China. So I had to get like a government phone, basically, where they like keep track of they like monitor it. And and the idea was the translator and I were going to try to go to this location together. But then they were going to they insisted on driving me away.

instead of having me meet them there. So I had to get into this car. I didn't know where we were going. And I was like driving, you know, along the interstate in Shanghai, like not understanding. I don't speak any Mandarin. So I was just kind of texting my translator like, we're going over a bridge now. I think we're headed west. And, you know, it sounds like

I mean, it was kind of poorly planned out, I guess. And luckily, I got through it. But it really, if something bad were to have happened, I would have been up a creek. Unbelievable. This is really ballsy for you to do all this. But the companies you were visiting, these labs, are they like official Chinese companies? Are they underground companies?

black money kind of organizations or what are they? No, they're operating legally. They're not owned by the government, but they are subsidized by the government. And that was a big part of my investigation in Fentanyl Inc. was determining that the Chinese government actually gives

export rebates known as VAT rebates to companies exporting these synthetic drugs like fentanyl. And I also visited this huge company in Wuhan, which has like 700 people. And a lot of them was the sales staff focusing on selling fentanyl precursors.

And these are the most important drugs used to make fentanyl. You know, they're only used to make fentanyl. They have no other use, but they're still legal in China. And they were mostly being sold to the Mexican cartels. And the Mexican cartels are the ones who finish the fentanyl and then send it north of the border. And so...

Again, you know, this company in Wuhan, I got to meet the CEO. He gave me a tour. I mean, they really had no shame in what they were doing. He, you know, he said, well, this is all legal here in China. And so he really acted like he had nothing to be ashamed of.

Would it be something like a gun manufacturer that, you know, hears about school shootings using his gun, the gun his company makes? But that's not his problem. We're just making guns. Is it something like that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, he said he was almost the exact same argument. He said, well, I don't know what people we sell these chemicals to. I don't know what they're using them for. This is, you know, that's it's it's out of my hands.

But the truth is that there's nothing else to use these chemicals for. And eventually, after my book came out, he was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice. And there was a $5 million reward offered for information leading to his capture. And

So everybody started asking me if I was going to try to cash in. But the problem was, you know, he never was going to be captured because once the indictment was unsealed, he knew that if he...

was dumb enough to go to the US or one of our allies that he would be arrested getting off the plane and he's not facing any charges in China at all because what the chemicals he makes are legal there and so he's still free. Did you actually purchase

Some of these chemicals or drugs? No, no money changed hands. I never received any drug. Yeah, I was going to say, but if you did, would you just bring cash? I mean, you can't put this on your Amex card, presumably. I think Bitcoin is their preferred way to do transactions. Right. That's one reason why the government wants to control cryptocurrency is to track drug purchases.

Definitely. Yeah, yeah. Okay, then walk us through the pipeline from these Chinese labs. These chemicals go out. They're not ready to consume drugs. So there's several middle steps in between before they get to the United States? Basically, these precursor chemicals to make fentanyl are sent on big barges across the ocean to Mexico, and there the ports are controlled by the cartels.

And the cartels get these shipments and they have these kind of like backwoods labs where they make the precursors into finished fentanyl. The same thing with meth. They order the ingredients for meth from China and then finish the meth in these backwoods labs. And then from there...

The finished drugs are sent north of the border into places like San Diego or parts of Texas, Arizona, and are distributed throughout the United States from those points. Yeah, here's what you write.

Driven by fentanyl, overdose drug deaths are, by the time of this book's publication, for the first time killing more Americans under 55 than anything else, more than gun homicides, more than even AIDS during the peak years of the crisis.

As of 2017, Americans were statistically more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car accident. More than 68,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics were available, and synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl and its analogs, were responsible for the greatest number of these deaths, more than 32,000.

compared to about 15,000 deaths from heroin overdose and about 13,000 from natural and semi-synthetic opioids, including Oxycontin. I mean, 32,000. I mean, that's like fill up most of Yankee Stadium and then kill everybody. That's a lot. I mean, that's massive.

Yeah, it's gotten even worse since the book came out. Now I think it's fair to say that this is the worst drug epidemic in world history. You know, there's never been something as bad as this that has killed so many people annually. Yeah. And the problem is not just the strength of the drugs, but also their addictive capacity.

Yeah, you know, heroin, no one would say that heroin is safe. But the good thing about heroin is that if you are addicted, you take a dose in the morning, it will last you all day long. But the thing is with fentanyl, it comes on so quickly, it goes off so quickly that you need to re-up.

two or three times a day or more. And so this leaves people, you know, having to commit crimes, you know, commit prostitution, or else they're plunged back into withdrawal. So that's what's so bad about it. And then, and so fentanyl, does it have a legitimate use in anesthesia or something like this? Well,

why it's not illegal? Yeah, that's why it was created. It was basically created by a Belgian chemist in the 50s to be an alternative to morphine. And so the same thing that make it a bad drug, that it goes off so fast and you need more, is what actually makes it a good hospital medication. It lets people sort of get up

from the operating table faster. And it really has, it was like the best selling American hospital drug for a long time and is still in use for like colonoscopies and epidurals and things like that.

I've had colonoscopies in which they put me in a little dream state. I wonder if that's what they're using. I bet it is. It was pretty nice, actually. It didn't really bother me at all. Okay, so obviously it's the dose. But what about these stories you hear where people just get touched by the chemical or you just have a few molecules and they keel over dead or they're comatose?

I think you've heard a lot about police entering a room where there's fentanyl and touching it and overdosing. But I think those stories are not accurate. You know, you don't have... The skin on your fingers are too thick. And I've talked to drug dealers who work with the stuff with their bare hands all day long and never overdose. I actually was listening to a podcast about this that speculates that

This phenomenon of police officers overdosing from touching fentanyl or inhaling a little bit in the air is what we might call a mass psychogenic event. Have you heard of that expression? Yes, of course. Yeah, we've done quite a bit in Skeptic on that very phenomenon. We think the Havana syndrome is one of these. Yes, exactly. And it has a lot in common with that. You know, it's

The DEA put out a report a number of years back to all police officers across the country, warning them that simply touching it could make them overdose. And once people started hearing that, that's when you started seeing all these cases. And sometimes when the officers, you know, they really believe that they're overdosing. But then when the toxicology report comes back, it turns out they have no fentanyl in their system at all.

Amazing. So, yeah, I mean, what's the causal chain there? You have it in your head that this could happen. And then randomly, some cops just don't feel so good part of the day when they happen to be in one of these places. And so they think, well, this is it. And that gives a positive feedback loop. Then other cops see this or that accelerates the symptoms in their own minds. And then you have a runaway effect like that.

Yeah, it's true. And what's really crazy is that sometimes these police are given Narcan, the opioid reversal drug, and then they snap out of it. And it's because that effect still works the same both ways, if that makes sense. It's a placebo and then a nocebo. Exactly. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, when I had a total hip replacement, they gave me hydrocodone.

And let's see, when did I have that? 2018, kind of the peak of all this stuff. And I had to actually purchase this. What's the counter drug? Narcan. Narcan. Yeah, the hydrocodone was pretty much free, super cheap. But the Narcan, I had to pay like $35 a shot or something like that. And then I didn't, of course, I'm not going to use it because I don't have that problem. And then I just, well, can I sell it back? No. No.

What am I going to do? Can I give it to the police? No? Okay. Well, if you're out and about and you see someone stooped over, it might come in handy someday. Well, right. So now there's all these videos you see on Twitter. Now that Twitter allows video content. I've noticed...

One of them is people in these stupors. You just see somebody like standing there in the supermarket aisle, just meh. And I don't know, there's no descriptions of what we're looking at, but it's like that must be one of these drug overdoses or something like that. Yeah, I mean, who knows, but certainly likely. Yeah. And so if it doesn't kill you, then it just puts you in something like an altered state of consciousness.

Well, yeah, I mean, it slows down your heart rate and opioid overdose. And so basically, or your breathing rate, excuse me. So basically, it like tells your brain to slowly stop breathing. And that's what kills you. Right. And why can't people stop using it? It's just because it's an addiction. Yeah, well, the problem is, you know, the the.

The opium poppy is able to give, I think Sam Quinones, the author, described it as the greatest pleasure you can experience in life and the greatest pain you can experience in life. And so the first time you try it, like, you know, you feel like nothing you've ever experienced, like all of your problems have gone away. But

And subsequent uses, you can't get that feeling again. It takes more and more and your body starts to require it. And so eventually you're you get in a state of withdrawal if you can't have it and taking it will only get you back to baseline.

And so the thing with fentanyl is for all these longtime addicted heroin users who are just used to taking heroin to get back to baseline, now fentanyl could help them get high again. And so that's why it was a revelation. That's why so many people went on to it. But ultimately, it just made their situation worse. Right.

Okay, yeah, so there is this debate in neuroscience about what extent you want an addictive drug like that or you need it. That is, is it just bringing you pleasure and you want more of the pleasure, or is it that when you go off of it, it's so painful to not have it that you need it? In other words, you may say to yourself, I don't want this, but I need this.

Yeah, well, there's definitely two aspects to it. You know, there's the physical dependency, but there's also the psychological addiction. And so, you know, when it comes to the physical dependency, even something like coffee, you know, if you don't, most people, if they don't have their coffee, they might get a headache. And it's really like a small form of withdrawal. And certainly, even with alcohol, you know, for people who are addicted to alcohol, the

the withdrawal can be so bad, you can die from it. You know, for fortunately, with opioid addiction, you can't really you don't really die from withdrawal. But, you know, the problem is, it's so easy to relapse from from opioid addiction, you know, most everyone who has been addicted to heroin or fentanyl for a long time, at some point, gets clean, you

You know, they kick it and then they probably have a celebration and everyone's so proud of them. But the recidivism rate is insanely high. And a lot of that has to do with, you know, what are called triggers. And so there's all these situations where there's one famous case where there was a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, that was called the Narcotics Farm.

because most of these addicted users were from New York City. They were brought to Kentucky. They milked cows. They were outside tending to the farm. And they totally got past their addiction. It might have been years and years and years. They didn't take any heroin. They were all on the mend.

But then when they went home back to New York City, the minute they got to the George Washington Bridge, the minute they laid eyes on their former stomping grounds, they reported this immediate craving for heroin. And they got home and just relapsed in extraordinary numbers. And so

That has really formed the basis of some of the addiction treatments that have been developed, this sort of like almost Pavlovian response. That's astonishing, just the sights and sounds and smells of a city. I guess it's like the same thing that triggers memories of past events when you encounter those.

Seriously, I'm doing it now. See what I did there?

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Sleepiness, sometimes serious, can occur. Common side effects include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and dry mouth. See full PI and medication guide, including boxed warning, at addy.com slash PI or call 844-PINK-PILL. Addy. That's A-D-D-Y-I dot com. Those triggers. Wow, that's, but it must have like a physiological change in the brain that leads them to, you know, seek it out.

I guess, yeah, we still know so little about why this happened. I mean, I remember when I was 16 years old, had my first cigarette with this girl I had a crush on at a coffee shop. And still to this day, when I smell those like,

grinding coffee beans. I haven't smoked in 30 years, hardly. But I find myself craving a cigarette. It's the weirdest thing. It's weird. And a girl. That'll do it. For guys, anyway. All right. So one of our partners, Big Nerve, is a crowdsourcing site that we went out to to ask if anybody wants to ask you questions. So here's two from one from Cameron Bowie.

Are there other drugs that act like fentanyl that are plaguing our country that aren't as well known?

Well, you know, fentanyl is an opioid, and I think this has been well covered that all opioids react on the same, affect the same neurotransmitters. And so fentanyl is just particularly strong. But one drug that I worry a lot about are benzodiazepines. And these are best known as Xanax and Zoloft.

And what was the one mother's little helper that starts with a V? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. Yeah, they're anti-anxiety pills. Yeah. Benzodiazepines. And so Xanax is the most famous. And but there's all these knockoff benzos that are coming onto the market now. And so, you know, they're very widely prescribed.

And they're not fatal in themselves. Right. No one ever died from just taking a Xanax. But the problem is that, again, they slow down your breathing rate. And so they're frequently combined with opioids. And so a lot of people take fentanyl and Xanax, fentanyl and heroin and Xanax.

And so in combination, this is one of the most fatal combinations you can possibly take. And so nowadays we're seeing these black market forms of Xanax, these black market benzos that are also being made in China. A lot of them, again, totally illegal in China. They're flooding the market and they can be twice as potent as...

as a valium, excuse me, that's what I was trying to think of, you know, twice, three times more potent than a valium. And in combination with other depressants like opioids or even alcohol, they're extremely deadly.

We also hear a lot about an animal tranquilizer called xylosine. And xylosine is especially bad on the East Coast. It's, you know, it was not intended for use in humans. It was a tranquilizer for large animals. But it's been gotten into the drug supply in a big way. Another depressant, very likely to kill humans.

when when combined with things like fentanyl and even worse it causes these huge lesions all over your body and so you'll see a lot of um addicted user pet users passed out in places like kensington philadelphia and they have these like big open wounds on their arms just festering and it's it's really gnarly stuff oh like a scene out of that movie of wrecking for a dream which was

Yeah. Yeah. Or like that, um, friends actor, Matthew Perry, who died of well, ketamine overdose, but maybe there was, I think wasn't there alcohol also, and he's in the hot tub. Maybe it's a combination of things. Yeah, it could be. Um, ketamine is definitely, um, a drug we're seeing more and more of, and it's being prescribed to a lot of people. And I know a lot of people have had success with it. Um,

with issues like depression and things like that, but it is also easily abused and can be fatal too when it's not used properly.

Okay, second question from Cameron Bowie. What is the point of contact for mass distribution of fentanyl, or where does it disperse to street dealers? I've always wondered what the distribution chain looks like for fentanyl. Obviously, targeting small-level street dealers is a good way of getting rid of petty distribution, but where in the chain does the mass distribution within the U.S. begin? Yeah, good question.

Well, the fentanyl is brought across the border. Often it's brought in just regular vehicles, you know, people in people's cars.

what happens frequently is these are actually U.S. citizens who are working, either they're U.S. citizens or else they're people who are working on the U.S. side. So maybe it's someone who lives in Tijuana but works in Costco in San Diego, right? And so they have a legitimate reason to come across the border every single day. So customs is very likely to...

you know, to give them trouble. And so the cartels target people like this and they have them act as mules and bring these huge shipments across. I've even heard about cartels like drilling holes in people's trunks so that they drill a hole in the trunk, they pop the trunk open, they put the drugs in the trunk,

They hide it somewhere in the car. They close it. And then the person takes the drugs across the border without even realizing it's in their car. And then the cartels retrieve it on the American side. At that point, it's usually...

When it's distributed in the United States, it's not the cartel members themselves, but often cartel-affiliated Mexican-Americans who take it from these big transshipment points like Los Angeles or Phoenix, and then it starts to fan out across the United States. And each part of the country has their own kind of criminal syndicate that is...

distributing the drugs regionally. So it's something like in a place like L.A., it might be like the Salvadorian gangs, for example. In St. Louis, where I live, it's African-American gangs. West Virginia, they have these extended white hillbilly families, basically, that are distributing these drugs. In New York, it's Dominicans. So, yeah,

The problem is that the street level drug dealers don't even know what's in these drugs by the time they get them. You know, you might say they're getting a batch of heroin, but really it's half fentanyl or more. And so it's cut at basically every step of the chain. And it's just a way to increase profits at every level. And that's the obviously the motivation. There's just a lot of money to be made.

Yeah, you know, fentanyl is both much cheaper and more potent than all these other drugs. So your customers need it more. So the demand goes up.

Yeah, they need it more. And at first, you know, no one really wanted it. No one was asking for this stuff. But once it got into the drug supply, people got so hooked that now people are starting to ask for it. And that's an even bigger problem. Oh, yeah. Okay, second question here from Paul from Maine. Is fentanyl addiction tied to a particular community? And what cultural factors lead to someone getting addicted to fentanyl?

I mean, it's pretty widespread across, you know, racial demographics, age demographics. I think people in their 30s and 40s are most likely to overdose and die. But the real contributing factor, I think, with fentanyl and with a lot of drugs, with most drug addiction, is a sort of trauma in someone's background, you know. And so when people have PTSD, when they have undiagnosed, you know,

family issues, abuse, things like that, especially in their childhood, they're much more likely to get hooked on these type of drugs. You know, you also hear a lot about especially kids who are taking a pill at a party that they think is a Percocet or Xanax or whatever.

but it's actually cut with fentanyl. And they'll just take, you know, or someone has an injury, a car accident, they're trying to relieve their pain, so they take a black market pill that actually has fentanyl, they overdose and die. This is certainly a problem, and you hear about this a lot, but the majority of deaths are from longtime addicted users

you know, people who are on the margins of society, people who are living in the streets. And they might have been cocaine, addicted to cocaine, addicted to heroin for decades even. But now they're not getting real, real cocaine or meth or heroin. It's cut with fentanyl. And so they're dying instantly.

Amazing. All right. Last question here from Paul from Maine. Why is pure fentanyl getting scarcer? In fact, and is it? Is it international pressure on Chinese companies that make fentanyl or is it the global crackdown on Mexican drug cartels that smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. or is it another unexpected cause?

Yeah, there is sort of a fentanyl shortage happening right now, which is, you know, a good thing. And I traced it back to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. So that's the most famous Mexican cartel. El Chapo was the head of it until he was put in prison. And so basically the

El Chapo cartel leaders are very close with the Sinaloa government. In many ways, it's like one and the same when it comes to these top figures. And the Sinaloa government was facing a lot of pressure to get this fentanyl trafficking out of that region. And basically, the governor convinced the cartel leaders to

to stop trafficking in Encino Loa. And so the cartel put out the warning that if people were caught trafficking fentanyl, they'd be killed. And lots of people were killed by the cartel for doing this. And so it doesn't mean fentanyl went away. It went to other parts of Mexico, but it did slow down the trafficking. Right. Wow.

All right, last line of questions on this before we shift to your other book. What can you do about it? What can the president do about it? What can the State Department do about it? What can the FBI do about it? All the way down to what can the local sheriff in some small town in the Midwest do about it? Well, there's no way to stop drugs from coming across the border. And this whole, the Democrats, the Republicans, they're all just like completely...

Crazy for thinking there is a way to stop it. You know, we can't stop drugs from getting into a maximum security prison, right? You hear about prisoners overdosing and dying on drugs all the time. So fentanyl is so strong and so powerful, you only need a little bit, like one suitcase full is going to have a million doses. And so all this like enhanced border security, all this technology they're trying to use to stop the drugs from coming across,

I've talked to border agents. I went down to the border and he said they're using drones to fly it across underground tunnels. You can bring it across through a water. I heard about a guy using a surfboard. He brought it across the border on a surfboard. The drugs are always going to find a way. We invest

probably $100 billion a year trying to stop drugs from getting into this country. That's not an exaggeration. You know, when you think about the money that's allocated to DEA, Customs and Border Patrol, the State Department, even, you know, like the BLM, Bureau of Land Management, you know, you think of them as being in charge of regulating where cows can graze in the West, right? Right.

Even they are tasked with stopping drugs from coming into this country and prosecuting these crimes. It's just like it doesn't accomplish anything.

It's just a tremendous waste of resources. And so what I think is that we need to take that money instead and focus it on helping the people who are already addicted. Because like I said, the majority of people who die from fentanyl and opioids are people who have been addicted for a long time.

And we have these great treatment drugs. I'm doing a documentary about a treatment drug called naltrexone, which is best known as the Vivitrol shot. It's basically a vaccine against opioids. You take a 30-day shot, and during that time, you could take as much heroin as you want, as much fentanyl as you want, and it wouldn't affect you at all. You know, it bounces right off. It's as if you never even took it.

We have methadone, buprenorphine. We have three FDA-approved medications that are really proven to be much more effective than not taking anything. And yet, the vast majority of addicted users don't take any medication.

We need to focus our funding on reaching these people, funding these medicines, making sure that everyone can take it. We need to do education campaigns. We need to explain to young people what this stuff is. I don't think we're going to arrest our way out of this problem at all.

I think we need to focus on the users instead of trying to stop the supply. Wow. Yeah, if you spend $100 billion a year on addiction research and recovery research and things like that. Yeah, exactly. There's so much better places that money could go. I've always wondered, how is it that prisoners in high security prisons get drugs? I mean, don't they control everything that they receive from the outside world?

Well, there's some drugs are actually can be a spray like this. These synthetic cannabinoids I was talking about K2 and spice. They're sprayed on a piece of paper, you know, so like you can write a letter to a prisoner, you can spray the drug on there and then they just eat the paper and it gets them high and, you

You know, in Missouri, you're not even allowed to send a letter to a prisoner anymore. You have to send it to this third party system in Florida where they make a photocopy and send it to the prisoner. Wow. Because of this problem. That's astonishing.

Yeah, we used to get letters from prisoners all the time at Skeptic, you know, just asking for free copies of Skeptic and books that we sell and stuff like that. But I soon found out that we could only send paperbacks because hardback books, the hardback can be turned into a weapon or something like this. Yeah. Okay. Wow. It's amazing. Yeah, well, that's depressing. Wow, that's incredible. So we lost the war on drugs long ago.

Yeah, I mean, it's only gotten worse and worse. Like Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs 50 years ago. And at that time, you know, there were a few thousand people a year dying from drug overdoses. And now it's over 100,000. So we definitely have not been doing something right. Have you examined other countries where they legalize it and let people use it as they need it and control it and tax it and regulate it?

Well, the most famous example is Portugal, where they really dropped their overdose rate after decriminalizing all drugs. You know, Portugal is different in a lot of ways. They never had fentanyl. And on the other side, you know, there's countries like Singapore, which is basically make it like you get the death penalty if you're even caught with certain amounts of marijuana, for example.

And they have a very, very low rate of drug use. So, you know, I'm certainly pro harm reduction, this idea that we don't want to, you know, send people to prison for drug use.

But, you know, we haven't figured it out by any stretch. Some of the cities on the West Coast that have been the most pro harm reduction are places like Vancouver and San Francisco. But they've actually seen their fentanyl problems get a lot worse. You know,

They do things like handing out free needles. They have drug consumption sites where you can legally use drugs and overseen by a doctor or nurse. And I write about that in the book, how that can really work. And I visited one of these centers in Spain that they cleaned up the whole city. They got the users out of the parks. So there are needles all around where kids play. And they connect people to services.

like drug treatment and things like that. And so, you know, like I say, I'm pro-harm reduction, but it's not moving the needle in a lot of places. And it's unclear the way forward. You know, the overdose death rate actually dropped in the last 12 months substantially for the first time in a long, long time. And so we're asking what happened. And I think the answer might be that

It's finally starting to burn itself out a little bit. You know, there were so, like I said, all these long-term addicted users tried fentanyl maybe for the first time and they died. And now there's just like none of these users left. You know, it's a sad thing. Darwinian process. Wow. Yeah.

It's amazing. Okay, let's move to your other book, Little Brother, Love, Tragedy, and My Search for the Truth. Wow. Another dark topic here. You decided to become an older brother to this young man, Jorrell Cleveland. He was, what, eight years old when you became his older brother? Yeah, it's the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program, and he was my mentee. I was

28 and he was eight when we were paired together here in St. Louis. And he came from this really poor family. They lived in Ferguson, Missouri, which became famous when Michael Brown was killed in the kind of the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in a big way. And, you know, Jarrell knew Michael Brown. Jarrell was...

You know, we were really tight. We were together for 11 years. I was writing about hip-hop music. He was, like, putting all this new music in my ear. I was interviewing his, like, favorite rappers. We took all these trips together. He came and stayed with my family for a summer. He was an incredible kid. And when he was murdered at age 19, it just completely blindsided me. I had no idea...

I thought it was an accident at first. I thought he must have just gotten been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the police investigation stalled. They didn't discover the killer. And as the years went by, it became increasingly clear they never were going to find out who killed him.

it seemed like they didn't care. And so, you know, as an investigative journalist, I decided I had to apply my skill set to solving this crime. And so in the process, you know, I interviewed everyone he knew. I looked at all the police records. I, you know, went into this dangerous kind of gangland territory to talk to people who knew what really happened. And, um,

Not only did I figure out who did kill him, but I kind of learned about Jor-El's real life in the process. You know, the stuff that he kept from me that he never told me about. Wow. Like what? Well, you know, it turns out that he actually was taking heroin himself.

You know, this, you know, we would we would hang out together and sometimes he'd be like super lively and peppy. And other times he would be like comatose, practically like I couldn't get him to talk. And, you know, he was a teenager. He was like 18. I figured maybe smoking too much pot.

you know nothing crazier than i would have been done doing at his age um he also it turns out had this huge gun collection and was buying these you know he was underage not legally able to buy a gun but he was buying them off the black market in like the most dangerous part of st louis he would just walk into this neighborhood you know known for like

like prostitution, drug running, homicide. He just strolled into this area and talked to people about buying guns. He became friends with them.

And the main thing was that he had all these enemies. He had this hair-trigger temper, it turns out, that he hid from me. You know, I never saw him raise his voice, curse someone out. You know, he always conveyed to me that, like, everything was great in his world. And it turns out he started all these...

awful disputes with people over these most minor things. And so once I really began investigating his case, there were like three huge beefs that he had with different people who ended up being my three main suspects. Oh, incredible. And what was Jor-El's family dynamics or background?

single mom or poverty and all that? He was actually being raised by his dad. His dad had 10 kids at one point, and his mom was in prison. And so that's kind of the program we got involved with. It was a special Big Brothers Big Sisters program dedicated to kids who had moms in prison because

They that supposedly makes someone even more likely to to kind of get into trouble in their own lives. And they lived in this huge house in Ferguson.

Ferguson used to be a very affluent suburb of St. Louis. And when they moved in, it actually still was pretty well off. But almost right when their family arrived, the kind of bottom fell out. There was this white flight was happening like crazy. The school system completely deteriorated.

And by the time Jarrell was a teenager, almost everyone on his block was was in a gang, was in one specific gang. And I and so was he. I never knew about that. You know, that's another thing that he kept from me. He was in the Crips gang. I knew he always liked wearing blue, but I never, never put two and two together. Wow.

That's just amazing. You know, so the devil's in the details here. He has a father.

Seriously, I'm doing it now. See what I did there?

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uh who was also not aware of this i mean how could you not be aware of it but on the other hand i mean i have one kid at the moment i had a daughter who was my lone child and now she's an adult now i have a young son i know everything he's doing i know where he is all the time but if i had 10 yeah i could see i maybe i wouldn't know what's going on yeah you know it's and and and

Also, being in a gang might not mean the same thing to him that it does to you and me. I think the gang affiliation is so common in that area that it's not like Jarrell was initiated in. You know what I mean? He just became a member by virtue of living in that area and all his friends being in it, basically. Right. So there's a kind of a social...

or social proof aspect of it. I mean, like when I was growing up, every kid I knew was doing some sports. So you just did sports. That's what everybody did. Something like that. Yeah, exactly. It's part of the environment. Part of the environment. Yeah. Right. Okay. So you narrow it down to three suspects and then what? You go to the police and go, Hey, let's open the case again. And they're like, what? Yeah. You know, the police were very unhelpful. Um, they, um,

They said basically, you know, right from when Jarrell was killed, I got the call. I went to the scene. You know, I saw them take away his body. Oh, wow. There was like the fire truck there that like sprayed down the sidewalk, sprayed off his blood. And and I talked to a detective there on the scene.

And I knew that Jarrell's friends and family wouldn't necessarily want to talk to the police. You know, that's part of the culture. They don't want to necessarily...

You know, some of them did. But I knew everyone would talk to me, you know, like they all knew me. I was part of the community. And I told the detective this. I said, you know, I'm an investigative journalist. I have good access. I really want to help with this case. I think that we can work together. You know, and basically he just like completely blew me off.

And I didn't hear from him. So as I kept investigating, you know, this is a three year investigation. I developed, you know, I got all this great information, but I couldn't quite put the pieces together. Like I said, there were these three suspects. I didn't I couldn't figure out who was the right one. And I knew the police had this huge, thick report. And if I could only access that, I knew I could solve it.

And so luckily, one day I decided to do kind of a Hail Mary pass. I tried to get these records through the official channels, submitting it through the Sunshine Law and all this, and then nothing worked. So finally, I just showed up at the police headquarters one day. And it turns out that the usual clerk was sick that day. So there was a substitute clerk.

who didn't know what she was doing basically and so i asked i just asked for the case and she just handed it to me she gave me the whole case it was like like this thick and it had all the answers i needed i was able to um to to figure out who did it and um that's what what did it and is that was that person then tried and convicted and is in prison

No, the big tragedy is that there is only one witness, and the witness refused to testify. And so even though it's very clear, even the police agree with me that we know who did it, but they can't convict this person without the eyewitness testimony. And they don't want to testify because what they did?

I think this guy fears for his own safety, basically, if he's perceived as a cooperator. Yeah, yeah. Cooperating with the police, sure. Yeah, you can see that in that environment. And the police not being very cooperative, what's the reason for that? Is it racism? Is it they're just so busy? There's too many of these cases?

Well, I actually they did more investigating than I thought. You know, I thought, you know, they were going to be like, oh, it's just another black kid, poor black kid. Like, who cares? But really, they did a thorough investigation. The reason they didn't want to share information with me, I don't know. I guess it's not protocol. I guess they weren't sort of thinking outside the box. They weren't being creative. I can't really say why they didn't. Hmm.

Wow. So it kind of leaves a bittersweet taste in your mouth. You solved the problem, but the murder is still free. Yeah, it is. It is scary. And it was very scary publishing the book because, you know, like identifying this this killer and he's still at large. It's a kind of a scary thing for you. You mean? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. OK, well, be careful.

Yeah, well, you know, we went to a great extent to keep our address off the Internet. And I think it would be very hard for him to find me. I also think, you know, he had a grudge against Jarrell. This was this was someone he went after. And I think he's trying to keep a low profile since then. Yeah. Well, I've written about this Donald Black's theory of.

or a crime is that it's more moralistic in nature. Something like 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature. Not instrumental, I killed him to get his BMW or his Rolex watch, but that he cheated on me in cards or embarrassed me in front of my girlfriend so I had to kill him or whatever. The problem is over-moralization and lack of self-control then at that moment where you blow your top. So this was something like that, revenge or anger.

Yeah, it was. It was... Jarrell had shot at his girlfriend, this guy's wife, actually. And I think this guy was genuinely kind of afraid for his own... for his wife and for himself. Yeah. Well, understandable, I guess. I mean, this is what Donald Black talks about. Actually, it was, I think, Homicide is Self-Help Justice, or Crime is Self-Help Justice, the title of his famous paper, but that...

You know, we all want justice and fairness in our lives. If the state doesn't provide it, then it becomes a black market for justice and revenge. And people just take the law into their own hands because they want justice.

Yeah, well, that's so true. You know, it's never more true than in these type of communities where Jarrell lived. Yeah, I mean, especially if you think about the BLM movement and all that defund the police. I mean, why are they saying that? And I think the deeper motive is they don't feel like they're getting justice from the police. In fact, the opposite.

Or if you want to go up one higher level higher, they don't feel they're getting justice from the criminal court system, which is what its job is so that you and I don't take the law into their own hands. We get a lawyer. But if you don't trust the criminal justice system, then what's the point of hiring a lawyer? Yeah. You know, I mean, I think it's important to note that like the majority of African-American people actually don't support these laws.

you know, defund the police movement. And I think that's, you know, because they're living in these neighborhoods where they want, they need the police, you know, there's higher crime neighborhoods. It's easy for someone in a wealthy neighborhood where there's no crime to say defund the police, but it's,

It's a lot harder when you're actually a potential victim of crime on a regular basis. Yeah. Well, that's another election issue is crime. Yeah. I mean, it did go up after the George Floyd killing and then the BLM riots and all that. But it has gone down the last year or year and a half or so. So it's not really fair for the Republicans to say it's worse than it's ever been in

You know, but it goes up and down. But overall, it's been going down since about 1993, except for this little spike in the last year and a half after the BLM movements and all that, but now getting slightly better. But the bigger issue, I guess, is what causes it to go up in the first place?

And then in the case of your guy, Jor-El Cleveland, I was interested in how lives turn out. You know, genes, environment, bad luck, good luck, whatever.

You know, you go left instead of right. You had two parents instead of one, or you went to this school instead of this other school. You're raised in a healthier environment, neighborhood versus one with gangs and so on. All these things have to have sizable effects on how somebody's life turns out. How do you think about that after going through this experience?

I do think there's, you know, there's some element of chance, but I really think that, you know, your birth is your destiny in a lot of sense. You know, like Jarell and I both came from outside of St. Louis. Like I grew up in Minnesota. He grew up in Arkansas.

You know, we came to St. Louis actually around the same time. But yeah, you know, he was slotted into this like this bad neighborhood with high crime and gangs. And I was living, you know, in a nice neighborhood. And because of the circumstances of my birth, it was probably...

most likely that I was never going to have any sort of tragedy like this. And for him, the odds were very high. And, you know, I think in America, we think about the American dream and people escaping their situation, their lot in life. But I think that that tends not to be the way it works out, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's called the just world theory that conservatives tend to embrace. That is to say, however things turned out, they happened because you made bad choices or good choices or you were hardworking or you were lazy or whatever. But liberals tend to exaggerate maybe in the other direction that, you know, it's overdetermined in the other way. You know, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's a complex social science.

And then even harder is the, you know, public policy or political solutions. You know, it's one thing for you and I to talk about it. But what if you're the mayor or the governor and the public says, do something about this problem? Well, OK, what?

Yeah. I mean, um, it's above my pay grade, you know, I think we, we, I, I think I heard a podcast that like the only thing that's really been effective is like school busing programs that, um, you know, kids who got out of bad neighborhoods and went to school in good neighborhoods really did show remarkable likelihood to, to better their, their lives. Um,

you know, I mean, ultimately it just comes down to poverty. Poverty is just holds people down. It causes chaos in lives. You know, you can work. I was talking with a woman who's like got a great job. You know, she comes from a tough background, but

She's working hard. She's doing everything she should be. But she's got these two cousins who are both, you know, opioid addicts and they're just making her life hell and they're like taking her money and ruining her credit and.

You know, it's just some things are just your destiny weighs you down. Yeah. I had a podcast guest, Chris Edwards, who does educational reform. He was talking about the zip code model of education and how this leads to this Matthew effect where to those who have more shall be given and to those who don't, they'll get even less.

And that's certainly the case with public schools because they're funded by property taxes. So, you know, parents want a better neighborhood for their to raise their kids. So they pay more for the house that they go in and the property taxes that go up, then fund the local schools and they get more money. And then the reverse effect happens in the crappier neighborhoods and you just get this huge divide.

Yeah, you know, but I've also read that just throwing more and more money at bad schools doesn't really produce super noticeable effects either, you know, because your background, your family life is so important. And, you know, I mean, like helping people, you know,

Get out of poverty, I think, is the only real way forward. But that, of course, is another huge problem in itself. Yeah, there was a book by an economist, a female economist, maybe six months ago, about why it's better to have two parents than one, just from a purely financial economic perspective. Having two incomes versus one, having two people to divide the division of labor at home rather than one, and so on and so forth. It makes a huge difference on average.

Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a whole like culture war just waiting to erupt over, uh, you know, uh, the, the stuff like that. But, but, you know, to me it's like, I, these cultural issues to me just like mainly go on the back burner, you know, to me, like economics is, is, is the one thing we should be focusing our effort on. You know, I, I, um,

After spending so much time in Jarrell's neighborhood, I mean that I know, you know, I know racism is an everyday part of life for a lot of people who live there. But really, poverty is like the thing grinding everybody down, if that makes any sense. Totally. I think that I agree with you completely. That's the fundamental problem right there. What causes that poverty, I suppose, could be debated, probably is debated, you know, family structure versus tax rates or I don't know what.

Yeah. So I don't know. There's only so much the government can do. You know, we don't want to live in North Korea where the government does everything and controls everybody. Right. So. Yeah. I've been ever since we were in Korea, I've just been obsessed with reading about North Korea. I'm on like my fourth book on the subject of what life's like there. I know. Did you hear that story today? We're recording this, what, on October 23rd that North,

North Korea sent 3,000 troops to eastern Russia to train, probably to go to Ukraine.

Wow. Yeah. That blows my mind. Yeah. The state, the secretary of state just announces today and they're, the state department's looking into it like, uh, okay, you know, you're going to die if you go there. Right. But you don't blame us for that. Well, yeah. Being part of the military is one of the like best things you can do as a North Korean citizen to improve your standing. And so I'm sure these are like the poorest of the poor there. Yeah.

Have you seen those numbers where the difference in height between North and South Koreans? It's like three inches or something like this. It's astonishing. That's just diet. Yeah, I mean, you know, when you think about the poorest parts of the world, parts of sub-Saharan Africa and things like that, it's tragic. And, you know, you wish it weren't that way. But it still feels like people there are like in it together. You know what I mean? Like the leaders may be corrupt, but the people are...

trying to pick themselves up whereas in north korea the whole population has been turned against each other they're all it's like east germany writ large you know what i mean everyone's got files on each other every you know every week they have these or maybe even every day in some schools you have to basically tell on yourself this is everything that i did that was wrong today then this and then you have to accuse other people you have to say this person you know i saw them um

not properly saluting the portrait of Kim Jong-un. You know what I mean? It's, it's like, it's just an awful, it's these like megalomaniac, megalomaniacal leaders who are just like egomaniacs.

That they've been in power for so long, it just makes me so crazy. I know. And how could anybody overturn the regime? I mean, it does happen in history, but it's rare and it's hard to do because if you fail, you're dead.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just people just surviving. It's hard enough in that country. It's like during slavery. Well, why didn't the slaves revolt? Well, how do you do that? You know, the other side's armed and we don't have arms and we speak different languages or we can't communicate clearly and coordinate our efforts. And, OK, you go over there and I'm going to go right. And then we're all going to charge at this particular moment, overturning and capture the guy, whatever. That's not easy to do.

Yeah. And even in the case that, you know, even if they, somebody assassinated Kim Jong-un, there's probably 10 people that would just take his place going, I'll take that spot. Yeah. You know, and at the same time though, he's like,

executing his own people if he feels the slightest bit of disloyalty. It's just one of the worst humanitarian crises imaginable. There was one horror story where there was some disfector, somebody didn't salute right or whatever, and they strapped him to a pole and fired a missile at him and then filmed it and showed. Yeah, just...

A missile. That's completely crazy. Yeah, public executions are part of daily life. Yeah. You know, when you see these films when Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Il-sung, died, and then for weeks there's just these films of the North Koreans sobbing hysterically, were they really feeling bad? Are they just so brainwashed they actually felt bad? Or is this just all theater?

I think a lot of them really did feel bad. They've been so brainwashed, you know, that the grandfather. So people say he was like actually beloved, you know, and in North Korea's first decades,

when they were propped up by the Soviet regime, you know, things were all right. Like the standard of living was actually higher than in South Korea, you know, through the 1960s. And people were coming from Japan, these like North Korean, you know, POWs who after the war who were living in Japan were like repatriated to North Korea. And they really, everyone thought this was going to be this great collectivist society. And it wasn't.

It wasn't until the Soviet Union came apart that they stopped getting their funding and then things really started to deteriorate. Yeah. I don't remember if I saw you in South Korea before I went to the DMZ or after, but I want to go to the place where Trump went, where the blue buildings and the borders right there, you know, and the whole thing. And that's closed now. Tourists can't go there anymore because that crazy American ran across the border last year. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, Americans can't go to North Korea at all anymore because of another dumb American who, like, stole that piece of propaganda. A poster or something like that. A poster, yeah, from a hotel or whatever. Oh, my God. That's crazy. Well, is that your next book? Are you going to do something on North Korea? You should. I wish. I would love to, but I don't know that I have the –

the context. And since I mean, I guess there are probably ways to go, but that sounds too risky. Well, there are, there are people who have escaped. It would be interesting to have a kind of a compilation of stories of what life is really like in North Korea. I don't know if this has been done or not, but yeah, there's a good book. Uh, I think it's called nothing to envy that, um, tell these types of stories. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Very good. Okay.

All right, Ben, thanks for your time. Thanks for your work. What are you working on next, if not on North Korea? Yeah, well, I've got this documentary about this opioid treatment drug. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And basically it's like this wonder drug. Like I said, it's like people call it a miracle drug, but it's it's almost not used at all. It's kind of like who killed the electric car, if you remember that documentary. Yeah.

I do. It's kind of this big money suppression of this drug. Right. Do they have one for beer and wine so I can drink and still lose weight and not feel crappy the next day? You know, I'm not joking. This drug, naltrexone, does do exactly that. What? Oh, my God. You take it, you can still drink.

And it's just that after you have a drink or two, you just don't you lose the craving. You know, it's called naltrexone. You you lose the craving and you're like, oh, that's funny. I'm good.

Oh, that's what I need. Yeah. Not that I'm addicted or anything. It's just that I, I work out in the mornings and I, and I don't like to feel crappy when I'm working out the next day. And also it, it does put on weight because beer and alcohol, beer and wine just gets turned to sugar and that gets turned to fat. Not good. Yeah. True story. And apparently it kills brain cells too. Not that I'm worried about at this point in my life, but at any rate. All right, Ben, thanks a lot. All right. Good talking to you, Michael. Yeah.

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