Ben Westhoff, music editor and author of Fentanyl, Inc., traces the opioid crisis to China’s unregulated labs producing fentanyl analogs like carfentanil (100x stronger than heroin) for the dark web, bypassing pharmaceutical companies. Over 30,000 U.S. deaths annually now exceed AIDS and gun fatalities, yet harm reduction—testing strips, MAT (Suboxone/Methadone), or psychedelics like ibogaine—faces political resistance. Westhoff contrasts past racial biases in drug sentencing with modern fentanyl’s lethal efficiency, arguing abstinence-only policies worsen the epidemic while harm reduction saves lives. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it does, but for things like, yeah, traditionally, people have gotten a lot of mileage out of morphine.
But for things like open-heart surgery, he wanted something that came on really fast and it lasted a long time.
And so he manipulated the chemical structure of morphine, came up with fentanyl, it was a blockbuster drug, you know, and still is used in hospitals all the time.
It's used, you know, there's the fentanyl patch, people with cancer, chronic pain, and then when you get a, like a colonoscopy, They give you fentanyl before that.
And then women who have epidurals during childbirth, that I believe is usually fentanyl.
So they would withstand more pain and would go longer and faster and could train harder.
Yeah.
And so this guy made the connection.
He's like, oh, this is fentanyl.
This is this new thing.
And he actually predicted what was going to happen.
He's like, we are in trouble now because not only is there fentanyl, you can make a new – if you ban fentanyl, you can adjust the molecule, make another type of fentanyl.
So, then the internet comes along, and through the internet, people started scouring the medical literature and scientific literature and chemical literature, and then they find fentanyl.
Yeah, because back in the old days, scientists would publish a paper.
They're trying to find a new drug that they can patent, say the drug isn't a hit, no one wants to buy it.
It goes on some dusty university shelf, never is heard from again.
But in the Internet age, all these papers start going online.
And so these rogue chemists that I reference in the title of my book, they start finding particular scientists who work on the type of drugs they're interested in.
And then they start going through all their papers and they pick out drugs that they think would work recreationally.
And so when fentanyl first came out, it was totally legal.
People, you could walk around with a giant bag of it.
They couldn't do anything.
And so it set in motion this sort of cat and mouse game between law enforcement and drug chemists, which really still persists to this day, although mostly in China now.
I forget what the quote was, but I've never had experience with heroin, but I've known people that were addicts, quite a few, and a couple of them that died.
And one of them that I knew, there was this guy who was a pool hustler back in my pool playing days in New York, and his nickname was Waterdog.
I forget his real name.
I think it was Bill.
No, that was Buffalo Bills, his other nickname.
I don't remember his real name.
But anyway, this guy was an elite pool player, a big-time gambler.
But the thing was, he had to do heroin first.
So they would play games for like $10,000, these huge games.
And all these guys would come from the tri-state area.
They would come around to watch these matches and bet on the side.
And Water Dog would go to the bathroom and everybody knew what was going on.
He would go and shoot up and then he would come and he would sit on a chair like this.
And then when it was over, when the half hour was over, he would just like...
He couldn't miss and he was playing this guy this this dude that I knew named George was also a big-time gambler and he was just screaming and yelling that this motherfucker when he's on this stuff he can't miss he had no nerves like nothing bothered him you could scream in his face he would look at you like an alien like it didn't didn't bother him at all like like an insect would look at you and he had This incredible ability to play at the very best while he
was fucked up on heroin.
And I remember thinking, what a bizarre drug.
I mean, think about all the amazing artists that's claimed.
I think the doctor might have been involved somehow.
It's a mystery where he got these pills, but...
Prince was doing the splits on stage at age 58 or whatever, and he was definitely a guy who walked around with a lot of pain.
He was a Jehovah's Witness.
He was not a recreational drug user as we think about it.
He wanted pain, and I'm sure for years his handler or whatever was buying him off the dark net or whatever, and they were fine for years.
But then a drug dealer trying to save some money, increase profits, cut it with fentanyl, and that's how he died.
And I heard Tom Petty actually suffered an injury or hurt himself at one of his concerts, and he just literally walked outside and asked the first sketchy guy he saw if he had any pain pills, and that's what killed him.
And it was from getting my neck yanked on, you know, getting it cranked on and using it to, like, move people around when you're doing jiu-jitsu and grappling.
But I found a thing called Regenikine.
Regenikine is what Peyton Manning used.
He actually went to Germany to go do it, but now you can do it here in America.
Kobe Bryant went and got it done as well.
It's great for people with back issues, disc issues, and with bulging discs in particular.
It helps relax the area around the disc.
It's your own blood.
There's some sort of strange procedure they do, but they take your own blood.
It's like a very advanced form of platelet-rich plasma.
And there's a place called Lifespan Medicine in Santa Monica that did it for me.
And another thing they're doing is they're shooting stem cells directly into the discs, and they're having some really good results with that, where the stem cells...
But a lot of that's...
They'll be doing that in other countries, because they're a lot looser with their regulations, if they have any regulations at all.
They can just fucking fill you up with stem cells, and you're like...
Yeah, and so I'm already, like, trying to think about how I'm going to talk to my kids who are younger.
But, like, you know, I hate to say it, it seems like marijuana, if you can smell the buds, if you can see them, you know, there have been kind of some scaremongering on the internet and certain police departments saying that there's been marijuana cut with fentanyl.
But if you go on Snopes.com, they sort of debunk all that.
So I think marijuana is...
If you can smell it, it smells like weed, you're probably pretty safe.
We had a guy named John Norris on the podcast and he wrote a book called Hidden War and he started off his career as a game warden, you know, investigating people that caught too much fish, things along those lines.
And he thought, hey, what a great job this would be.
I'm going to get a job in the great outdoors.
I love the outdoors.
And, you know, I'll get to do some good for the wildlife.
Well, turns out, along the way, they started stumbling upon these public land Mexican cartel grow operations, where they would grow these marijuana plants, just giant plots of them, and they would use these extremely toxic pesticides.
Yeah, my friend Amanda Chicago Lewis is this great journalist focused on marijuana.
And yeah, she put the fear of God in me about those pesticides and carcinogens.
And the other thing is just like these different oils that people are smoking— Some of them are marketed as like all natural, but they find synthetic cannabinoids in them.
And basically, you know, synthetic cannabinoids like K2 and Spice are what they're known as sometimes.
And those are, people call it synthetic marijuana, but the big difference is that THC is known as like a partial agonist.
So it will, like, these receptors, it will activate them to an extent.
You're chilled, it's relaxed.
But the cannabinoids, they also interact with the cannabinoid receptors, same as THC, but they're full agonists.
And so they make you basically, like, go crazy, and your heart starts beating fast.
You start, people overdose and die on these cannabinoids.
And these are all made in China, too.
I went into a lab in China where they made these and they made fentanyl analogs.
And so then he showed me – because they have the website.
A lot of these companies in China, they make legitimate chemicals and recreational chemicals.
And they specialize in drugs that are legal in China but banned in the West, so banned in the U.S. What is illegal in China?
Well, in the U.S., we have this thing called the Federal Analog Act.
And so that bans all these drugs even before they're invented.
So anything that's similar to marijuana, structurally, or in effect, anything that's similar to opioids, is just automatically banned, automatically scheduled.
But in China, they have to do it one by one by one by one.
And so fentanyl itself was scheduled in China, was banned in China decades ago.
But these chemists, like this one I met, specialize in this window when something is banned in the U.S., but it's still legal in China, but it's become popularized on the Internet.
So there's all these websites, these web forums, where these drug nerds basically are like, you can't get fentanyl, but you can get this thing that's kind of like fentanyl.
And like psychonauts, I'm sure you've heard of psychonauts, right?
They specialize in these new, usually psychedelics they tend to prefer, that have never been tested on human subjects.
But this guy was entirely specialized in...
Fentanyl analogs and synthetic cannabinoids.
And so he took out, you know, he had his like fake list on his website of all the legitimate, you know, like Cialis and, you know, legitimate pharmaceuticals, things like that.
But at his apartment he showed me the real list.
And that had all these, you know, it was cannabinoids, fentanyl, it was like fake Valium, like different types of Xanax.
And he showed me the prices and I was like, alright, looks good, can I go see your lab?
And so finally he decided he trusted me.
He called up his driver on the phone.
And the driver showed up.
And he was kind of this big, like, muscular dude who didn't speak any English.
And I was a little worried.
I was like, oh, this is the dude who's going to break my kneecaps if...
When he finds out I'm a journalist, you know, but I just got in the car and we drove like 30 minutes to the outskirts of Shanghai.
And we got to the lab and it just looked like a regular office park, like a suburban office park.
There was a fountain in front of the building.
There was like, you know, you use the key card to get in the parking lot.
And then it looked like kind of a new construction building.
It smelled like cement.
We went inside.
We went up to the labs.
All the windows were open.
It was the middle of the winter, and it was kind of a strong chemical smell.
But it looked kind of just like Breaking Bad, like industrial-sized glassware, beakers, Bunsen burners, all that stuff from high school chemistry.
Basically, I had my recorder on my phone and I had it in my jacket pocket just on record.
And so he told me I couldn't take pictures.
And so to take notes, I would just say stuff aloud.
I'd be like, oh, that's a light orange mixture that's being mixed up by a mechanical arm.
And you say it's benzofentanil.
Very interesting.
But the language barrier was such that he didn't think I was being too much of a weirdo.
I clearly was.
But the cannabinoids were crazy.
There was like a table like this, like almost exactly this size, that was piled up with the cannabinoids that were there for drying.
And they were mounds like this high, just sitting right out in the open.
So they try to make it look like pot, and, you know, you can smoke that stuff out of a pipe or even roll it into a joint, but if you look closely, though, it's very clearly not pot.
It looked like, my editor didn't like it when I used this term, but you know when you go into Subway and there's the bread baking machines right there?
But I grew up in Minnesota though and there's a big Somali population and so there was a big controversy in Minnesota whether or not to ban cat leaves from being sold in regular stores.
And so the synthetic cathinones are the synthetic version of that, like made in a lab, but there's tons of different kinds.
You don't know how strong it is.
And the bath salts...
Of course, it has nothing to do with, like, salts for your bath, you know.
This was a misnomer.
And they also wrote, called them, like, incense, sometimes plant food.
And on the back of all of them, it would say, not intended for human consumption.
So that was like the way they got around.
They thought they could get around the Federal Analog Act because part of the law says that something is automatically illegal if it's intended for human consumption.
So these guys are like, not intended for human consumption.
And if you look it up on YouTube, there's all these people going crazy.
That killed, I think, maybe 100 people in Florida during that time.
And the problem is, you know, like the prohibition on drugs causes people to do really stupid things, right?
So you have this cathinone, like Flocka.
And as bad as that was, once they banned Flocka, the chemists started manipulating the chemical structure.
So they changed one little thing.
They add like a chlorine group, for example.
So like a chlorine, like...
It has nothing to do with the drug, but they just add it on there to make it so it becomes legal.
But then it becomes more difficult for your body to digest it.
So it becomes worse for you, and the high becomes worse.
And then they ban that, and then they make something new that's even worse for you.
And it's just like...
Down the line.
So that's what all these new drugs have in common.
My book is about, they're called NPS, Novel Psychoactive Substances.
So fentanyl is the most famous and the most dangerous, but these include basically like synthetic new versions of every drug.
So there's marijuana, the NPS version is the synthetic cannabinoids.
Heroin, the NPS version is fentanyl.
There's LSD. So you take LSD. It's like a wonder drug, right?
No one has ever died of an LSD overdose.
People may have thought they were a bird or whatever and jumped off a roof, but no one has ever overdosed on the drug itself.
But once they started banning, once they started really cracking down on LSD, These Chinese chemists started manufacturing this new type of psychedelic that was sold as acid.
And so if you went on the dark web, this was like 10 years ago or so.
Five, ten years ago, you would search for acid and you would think you were buying LSD, but you were buying this new psychedelic that could kill you and did kill you.
These drugs are called N-bombs.
It's like the worst name of all time.
These N-bomb drugs.
And they started killing people in like the suburbs in Dallas.
Yeah, well, the way to think about it, I think, is like decriminalization a lot of times is like a better alternative, in my opinion, in my research, than legalization, right?
So like the presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, talks about decriminalizing opioids.
And so when I first heard about that, I was like, what?
But the more you think about it, it's like people get arrested for using fentanyl.
They go to jail.
And then the recidivism rate is like through the roof.
People like get out and they start using again.
They don't get the treatment they need, you know.
And so the opioid, you know, like people don't realize that fentanyl is killing more people than any drug in in American history ever on an annual basis.
More than heroin, more than pills, more than meth, more than crack.
And so things just get worse and worse every year.
And so studies have shown that if users know fentanyl is in their cocaine or their meth or their heroin or their pills, they will be much less likely to use it and overdose from it.
And so fentanyl testing strips...
They look kind of like pregnancy tests.
They're really cheap, just these paper strips.
You mix up your solution of whatever you think you have, heroin, and you dip the strip in there.
And if there's two stripes, that means that you have fentanyl.
And if there's one, it means you don't, or else the other way around.
And so it's simple.
It's immediate.
But again, U.S. laws are so insane that these are actually banned in certain states, like Pennsylvania.
And isn't it the case that some fentanyl overdoses, the people actually have it on their skin, so these people that are helping them, whether they're police officers or firefighters, That's actually another thing that's kind of a Snopes.com thing.
But he had – he was addicted to meth at one point.
He had a lot of sort of depression, self-esteem issues.
But then he tried the opioids and he said it was like an antidepressant.
So he became hooked.
And so he started selling fentanyl on the dark web because he didn't want his kids to have to live in poverty.
He didn't want his drug addiction to interfere.
And so not only that, but he claims that...
He's helping addicted users more affordably maintain their habits.
So he has this big, like, fuck, you know, Purdue Pharma, anti-government, anti-big pharma mentality.
So he blames, like, Purdue Pharma made OxyContin pills and that's how the whole opioid epidemic began.
So first it was the pills, then people switched to heroin, and now it's fentanyl is in all the heroin.
And so this guy says that because he makes a nasal spray too...
And he says that people can buy his fentanyl nasal spray on the dark web for like $60, take one spray, it's equivalent to one OxyContin pill, and that's enough to maintain their addiction.
And so he says, you know, instead of paying money to the big pharmaceutical companies, people buy this, it's much cheaper.
So he had a whole moral justification of how he did it.
Yeah, I get it, but so many people who sell drugs and so many people who are involved in drugs, people who have fucked up lives like to paint the best version of what they're doing.
That's what that sounds like.
I mean, I feel like if you're selling fentanyl, someone's probably died.
Because of what you sold them.
I mean, it's one of those things where it's so deadly.
I mean, what are the numbers in terms of annual deaths from fentanyl in the United States?
Then more people were injured, ten people, a little kid, little girl was shot in the back, and she's in a hospital.
It's like, they just gun these people down.
And this is all just this inhuman violence from the cartels and the cartels that have rose to power and prominence because of the fact that there's an illegal drug trade.
So there's money to be made.
So instead of that money being made by pharmaceutical companies, that money is being made by these ruthless, murderous cartels.
And this is exactly what happened during Prohibition in the United States.
When they made alcohol illegal in the 1920s, when they made alcohol illegal, it didn't stop people from drinking, it just made people sell it illegally.
And so organized crime rose.
And then Al Capone and all these different organized crime members, they made insane amounts of money and developed insane amounts of power.
And we're seeing the exact same thing happening in Mexico.
You know, the war on drugs stuff, it's increasingly going to be turned towards China.
You know, and in fact, Trump has been meeting with the Chinese president and all the trade war stuff, the increasing the tariffs.
This is now tied into fentanyl.
And so supposedly in a couple of days, this might be out by then, but there's this announcement of a new partnership.
China says they're finally going to crack down on these drug labs and we'll see if it happens.
But the point is, like, we can do everything we want to try to, you know, we can go to war with China.
Over this issue.
But, you know, what is our past record in this realm?
Like, the DEA helped kill Pablo Escobar, right?
But since then, there's more cocaine coming out of Colombia than there ever was before, you know, nowadays.
El Chapo was arrested, tried.
That's doing nothing to stop the drugs, the cartels, the drugs coming into the U.S. And...
And...
And there's every indication that if we do get China to stop this insane, like 90% or more of the illicit fentanyl comes from China, that if we do get them to crack down on it, the industry is going to go to India.
And India is already starting to see these huge busts.
There's these Mexican cartel members getting busted in India for buying fentanyl.
The thing is, China and India have the two biggest...
Chemical industries when it comes to generics, kind of lower level chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
The U.S. has the most profitable pharmaceutical industry because we make like the brand name drugs, things like that.
But when you're talking about generics and stuff like vitamin C, acetaminophen, which is the drug in Tylenol, these are all made in China, a place like India.
And so they have this huge kind of brain trust Of chemists, people go to university, they learn how to be chemists, and then a certain amount of them get into the illicit industry, right?
So Mexico doesn't have that.
Mexico doesn't have its own chemical industry and a bunch of scientists who can make fentanyl, who can make these new drugs.
So that makes India so susceptible to it.
And the biggest problem is actually not even the fentanyl itself.
And so that was sort of the main investigation in my book.
Almost like 80 pages of the book are dedicated to this one company.
They're called Yuan Cheng, this Chinese company that makes more fentanyl precursors than any company in the world.
And not only that, they sell them to the Mexican cartels.
And they're totally sanctioned, not only sanctioned by the Chinese government, but they get tax breaks from the Chinese government.
They get subsidies, they get their land subsidized, their staff training, things like that.
And that was sort of the most jaw-dropping revelation that I had, was that the Chinese government is not only failing to crack down, but they're encouraging this industry.
A lot of people ask me if they think this is a blatant conspiracy to try to, like, inflict harm upon the U.S., a subversive form of warfare.
And so I think it didn't start out that way.
I think that these benefits were given so that China could increase its exports, could grow its economy, particularly when it comes to chemical exports.
So that's why these tax credits started.
They're called value-added tax rebates.
And so what that means is Any chemical that you use to—any ingredients you use to make a chemical for exports, you can write off the cost of those ingredients when you export it.
So basically, it's like a 16% tax rebate.
And so they originally did that just to try to, like, improve their economy, improve their exports.
Yeah.
But what's crazy to me now is that last year, in the middle of the trade war, this was at the height of when you heard about the trade war every day.
You know, Trump was raising tariffs and doing this and that.
Right at the height of that, China increased the tax rebate for fentanyl from 9% to 10%.
So it was almost like a, seemed like a thumb in the eye.
Iboga, which is known for its psychedelic qualities and used in African spiritual ceremonies.
Some claim...
It's something of a miracle cure for opiate addiction with minimal withdrawal symptoms.
There's something that happens with Ibogaine when you take it that it does something to rewire the areas of the brain that respond to opiates and that sort of are hardwired for addiction.
It rewires them in a way that they have a very low recidivism rate, a very low repeat addiction rate.
Yeah, like psychedelics seems to be so much potential.
There's this professor that I write about, his name is David Nichols, and he basically spent his whole career studying psychedelics as a way to help people beat cocaine addictions, alcohol addictions, even fight things like PTSD. It was actually found that MDMA, ecstasy, is like this amazing drug for PTSD. Yeah, I've heard this.
And I think it also changes the way people think about drugs because these are not escape drugs in the same sense as heroin is or fentanyl is or cocaine is.
These are drugs that sort of just give you a refocused perspective on reality itself.
But I mean, that's also, ayahuasca is also very successful for people to quit smoking, using it to quit alcohol, people that have real issues.
It sort of gets to the heart.
It lets you understand, like, hey, we're going to take you on a little journey into the mind and show you through dimethyltryptamine, show you what's fucking with you.
This is something that you've sort of stored away in the back of your brain.
It's rotten.
You're always ignoring it, but it's always there, so it flavors everything you do.
And psychedelics, one of the things that they do is they shine a bright light on all of those weird parts of the mind that we all have.
We all have weird memories or weird feelings or weird thoughts of inadequacy or self-hate, whatever it is, that cause us to be self-destructive and make poor choices.
And a lot of times we're not even aware of it.
These things sort of fester in your subconscious.
And DMT, psilocybin, a lot of different psychedelic drugs, which oddly enough, the most potent ones, they mirror normal human neurochemistry.
So I got to go to the farm where he designed all his drugs.
And, you know, he dedicated his whole career to trying to, you know, discover new psychedelics that could be used as medicine.
And so he took like the chemical structure of mescaline was one of his most often used, they're called the scaffolding effect.
So it's like that's the chemical scaffolding.
And so he would tweak little bits to try to come up with new drugs, sample a tiny bit If it did nothing, it took a little more, a little more, a little more until it had an effect.
And he invented over 100 new drugs.
He was working for Dow Chemical, the people who invented Agent Orange, at the start of his career.
And he invented psychedelics while working there that have the Dow.
Dow was patented.
And so he invented this drug that was known as STP. It's a psychedelic.
It stood for Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace, I think.
And so this was like a hippie-era drug.
And there was...
The Hell's Angels actually got into selling it and distributing it.
It was this crazy story.
But the problem was the Hell's Angels got the dosage wrong.
So they gave everybody way too much.
And there was this big...
This big protest in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, it was called the Human B-In.
And they were protesting the banning of LSD that year.
It was 1967. And so everybody went to Golden Gate Park, took this stuff, this SDP and this really high dosages.
And they all like freaked out and ended up in the hospital.
It's some kind of not related LSD. Is it available now?
I'm sure it is.
Yeah, on the dark web, I'm sure you could get it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It doesn't sound that great.
Even in its regular proper dose, Sasha Shulgin has those books called P-Cal and T-Cal, which are basically cookbooks and how to make all his psychedelics.
And even he wasn't that crazy.
About this one.
But anyway, after all these people in Golden Gate Park started freaking out and Dow Chemical realized that it was their guy doing this, they're like, all right, all right, that's enough.
Nobody knew anything about what China was doing and why.
And so I'm, you know, like the left and the right are sort of like this book, which is a rare consensus because the right wing is really into like China is fucking with us and the left wing is really into this idea of harm reduction.
And that's my big sort of talking point.
It's like the war on drugs stuff is...
I always compare it to sex education, right?
I mean, we can teach abstinence, believe that kids aren't going to have sex, stick our heads in the sand, or we can understand kids are always going to have sex, kids are always going to take drugs.
Let's try to help them do it more safely.
And so, you know, I've been in rooms where it was like...
Hardcore, law and order Republicans.
And I just try to make my point.
We can keep doing things the way we have.
We're failing miserably.
Why not give these other methods a chance?
And a lot of times, they have a proven track record of success in places like Europe.
I think it's, you know, the good news is like the optimistic thing is that that's slowly changing, you know, and a lot of people say, well, during the crack era, there's a lot of racism, people say, like, during the crack era, it was all about, like, lock these people up, you know, criminalize the users.
But now that it's like the white politicians' kids who are dying from opioids, now all of a sudden this is a health problem and this is something we need to address as a disease.
And so there's no doubt that that's true.
But at the same time, the positive is that this is spilling into other realms, too.
So I went to North Dakota, this small-town Grand Forks, where this 18-year-old kid overdosed and died on fentanyl.
And it just shocked the town.
Everyone freaked out.
But it inspired all these new reforms.
So now they have all these new laws in North Dakota, things like the Good Samaritan Law, where if someone is with you and they die from drugs, you can call the police and they won't arrest you.
You know what I mean?
Because that happens in a lot of places still.
They blame the person who they're with.
And they have things like they can use Skype, like a Skype-type service when they live in these small rural towns to get a prescription from a doctor far away.
They can use these services.
And what they told me in Grand Forks is that This system is spilling over to other—even like alcoholism now, people are starting to think of that as a disease.
I mean, it just takes time, right, for people to understand that this is a real issue that's affecting everyone.
I think you're right about the racism in terms of, like, the attitude about crack versus cocaine, and that could clearly be demonstrated by sentencing.
Yeah.
You know, people were sentenced, the mandatory minimums for crack use were so much higher.
When people got caught with crack or selling crack, I mean, they went to jail for a long fucking time.
Whereas people got caught with cocaine, they didn't go to jail for as long.
Yeah, the Rick Ross story, the real Rick Ross story, I should say, Rick Ross, Freeway Ricky, which is what they used to call him, was making millions and millions of dollars, did not have any idea that he was involved in that whole Oliver North, which is incredible.
They were using the cocaine money to fund the war with the Contras and the Sandinistas.
But see, when I came to LA, though, everyone's like, Tupac, Tupac, Tupac.
And I was like, I don't get it, man.
His flow is not that great.
You know, I just don't get it.
But the more I, like, listened to his lyrics, the more I saw he was more than just a rapper.
He was like a cultural influence.
He was like a political leader to a lot of people.
And finally, I'm like, yes, I get it.
He stood for something.
And now, like, I just don't hear Biggie the same way, you know, because so many of his songs are about, you know, partying and crime and stuff, and the bigger message of Tupac just really won me over in the end.
When you write a song that's as profitable as the Humpty Dance, I would imagine it kind of like saps your need to do too much else when you're that set.
Well, it's interesting to me, too, that much of, I mean, it's weird when we talk about drugs, because drugs seem like a blanket expression that you can throw over things that are good and bad, things that are productive, like caffeine, and things that are terrible, like meth.
Well, they smoked so much of it, it became effective.
But, you know, I've talked to some people and they said there was always some good weed back then.
You know, they'd call it Acapulco gold or whatever.
But there was no botanists, some fucking scientists that are working on like some of the weed that we have today, which is 40 plus percent THC, mind-numbing.
You know, you can't feel your feet, you know, that kind of stuff.
I mean, I feel like all these things that we're saying, all these moves towards positive lifestyle choices will also, in some way, sort of negate this move towards these drugs and the attractiveness of these drugs.
If people are drawn towards being healthier and happier and cleaner and keeping your mind right, you'll be less likely to want to seek this sort of opiate escape.
I think the attractiveness of living a happy, healthy life is contagious.
It's very addicting, and that people – addicting in the right way, addictive in a positive You see someone living a good, healthy life and being happy and being nice to people and smiling a lot, laughing a lot and having your life go well, where you're making a good living and you're being productive and creative and all those good, positive things.
Those are attractive to other folks.
And I think they see that and they go, oh, do I want to be like Mike over there who's doing well or Cindy who's doing well or do I want to be like those poor fools that are under the bridge that are living in tents because they have drug addicts, drug problems?
He detailed like all the various ways that he tried to get off and all the different things that he did and nothing worked other than this last time he just kind of hit that rock bottom thing and had slowly but surely worked his way out of being addicted into this place of sobriety and then two days led to twenty days led to three months led to where we are now and you know he's so happy.
And, you know, he's still getting his piss tested like five times a week.
I mean, he's under, it's crazy because he's under this program where if he fucks up, he goes to jail.
I think he goes to jail for a long time.
He's not a dealer and he didn't do any violent crime or anything like that.
He's just a user.
It's really strange that they've got him on this, this drug court thing.
But what it's doing for him is it's forcing him to be accountable and forcing him to be sober.
And then he's doing that.
And then he's saying, look, I like this.
I'm happy.
I'm alive.
I'm doing great.
I'm doing shows.
I feel good.
His fucking stories were insane.
He's so funny.
He was so much more vibrant than I've ever seen him before.
I love when I see people doing well.
I love it.
I love when someone was...
Their life was fucked up and now it's not fucked up at all.
Like he's doing great.
He's on the right path.
And the more people see things like that, I think the better it is for all of us.
And even, like, there's so much, like, I'm no, you know, I'm not, like, a teetotaler, but there's so much part of the culture is drinking, you know what I mean?
And it's, there's so many, like, I'm drinking beer for breakfast, like, this is amazing.
And people get caught up in that, and it doesn't agree.
Drinking is not for everybody, you know, but they, it becomes part of their identity.
And so, My wife and I do this thing called kundalini yoga.
Totally for drug people who like getting eye on drugs because you get that buzz in your head.
It's like half meditation, half yoga.
I'm like the world's least flexible person, so it's not like hard yoga, but it's just that you have to, it's mind over matter stuff.
And so you do things like, you know, we had to do this one where you put your arms above your head and hold it in this position and do this mantra for like 11 minutes and And you're constantly correcting your posture.
You're trying to like, you know, look in your third eye.
And your brain doesn't have time to wander around and think those negative thoughts and how terrible you are.
And at the same time, it's like a physically demanding thing to do.
I mean, it doesn't look like much, but you're like sweating.
And, you know, my wife like got us into that.
There's so many recovery stories because I really think it's like people think it's a chemical thing, but it's like a mind thing so often.
And I think that the ability to silence all the internal chatter that you were just discussing, like that thing like you think about being a terrible person or you hate yourself or that is so common with people.
And so many people just live with those thoughts bouncing around their head and they don't have an outlet.
And that's another reason why they turn to alcohol or turn to drugs.
They try to squash that chatter.
But that's one of the things that I really love about yoga is no matter what's going on in my life, it's business stuff, personal stuff, creative stuff, whatever it is that's bothering me, I can do yoga and the difficulty of those poses makes me concentrate almost entirely on them.
And I take a concerted effort to just think about my breathing.
And like meditation, you'll go off track and you start thinking about things.
No, but someone came in with a sword, and he had a comb stuck in there, and it was, like, I think a metal comb, and that was the only thing that saved his life from this, like, sword attack from the back.
That sounds like a great story, but probably bullshit.
That's what I would say.
This sword bounced off my comb, and I am here to teach yoga!
Yeah, something happens when people become like a leader of something that, especially something that's so spiritually oriented and also sexual.
There's something about yoga class, everybody's in their underwear, everybody's sweaty, and you're all like sort of releasing and it's like, it's very sexual in a lot of ways.
That's why people think yoga teachers are like the hottest teachers.
Like if a girl's like a yoga teacher, your friend goes, dude, I'm dating a yoga teacher.
And I agree with you, what you said also, about a lot of times when people use drugs or drink or whatever it is that's their vice, they become a prisoner to that thought, like that this is their identity.
Well, fortunately, I developed, uh, fuck you money at a time where I, like, during the Fear Factor days, I got fuck you money, and I used it to say fuck you.
The problem with Hollywood, and it's one of the giant problems, is that you're always trying out for the next thing.
You're always auditioning.
People develop an incredibly disingenuous mindset.
Because the mindset is, I want to be manipulative, To the casting agents and the producers, I want them to like me.
So I want to adopt whatever conglomeration of ideas they have politically, socially.
I want to fit in.
So this is why Hollywood is almost like universally left-wing.
It's not because the people are all...
They all think exactly the same way, because they're creative types.
That would be ideal, right?
But that's not what it is.
What it is, is the people that run the show know that this is how the show is run.
The show is run through progressive thought.
You vote Democrat.
You support these candidates.
You want a woman president.
You want this.
You want that.
You're pro-everything that the left stands for.
And so, these people, they don't even have their own opinions.
They just have these opinions they've adopted because they think it's going to help them get through.
And so then they do get through, and then they become famous, and then they go, who the fuck am I? Like, they don't know who they are.
And then when it comes to, like, hey, tell us your opinion on this.
Like, oh my god, they don't even know what their opinion is because they've never really developed opinions.
They've developed an act.
And that act is, say the things that these people would like you to say so that you can continue to work, so that you can get picked.
Because if there's two people that are up for a role, and one of them is like this staunch libertarian who's like this pull yourself up by your bootstrap thing that, you know, doesn't believe in white privilege, and the other one is like super progressive, I call myself a male feminist, I want a woman president, like, that guy gets the role.
What happens to so many people where they have that position where they're taking people and they're hiring them and then putting them in these magical positions?
Look at her.
She's on the big screen.
She's the star.
I could have been the star, but I didn't have sex with Harvey.
And then this creates that culture.
That guy just ran through that business with impunity.
Yeah, I think, I don't know, like when you look at Hollywood movies, like what it is and what the formula became, I always wonder if this is like something that developed organically or if it's like we're hardwired to want to see this kind of, like take the three-act structure, right?
Like every movie has to have a three-act structure, whether it's the most independent or the biggest Hollywood.
So it's like, why is that?
Is that part of our brain?
You know, and take songs, like pop songs.
They're all structured the same.
Verse, chorus, verse, bridge, you know, chorus again.
Yeah, and so when I'm trying to, like, write a book like this, I want there to be narrative and tell stories, you know what I mean?
Like, there's drug books out there, and it gets way deep into the neuropharmacology, and, you know, but it's, like, ultimately...
You know, 30,000 people dying of fentanyl is a horrifying statistic, but it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around it.
When you know one person who died, like my friend, his name was Michael Schafermeyer in 2010. He died from fentanyl patches.
I had never heard of fentanyl at the time.
A patch killed him.
And he was drinking at the same time, but then what actually literally killed him was when he was sleeping with his face in the pillow and it just cut off his breathing.
He didn't have the strength to move.
So that's why they think these number of deaths actually might be undercounted because his death was listed, I believe, as cardiac arrest or something.
So that doesn't even show up as a fentanyl death, for example.
But just that one story means so much more to me than 30,000 people I don't know, for example.
Yeah, people, a lot of times, I've tried to, you know, many people have successfully killed themselves with Tylenol because it's got such a narrow therapeutic window.
Like, the amount that makes you feel better versus the amount that will kill you is not that far apart.
You're obviously aware of the endorphins that you get from running.
I never really experienced that the way I did during that Sober October thing because one of the things that me and my friends talked about was how when you do do cardio for like five, six hours a day, you don't give a fuck.
And it's like the most amazing full day workout we would get up at...
Dawn and like we'd be canoeing and portaging all day and I had no idea my body could handle it.
I get my like 30 minutes of exercise in every other day and I'm like I'm good but now we're exercising hardcore like eight hours a day and my body just loved it and by the end of it it was like oh we have to go back to the city life again and it's not looking forward to it.
Yeah, if you get your body used to that, like I imagine if you worked on a ranch or something like that and you're throwing bales of hay every day and doing chores and walking around, your body's just going to become accustomed to it.
Your body becomes accustomed to the demands that you require of it.
But most people just don't use their body enough.
And it's a really disappointing thing that we're really intelligent people.
Connect exercise with being a superficial thing.
And there's less of that now than there was when I was younger.
But that if you exercised and you were into your appearance and you were trying to look good by working out, you were somehow or another shallow and immediate.
And again, to bring it back to fentanyl and drugs and drugs of escape, the more you can emphasize, the more we all can emphasize healthy choices with your life, the less attractive those escapes will be.
And so we're still facing the repercussions from the first one, and that's what all these lawsuits that you hear about in the news are all about.
And Another scary thing is that up until now, people hadn't been asking for fentanyl by name.
Like we said, it's just put in other drugs.
But now in places like San Francisco, even St. Louis, fentanyl is starting to acquire a reputation as a street drug because long-time heroin addicts don't get high anymore.
You know what I mean?
They take heroin, and it just gets rid of their withdrawal symptoms.
And so fentanyl will get them high again, and so people are starting to seek it out.