True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 138: OC 80
Aired: 2021-02-18
Duration: 01:32:58


=== How a Flower Becomes a Drug (07:56) ===

[00:00:00]  Brace.
[00:00:01]  Yes.
[00:00:01]  Okay, I have a question.
[00:00:03]  Yes.
[00:00:03]  So how does a flower become a drug?
[00:00:07]  Well, with opium, with the opium poppy.
[00:00:10]  Yeah, yeah, poppies.
[00:00:11]  Of God's, you know, as a former florist, I'm very familiar with many of many of the Good Lord's creations of flowers.
[00:00:17]  Despise almost all of it, except for the poppy.
[00:00:21]  You cut it open, you get the sap.
[00:00:23]  I'm not too entirely familiar with exactly the step-by-step making of the dope, but I do know that it's the sap of the opium poppy.
[00:00:31]  You cut it open, you process it somehow, and there's a bunch of different things you can do with it after that.
[00:00:35]  You can make it into morphine, and after that, you can refine it further into heroin.
[00:00:40]  You can synthesize it, make fake opium, which is that's what they call opiates or opioids, rather.
[00:00:46]  Wait, what's the difference between opiate and opioid?
[00:00:48]  Opiate is from the earth.
[00:00:49]  It's natural.
[00:00:50]  It's okay to do.
[00:00:52]  It's just like smoking cannabis.
[00:00:53]  It cannot possibly harm you.
[00:00:55]  Opioids are opioids are created in labs in order to kill you.
[00:01:02]  That sounds bad.
[00:01:03]  That's the big difference.
[00:01:04]  You cavemen actually apparently used opium.
[00:01:08]  Well, they were buried alongside the flowers.
[00:01:10]  And, you know, it's, you know, how like when you get buried, you usually bring like a couple of your relatives along.
[00:01:16]  Like you die and then you have a couple of them killed there alongside you.
[00:01:20]  Yeah, I don't think that's true.
[00:01:20]  Because you love them.
[00:01:21]  Well, that's what they did with the opium flower with the poppy.
[00:01:27]  But people have basically used opium or used the poppy in various forms since like I think the earliest they found it was like 3,500 years ago for sure, but almost certainly before then.
[00:01:39]  And like, again, like I said, it's buried alongside Neanderthals and everybody was using it.
[00:01:44]  I bet like crazy Greeks definitely for sure.
[00:01:47]  Absolutely.
[00:01:47]  Sort of total Freakozoids.
[00:01:49]  Yeah.
[00:01:49]  Homer talks about this drug called the penth in the Odyssey, which makes you sleepy and dreamy and forget everything.
[00:01:57]  You know, people, the Sumerians, like definitely used opium.
[00:02:01]  They called it Holgill, which means the joy plant.
[00:02:05]  Stupid name.
[00:02:05]  They also called it smack, which I thought.
[00:02:07]  Really?
[00:02:08]  No, no, I just made that up.
[00:02:10]  Minoans used it.
[00:02:11]  Alexander the Great brought it to fucking India.
[00:02:14]  Eventually, you know, back then people were kind of just patterning the paste and putting that into like potions and shit.
[00:02:20]  Like, you know, basically everyone back then was a magician.
[00:02:23]  But eventually the Portuguese, the perfidious, vile Portuguese.
[00:02:29]  Underrated, by the way.
[00:02:30]  Everyone forgets about the Portuguese when they're talking about colonizers.
[00:02:34]  Yeah.
[00:02:34]  Everyone forgets about them.
[00:02:36]  Well, it's Iberia's Canada.
[00:02:38]  It kind of is, actually.
[00:02:39]  Absolutely is.
[00:02:40]  That's a great.
[00:02:41]  Okay, anyway, go on.
[00:02:42]  Well, they invented smoking opium.
[00:02:44]  The Dutch, another invented peoples.
[00:02:50]  The Dutch bring it to South Asia and to the, you know, to the Pacific, and then the British bring it to China.
[00:02:55]  And at one point, 10% of the Chinese population smoking dope.
[00:03:00]  So I have a question about that.
[00:03:03]  I feel like, so with the British, they also used the, they also used India for this, right?
[00:03:09]  Yeah, they grew it in India and then forced the Chinese.
[00:03:12]  Forced it into the Chinese.
[00:03:14]  Yeah, I mean, they fought a couple of wars about it.
[00:03:15]  The crazy thing about that is, is that the Chinese didn't even really do opium before the British brought it there.
[00:03:21]  And then after, you know, they got the whole country hooked, opium became sort of seen as like this Chinese, this like oriental, you know, right?
[00:03:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:30]  You know, you go to Chinatown and take a little alcove in the opium den, which sounds like a fucking, every junkie dreams of being able to relax in one of those little alcohols.
[00:03:40]  A little like sea town on like south of LA where you're like, you know, you take your like detective's cap off and put it on the counter and the, you know, the gorgeous prostitute comes and gives you a pipe or whatever.
[00:03:53]  No, it's like a, it's like a 14-year-old catamite that once worked for the Lincoln Project, clad in a loincloth, brings you over and you ask him for something, but he can't answer because his tongue has been cut out.
[00:04:04]  But yeah, it's the same sort of thing as that.
[00:04:07]  But up until about 1914, you could literally just buy opiates in America, basically anywhere.
[00:04:14]  People have been refining poppies in a bunch of different ways for a really long time.
[00:04:19]  It hasn't always been heroin.
[00:04:20]  Confessions of an English opium eater, the famous book, which, by the way, I tried to read while I was on heroin.
[00:04:26]  Fucking sucks, dick.
[00:04:27]  Really boring.
[00:04:28]  You don't got to read it.
[00:04:29]  That guy wasn't even on dope.
[00:04:31]  He was taking laudanum, which is like dope and a bunch of other stuff.
[00:04:33]  It's how like the Victorians got high.
[00:04:36]  Eventually, in, I think, the mid kind of early 1800s, early 1800s, excuse me, they invent morphine synthesized.
[00:04:44]  And then later, a British guy, and then a German really refined it, invented heroin.
[00:04:50]  And you could buy heroin basically anywhere.
[00:04:52]  It was, I believe, marketed by Bayer, which later became part of IG Farben, which of course made Zyklon B and had all the slave camps and stuff like that.
[00:05:00]  And in fact, Germans who, you know, not to get every European angry at us with this episode.
[00:05:08]  You know what, though?
[00:05:08]  They should, you know, maybe they should.
[00:05:10]  You should feel bad.
[00:05:11]  I got to say, you guys kind of got us into this mess.
[00:05:15]  Invented heroin.
[00:05:17]  Invented oxycodone.
[00:05:19]  Invented fucking, what are the other?
[00:05:21]  You invented perks, I believe, too?
[00:05:23]  Yeah, they invented all this kind of shit.
[00:05:26]  Invented methadone as well.
[00:05:28]  In fact, methadone was invented because I believe the Nazis thought that their supply lines to India to get the poppies were going to get cut off by World War II.
[00:05:38]  Oh, interesting.
[00:05:39]  Yeah.
[00:05:39]  So they invented methadone.
[00:05:40]  And the reason several guys I know got really fat in the early 2010s.
[00:05:44]  Oh, my God.
[00:05:45]  It's the Nazis.
[00:05:46]  Hitler, apparently, was taking fucking daily injections of Yucadol, which I believe it's like oxycodone.
[00:05:53]  That was synthesized in Ukraine.
[00:05:55]  Wait, I thought he was on meth.
[00:05:57]  Baby, you take all kinds of stuff.
[00:05:59]  He was on lots of stuff.
[00:06:00]  I mean, he's Hitler.
[00:06:01]  Yeah, he's Hitler.
[00:06:02]  Well, listen, you don't got to be Hitler to take uppers and downers at the same time.
[00:06:05]  Let me tell you.
[00:06:06]  It greatly improves your industrial capacity, speaking in a personal way about it.
[00:06:11]  Well, the Germans are very industrious.
[00:06:13]  Exactly.
[00:06:13]  Well, after that, you know, World War II ends.
[00:06:18]  Dope takes on something of a different nature.
[00:06:21]  It basically becomes something that you grow and you sell.
[00:06:24]  And then the CIA helps you distribute in order for them to give you guns so that you can kill people who like ask for a raise and stuff like that.
[00:06:32]  Chiang Kai-shek sells it.
[00:06:34]  The Italians sell it.
[00:06:35]  In fact, the CIA basically goes into the port town of Marseille in France, beats the shit and fucking kills every big time trade unionist there in order for the Corsicans to come in, start refining heroin.
[00:06:48]  Well, refining heroin elsewhere, but start be able to ship it through there in the French connection.
[00:06:53]  But dope's a big fucking business.
[00:06:56]  By the 1950s, selling heroin was basically inextricable from fighting communism.
[00:07:02]  Of course, we get to the Vietnam War.
[00:07:05]  At one point, I believe one in five soldiers in Vietnam was shooting dope, or at least using heroin in some respect.
[00:07:11]  They were bringing it back home in coffins.
[00:07:14]  It becomes this huge craze in America.
[00:07:16]  Everybody loves heroin.
[00:07:18]  Then, of course, there gets the drug war, and then people discover cocaine.
[00:07:22]  And they realize that if you do enough cocaine, you end up making a lot of money, which isn't true with heroin.
[00:07:27]  Well, unless you're good at guitar.
[00:07:29]  And so, you know, cocaine kind of takes over.
[00:07:32]  And until about the 1990s, opiates were sort of taken aback.
[00:07:36]  So, you know, there's always low-key fell off after Kurt Covain died.
[00:07:40]  Exactly.
[00:07:41]  Exactly.
[00:07:42]  Not great for the industry.
[00:07:43]  No, no, not at all.
[00:07:45]  And it took the pharmaceutical industry who, you know, as much as I want to give them shit for, got to give them respect and the invention of OxyContin to really bring it to guys like me.

=== Unlike a Lot of These Things (02:50) ===

[00:07:57]  Because my whole thing is, I think I said this earlier.
[00:08:01]  In fact, I believe I started with this.
[00:08:02]  I love heroin.
[00:08:04]  So the thing is, like, unlike a lot of things we talked about in this show, you know, I didn't get to be in 9-11.
[00:08:11]  I was never, you know, invited to Epstein's Island.
[00:08:14]  But I actually got to be a first-hand and long time, well, relative to the span of my life, participant in the opiate crisis.
[00:08:24]  And it's kind of funny to like, you know, read over these things.
[00:08:26]  When I was on dope, I used to read a lot about heroin.
[00:08:30]  You know, I would read like novels like junkie and all that kind of stuff, but I would read about the history of dope too.
[00:08:35]  And it's weird to like see that all that stuff traced back throughout history that leads to you in the bathroom of the fucking, what's that goddamn Indian restaurants open 24 hours in O'Farrell?
[00:08:47]  Not in Curry.
[00:08:48]  Oh, yeah.
[00:08:49]  I had the bathroom code there.
[00:08:50]  And I would spend probably about, I spent about a quarter of a year of my life in that bathroom, all told.
[00:08:57]  I spent many years going to the bathroom, but you know, altogether, a quarter of a year of my life.
[00:09:02]  And it's funny to trace it back to that because, like, you know, unlike a lot of these things that we talk about, this one actually, well, this time, baby, it's personal.
[00:09:36]  Hello, everyone.
[00:09:37]  Welcome.
[00:09:38]  Oh, hold on, baby.
[00:09:40]  Oh, my God.
[00:09:42]  I'm all good.
[00:09:44]  Nice try.
[00:09:45]  I'm Liz.
[00:09:46]  My name is Brace.
[00:09:49]  My name is Brace.
[00:09:50]  Brace is not high.
[00:09:52]  I'm not nodding off.
[00:09:54]  This is, welcome.
[00:09:55]  This is Truan.
[00:09:56]  Hello.
[00:09:57]  Hello.
[00:09:59]  And if you can't tell by the lovely opening we just did, this week we're talking about heroin.
[00:10:07]  Yes, dope talk, baby.
[00:10:09]  Which is good because when it comes to dope talk, I'm a real dope.
[00:10:15]  I don't know a lot.
[00:10:16]  Liz is a little bit of a babe in the woods.
[00:10:19]  Thanks.
[00:10:20]  Wait, that's a good thing, right?
[00:10:21]  Yeah.
[00:10:21]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:22]  Well, it's, it's a, if I saw you in the woods, I would, I would sexually harass you.
[00:10:27]  Okay.
[00:10:28]  Well, we should say that we have a bit of a long episode today, but I think a good one.
[00:10:34]  Yeah.
[00:10:35]  Let's just get into it.
[00:10:36]  So I don't know if everyone heard or everyone read because there's a big story in the news, but one of the largest, how do we put it?

=== Pete And The Opioid Crisis (10:26) ===

[00:10:47]  Like most evil corporations in the world.
[00:10:52]  I think that's fair.
[00:10:52]  McKinsey, the consulting group of Mayor McGee's Mayor Pete, now transportation secretary Pete.
[00:11:00]  Do you think he's going to like demand that he's now called Secretary Pete instead of Mayor Pete?
[00:11:04]  I think he's still going by Pete.
[00:11:06]  Yeah.
[00:11:07]  Is he going to forever be Mayor Pete?
[00:11:09]  It's one of those things.
[00:11:10]  Once you get a nickname like that, you get a lot of fun.
[00:11:12]  Yeah, with that boyish face.
[00:11:13]  Yeah, it's awful.
[00:11:14]  Oh my God.
[00:11:15]  He did pledge to make the trains run on time, which I appreciate, but we don't have high-speed rail, so I don't know what he was doing.
[00:11:20]  I knew he was a fascist.
[00:11:22]  Anyway, so McKinsey and company, they made a huge settlement, one of the largest of its kind, close to $600 million.
[00:11:32]  I think it's like $534 million for their role in what is sort of casually deemed the opiate crisis in America, but specifically for their business consulting for Purdue Pharma and Johnson  ⁇ Johnson, but Purdue, particularly with the, who are the makers of OxyContin.
[00:11:51]  And we'll get into them and all that in a little bit because the details of it are quite gruesome.
[00:11:59]  But it's hard to kind of talk about McKinsey's role in Purdue pushing OxyContin without kind of backing up and telling like a bit more of a history here of like the role of opiates, which I've now learned are different from opioids.
[00:12:18]  I'm going to confuse that through the whole episode phrase.
[00:12:20]  Yeah, don't worry about it.
[00:12:21]  I mean, in this case, they're almost, we're mostly talking about opioids at the beginning.
[00:12:26]  That's true.
[00:12:27]  Okay.
[00:12:28]  But anyway, the big old, this big old drug crisis in America, we kind of have to like back up a bit to like, I mean, I don't know, we started talking in the Neolithic era, but we got to back up to at least like the 70s, 60s, 70s, right?
[00:12:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:42]  So the thing is with with opiates in America is that is that this crisis basically came out of what was essentially a movement to get chronic pain recognized as like a real thing.
[00:12:54]  Right.
[00:12:55]  So prior to the, really to the 90s, pain actually wasn't really recognized by doctors all that much, which sounds a little wild to say.
[00:13:03]  But for instance, like if you were dying of something that wasn't cancer, like if you were in hospice care, stuff like that, it would actually be pretty unusual in some cases to get opiates.
[00:13:15]  Now it's like, you know, you get in the hospice.
[00:13:18]  I mean, the place looks like a shooting fucker.
[00:13:21]  They're giving you dilotted.
[00:13:22]  They're giving you fent.
[00:13:23]  They're giving you what I mean, which is fine with me.
[00:13:24]  I don't, you know, you're about to die.
[00:13:26]  You might as well go out high.
[00:13:27]  But up until about the late 80s, early 90s, when there was a real movement to get pain recognized as what some doctors call the fifth vital sign.
[00:13:38]  So you know how you go into the doctor's office, which of course you never would because, you know, you're very, you know, fit.
[00:13:45]  You know, you do all the keto stuff.
[00:13:47]  I don't do that.
[00:13:48]  You do the skin grafts, et cetera.
[00:13:49]  Yeah.
[00:13:50]  I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:13:51]  But, you know, you go into the doctor's office and you're like, you know, I got a toothache or something.
[00:13:55]  They're like, well, on a scale of one to 10, how bad is it?
[00:13:57]  Oh, right.
[00:13:57]  Yes.
[00:13:58]  The pain scale, stuff like that.
[00:13:59]  So people didn't do that back then.
[00:14:01]  You go in there, you're like, doctor, I slammed my penis in the car door trying to chase a cat that I was trying to fuck.
[00:14:07]  You know, in this case, you're Pepe Le Pue.
[00:14:09]  The doctor's like, here, I'm giving you some ibuprofen, but you got to get the fuck out of here.
[00:14:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:13]  Then you got to go out and do cocaine with your Wall Street buddies in order to numb the pain.
[00:14:17]  There was particularly a guy named Russell Portnoy who was really, really influential on this.
[00:14:24]  I know what you're thinking.
[00:14:26]  Yes, he's his father.
[00:14:28]  It's not his father.
[00:14:30]  It's not David Portnoy's father.
[00:14:32]  It's not even spelled the same way, but fuck, wouldn't that be a really crazy turn of history?
[00:14:36]  I would love if like Dave Portnoy was related to he could finally, I could sue him into giving me a job as this co-host of Call Our Dead.
[00:14:44]  Okay, wait, well, I'll let people know about that at the end of the day.
[00:14:48]  We can announce that at the end of the episode and in the show notes, but yeah, we need to get on that show.
[00:14:53]  Anyways, this guy was like the evangelist for using opiates and opioids.
[00:15:00]  to treat pain.
[00:15:01]  Right.
[00:15:02]  And we're not talking about just pain like, oh, you know, like I'm fucking dying.
[00:15:06]  I'm in the hospital, that kind of pain, because, you know, except if you had cancer, you really were not getting opiates for much of that anyway.
[00:15:12]  But he's talking like back pain, you know, knee pain, chronic pain, which is something, as we have learned, seems like most Americans have.
[00:15:20]  Yeah, we'll get into that a little bit later.
[00:15:23]  But the reason that doctors weren't prescribing opiates were probably for the reason you think, because they're insanely addictive and they rock.
[00:15:33]  Well, yeah, also you mentioned, look, after Vietnam, there was a huge fucking uptick in heroin and opiate addiction in the fucking country.
[00:15:43]  So like the entire medical profession was like very, very wary of this.
[00:15:48]  And, you know, it just was, it was like highly regulated.
[00:15:52]  It wasn't a thing.
[00:15:54]  Yeah.
[00:15:54]  Well, listen to this clip of David Portnoy.
[00:15:58]  Addiction when treating pain is distinctly uncommon.
[00:16:03]  If a person does not have a history, a personal history of substance abuse and does not have a history in the family of substance abuse and does not have a very major psychiatric disorder, most doctors can feel very assured that that person is not going to become addicted.
[00:16:19]  So he would go on television shows, the Good Morning America, all this stuff, for decades, basically saying not only that it was okay to give pain patients pain pills, which, you know, they're called pain pills now, which, you know, again, I'm not here to judge if somebody needs, you know, pain pills or not.
[00:16:36]  Obviously, it's, I think the data bears out there has been a lot of prescriptions for pain pills that maybe were not so necessary and a real abundance of doctors giving them out basically like candy.
[00:16:49]  But his whole thing was like, just give them out for anything because they're essentially non-addictive.
[00:16:54]  That was their whole thing.
[00:16:55]  If you take it as advised, this isn't addictive.
[00:16:59]  And now he says he's really sort of switched sides on this publicly and came out against his former paymasters because he has a little hint for later in the episode.
[00:17:07]  He was being heavily subsidized by pharmaceutical companies.
[00:17:12]  He said in Wall Street Journal in 2012, he said, did I teach about pain management specifically about opioid therapy in a way that reflects misinformation?
[00:17:21]  Well, against the standards of 2012, I guess I did.
[00:17:24]  We didn't know then what we knew now.
[00:17:27]  And I want to remind you, this stuff is not complicated.
[00:17:31]  No, dude, it's heroin.
[00:17:32]  It's fucking great and everybody loves it.
[00:17:35]  No, that the thing is, it's true.
[00:17:36]  It's like people have known that opiates are addictive literally since, I mean, before the 20th century, but like the government of the U.S. banned heroin in 1924, not because it was too effective at treating coughs.
[00:17:50]  Right, right, right.
[00:17:51]  You know, like, and this, by the way, these same sort of like crises over prescribing played out back then as well.
[00:17:59]  Right.
[00:18:00]  And so obviously bullshit.
[00:18:02]  At this time, Portnoy was claiming that less than 1% of people who take prescription opiates become addicted.
[00:18:10]  This statistic, which by the way, has made its way into like essentially every piece of fucking like literature and science and all this shit that these pharmaceutical companies put out comes from a single letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine known as the Porter Jick Letter from 1980, which is a whole other campus.
[00:18:30]  But I thought we were supposed to believe science.
[00:18:34]  No, that's the thing.
[00:18:35]  All these guys are actually looking out for your best interest.
[00:18:38]  So it's the letter is just a really good letter.
[00:18:42]  Yeah.
[00:18:43]  So there was also, okay, so that was going on like all through the 80s.
[00:18:47]  And then stuff basically started changing in the mid-90s.
[00:18:53]  We should say, just to kind of like set the stage for this, as we're talking about OxyContin in particular and Purdue Pharma, like the pharmaceutical industry in the 90s fucking exploded.
[00:19:05]  Yeah.
[00:19:06]  With the, with the kind of like surge in Prozac and the sales of fucking drugs like Viagra, there was like a massive, massive gold rush.
[00:19:19]  Like the, when we say like the pharmaceutical industry, it's not just the big pharmaceutical companies.
[00:19:24]  It's also like the sales reps that then like are contracted to those companies.
[00:19:29]  And then it's the hotels that handle the huge conferences that they throw and the huge parties.
[00:19:36]  Then it's all the people that fucking print the literature.
[00:19:39]  Like this is a massive fucking industry that industry cascades out.
[00:19:43]  The fucking doctors themselves in a lot of cases.
[00:19:46]  Well, yeah, we'll get into that.
[00:19:47]  But so in the 90s, like the whole fucking game changes.
[00:19:51]  And there's a doctor in 1996, James Campbell, and he kind of starts also pushing the same line about pain.
[00:20:01]  So the phrase pain is the fifth vital sign becomes something like a fad phrase in hospitals and doctors' offices and clinics across the country.
[00:20:08]  And it becomes really important for doctors to monitor people's pains.
[00:20:12]  I mean, the medical community really had a fucking field day with this.
[00:20:16]  Articles come out really like clockwork at this point saying that, yes, pain is important and there is a cure for pain.
[00:20:23]  The cure for pain is opiates.
[00:20:27]  Dude, wait, can we pause for a second?
[00:20:28]  This is so nuts.
[00:20:29]  Like, first, okay, so I'm a person who, like, I don't know that much about drugs or like whatever, but it's so crazy to think that doctors literally not that long ago, 1990, in the 90s.
[00:20:41]  Yeah.
[00:20:42]  Literally, like, not that long ago, were just like, oh, we cured pain.
[00:20:45]  The cure is heroin.
[00:20:46]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  Exactly.
[00:20:47]  Dude.
[00:20:48]  I mean, the thing is, it's, it's like, it's, it's like a, it's a, it's them.
[00:20:52]  I don't know.
[00:20:53]  I feel like overcorrecting is the wrong thing to say because they didn't correct it.
[00:20:57]  No, that's the thing.
[00:20:58]  I know.
[00:20:58]  I don't think that's right either.
[00:20:59]  A lot of people have said that, and I don't think that's even the right framing.
[00:21:03]  Exactly.
[00:21:03]  It's like, it's like they were fucking up on this one problem anyways.
[00:21:07]  And then they're like, well, we messed this up.
[00:21:09]  Why don't we do something even worse?
[00:21:12]  Well, what rich?

=== Why OxyContin Marketing Went Wrong (15:34) ===

[00:21:14]  Yeah.
[00:21:14]  Well, that's the thing because what didn't help was this fucking company called Purdue Pharma.
[00:21:18]  Exactly.
[00:21:19]  So I think we should talk a little bit about the history of Purdue.
[00:21:22]  No.
[00:21:38]  These guys, so everyone might know Purdue Pharma if they've followed anything.
[00:21:42]  They're the manufacturers, the creators, the geniuses behind OxyContin.
[00:21:49]  But it's also, it's the Sackler family.
[00:21:51]  The Sackler family has gone at great length to not have you associate the Sacklers with anything having to do with Purdue Pharma.
[00:21:59]  That has been changing recently.
[00:22:01]  Their name has basically become synonymous with it.
[00:22:03]  But yeah, they stayed pretty much behind the scenes.
[00:22:05]  Yeah.
[00:22:06]  I mean, it was if you would, I mean, you wouldn't even know the Sacklers.
[00:22:10]  You would think the Sacklers and you would think like the Rockefellers or the Carnegie Mellon.
[00:22:15]  You would not think pushers of quote-unquote Hillbilly heroin.
[00:22:20]  Yeah.
[00:22:20]  Yeah.
[00:22:21]  Well, Brace Belden heroin.
[00:22:24]  Well, no, that was probably the actual heroin.
[00:22:26]  But anyways, the thing with Purdue is Purdue's fortunes really come from the genius of one of the three Sackler brothers, the three original Sackler brothers.
[00:22:36]  We had Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer, which, by the way, Mortimer, great name.
[00:22:41]  Mortimer Sackler.
[00:22:43]  Yeah, Mortimer.
[00:22:44]  I mean, boy, yeah.
[00:22:45]  Oh, my God.
[00:22:46]  It's an unkind thing to name your child.
[00:22:47]  Click sounds like the evil guys in Trading Places.
[00:22:53]  Haven't seen it, but that's correct to me.
[00:22:55]  Yeah.
[00:22:55]  Oh, my God.
[00:22:56]  I haven't seen it 95 times you've mentioned.
[00:22:59]  I mean, that's like one of the best Christmas movies.
[00:23:02]  Oh, well, I guess I gotta wait.
[00:23:04]  I guess it's a Christmas movie.
[00:23:05]  Yeah, it is a Christmas movie.
[00:23:05]  Well, the thing is, with Arthur Sackler, he's the real fucking little smarty pants of the bunch, right?
[00:23:11]  He got a start at a pharmaceutical advertising firm, and this is important called Willie.
[00:23:15]  Well, the name of the firm isn't that important, but what he does.
[00:23:18]  The firm's called William Douglas McAdams.
[00:23:20]  And this guy helps revolutionize the way that drugs are sold.
[00:23:25]  Because back then, you know, there wasn't really a whole cross, a lot of crossover between like the Madison Avenue set and these, you know, these drug companies.
[00:23:34]  But he gets the idea to start marketing volume in a way that he's both marketing to consumers, but he's marketing to doctors.
[00:23:42]  So what he does is he makes these like, you know, these really official looking advertisements, essentially, with doctors paid by the advertising company and the drug company that are extolling the virtues of volume.
[00:23:53]  And that is a whole other can of worms to get into.
[00:23:56]  I mean, the volume shit is.
[00:23:57]  Yeah, the volume stuff is really crazy.
[00:23:59]  Not only was he like marketing to them, though, but like his added.
[00:24:04]  So basically he starts as like a copy editor and then ends up being like so successful, he like fucking buys the marketing firm himself.
[00:24:11]  You know, it's like really actually classic, kind of like weird rag to riches story.
[00:24:15]  But at one point, I mean, they were running a like medicine journal that the advertising agency created.
[00:24:23]  It was called like Medicine Today or something like that.
[00:24:26]  The Lancet.
[00:24:27]  That, no, it was not The Lancet, but it went to like every single fucking doctor's office and it was only, it was like geared towards doctors and was like all industry news.
[00:24:35]  And it was all just fucking like, you know, what we would call like spawn con.
[00:24:40]  Yeah.
[00:24:41]  Now, like, you know how Instagram girls are like, I love skinny tea, blah, Like the fucking Sacklers are responsible for that, basically.
[00:24:48]  I actually, you know, it's funny because they kept doing that up until very recently when in back in 2015, the Atlantic magazine ran four advertorials from Purdue extolling basically the virtues of opiates.
[00:25:04]  Oh my God.
[00:25:05]  2015, by the way, which is, I mean, Christ, even I knew they were bad at that point.
[00:25:10]  Yeah, this is, I mean, this stuff is really crucial to remember because this guy basically invented the playbook and then his family really perfected it.
[00:25:18]  And this stuff plays out in really any industry you can think of.
[00:25:22]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:23]  Like fake trade journals, all that kind of shit.
[00:25:26]  Yeah, totally.
[00:25:27]  He also, like, at one point, he paid the, or it came out that the head of the FDA had taken like, it was like $300,000 or $250,000 to like insert slogans from Sackler's clients into his speeches.
[00:25:43]  Yes.
[00:25:45]  Like it was like, and it was like so egregious.
[00:25:47]  And when the scandal kind of like came to light, someone was like, oh, guess he got a little out of, you know, got a little out of hand over there.
[00:25:55]  Must have read too much of the literature.
[00:25:57]  Yeah.
[00:25:58]  Well, that is not the only instance of FDA malfeasance here.
[00:26:02]  Yeah, these guys, I mean, the family obviously now is hugely rich.
[00:26:06]  You know, have their names plastered in a bunch of different museums.
[00:26:09]  That's like, we're not even going to get into their art world stuff, but suffice to say, there's one thing I do want to mention is that one of the descendants, Elizabeth Sackler, Franzak is actually her, it's like a hyphenated name.
[00:26:22]  She endowed the Brooklyn Museum with the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which is, I will be displaying that.
[00:26:32]  To be fair, though, most Brooklyn art is brought to you by OxyContin.
[00:26:36]  Yes, yes, very true.
[00:26:38]  Same with most of my musical career.
[00:26:40]  But yeah, the Sacklers, I mean, without even getting into them too specifically, because there are a lot of members of the family.
[00:26:47]  Richard Sackler, you know, one of the sons of the original Sackler trio, he was kind of the guy who steered the Purdue ship throughout most of this.
[00:26:57]  But a lot of the family is really involved in it.
[00:26:59]  And the thing is, some of the family who claim that they actually have no relation to Purdue might not have a relation to Purdue anymore because, you know, I think it was Mortimer Sackler or sold a bunch of mistakes in like the 89.
[00:27:14]  They all definitely profited from Purdue's other weird bullshit they did pre-OxyContin.
[00:27:20]  So none of these people have clean hands, even though some of them are documentary filmmakers about inner city, you know, inner city youth who have to go to prison.
[00:27:30]  All these assholes are.
[00:27:31]  Singer-songwriter who has a Wikipedia, even though his fucking albums don't have individual Wikipedia pages, which is how you can tell a musician made their own Wikipedia page.
[00:27:40]  Yeah, I mean, they're all sons of bitches.
[00:27:42]  But in 198, a non-profit incubator that supports organizations like the Malala Fund.
[00:27:49]  Yes, yeah.
[00:27:49]  And by the way, Malala is a Trotskyist, so you can kind of see that the connection's being made here.
[00:27:55]  Absolutely.
[00:27:55]  Member of the IMT.
[00:27:58]  The thing is with Purdue, you might think that, oh, well, they're innovative.
[00:28:02]  They came up with OxyContin.
[00:28:03]  No one's ever been able to get so many people on dope before.
[00:28:05]  And, you know, you're correct.
[00:28:06]  They did come up with Continent.
[00:28:08]  So, Liz, here's a little quiz.
[00:28:11]  What do you think Contin means?
[00:28:16]  Continue like continuous.
[00:28:18]  Exactly.
[00:28:19]  Really?
[00:28:20]  I didn't know that until then.
[00:28:21]  Now, it makes sense because it's the Oxycontinu.
[00:28:27]  Yeah, but I was just like, oh, it's like a word they made up, like Vivance or something.
[00:28:31]  I didn't know it actually meant continuous, but it does.
[00:28:33]  Yeah, it makes sense.
[00:28:34]  I have put gallons of OxyContin in myself and I had no idea.
[00:28:38]  Well, 1972, they come up with Contin, which is a method.
[00:28:42]  You might think, oh, you know, these are so scientific.
[00:28:44]  No, this is just a method for the delayed release of a drug within a pill.
[00:28:49]  Right?
[00:28:50]  So if you want to take, you know, Viagra continued because you want a boner for like five days, you know, you take some Viagra continuing.
[00:28:59]  It releases it slowly.
[00:29:01]  Could you imagine?
[00:29:03]  I think that has happened to people.
[00:29:05]  I think that's like a thing with it doesn't go down.
[00:29:08]  That it like, doesn't it fuck with your heart rate?
[00:29:11]  Yeah, dude, like people can die from like heart attacks from taking it.
[00:29:14]  Old people.
[00:29:14]  You know what's crazy?
[00:29:15]  Remember how Bob Dole was the spokesman for Agra?
[00:29:18]  And everyone was like, this is totally fine.
[00:29:20]  Yeah, that was what happened.
[00:29:21]  Was very weird.
[00:29:22]  He likes fucking.
[00:29:24]  Imagine if, like, who was like the last person?
[00:29:28]  What if Jill Stein started hawking Viagra?
[00:29:32]  I would buy it.
[00:29:32]  That'd be kind of cool.
[00:29:33]  Yeah, blue tune.
[00:29:51]  So they come up with Oxycontin in around 1993.
[00:29:55]  And OxyContin is just oxycodone, which is a drug that has been around since 1916 and continues.
[00:30:04]  They come up with a pill called MSContin, which I believe is morphine sulfate continu.
[00:30:09]  That is morphine.
[00:30:11]  For a long time.
[00:30:12]  For a long period of time.
[00:30:14]  Later, they develop OxyContin.
[00:30:18]  This is in about 1993.
[00:30:20]  They come up with this.
[00:30:21]  All this does is put together an existing synthetic opioid, which is oxycodone, together with contin.
[00:30:31]  Time release.
[00:30:32]  Exactly.
[00:30:32]  Got it.
[00:30:33]  What we have here, OxyContin.
[00:30:36]  Now, you might not think that this is a patent-worthy invention.
[00:30:39]  Yeah, I wouldn't.
[00:30:40]  You might be like, well, all you did was just add a time release thing from like 25 years ago to a drug that has been around so long that the guy who invented it died in the Holocaust as like a middle-aged guy.
[00:30:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:56]  You would be correct in thinking that that was weird, but nobody else did.
[00:31:01]  Patent process for this thing was unbelievably smooth.
[00:31:05]  Instead of waiting years, which by the way, the Sacklers and Purdue heads were all very aware of this and talking about how, you know, lucky they were about this stuff.
[00:31:13]  Quote unquote.
[00:31:14]  Instead of waiting years for this to be, you know, patent to go through and everything to be approved, they only have to wait 11 months.
[00:31:21]  And the FDA even allows them to write on the label that there's less of a risk for addiction with OxyContin compared to other opioids.
[00:31:33]  Oh my God.
[00:31:34]  That really brings us to why they would make that claim.
[00:31:37]  And that all has to do with the OxyContin marketing.
[00:31:41]  Yeah.
[00:31:41]  So this is the stuff that's like a lot of people have, I think, rightly Focused on.
[00:31:47]  There have been a lot of lawsuits basically over the past decade.
[00:31:52]  And so a ton of internal Purdue memos have come to light.
[00:31:56]  And we spent some time reading through this shit and it's really fucked up.
[00:32:01]  I don't know if you guys have come across any of this stuff.
[00:32:06]  I would, if you guys are interested, I would encourage you to seek it out and read these like internal papers because seeing like we'll read some of it here for you guys, but really like seeing how these guys talk to each other, it was like, I don't know, we do this fucking podcast and I was like really shocked at like how depraved and disgusting this shit was.
[00:32:29]  It was like, it was, it's like, it was, it's worse than Enron.
[00:32:34]  To me, it was like up there with the tobacco firms, if not more.
[00:32:37]  Dow Chemical.
[00:32:38]  I mean, this is where what Purdue is responsible for is kind of should be thought of, right?
[00:32:44]  Absolutely.
[00:32:45]  And it's, it's, the, the wild thing about that, by the way, Stat News has like a really, a shit ton of these documents.
[00:32:51]  I'll put a link to a couple of their things.
[00:32:53]  But, uh, but what, what sort of struck me about this is just the absolute like, it really reminds me of like a gold rush kind of thing.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:01]  Like Wolf of Wall Street that like a shit ton in common with that, where all of these guys basically saw that they had a hit on their hands.
[00:33:11]  Yeah.
[00:33:11]  And or like the fucking mortgage.
[00:33:14]  Exactly.
[00:33:14]  Fucking mortgage crisis.
[00:33:16]  Yeah.
[00:33:17]  I mean, it's, it's, it's really something.
[00:33:19]  I mean, the whole thing with the way OxyContin was marketed, like I said, you know, prior to really the mid-90s, most opioids were given to cancer patients.
[00:33:30]  Right.
[00:33:30]  Particularly really bad cancer patients.
[00:33:33]  You had can't, well, not really bad patients, but like terminal, terminal kind of cancers or in hospice situations.
[00:33:39]  The thing is, cancer pain was only about 15% of the possible opioid market, right?
[00:33:44]  Yeah.
[00:33:45]  And so the real thing that Purdue wanted to do was to get OxyContin available for everybody.
[00:33:53]  They wanted, if you had chronic pain, if you just had a little pain, this is the drug for you.
[00:33:59]  And so their whole thing was: okay, well, the reason that opioids aren't given to people with chronic pain is because they're addictive.
[00:34:08]  And so their marketing revolved around the entirely made up, there's zero basis for any of this stuff.
[00:34:14]  Entirely made up claim that OxyContin was less addictive because the thing is with OxyContin, the big claim about it was that it's released over a 12-hour time period.
[00:34:26]  So there are less peaks and valleys.
[00:34:28]  And if you have to take it less, there's less of a chance for addiction, which is just nonsense.
[00:34:34]  It's just like something a marketing guy came up with.
[00:34:36]  It's like not a real actual medical thing.
[00:34:38]  And yeah, OxyContin also does not last for 12 hours.
[00:34:43]  Well, yeah.
[00:34:43]  So they, I mean, you mentioned that the FDA let them put that on its, on its packaging, its claim about it being non-addictive.
[00:34:50]  I mean, it's a lot of scrutiny has come over the FDA for this, and rightly so.
[00:34:55]  The guy who oversaw that process, Dr. Curtis Wright, he left the FDA two years after that to take a job at Purdue.
[00:35:04]  Yeah.
[00:35:04]  And those kind of stories are all over this entire, the fucking decades of Purdue Pharma.
[00:35:12]  That's the thing is like a lot of the people who came after Purdue, Purdue was actually able to poach them from their jobs.
[00:35:18]  I mean, not like this FDA cat did, but like attorneys, you know, from different various states would like, you know, put a lawsuit against Purdue and then be poached by Purdue to work.
[00:35:28]  Yeah, it's similar.
[00:35:29]  I mean, Philip Morris and I would say also the Defense Industry Act very similarly.
[00:35:34]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:35]  And I think we can, we should consider like this company on that scale.
[00:35:38]  Yeah.
[00:35:39]  I mean, after we did that episode with Abby Martin last week, I mean, I got a big ass check from Raytheon.
[00:35:44]  She will not be on the show again.
[00:35:47]  I mean, the thing is, if you actually look at like the OxyContin reading materials from the 90s, they read like something like a bad joke.
[00:35:55]  I read this one brochure from the 90s.
[00:35:58]  And at one point during like an FAQ portion of the pamphlet, there's a question about addiction risks.
[00:36:03]  And it's like way buried down there.
[00:36:05]  And the pamphlet says that there aren't many addiction risks.
[00:36:08]  And that if you're concerned, you should not get, let fear get in the way of relief.
[00:36:14]  Like basically, if you're afraid about being a junkie, you're being a pussy.
[00:36:20]  And that was like, that's their whole like, you got to understand, this was a giant push back then to essentially turn science on its head and say that pain pills are not only not addictive, but they can be used essentially indefinitely without any risk of addiction.
[00:36:38]  But you say turn science on its head and like, oh, here's a fun fact.
[00:36:42]  Like, I mean, this is a great example.
[00:36:44]  And there's plenty of current contemporary examples of this.

=== Pushing Pain Pills (15:17) ===

[00:36:48]  But like, hey, science isn't just like a not like a non-ideological object that exists outside of like being a tool for those who want to use it.
[00:37:02]  Like it can be whatever it needs to be.
[00:37:06]  Yeah, it is whatever case.
[00:37:07]  Like there is no, there's no like, there is no one true science.
[00:37:13]  Well, there is one true science, but you know, it's not, it's not neutral ground.
[00:37:18]  No, it is not neutral ground.
[00:37:19]  And the thing is, like, in this case, you know, and in many other cases throughout history, but this case I think is really apparent is that science and trusting the science is essentially trusting people that hate you and want to profit off of you.
[00:37:33]  Because science in a country like America exists essentially to further the needs of the people who run the country, the capitalists.
[00:37:41]  Well, and this is what they did.
[00:37:42]  I mean, look, they fucking went after specific doctors who had big practices, who they knew they could push, and turned them into, I mean, everyone's heard it, fucking pill mills.
[00:37:55]  Exactly.
[00:37:57]  The shit that they did with doctors is insane.
[00:37:59]  So they were big data freaks, which don't get me started on data, guys.
[00:38:03]  I mean, my God, what is literally like individuals?
[00:38:06]  Okay, hey, news flash, you work in data.
[00:38:09]  Where has have we seen big data do good stuff?
[00:38:13]  IBM in the Holocaust.
[00:38:16]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:18]  Not a good track record.
[00:38:19]  IBM in the second secret Holocaust that they did in the 80s.
[00:38:23]  Horrible.
[00:38:25]  Yeah, I know.
[00:38:26]  They were like really big data freaks.
[00:38:28]  I mean, these guys make 538 look like 537 or something like that.
[00:38:32]  It's wild.
[00:38:32]  What they would do is they had these like heat maps of where doctors were prescribing OxyContin.
[00:38:38]  And they sort of overlaid that with where laws might not be very strict.
[00:38:43]  And they sent their sales reps out to these motherfuckers.
[00:38:45]  I mean, I was reading this one guy's calendar of how many times he met with a sales rep. Sales rep came to this doctor's office 200 times in a year.
[00:38:54]  And the thing is, they weren't just going there to be like, hey, how's it going?
[00:38:57]  Like, so good.
[00:38:58]  They were like, you need to push more OxyContin.
[00:39:01]  And what they would do is these, and this, by the way, still happens.
[00:39:06]  I can link to the website, but there's actually a way to look up if your doctor does this, is drug companies.
[00:39:11]  And by the way, the drug companies are still really doing that.
[00:39:14]  Pfizer, all these companies are huge into this is they have speakers panels.
[00:39:22]  And speakers panels is essentially a way to legalize bribing doctors to sell drugs.
[00:39:27]  So what Purdue would do is they would have these like giant fancy dinner, all expenses paid resort vacations in Boca Raton for doctors.
[00:39:37]  And by the way, tens of thousands of doctors flew out to these things.
[00:39:40]  They would get you wined and dined.
[00:39:42]  And they did this because as they acknowledge in their own internal documents, when they brought doctors to these dinners, their prescriptions of OxyContin, specifically OxyContin, doubled.
[00:39:54]  I mean, it's a way to do bribery.
[00:39:56]  And by the way, this, again, like, I'm not kidding, this still happens and this is not illegal.
[00:40:01]  Like, they can do this kind of thing.
[00:40:03]  This makes me so upset.
[00:40:05]  Oh, it's incredible.
[00:40:08]  These are the people who, I mean, these are the people who are supposed to care for us and supposed to make you better.
[00:40:15]  And they're fucking killing you.
[00:40:17]  And, and just like, uh, it makes me so angry then that like at like liberal snobs and politicians who then get mad at normal people for like being wary of doctors or medicine or whatever.
[00:40:30]  And it's like, look what this fucking country has done to people.
[00:40:33]  Well, let me tell you real quick about, you know, what happened with me.
[00:40:36]  So I was not given OxyContin for pain.
[00:40:38]  And that's not even what I'm talking about.
[00:40:39]  talking about a drug I was given after I got off of heroin that was supposed to help me with withdrawals.
[00:40:46]  The drug is called neurontin or gabapentin.
[00:40:49]  I was given this off label by a doctor, in fact, by, well, nurse practitioners at like four different detoxes and rehabs.
[00:40:57]  Every single time I went back in, they would prescribe me this drug.
[00:41:01]  And three of the four times, maximum dose, which is like really high.
[00:41:08]  It was, I think it was 3,200 milligrams a day.
[00:41:11]  Whereas most people who are on it are like 300 milligrams a day.
[00:41:15]  Gabapentin is not approved for that.
[00:41:19]  Gabapentin is basically only, it's like a seizure medication.
[00:41:22]  It is one of the top, I believe, five or at the very least, 10 prescribed, most prescribed drugs in America.
[00:41:28]  Not that many people have seizures.
[00:41:30]  That's because Pfizer went around in the early 2000s to doctor's offices, giving them all this bullshit literature on how this was essentially the cure-all drug for everything.
[00:41:43]  I mean, I was on Gabapentin for years.
[00:41:45]  It has tons of really bad side effects.
[00:41:47]  I mean, especially at high doses.
[00:41:49]  I'm sure at low doses once a day, you know, I know people who've been on it for that, they don't really experience anything.
[00:41:54]  I was on a shit ton of it.
[00:41:56]  And doctors just kept represcribing this, even though I'd be like, I don't know why I'm on this because it has bad withdrawals.
[00:42:03]  So, you know, they don't like to take people off of it.
[00:42:06]  And this was like, I mean, Pfizer eventually settled for like 350 million of something like that.
[00:42:12]  I don't know who got that money.
[00:42:15]  But I mean, these practices occur with like almost every drug.
[00:42:18]  Here's the thing.
[00:42:20]  Between 2009 and 2018, while your dumbass was working at a coffee shop, pharmaceutical companies spent $9 billion on bribing doctors.
[00:42:31]  I mean, this shit works, you know?
[00:42:34]  And that's, yeah, I am, I have, I have, I have not had a good experience.
[00:42:37]  And by the way, this was with, I probably had about 20 doctors since I was prescribed that.
[00:42:41]  That's the perks of going to a free clinic.
[00:42:44]  But yeah, really bad shit.
[00:42:46]  Anyways, to get off of that, like we said, these guys specifically targeted states with less regulations.
[00:42:54]  So they had a kind of like tiered strategy.
[00:42:56]  So we talked about they target the doctors.
[00:42:58]  They're like throwing a shit ton of money at the doctors.
[00:43:00]  They're throwing all these sales reps with their own.
[00:43:03]  By the way, these sales reps have their own fucking perverse sales incentives.
[00:43:07]  Huge bonuses.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:08]  Huge bonuses.
[00:43:10]  I mean, yeah, it's like fucking, it's really fucking depraved.
[00:43:14]  They're going after the states with really loose regulations.
[00:43:16]  They're going after towns, by the way, that have been completely and totally deindustrialized.
[00:43:24]  That's a big thing.
[00:43:24]  Yeah, they're we'll get into that a little bit later, but that's, those are people that they're specifically targeting.
[00:43:30]  And they're also like, they were also kind of fighting against what they saw to be kind of like individual hurdles.
[00:43:37]  Yeah.
[00:43:38]  They really wanted to fight back against this kind of perceived what they called sealing effect, meaning that like the drug would stop working after a certain dose level.
[00:43:50]  So, I think that we should just kind of read from some of these emails because, like we said, the I mean, it's pretty depraved what they're getting into here.
[00:43:58]  Well, one of their big targets with their sales rep was to make sure that doctors were prescribing them at 12-hour intervals, right?
[00:44:05]  Right?
[00:44:05]  The whole thing with OxyContin, the thing that made it different from other drugs, the thing that made it safe and not addictive, was the fact that you could take it just a couple of times a day and it would last the whole time.
[00:44:17]  I want to be clear.
[00:44:18]  I think I said this before, but I want to be clear.
[00:44:20]  That is not true.
[00:44:21]  I have taken OxyContin in every single way except for putting up my ass that you can take it.
[00:44:27]  And I know plenty of guys have put it up their asses.
[00:44:29]  It's called boofing it.
[00:44:32]  I have boofed Suboxin, but the film in it.
[00:44:34]  I just put it, it didn't work.
[00:44:38]  But, but OxyContin does not last for 12 hours.
[00:44:42]  OxyContin, if taken as directed, lasts most of it gets in your system 40%, I think, within two hours.
[00:44:50]  And then, so you do get an immediate high.
[00:44:53]  Because the other claim too, which they stopped pushing as much, was that you don't get high from it because it's released in such a slow, gentle wave that you don't even notice except for the analgesic painkilling effects.
[00:45:07]  The fact is, that wasn't true.
[00:45:09]  You get high from it, and it only lasts for at most eight hours.
[00:45:13]  And so, people would re-dose, and doctors started writing prescriptions for eight hours at a time for eight-hour intervals.
[00:45:20]  And Purdue was freaking out because that was like how they got FDA approval on this stuff.
[00:45:26]  You know, that was one of their big sales pitches.
[00:45:28]  That was the crux of their sales pitch: it was a 12-hour drug.
[00:45:32]  And so, they sent out tons of sales reps to really hammer this stuff home and to get doctors to prescribe more OxyContin.
[00:45:40]  So, this is an email in one of the internal memos.
[00:45:44]  This is from Richard Sackler, who allegedly is a doctor.
[00:45:49]  And this is what he's writing.
[00:45:51]  This is in May 1999.
[00:45:53]  May your growth exceed your greatest expectations and may your requirements expand faster than anticipated.
[00:46:01]  You won't believe how committed I am to make OxyContin a huge success.
[00:46:06]  It is almost that I dedicated my life to it.
[00:46:10]  And after the initial phase, I will have to catch up with my private life again.
[00:46:14]  It is also so encouraging to see and experience how happy the key pain specialists are for me.
[00:46:22]  I intend to invite the president of the Pain Society to our gala night at the kickoff meeting.
[00:46:28]  It is unusual to have customers at company functions, but we have such a good relationship with them that in some cases I know they would like to join us and also meet you.
[00:46:37]  We could do it under the banner of partners against pain and oxycontin, of course.
[00:46:43]  Kind regards.
[00:46:45]  Must go back to packing.
[00:46:46]  We are moving into the new house on Monday and I'm way behind with packing.
[00:46:52]  Boy, just 10 years after this email was written, I would be selling 50% of my record collection at a 100% loss in order to buy a gram of heroin.
[00:47:04]  I'm just kidding.
[00:47:04]  My record collection was worth more than that.
[00:47:06]  Yeah, I mean, there's dozens and dozens, I mean, that we read of these kind of emails to doctors.
[00:47:16]  I wanted to get into a couple because a lot of these are from Kentucky, and Kentucky has been hit really hard by the opioid epidemic.
[00:47:22]  In fact, most of these are from Boone County in Kentucky, which is one of the top three most hardest hit counties in Kentucky by the epidemic.
[00:47:31]  So this one says, Emily, the farm D, told me that Dr. Kennedy is writing Oxy, writing, by the way, this misspelled, writing Oxy with both hands.
[00:47:42]  She rolled her eyes and told me it is doing very, very well.
[00:47:47]  Another one says stress low abuse with OxyContin.
[00:47:50]  He promised to use more.
[00:47:51]  This is from Florence, Kentucky in Boone.
[00:47:54]  Spoke with MD.
[00:47:56]  She is having success with Oxy more and more frequently.
[00:47:58]  Discussed that some of her patients may be crushing tablets to inject or snort the oxycodone.
[00:48:04]  Discussed side effects of abuse and that oxy is less likely to be abused than Percocet or Vicodin.
[00:48:10]  Jesus.
[00:48:11]  Uni samples need it in both 400 and 600 milligrams.
[00:48:15]  MD signed for samples.
[00:48:16]  Senecot samples also needed.
[00:48:18]  MD appreciates them.
[00:48:19]  So the thing is with that is Oxy was usually just one pill, right?
[00:48:25]  You know, Oxy is a lot stronger than most of the time, you know, Vicodin and Percocet.
[00:48:31]  I don't think they even have high-dose Vicodin.
[00:48:34]  I've never seen, I mean, I've seen like PERC30s, but beyond that, you know, I don't think they go much higher.
[00:48:39]  Oxycontin, you just need that one little pill.
[00:48:42]  And so like, yeah, you can crush that and snort it.
[00:48:44]  It's way easier to abuse because the thing is with Percocet and Vicodin is they also have aspirin in them.
[00:48:50]  And people don't want to do the whole cold water extraction thing because you can get just the gym like that.
[00:48:55]  I never did it because I just took them.
[00:48:57]  I'm like, well, aspirin's good for you.
[00:48:58]  But it's a way to just isolate the opioid and to not take a bunch of Advil, essentially.
[00:49:08]  Another one from Somerset, Kentucky.
[00:49:11]  By the way, these are really small towns, which if you Google any of their names now, you will see like 20 dead from opiate or even overdoses this year.
[00:49:20]  He loves Oxy and told there is less euphoria, less abuse, and fewer side effects.
[00:49:25]  He told me that he has seen many of his back pain patients coming from Lexington pain clinics on MSC.
[00:49:30]  And he told me that he is now a believer in long-acting narcotics.
[00:49:34]  He enthusiastically told me that he would use Oxy for all pain patients.
[00:49:39]  Now, I don't know if you guys remember back then, but I can remember when Oxy hit.
[00:49:46]  I mean, for me, it was like one day, you know, me and the guys, we'd, you know, we maybe signed some Viking here, maybe find a little, you know, bit of Percocet there.
[00:49:57]  But like when Oxy really hit where I was, like, you know, my friend, it was actually kind of late in the game.
[00:50:03]  It was about 2007.
[00:50:04]  People were doing it in high school and stuff.
[00:50:06]  But all of a sudden, it was everywhere.
[00:50:08]  Like, I knew guys with multiple prescriptions, and it was like everywhere I turned, people were doing Oxy.
[00:50:14]  I remember I lived in a really small apartment above, I think what's now an Afghani restaurant on Gary Boulevard.
[00:50:22]  And my roommate had a good OxyConnect, but it was cheap because at that time it was getting more expensive.
[00:50:30]  But, you know, this guy would come home with like 20 oxys every day, sometimes five oxies, whatever.
[00:50:36]  And I would buy some off of him.
[00:50:38]  Sooner than that, you know, I knew other guys who were doing it.
[00:50:41]  They had their connects.
[00:50:42]  I had all these different connections.
[00:50:43]  And I ended up going to this guy, Dr. Z, an Egyptian dwarf who was not a doctor, who lived on, I think, Turk and Leavenworth.
[00:50:53]  And my friend once saw him stab a woman with a samurai sword.
[00:50:56]  He and still bought drugs from him while the woman was bleeding.
[00:51:00]  But he had like 50 different prescriptions from like 50 different doctors all for OxyContin.
[00:51:06]  And it was everywhere.
[00:51:07]  I mean, Christ, I can get into what happened after that.
[00:51:11]  But like at that point in like 2006, 2007, 2008, it was like the fucking drug.
[00:51:18]  There was nothing else.
[00:51:20]  And a lot of guys I know got really into it.
[00:51:22]  And so it's nice to see that they were really thinking about us back then.
[00:51:25]  The whole thing with crushing your snorting is that like there's no time release then.
[00:51:30]  Right.
[00:51:31]  You know, and so basically everyone would do just that.
[00:51:34]  Some people even smoke it or shot it.
[00:51:36]  I never shot like shooting pills.
[00:51:38]  It always kind of freaked me out.
[00:51:40]  But that was the way to do it is you would, you would essentially you would crush it up.
[00:51:44]  You could even chew it, and you would get rid of the time of this.
[00:52:02]  Anyways, all those doctor visits really fucking paid off.

=== Opioid Epidemic's Rise (17:25) ===

[00:52:06]  Yeah.
[00:52:07]  This is...
[00:52:07]  There's a lot of like insights into how this stuff worked from the lawsuits filed against Purdue.
[00:52:13]  This is from a 2012 lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts.
[00:52:18]  Liz, do you want to read from this?
[00:52:19]  In January 2013, a Purdue sales representative noted to praise from her supervisor that JMA was taking opioid patients that other practices were turning away.
[00:52:30]  JAMA's a doctor in this.
[00:52:32]  In May 2013, Purdue's rep reported that JAMA was seeing a lot of patients from a doctor who had been arrested for improper prescribing and has had his license seized.
[00:52:41]  Purdue kept promising its opioids to JAMA until a new sales rep was assigned to his account and reported overwhelming signs of, quote, inappropriate prescribing.
[00:52:50]  And this is them quoting, upon entering the office, it did not appear to be typical internal med general medicine practice.
[00:52:58]  All patients appeared to be there for pain management and no other health concerns.
[00:53:03]  While in the office, the police had arrived because there have been two prescription pads stolen by a girlfriend of the patient.
[00:53:09]  She tried to fill prescription at local stop-in shop and was turned down.
[00:53:12]  The medical assistant further stated that they do see out-of-state patients and do not take driver's licenses and insurance cards at the time of check-in.
[00:53:20]  She stated that Rite Aid Pharmacy as a corporation will not fill any of doctors' prescriptions.
[00:53:25]  Many other local pharmacies require additional information.
[00:53:29]  On November 26, 2013, Purdue finally told its sales reps to stop promoting opioids to JAMA.
[00:53:36]  Within six months, JMA's prescriptions of Purdue opioids fell by 99%.
[00:53:40]  In the summer of 2014, when JAMA was no longer valuable to Purdue, Purdue reported him to the DEA.
[00:53:46]  Whatever happened to stop snitching.
[00:53:50]  The thing, too, I want to say, like, I remember when all this stuff was kind of exploding in the news.
[00:53:55]  Yeah.
[00:53:55]  And I mean, it was kind of, when was it, like 2012 to 2014?
[00:54:00]  Yeah.
[00:54:00]  There's a lot of this in the news.
[00:54:01]  A lot of steam.
[00:54:02]  But I remember when all this stuff was kind of hidden in the news and all the stories really focused on patients like faking it.
[00:54:11]  Yeah.
[00:54:12]  You know, maybe a couple bad seed doctors.
[00:54:14]  They would talk about like this, maybe perhaps this one made like some kind of dateline story.
[00:54:19]  Yeah.
[00:54:19]  Pillmills in Florida.
[00:54:20]  Yeah, pillmills and also and people like, you know, really scrounging for the drugs and faking pain and all of that.
[00:54:27]  Right.
[00:54:27]  But at the time, not enough of the heat was going on in Purdue and the fact that they kind of created this entire little industry for themselves.
[00:54:39]  Absolutely.
[00:54:40]  And a lot of people profited off of this industry too.
[00:54:42]  I mean, think about the drug distributors who noted nothing wrong with like sending to these small towns so many doses of opioids that it could like literally, you know, give one to every single person in the state, just to like one small town.
[00:54:57]  I mean, at one point, there were like, I don't know the exact statistics.
[00:55:01]  You can look them up, but it was like, you know how like there's like five guns or whatever for every American?
[00:55:07]  This made guns look like, you know, gold coins or something.
[00:55:11]  Like they were so common and it was like, there was like, I can't remember, again, the exact number, but it was like 10 for every single person in the country.
[00:55:21]  Well, we can't really talk about Purdue's like marketing strategy without talking about McKinsey because they hired McKinsey in like 2004.
[00:55:30]  Correct, yeah.
[00:55:32]  And man, McKinsey did, I mean, we've talked a little bit about this company.
[00:55:37]  I mean, management consulting.
[00:55:38]  This is, I mean, McKinsey is the end-all-be-all of management consulting.
[00:55:44]  Yeah.
[00:55:44]  They're the top dogs.
[00:55:45]  Yeah.
[00:55:46]  They, I think that they probably are worse than at least a couple of the banks.
[00:55:56]  Yeah.
[00:55:56]  I think that you can, I mean, you know, I think it's Goldman Sachs is a terrible, fucking, terrible, terrible fucking company.
[00:56:05]  Look, everyone knows how much I hate bankers.
[00:56:08]  It's hard to pin actual bodies on the, on Goldman Sachs.
[00:56:14]  It's very easy to do that to McKinsey.
[00:56:17]  Yeah.
[00:56:17]  I mean, literally specifically in Saudi Arabia, they handed over or the government got their hands on a list from McKinsey of critics of the regime on Twitter.
[00:56:28]  Right, right.
[00:56:29]  Two of them were arrested and one had, who I believe was out of the country, had several of their relatives who were in the country arrested.
[00:56:35]  McKinsey, of course, claims it has no idea how the government got that list.
[00:56:39]  No, no, it says that they didn't know what the government was going to do with that list.
[00:56:43]  Oh, well, technically, that's true.
[00:56:45]  Yeah.
[00:56:45]  So, I mean, these people are, I mean, they're really fucking evil.
[00:56:50]  And I guess one thing to say is that, you know, Purdue, in order for Purdue to make money off OxyContin, they realized they needed to create addicts.
[00:56:57]  Yeah.
[00:56:58]  And McKinsey came in and said, we can actually help you create that more efficiently.
[00:57:04]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:57:05]  I mean, so combining their expertise with like the Sacklers' innovation in advertising, I mean, it was a perfect storm.
[00:57:13]  Yeah.
[00:57:14]  Some of the, I think they called their program Evolve to Excellence, which is a fucking succession ass fucking kind of manager.
[00:57:25]  Yeah, But basically, they were, their whole, what they saw was that they already had, that Purdue already had these kind of, you know, high volume prescribers and that what they needed to do was target them more.
[00:57:40]  I mean, this is in 2013.
[00:57:42]  Yeah.
[00:57:43]  So this is still, this is at the fucking height, right?
[00:57:47]  What McKinsey said is they have to pull their resources from all of the ones that were low-level prescribers and just fucking pummel the high volume prescribers with more and more resources.
[00:58:00]  And they they promised Purdue that they could increase their sales upwards of 100 million by doing this.
[00:58:08]  They called it turbocharging, the Purdue sales engine.
[00:58:12]  They actually use the words turbocharging too, right?
[00:58:14]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  No, that was, that was part of the presentation.
[00:58:17]  They also, I mean, this is the thing too, is that McKinsey, and particularly, you know, it should be noted in their settlement that they just reached, which is about like five, I think it's around 600 million.
[00:58:31]  They, one of the stipulations is that they would not admit to any wrongdoing.
[00:58:35]  Classic.
[00:58:36]  Yeah, super classic.
[00:58:38]  But I mean, these guys fucking knew what they were doing.
[00:58:40]  In 2017, their presentation to the Sacklers estimated how many customers from companies that were prescribing OxyContin would overdose.
[00:58:52]  Yeah.
[00:58:53]  So they would.
[00:58:53]  There's some really fantastic slides in that.
[00:58:55]  Yeah, it's disgusting.
[00:58:56]  And so with like CVS and with Anthem, and I think in particular in CVS, what they did was they said, okay, well, in 2019, we think that at least 2,500 CVS customers will either have an overdose or develop a disorder.
[00:59:12]  And so what we're going to do is as like a kind of incentive to CVS to not drop shilling OxyContin is that we're going to promise a rebate of $14,018 or $800, quote, per event in case of, in case that happened.
[00:59:33]  And so we promise to pay you an additional, you know, CVS, we're going to pay you an additional $37 million a year.
[00:59:39]  So just to like be totally clear, McKinsey, like their business plan for OxyContin was to drive sales by promising companies refunds for every overdose.
[00:59:49]  Yeah.
[00:59:50]  And of course, they like, they, the, reading sort of like the analysis of how they do the rebates too in the documents is, I mean, the whole thing is just totally sick.
[00:59:59]  Perverse, yeah.
[01:00:00]  These people are, these people are sick.
[01:00:02]  And to be clear, like the people who work at McKinsey are the top graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stamford.
[01:00:09]  Yeah.
[01:00:10]  And they go on to do really wonderful stuff.
[01:00:13]  Yeah, too.
[01:00:14]  They work for the government.
[01:00:15]  They work for fucking tons of politicians.
[01:00:18]  The biggest law firms.
[01:00:19]  They work for the biggest banks.
[01:00:21]  They work for, they're the heads of the IMF and the World Bank.
[01:00:24]  I mean, these are the fuck, this is the elite training ground.
[01:00:27]  This is what our country trains people to do.
[01:00:32]  Yeah.
[01:00:33]  To fucking come up with the idea of selling fucking rebates for everybody in the ground.
[01:00:40]  Now, I have overdosed.
[01:00:44]  Obviously, non-fatally.
[01:00:46]  And, you know, to their credit, not on OxyContin, because at that time they weren't making any OxyContin strong enough for me to overdose on.
[01:00:53]  But one thing I noticed, so, you know, there's, I think the statistic is something there's like half, almost half a million people dead from overdoses in the past, like, since I think like 2000, something like that, since the opioid crisis started.
[01:01:07]  Obviously, that that's not all from opioids, and that's not all from synthetic opioids.
[01:01:14]  But one thing that I don't ever really see, and I couldn't find the literature on this, I'm sure this exists.
[01:01:19]  Although there's no way for the information to be complete because obviously a lot of these don't, you know, these people don't come into contact with hospitals, and so they're not reported.
[01:01:28]  But non-fatal overdoses too can really fuck with you.
[01:01:32]  You know, people can be in comas for days, they can suffer permanent brain damage.
[01:01:37]  You know, I know people who have, you know, lost mental faculties from this kind of stuff.
[01:01:41]  You know, I work, I used to work in a, until last year, I worked in a like a detox down down the street from here.
[01:01:49]  That was a pretty shitty run.
[01:01:51]  It was, it was a city-run detox.
[01:01:53]  And we'll talk about rehabs in a sec later, but that's another really fucked up industry.
[01:01:58]  And I met guys who were, you know, for all intents and purposes, like pretty disabled from overdosing.
[01:02:06]  And so it's like the calculating the actual wreckage from this stuff is really, you know, the numbers that we see are really deceptive because they basically calculated just in deaths immediately from these drugs, right?
[01:02:21]  Where the fact of the matter is, is you have to really count the secondary things that happen here.
[01:02:27]  I mean, I know that if I had never, you know, gotten addicted to opioids, I wouldn't have done a lot of the things that I've done in my life, including a lot of dangerous situations.
[01:02:34]  I have been beaten pretty badly.
[01:02:36]  You know, I've been robbed.
[01:02:38]  I have injected things that were not safe for injection.
[01:02:43]  And I actually, you know, I'm pretty lucky with my experience.
[01:02:46]  I know people who have made mistakes that will haunt them the rest of their lives.
[01:02:52]  I know a lot of people who died, a lot of people.
[01:02:57]  And I'm willing to bet that most, at least American listeners of this, know at least one person who has been really affected by this.
[01:03:06]  I mean, this has touched basically everybody.
[01:03:08]  And so the thing is with like the numbers that you see, and some of the numbers are really shocking and appalling.
[01:03:16]  I think it was like Purdue's thing, it was like there was a 223 with sort of the advent of opioids to treat chronic pain, 223, 26% increase in fentanyl prescriptions, 73% morphine prescriptions, 402% increase in oxycodone prescriptions.
[01:03:36]  And those were, you know, met with a 641% increase in fentanyl hospitalizations, 113% for morphine, and 346% for fucking oxycodone.
[01:03:48]  But that doesn't even touch it, right?
[01:03:50]  I don't understand what that means.
[01:03:52]  Like I can look at those numbers.
[01:03:54]  I understand that they're big numbers.
[01:03:55]  I understand that this affects a lot of people.
[01:03:57]  But like for me, it's all you have to do in San Francisco at least is walk down the street, man.
[01:04:03]  And like you will see a lot of people and a lot of older people because don't forget that this, these fucking drug companies created junkies out of like lots of people's grandparents and parents.
[01:04:15]  You know, I was probably destined to get high in some form and somewhere or another my whole life, but there was a lot of people out there that wouldn't have touched this shit unless they were given to them by the doctor and a doctor who was either paid or pressured or whatever by Purdue.
[01:04:30]  I mean, you know, they had that statistic about 1% of people who try this or, you know, get addicted.
[01:04:35]  And Purdue was very down on addicts and all this kind of stuff.
[01:04:38]  The actual statistic is something like 13% who were prescribed.
[01:04:42]  I mean, it really devastated Florida.
[01:04:44]  A lot of people make fun of Florida and I think you should stop doing that because, I mean, it is the people of Florida, I mean, really get taken for a ride by some of the worst fucking criminals in the history of America consistently and like repeatedly.
[01:05:01]  Yeah.
[01:05:02]  You know, I mean, you want to talk about mortgage fraud.
[01:05:04]  You want to talk about fucking what the pharmaceutical industry did in Florida.
[01:05:08]  I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
[01:05:10]  Yeah.
[01:05:11]  At 1.4 out of every 10 pills of OxyContin, the 30 milligrams that were sold were sold in Florida.
[01:05:17]  And by sold, I mean prescribed.
[01:05:20]  Of the top 50 OxyClinics in America, 49 of them were in Florida.
[01:05:24]  And all of the attempts by members of the Florida legislature or law enforcement there to cut that crack down on these were hit down specifically in two instances by Marco Rubio and by DeSantis.
[01:05:39]  Like this shit was allowed to run rampant.
[01:05:42]  You know, Jeb, I didn't know this, but I found her mugshot.
[01:05:44]  Jeb Bush's daughter in fucking 2002 tried to get oxies, I believe Oxys, with a fake prescription.
[01:05:52]  No way.
[01:05:53]  Yeah, she got arrested for it.
[01:05:55]  I mean, it's totally insane.
[01:05:56]  So there was basically no regulation.
[01:05:58]  I mean, so 2007, Purdue gets sued by a bunch of different people, end up paying $600 million by different people.
[01:06:05]  I mean, like state governments, federal government, end up paying something like $600 million out.
[01:06:10]  They faced no, at first we're going to face criminal charges and then, of course, settled because drug companies always settle in these cases because they have so much money and so escaped any actual criminal culpability.
[01:06:23]  And in 2010, they're forced to change the formula of OxyContin.
[01:06:31]  Liz, let me tell you, I remember this vividly.
[01:06:34]  Really?
[01:06:35]  Absolutely.
[01:06:36]  So prior to 2010, if you got a pill of OxyContin, it was just like any other pill.
[01:06:41]  You know, you take it, you crush it, you snort it, you feel good.
[01:06:45]  You take a little bite off of it maybe when you're first starting out, whatever.
[01:06:49]  You get high off of it.
[01:06:50]  You can bypass the continent.
[01:06:53]  It's not continuous.
[01:06:54]  It's immediate.
[01:06:56]  2010, they get a lot of heat and they have to change it.
[01:07:00]  And that's when we came out with the rest.
[01:07:02]  We were faced with the reformulated OxyContin.
[01:07:05]  And let me tell you, baby, these things were hard as a brick.
[01:07:08]  I remember in 2010, because 2010 is when I was like at, I was on OxyContin 100% of the time.
[01:07:15]  I made, I think, $13.50 an hour at the flower shop.
[01:07:20]  And $12 of those dollars of every hour was going to OxyContin.
[01:07:25]  I was, this was, I was, this was like when I was becoming a junkie junkie.
[01:07:30]  And, and they changed the formula and I couldn't get high off of it anymore.
[01:07:35]  You'd have to take it and then wait for the onset and then it wasn't as strong, you know, and it, and it, you couldn't, I mean, and there was no way.
[01:07:41]  I mean, these things were like bricks.
[01:07:43]  You know, you could smash them with a hammer and they'd barely come apart.
[01:07:46]  They were not water soluble, so you couldn't shoot them.
[01:07:48]  They turned into a goo.
[01:07:50]  And I remember reading on like drug websites about all of these different, like, oh, if you bake them in a sheet pan at this time and then, you know, put water on them or whatever.
[01:07:59]  I can't remember the actual things people say.
[01:08:00]  Oh, my God.
[01:08:01]  You could shoot them.
[01:08:02]  But, you know, and people got fucked up shooting them too, like, because they would, you don't want to shoot goo into your arm.
[01:08:09]  But I switched to heroin.
[01:08:12]  And a lot of other people switched to heroin too.
[01:08:15]  Because the, you know, these drugs were being prescribed less and less.
[01:08:20]  You know, they were, there were more and more restrictions were coming out around this.
[01:08:24]  And, you know, they were making drug databases too for prescribers so you could see what you were prescribed by other doctors elsewhere, which I'm sort of surprised they didn't have before.
[01:08:33]  But I switched to heroin because heroin was cheaper.
[01:08:37]  It was easier to get.
[01:08:40]  And, you know, $10 worth of heroin at that point was like, I mean, that's about $50 worth of OxyContin because the price was really going up.
[01:08:50]  And I was not the only one.
[01:08:52]  Yeah, no, that's sort of like, that was the move, right?
[01:08:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:55]  That was, that was, but everybody did.
[01:08:57]  A thousand addicts bloomed.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:08:59]  And that's really what happened too.
[01:09:01]  It's like all the guys I know who are real serious about their OxyContin.
[01:09:05]  I mean, all of us were shooting up within a year.
[01:09:08]  And I never looked back.
[01:09:10]  I don't think I ever did any kind of oxy product or even synthetic opioids besides, of course, the lauded.
[01:09:16]  And that's when we see heroin overdose deaths skyrocket.
[01:09:20]  And so the opioid industry was pointing to, well, look, synthetic opioid deaths are down, but that's because everybody switched to fucking heroin because it was cheaper, it was more readily available, got you higher faster.

=== Opioid Crisis Shifts (07:46) ===

[01:09:31]  And I'll tell you, it's shooting heroin.
[01:09:35]  Like I remember when I was first doing it and I was sort of like shocked.
[01:09:40]  I was in this guy's apartment.
[01:09:43]  The only other guy I really shot up with, and I mostly did it by myself.
[01:09:45]  I remember him hitting me or teaching me on a hit for the first time.
[01:09:48]  And I was like, man, I thought I was smart.
[01:09:51]  Like I'm, I was like, this is just, this isn't me, man.
[01:09:56]  Like, I'm not doing this.
[01:09:57]  This is somebody else.
[01:09:58]  And that's how it felt.
[01:09:59]  Like I was in somebody else's movie the whole time.
[01:10:02]  And that continued for years.
[01:10:03]  But, you know, tons of guys I know who are like a lot smarter than me, a lot more capable than me, a lot more together than me.
[01:10:13]  You know, by the 2011 fucking arms looked like they'd been, you know, shot with a pellet gun a million times or something.
[01:10:20]  I mean, it was crazy.
[01:10:21]  I mean, it's, and it's increased.
[01:10:24]  I mean, heroin now is, well, we'll get to that in a second, but like OxyContin is directly responsible for the heroin craze because this happened.
[01:10:33]  Okay, me, I'm, I'm a drug addict.
[01:10:34]  I live in a city.
[01:10:35]  I'm a young guy, whatever, a prime sort of target for being a junkie.
[01:10:39]  But like these fucking moms and dads in the Midwest or, you know, West Virginia or any of these kind of places, like, you know, these weren't heroin towns before then.
[01:10:48]  Obviously, people do.
[01:10:48]  I mean, these are meth towns, but, you know, they weren't heroin towns.
[01:10:51]  It's different because you can make that at home.
[01:10:53]  Exactly.
[01:10:53]  You're making a car if you know how to do it, right?
[01:10:56]  But, but all of a sudden, you know, heroin's everywhere because there is, they created this new market, right?
[01:11:03]  This market where there wasn't a market before.
[01:11:06]  And so there, there is no like, oh, there is no separating these two things.
[01:11:12]  There's no separating them from the fentanyl epidemic either.
[01:11:14]  But like, it's all one straight line between drug companies, between drug distributors, between, you know, a lot of doctors wanting to make money and then your fucking cousin, Odin.
[01:11:27]  You know, I mean, it's, it's not even like a curvy line.
[01:11:30]  It's a direct line.
[01:11:31]  You said that now the heroin, like heroin deaths are going down.
[01:11:36]  Yeah.
[01:11:36]  But that's because something else is on the rise, right?
[01:11:38]  Fentanyl.
[01:11:39]  Yeah.
[01:11:40]  It's, if you look at a graph of like drug overdoses by death, you'll see like around, you know, 2009, heroin really picks up and then it continues until it about peaks in 2015.
[01:11:54]  And around 2015, synthetic opioids, namely fentanyl, takes off.
[01:12:01]  And like that, that they now account fentanyl specifically now accounts for the vast majority of drug overdose deaths.
[01:12:09]  Regular opioids have gone down.
[01:12:12]  Yeah.
[01:12:12]  Cocaine, you know, gone down.
[01:12:15]  But fentanyl, I remember the only time I've ever knowingly done fentanyl because when I was doing drugs, it was some shit you heard about like a guy died from smoking fentanyl gel out of his grandma's cancer patch.
[01:12:28]  The thing is with fentanyl, fentanyl is a lot stronger than heroin or OxyContin or any stuff like that.
[01:12:34]  It is like, this is the shit that they should only give cancer patients, right?
[01:12:39]  It is fucking strong, like so strong that I don't even really know if they actually should have invented in the first place.
[01:12:47]  But, you know, there was, it started getting marketed really aggressively.
[01:12:51]  And it, you know, in my time, I'd only heard about in the patches or in lollipops.
[01:12:55]  I mean, fentanyl lollipops, which I think Brian from Street Fight has taken one, which always been very jealous of that.
[01:13:00]  But they, you know, there's this one company called Insys that really marketed a lot.
[01:13:06]  In fact, they're some of the only people who've gone to Tanta prison for their role in the epidemic.
[01:13:11]  And they were trying to get it marketed off label basically for use in non-cancer patients.
[01:13:16]  And it did start picking up steam in that.
[01:13:18]  But then people really figured out how to make it in their own labs.
[01:13:22]  And so since then, it is far outstripped.
[01:13:25]  I mean, some cities, apparently on the East Coast, I wasn't really familiar with this until I started reading about it a couple of weeks ago.
[01:13:32]  But you can mix fentanyl in with other drugs really easily.
[01:13:35]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:13:36]  That's what you always hear about.
[01:13:37]  Like, oh, there's, you know, people get, you know, really scared about parties.
[01:13:41]  Like, oh, don't do drugs.
[01:13:43]  You know, it's all cut with fentanyl.
[01:13:45]  You always hear that.
[01:13:45]  It's cut with fentanyl or watch out.
[01:13:47]  Those are fake drugs.
[01:13:48]  It's fentanyl.
[01:13:49]  Yeah.
[01:13:49]  What's the deal with that?
[01:13:50]  So you can put fentanyl, a little bit of fentanyl goes a long way.
[01:13:54]  I mean, there was all those kind of stupid stories about cops pretending that they OD'd from like being in the same room as it.
[01:13:59]  That can't happen.
[01:14:00]  But you can get high off a very little amount of fentanyl, like tiny, tiny little amount.
[01:14:06]  And so people put in other drugs.
[01:14:08]  I don't, I'll be honest with you.
[01:14:09]  I don't really understand the mindset of putting it in like meth.
[01:14:12]  A few guys died in the hate from smoking methylase with fentanyl a couple of years ago.
[01:14:18]  I don't understand the point of doing that, just sell them bad drugs rather than drugs.
[01:14:23]  But I guess it's to keep people coming back.
[01:14:26]  But in some East Coast cities, they used to mix it with heroin to make the heroin stronger because it's cheap.
[01:14:33]  It's cost effective, right?
[01:14:35]  But now the heroin's gone in a lot of places and it's just fentanyl.
[01:14:39]  So that's what you were telling me.
[01:14:40]  You were saying that like there's no heroin in Baltimore anymore.
[01:14:43]  Apparently, that's a couple articles I read said that.
[01:14:45]  That's wild.
[01:14:46]  If you are a Baltimore doper, write the podcast and let me know.
[01:14:50]  But from what I understand, and the thing is with fentanyl too, is like heroin, I usually knew what I was getting.
[01:14:54]  I had the same connect every time.
[01:14:56]  I would go meet Jacques in the fucking Taco Bell downtown Oakland.
[01:14:59]  He'd give me the same bag of heroin I had every time.
[01:15:01]  Sometimes he'd tell me it was stronger.
[01:15:03]  Obviously, you can get different strengths from different people.
[01:15:07]  Monkey, when I used to go to Monkey, he had the same shit every single time, very consistent until he got shot and his brother Black took over and black shit was always really cut.
[01:15:17]  But with fentanyl, it's like you, it's really hard for these old-timer junkies to like gauge the strength.
[01:15:22]  And so there's been a huge increase of deaths because of this.
[01:15:25]  And so it's like we went from this phase of like synthetic opioids and then we came back, you know, returned to tradition with heroin.
[01:15:33]  And then that lasted for about, you know, six or seven years.
[01:15:37]  And now we're at the age of the synthetic opioid thing.
[01:15:41]  This is the cyberfunk future.
[01:15:43]  Exactly.
[01:15:44]  And it's, it's, it's really wild shit.
[01:15:46]  It's really, you can get it shipped to your fucking house.
[01:15:49]  You know, it's, it's, they crack down a lot on that.
[01:15:52]  But by the way, if you're buying any drugs on the dark web, like you are literally buying that, like the government's watching you.
[01:15:57]  Yeah, you're probably buying it from the feds.
[01:15:59]  Exactly.
[01:16:00]  But a lot of it's from China because you can make in labs there from Germany too.
[01:16:04]  And a lot of the cartels in fucking Mexico, which, you know, they have their own special relationship with the DEA.
[01:16:10]  They're selling that shit too.
[01:16:12]  And, you know, it's, it's, I don't know.
[01:16:14]  I mean, I am, I, I did fentanyl a single time.
[01:16:17]  It was sold to Miss China White.
[01:16:18]  I knew it was fentanyl.
[01:16:19]  I did it in the bathroom of the Sears in downtown Oakland.
[01:16:21]  And it was, it fucked me up, man.
[01:16:23]  And I was like, that was when I was a fucking junkie junkie.
[01:16:27]  You know, I mean, I had been shooting heroin every day for years.
[01:16:32]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:16:33]  It's, it's, I mean, I, not to come back to this, but it's like the human wreckage this stuff caught like has caused.
[01:16:39]  It's like, it's going to just multiply.
[01:16:41]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:16:42]  I mean, we always, I think one of the things we always kind of stress on this podcast are these kind of like cascading effects.
[01:16:47]  These like, there's these little kind of stories.
[01:16:50]  And this isn't a little story, but it feels like it's at least contained.
[01:16:53]  You know, you might not be a junkie and you might not know someone who's a junkie, but these things have, you know, it ends up touching everyone in its own way.
[01:17:03]  I mean, you know, the story of the opioid crisis isn't just like over-prescribing doctors and disgusting capitalists and pharma pushers and like drug dealers, like all getting involved in the same fucking market.

=== Opioid Crisis Impact (11:51) ===

[01:17:18]  Like it's also, I think, you know, there's been studies that look at what truly made communities, because entire communities have been completely fucking devastated by this.
[01:17:29]  Yeah.
[01:17:30]  And are not coming back at any point in the near future.
[01:17:33]  And one of the, I mean, one of the prime causes is like economic devastation.
[01:17:40]  Yeah.
[01:17:41]  And, you know, there's been studies that have looked at this because it is a really, you know, people, you know, there's the joke where they call it hillbilly heroin or whatever.
[01:17:48]  I don't really like that.
[01:17:50]  But, you know, it's not every rural community.
[01:17:53]  And there's some rural communities that have been, like, have been able to kind of like weather through this and remain strong, right?
[01:18:00]  Like, why is it just like all over fucking Kentucky and all over Maine and not in Idaho and Iowa?
[01:18:07]  Yeah.
[01:18:08]  Right.
[01:18:09]  And so it's, I mean, like you mentioned, it being in a lot of urban counties.
[01:18:13]  That's totally true as well, even though it's known as this kind of like rural disease because rural sickness.
[01:18:21]  But it basically was like striking in like two specific places severely economically beaten down like towns that were used to be centered on mining and distressed areas where people are now like wholly dependent on service jobs.
[01:18:41]  Yeah.
[01:18:42]  Yeah.
[01:18:42]  And they found that this actually mattered more than a lot of the supply factors that we've talked about in terms of the kind of like economic devastation that this would make sense.
[01:18:58]  So there's been a lot of talk about all those studies about deaths of despair.
[01:19:03]  I mean, the thing about despair is that it builds as generations of jobs leave counties.
[01:19:12]  And that then cascades into people not having a degree so they can't make a living.
[01:19:20]  And then the people who are bright and maybe, you know, see a different future for themselves, they leave the towns.
[01:19:27]  And so you have a total drain of, you know, local kind of like, you know, what they call like a brain drain or whatever, right?
[01:19:36]  People rely on badly paid service jobs that have like basically zero benefits.
[01:19:42]  This starts to, I mean, communities basically start to implode.
[01:19:47]  Yeah, they crumble.
[01:19:49]  Families break apart.
[01:19:50]  The tax base totally shrinks.
[01:19:53]  Social services dry up.
[01:19:56]  And then the towns have to rely on economic policies that disinvest from social services while like relying on anti-worker and pro-corporate friendly policies in order to kind of like attract any, literally any kind of capital investment.
[01:20:13]  And this is just like a fucking fucking spiral.
[01:20:16]  You know, it's distress, anguish, despair.
[01:20:19]  Like you use these words because that's that's the best, that's the only way to describe the kind of virus that this, I mean, it really is a virus.
[01:20:29]  It infects every sector of a town.
[01:20:33]  Absolutely.
[01:20:34]  And so like they've, you know, you look at, you know, places in, like I said, Idaho, Iowa, whatever, like farming communities have been able to weather some of this because they have, they're not reliant on like precarious labor markets.
[01:20:48]  You know, they're not reliant on, they've got a little bit more of some fucking community ties there to keep them together.
[01:20:56]  But in places like, I mean, we talked about Pennsylvania, but in, you know, in fucking Kentucky, in Pennsylvania, in fucking Florida, where the entire fabric Of nearly every community is just has already been burned.
[01:21:12]  Yeah.
[01:21:13]  There's no coming back.
[01:21:15]  And so, like, I don't know.
[01:21:17]  I take it like real personally when people are cavalier about like the economic hardship people might be facing in this country, or they kind of like try to wave it away or make jokes about it as if as if there's something to joke about.
[01:21:32]  Like, our country did this to these people.
[01:21:34]  Like, I just don't understand.
[01:21:37]  I don't understand the lack of care at all.
[01:21:42]  Well, I mean, you see, you see something similar here in San Francisco, right?
[01:21:45]  Like, absolutely.
[01:21:46]  The cities are fucking rotting.
[01:21:49]  Exactly.
[01:21:49]  I mean, it's, it's a place in decay.
[01:21:52]  And, and concurrent to that, you see a huge spike in drug abuse and you know, people losing their houses and having to sleep on the street and stuff like that.
[01:22:00]  And it's viewed as you know, the sort of common myth here is that, oh, they're from out of town.
[01:22:04]  It's like, no, man, like most of these people used to live in apartments here or live in SROs here.
[01:22:09]  And it's like, you know, it's, it's, there's this like lack of cohesion.
[01:22:14]  It fucking, it drives people almost literally insane.
[01:22:16]  I know it drove me insane, you know, just when I was in that world.
[01:22:21]  It's, it's, I, I mean, I don't even know how to like describe the scale of it that I've seen and just in every way.
[01:22:28]  I mean, just in my own life, um, the things that it's affected, you know, if I had never, I mean, I lost probably four years of my life, you know, on this stuff and more than that, really, playing catch up.
[01:22:45]  Um, you know, I did sort of irreparable damage to my body.
[01:22:48]  You know, if I hadn't shot heroin, I never would have shot meth.
[01:22:51]  Uh, you know, I shot meth for concurrently for about a year.
[01:22:54]  Uh, and that doesn't, that does irreparable damage to your brain, you know.
[01:22:58]  I mean, I'm lucky, I'm okay, but certainly has caused somewhat of a cognitive decline.
[01:23:03]  You know, it put me a lot in debt.
[01:23:05]  I ruined my family.
[01:23:06]  Uh, I ruined many relationships I had with people.
[01:23:09]  I hurt people really badly.
[01:23:11]  Uh, you know, I went to jail.
[01:23:13]  I, I, uh, and it's this thing is like, I, I'm just, I, I'm, I had it easy compared to a lot of people.
[01:23:21]  And it's this like whirlwind of like destruction.
[01:23:25]  A lot of this destruction takes place internally in a person, right?
[01:23:28]  Like this, this sort of thing.
[01:23:30]  And so, like, it's this like little, it's, it's even a lot of this suffering kind of takes place like alienated from each other.
[01:23:37]  You know, it's not like we're all dying together.
[01:23:39]  It's people dying in their apartments, you know, fucking getting found face down two weeks later because they don't fucking know nobody and their landlord comes to check on them.
[01:23:48]  Um, you know, I know people that that's happened to.
[01:23:53]  And like, it's, it's this like, it's this like individualized battle that all these people are fighting.
[01:23:59]  And they're losing, you know, a lot of them lose.
[01:24:02]  You know, the rates for getting out of this stuff are not great.
[01:24:05]  You know, there's a, I think about 150 people die a day of drug overdoses now.
[01:24:12]  In San Francisco alone, I think about 200 people have died of COVID and almost 700 have died of ODs since the pandemic started.
[01:24:19]  You know, and it's, it's, it's just the cascading effects of this, you know, again, like the secondary effects of this, the, the, the, people having to turn to crime and ruining their lives by having to go to prison forever or, you know, for a long time.
[01:24:34]  You know, people who die in car accidents because they nod off, shit like that.
[01:24:38]  I mean, who lose their kids.
[01:24:40]  It's, it's who go into, you know, basically limitless lifetime debt.
[01:24:44]  I mean, it's, it's, it's totally psycho.
[01:24:47]  And, and, uh, and, and, you know, again, like, I doubt that there's many people listening to this who don't know somebody that this has happened to, or at least know somebody who has a relative that died or something like this.
[01:24:57]  I mean, this is a war on essentially everybody from like all of these companies.
[01:25:05]  And like, none of them, by the way, are free from this shit.
[01:25:08]  You know, we talk a lot about Purdue because their shit's out in the open and because they made OxyContin, but Pfizer, fucking Tiva, Johnson Johnson, which by the way, was fucking bribing farmers in Tasmania with BMWs to make them grow poppies out there.
[01:25:22]  And they made these fucking super poppies.
[01:25:24]  You know, it's, it's, it's none of the, the problem is, is that, and the thing that kind of drives me so insane, I don't really think like in the day-to-day of assess like this stuff, I don't think of myself as like a victim of these companies or anything like this.
[01:25:37]  But like when I zoom out, I'm like, I absolutely got caught up in this stuff, just like everybody else did.
[01:25:42]  You know, I rode the wave of this stuff.
[01:25:46]  And like, I, I want these people to be punished.
[01:25:49]  That's the thing.
[01:25:50]  Like, I, I mean, you know, I'm always like, I read, I was reading through all this shit and I'm like, this family fucking deserves to be strung up on a Christmas tree in fucking Times Square.
[01:26:02]  Like, absolutely.
[01:26:03]  I, I feel, you know, a lot of people have made comments that like sometimes our podcast is depressing because we're talking about such terrible things.
[01:26:13]  But like, this should fucking make you angry.
[01:26:16]  This makes me so angry.
[01:26:18]  This is like, I mean, it's like Dow Chemical level, the tobacco companies level.
[01:26:24]  These are major, major corporations poisoning the like entire world.
[01:26:30]  Yeah.
[01:26:30]  It's, yeah, it's an environmental health disaster.
[01:26:33]  And I don't know any other like way or scale to kind of like put it like or how to think about it otherwise.
[01:26:42]  Yeah.
[01:26:42]  Yeah.
[01:26:43]  I mean, it's, it's, I don't know how to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this either.
[01:26:46]  You know, they come up with all these different, you know, plans to take care of the opioid epidemic and stuff like that.
[01:26:52]  And it's like, I don't know, man.
[01:26:54]  Like, I know how to get an individual guy sober.
[01:26:58]  I don't know how to get a lot of people off of this shit.
[01:27:00]  You know, it's, it's, and the thing is, too, it's like, you know, this is why, you know, I hear a lot of people talk about like, you know, legalized drugs and all this stuff like that.
[01:27:07]  Like, okay, like, you know, I'm not even talking about that, but it's like, brother, like, you don't want heroin sold at fucking Walgreens.
[01:27:13]  Like, communities have tried to do it.
[01:27:14]  Oh, it is.
[01:27:16]  Like, yeah, yeah, also, it literally is.
[01:27:18]  But communities have tried for like decades to get this shit off of their, out of their streets, off of their communities.
[01:27:25]  So when people go around talking about like, oh, we need to legal, not just like decriminalize and get Addicts and shit out of jail.
[01:27:31]  Obviously, I'm for that.
[01:27:32]  Or I'm decriminalizing.
[01:27:33]  That's totally separate.
[01:27:35]  But like, they shouldn't be fucking selling.
[01:27:37]  I mean, that's a libertarian fucking argument right there.
[01:27:39]  And that's some shit that like, I know enough people have died on this shit.
[01:27:43]  It's like, it's not, you know, it's a fuck, it's fucking poison.
[01:27:46]  Yeah, man.
[01:27:46]  Like, I don't know.
[01:27:47]  Join hands with fucking Pfizer and Purdue and the scumbags at McKinsey for your libertarian paradise.
[01:27:55]  But like, you're, you and I are not on the right, on the on the same side, my friend.
[01:28:00]  Yeah, that's, that's the thing is, man.
[01:28:02]  It's like, I, know, you know, this shit is, this shit is point.
[01:28:06]  I loved heroin.
[01:28:07]  And, like, I gladly at some points ruin my life for heroin.
[01:28:12]  Um, and like, I, you know, it's, I, I don't have dreams about like, you know, women I have loved in the past.
[01:28:19]  I don't have dreams about like good times in my life.
[01:28:22]  And I still have dreams about heroin.
[01:28:24]  You know, it's like, it sticks with you.
[01:28:27]  And like, it's, it's a fucking poison, you know, in a lot of different ways.
[01:28:33]  Well, like we said at the beginning of the episode, just this, a couple weeks ago, McKinsey agreed to pay $573 million to settle claims with 47 states and, of course, the District of Columbia for all of its work with its recommendations, whatever, that it provided to Purdue and all the other drug companies.
[01:28:55]  That to me seems very little, $573 million.
[01:28:58]  They've made about $31 billion off of it in total.
[01:29:02]  Yeah, Purdue last October agreed to pay about $8 billion in a criminal and civil settlement with the Department of Justice.

=== McKinsey's Settlement Shock (03:47) ===

[01:29:10]  Yeah.
[01:29:10]  They're still, I think, in negotiations with some of the states.
[01:29:14]  The Sackler family, just the family itself, agreed to pay $225 million.
[01:29:21]  They're still all denying all the allegations.
[01:29:24]  They're the 30th richest family in America, too.
[01:29:26]  Yeah, that's surprising to me.
[01:29:28]  They used to be way, way higher up on the list.
[01:29:32]  They've moved a lot of their money around.
[01:29:35]  They sort of saw this storm coming.
[01:29:37]  Oh, yeah.
[01:29:37]  They got a little, maybe they got a little Epstein help.
[01:29:39]  It's out in the British Isles.
[01:29:41]  Oh, no, it is literally in the British Islands.
[01:29:43]  Yes, yeah, yeah, it is.
[01:29:45]  Great.
[01:29:46]  Yeah, so all these kind of lawsuits are happening.
[01:29:49]  The Sacklers, it sounds like their name has been kind of thrown through the back.
[01:29:54]  All these art institutions that were like not commenting on it are like now reluctantly taking their names off of things.
[01:30:02]  Yeah, I mean, they're going to be the sin eaters for this whole industry, right?
[01:30:06]  Yeah.
[01:30:06]  Well, I know one thing that I've learned from all this.
[01:30:10]  We've got to trust the science.
[01:30:12]  I swear to God, if I hear that one more fucking time, what are you going to do?
[01:30:16]  Shoot some heroin?
[01:30:18]  No, no.
[01:30:21]  Maybe.
[01:30:22]  No, just kidding.
[01:30:49]  I'm Liz.
[01:30:50]  My name is Brace, aka.
[01:30:55]  Oh my God.
[01:30:55]  Do you know what I realized?
[01:30:56]  Mr. Methadone, what?
[01:30:58]  At the beginning of the show, we didn't say that we were joined by.
[01:31:01]  Oh, my God.
[01:31:01]  You know why it is?
[01:31:03]  Ladies and gentlemen, behind the curtains, Liz and I are recording in the same room right now.
[01:31:08]  And that means we don't have good old Young Chomsky up on the screen because that would mean we'd also have to look at each other on the screen.
[01:31:14]  Which would be very weird.
[01:31:15]  But let me say it twice then.
[01:31:17]  Let's both say it.
[01:31:18]  Well, wait, before you do, can I mention one thing?
[01:31:21]  Yeah.
[01:31:22]  There is, I think last night it was posted.
[01:31:28]  Our sister podcast on the Port Noi News Network.
[01:31:33]  Oh, yes.
[01:31:34]  Call her daddy.
[01:31:36]  Has put out a kind of, I don't know, an alert, a bat signal to its followers asking for recommendations for who it should have on the show.
[01:31:48]  Here's the thing, dear listeners: we need you to get Brace Belden on Caller Daddy.
[01:31:54]  I need to talk to her.
[01:31:56]  She needs to call me.
[01:31:58]  She doesn't need to call me Daddy.
[01:31:59]  I think that's weird.
[01:32:00]  This happened to me a few times.
[01:32:01]  I never dug it.
[01:32:04]  But I need to talk to her.
[01:32:06]  Please.
[01:32:07]  Through every available means that won't get us in trouble for like weird harassment.
[01:32:11]  Including psychic.
[01:32:12]  Everyone throw out a psychic, some good psychic bomb energy orb.
[01:32:16]  Think of like the orb.
[01:32:17]  Remember Trump's orb?
[01:32:20]  Yes.
[01:32:20]  Oh, yeah.
[01:32:21]  It's like first visit.
[01:32:23]  If this will help, this is a little drug-related thing, although I'm not sure I should say this.
[01:32:27]  I have poured cocaine into every orifice of another human being.
[01:32:31]  Yeah.
[01:32:31]  So that she'll probably like that.
[01:32:33]  I'd not like to do it to her, but like to hear that.
[01:32:36]  Okay, anyway, on that note, we are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:32:44]  We are joined by producer.
[01:32:45]  I thought we were going to say the same time.
[01:32:46]  Well, I don't want to.
[01:32:47]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:32:50]  Producer Young Chomsky.
[01:32:54]  This has been Tronan, and we will see you next time.