True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 309: I Need Speed and Weed
Aired: 2023-08-03
Duration: 01:03:27


=== Strength Is (03:33) ===

[00:00:00]  I'm going to give you a red pill for free.
[00:00:04]  Listen up.
[00:00:06]  Depression isn't real.
[00:00:09]  Strength is.
[00:00:10]  Integrity is.
[00:00:12]  Ghosts are real.
[00:00:13]  But depression is just the mind telling the body, you aren't good enough.
[00:00:17]  Strength is the body telling the mind, I'm strong.
[00:00:21]  Ever since I moved to Miami, my entire view of mental health has changed completely.
[00:00:27]  I've stopped taking Paxil and started ingesting of numerous myriad of natural supplements like cocaine and anivar.
[00:00:35]  Stuff that comes from the earth.
[00:00:38]  See, my eyes are wet, but no longer from the tears of depression.
[00:00:43]  They're crazy ass wet now because I've been looking into the sun because I know my future is there.
[00:00:49]  My future is bright.
[00:00:51]  My future is on the sun.
[00:00:54]  I'm going to be the first Polish woman to live in the sun colony.
[00:00:57]  Strength, integrity, the sun.
[00:01:01]  There is no room for my depression in my pyramid of wealth.
[00:01:06]  Yeah, Brace, I'm not saying that.
[00:01:29]  That was written for Liz, and I read it as written, but unfortunately, she doesn't think that she can inspire you.
[00:01:35]  I think she can.
[00:01:37]  I don't think that was written for me.
[00:01:38]  I understand that you wrote First Polish Woman, but I believe that was very much written for Brace.
[00:01:43]  I'll be by Brace.
[00:01:45]  For Brace.
[00:01:45]  No, it's not for me.
[00:01:47]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:47]  Hello.
[00:01:48]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:49]  My name is the beloved Brace Belden.
[00:01:54]  Wait, we said this off air.
[00:01:56]  Oh, wait.
[00:01:57]  Also, joined by Producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:59]  Hello, this is Tronan.
[00:02:00]  Thank you, everyone.
[00:02:01]  Messed that up.
[00:02:02]  Blah, Who cares?
[00:02:03]  You know where you are.
[00:02:04]  Guys, guys, guys, how funny would it be if Brace changed his name to Brace Ma Belden?
[00:02:09]  Brace Babeldon.
[00:02:10]  So I have told you guys this before.
[00:02:12]  No, Brace B. Apostrophe Belden.
[00:02:14]  Brace Babe.
[00:02:15]  Yes.
[00:02:15]  Well, so two things about that.
[00:02:17]  Once is I did trick a large number of people over a number of years that my name was Brace, Brace, Brace Belden.
[00:02:27]  Not only was my middle name Brace, Brace Belden.
[00:02:30]  So two middle names?
[00:02:31]  Three.
[00:02:32]  It was three names.
[00:02:33]  Right, right.
[00:02:33]  But two middle braces.
[00:02:35]  Two middle braces.
[00:02:35]  And then the bookend of Belden.
[00:02:37]  Belden and Brace.
[00:02:38]  Yeah, it's kind of the caboose on the brace train.
[00:02:42]  I hate that.
[00:02:42]  Never say that again.
[00:02:43]  also it's kind of the caboose on like the train of race but i also used to be in a you think brace is in a brace train I would say like a train, a brace train, like or the other kind of train.
[00:02:56]  And the Belden is just like kind of serving as the caboozo.
[00:03:00]  But I was also used to be in a group chat, which I did tell you guys about, with a bunch of guys from Africa named Brace.
[00:03:06]  I think it's Brace is like some frank in Africa.
[00:03:12]  In Africa, most of you guys have last name Brace.
[00:03:14]  But I joined a Facebook group of guys named Brace.
[00:03:16]  How did you find it?
[00:03:18]  How did they find you?
[00:03:19]  How did you all find each other?
[00:03:21]  I don't know.
[00:03:21]  They could have literally all been related because they all have the same last name.
[00:03:24]  I have no idea.
[00:03:25]  But it was just all the guys with the name Brace.
[00:03:26]  I was one of the few people with the first name Brace in there.
[00:03:29]  I feel like there's like a movie to be made of you going to Africa and meeting a bunch of braces.

=== Braces in Africa (06:35) ===

[00:03:33]  I would love to.
[00:03:34]  I wonder if Africa is so bad.
[00:03:36]  I feel like this could like this could, you know, Brace.
[00:03:40]  I've been told by a ton of people sort of secretly that Africa kind of yearns for Brace.
[00:03:46]  Like it long, Mother Africa.
[00:03:47]  I don't know.
[00:03:47]  It sounds like they've got enough already.
[00:03:49]  No, I don't know if they need another one.
[00:03:51]  They've never met a white boy like me before.
[00:03:54]  Let me tell you that.
[00:03:54]  I'm different.
[00:03:55]  I'm different than all the other white boys who've been here.
[00:04:00]  But unfortunately.
[00:04:01]  They need a little quirked up brace.
[00:04:02]  They do need a little quirked up.
[00:04:04]  I might go and take a side on one of the Sahel things that's going on right now.
[00:04:08]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:08]  Whoever kind of.
[00:04:09]  Well, now that you're getting called up for that Wagner thing, I think that you might be down there soon.
[00:04:14]  Yeah, I know.
[00:04:15]  You know what?
[00:04:15]  It pays good.
[00:04:16]  I'm sorry.
[00:04:17]  I hustle.
[00:04:18]  I'm sorry that you can't.
[00:04:19]  I'm sorry that you have depression.
[00:04:20]  Why are we still wearing headphones?
[00:04:22]  That's what's called being a mercenary.
[00:04:24]  Hello, everyone.
[00:04:24]  Hello.
[00:04:27]  Welcome to True Anonymous.
[00:04:31]  Extended opening version.
[00:04:34]  AC is on.
[00:04:36]  You can hear it.
[00:04:36]  If you complain, I will fuck your IP address.
[00:04:41]  And I'll come to your house and I'll turn your AC on and I'll put your fucking face in front of it for so long that you get whatever kind of sinus thing that I've done from.
[00:04:49]  And then it'll be like the cartoon where they've got the icicles coming out of their nose.
[00:04:53]  And then maybe you'll get so sick that you have to be antibiotics and maybe your shit will get a little crazy in your penis area.
[00:05:00]  And no one will care because you don't have a podcast.
[00:05:02]  Because you don't have a podcast.
[00:05:03]  You can't tell the world.
[00:05:03]  And if you think about starting your podcast right now, please don't do that.
[00:05:06]  Please don't do that.
[00:05:06]  It's a really credit market.
[00:05:07]  Please don't start a podcast right now.
[00:05:09]  Please.
[00:05:11]  We have an episode today that has nothing to do with anything that we talked about.
[00:05:13]  None of that stuff.
[00:05:15]  But yeah, it really doesn't.
[00:05:17]  But I do think it's pretty good.
[00:05:18]  I do too.
[00:05:19]  And I think that we are, we're talking about drugs.
[00:05:21]  Which is a great topic that lots of people love.
[00:05:24]  But we're talking about drugs in an interesting and kind of funky way.
[00:05:27]  Yeah, which is a topic that most people are going to go, oh, interesting.
[00:05:30]  That's kind of funky.
[00:05:31]  Yeah.
[00:05:31]  There you go.
[00:05:33]  No, we have Benjamin Fong on the show to talk about his book, Quick Fixes, Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Bench.
[00:05:39]  I'm just saying it like that, like professional podcasterry, because I have the book right in front of me because Bryce and I read it and it's a great book.
[00:05:47]  Yeah, and it's funny when I, because when I sort of fucked up introducing him, as many of you will hear.
[00:05:53]  No, I think it's cute.
[00:05:55]  I feel like I call it quick foxes or something, or maybe, I don't know.
[00:05:57]  Did you like stumble over it or something?
[00:05:59]  It's whenever someone has written a book and we have them on here.
[00:06:06]  This book jumped over the lazy thing.
[00:06:08]  Quick foxes?
[00:06:09]  Honestly, to me, it better be like a slow turtle than a quick fox in any situation.
[00:06:15]  Sure.
[00:06:16]  But because you kind of like armor.
[00:06:18]  But whenever we have like a guy who's written a book on, I always feel like it's like, I get, I'm scared for the introduction because I'm like, what if he's so smart that he thinks I'm like mentally no, I don't think people first of all, if they think that about you, I will fucking kill them.
[00:06:36]  Thank you so much.
[00:06:37]  Second of all, I think they probably think it's really charming.
[00:06:40]  I also wrote like one of the encyclopedias.
[00:06:42]  Yeah.
[00:06:42]  Like I wrote the M section in the.
[00:06:44]  Oh, I thought it was Q.
[00:06:45]  No, well, I contributed to that, but it's very slim volume.
[00:06:49]  Anyways, let's take you.
[00:06:52]  Here's the thing.
[00:06:53]  We have, I'm going to tell you guys something.
[00:06:55]  Yeah, let's give a peek behind the curtain.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:56]  We have guests on.
[00:06:57]  Oh, yeah.
[00:06:58]  Thank you for buttoning your shirt up.
[00:06:59]  No problem.
[00:07:00]  We have guests on.
[00:07:02]  And then Bryce and I don't get to talk to each other because we just do the guest part, which is very cool and fun.
[00:07:06]  And we really enjoyed this conversation that you guys are about to listen to.
[00:07:09]  It's a good one.
[00:07:10]  It's about drugs.
[00:07:11]  It's about getting high.
[00:07:15]  But then Brace and I don't get to do our thing where we talk to each other.
[00:07:17]  And here's the thing.
[00:07:18]  All these people at home, they're like, they're not really friends.
[00:07:21]  They don't really like each other.
[00:07:22]  I saw Movie Magic.
[00:07:23]  It's Hollywood bullshit.
[00:07:24]  They don't even know each other.
[00:07:25]  It's not true.
[00:07:26]  That's not true.
[00:07:27]  And we like to catch up and joke around.
[00:07:29]  Here's the thing.
[00:07:30]  Podcasts can be whatever the subject the podcast says it's about, right?
[00:07:34]  Yeah.
[00:07:35]  Maybe it's, oh, we're you're wrong about this.
[00:07:38]  Or like, maybe we're debunking or we're bunking or whatever.
[00:07:41]  Yeah, you could de-book or boom.
[00:07:43]  Here's the deal, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:07:45]  At the core of every podcast is the story of two people's friendships.
[00:07:49]  Yeah.
[00:07:50]  Three people in our case.
[00:07:52]  And I got to say, those, those, those threads have really frayed for me in the past couple months.
[00:07:58]  I just realized we have a poly podcast.
[00:08:00]  I don't like that.
[00:08:01]  What do you mean?
[00:08:02]  There's three of us.
[00:08:03]  There's three of us?
[00:08:04]  Yeah.
[00:08:04]  First of all, that's not that poly.
[00:08:06]  That's just like a, it's called a thruple.
[00:08:10]  And it's in the poly canon.
[00:08:12]  I don't like that word.
[00:08:13]  Okay, cool.
[00:08:14]  Well, then I guess me and your children will just take down our fucking roof.
[00:08:17]  We have really tried to make that happen.
[00:08:19]  Thruple.
[00:08:20]  And it just doesn't work as it's not as elegant as people think it is.
[00:08:23]  Wait, I actually, can I ask a sincere question from our podcast listening audience?
[00:08:28]  Oh, I thought you meant to me.
[00:08:29]  If you live in the New York area and you are in a real deal, no shit polycule.
[00:08:38]  Like more than three?
[00:08:40]  You know what?
[00:08:41]  I was kind of fucking around before.
[00:08:42]  I think it is three, but I would prefer more than three.
[00:08:44]  I'm definitely looking for at least five.
[00:08:48]  But not for you.
[00:08:49]  Not for me.
[00:08:50]  No, God, no.
[00:08:51]  I mean, not that I judge.
[00:08:53]  Not that I judge.
[00:08:54]  But the way you make it sound when you start to get a lot of fun.
[00:08:57]  Because do I want to fuck the dudes?
[00:08:59]  I don't know how those things work because I'm like not trying to hit them shits up.
[00:09:04]  But my question is, listen, if you are in, I know I sound trying to embarrass me right now.
[00:09:13]  Who's they?
[00:09:14]  You and young Chomsky over here.
[00:09:16]  You're laughing at me, and he's just been flipping me off.
[00:09:18]  To be fair, I'm trying to do that all the time.
[00:09:20]  If you are in a real polycule in the New York metropolitan area or even the tri-state area, really, if we're getting down to it, and your polycule is in crisis.
[00:09:31]  Oh, okay.
[00:09:32]  And your polycule is in crisis.
[00:09:34]  And they need a counselor.
[00:09:35]  And you need a counselor and you're willing to be public.
[00:09:39]  This is not a true and on thing, but this is just maybe an idea I had.
[00:09:43]  Please write to the podcast account.
[00:09:49]  This says in some sort of professional capacity, not so much in a personal.
[00:09:53]  Not in a personal, not want to set some boundaries, which is, I know, is really important to you people.
[00:09:59]  I want to set some boundaries really clear right now.
[00:10:01]  Definitely not in a personal capacity, just to be clear about that.
[00:10:05]  Not trying to get involved.
[00:10:06]  But as a doctor.
[00:10:08]  Sure.

=== Debate Over Drug Legalization (17:35) ===

[00:10:09]  As Brace Babeldon.
[00:10:10]  Brace Babeldon.
[00:10:11]  Dr. Babelden.
[00:10:13]  DDR.
[00:10:15]  Dr. Babeldon.
[00:10:16]  Dr. Babeldon.
[00:10:17]  Can you imagine?
[00:10:17]  It's the Irish half.
[00:10:21]  Dr. Babelden.
[00:10:22]  Dr. Babeldon.
[00:10:23]  All right.
[00:10:26]  Let's, you know what?
[00:10:27]  Let's just do it.
[00:10:28]  Let's tie off, shoot up, and nod out as we brush past the tweakers spazzing out on the street.
[00:10:46]  We move silently past the lotus eaters.
[00:10:49]  And finally, arm in arm with our dear friend, John Barleycorn, we come a knocking.
[00:10:57]  That's right, baby.
[00:10:58]  Number one party school in the U.S. motherfucking A, Arizona State University, joining us from there.
[00:11:06]  Two beer.
[00:11:07]  He is doing the Edwards 40 hands taped to his hands, but they are with original formula sparks in one hand and the rare hidden formula of For Loco in the other hand.
[00:11:18]  That's right.
[00:11:19]  Benjamin Fong, the author of Quick Fixes, which is, as far as I can tell, a guide to how to best win at beer pongs, Cornhole, and other party games.
[00:11:31]  No, it is a book on, well, I'm just going to read the tagline right here.
[00:11:35]  Drugs in America from Prohibition, never heard of it, to the 21st Century Binge.
[00:11:40]  Fantastic book.
[00:11:41]  Benjamin, thank you for joining us and thank you for humoring that introduction.
[00:11:45]  Hey, thanks so much.
[00:11:46]  I think that was the best intro I've ever gotten.
[00:11:48]  So that was great.
[00:11:50]  You know, I've meant to ask you really quick, Brace.
[00:11:53]  Do you come up with those like before?
[00:11:55]  Is that right off the dome?
[00:11:56]  I want to make something very clear to everybody listening.
[00:12:00]  It's not like you're in the shower and you're like, okay, do almost zero thinking of things that are going to happen in the future before they happen.
[00:12:10]  Like, I'm not like, I'm not future tripping.
[00:12:13]  You know, I'm just let it flow.
[00:12:15]  Just regular tripping.
[00:12:16]  I'm in the garden of the lotus eaters.
[00:12:17]  Benjamin, hello.
[00:12:19]  Hello.
[00:12:20]  Thanks very much for having me.
[00:12:21]  Hi, Ben.
[00:12:21]  Thanks for having me.
[00:12:22]  Thanks for coming on.
[00:12:23]  I'd like to say thanks for having us.
[00:12:25]  This book is great.
[00:12:27]  Quick fixes.
[00:12:28]  I think Brace and I both read it real quick.
[00:12:30]  It's a great read.
[00:12:33]  In it, you basically take on a really big topic, which is the history of drug use in America, literally from like basically America's inception.
[00:12:44]  And, you know, Brace and I were talking about this this weekend.
[00:12:47]  We were saying like something that is insane about America that really you don't notice until you've been out of it for like on a vacation or talking to people who aren't from America or, you know, are not in America or whatever is the sheer amount of drugs that Americans use is historically quite large.
[00:13:09]  It's very unique to like basically the history of the world, right?
[00:13:14]  I mean, Americans use an absurd amount of drugs.
[00:13:17]  And in your book, you kind of talk about why that is.
[00:13:21]  Yeah, I mean, we're very unique amongst other industrialized nations.
[00:13:25]  You know, Americans comprise, I think it's 4 or 5% of the world's population, but we consume 80% of its opioids, about 80% of its ADHD medications or amphetamines.
[00:13:37]  And really in the 21st century, all metrics of drug consumption have been, are at historic highs and they're going up.
[00:13:44]  So I think most people know about the opioid crisis, but that's true for amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antipsychotics, antidepressants, like basically any drug with the notable exception of cocaine has been going up in the 21st century.
[00:14:04]  At the same time, of course, that we have this, you know, the largest prison system in the world with a full one-fifth of prisoners in for nonviolent drug offenses.
[00:14:13]  So it's a pretty unique contradiction that we're in.
[00:14:16]  And it's kind of been that way for a century.
[00:14:20]  Yeah.
[00:14:20]  I mean, you make the point that drugs, for the most part, were completely legal in the late 1800s.
[00:14:27]  That was, I guess, by the point where they had synthesized the most amount of drugs that we still have today.
[00:14:32]  But also we had the most lax regulation.
[00:14:34]  I mean, you didn't even need a, and believe me, as a former inviter of the stuff, would often fantasize about this time, but you didn't even need a prescription to get, you know, medical grade cocaine or heroin or anything like that, late 1800s.
[00:14:48]  We've talked about on the show before the Narcotics Act and like the real, along with prohibition of alcohol, the real clamping down on illegal, well, drugs that became illegal in the early 20th century.
[00:15:04]  And I think that's something that sort of runs through your book is the tension between basically people who are, I guess both sides would be reformers in some sense, but people who are pro-prohibition for all drugs.
[00:15:19]  And then on the other side, this sort of libertarian, you know, free-for-all that ranges from like libertarian free-for-all, but or other people who are sort of interested in legalization or more normalization of drugs and this sort of tension between the two that leads to a lot of policies and leads to a lot of advancements basically in drugs themselves.
[00:15:42]  Yeah, I mean, so it's certainly gone in waves.
[00:15:44]  There are periods of relative normalization of drugs and then periods where the prohibition emphasis is more stark.
[00:15:52]  But really that contradiction has been with us since the late 19th century.
[00:15:56]  And as you say, there was an enormous patent medicine industry in the United States in the late 19th century, medically pure heroin, cocaine, basically anything you want, you could get it at the local drugstore.
[00:16:08]  At the same time that the United States is really commencing global drug prohibition, like as we know it.
[00:16:15]  With 1914, there was the Harrison Act, which sort of inaugurated the long war on drugs, you could say.
[00:16:24]  But it was also the Americans that started global controls over opium and cocaine.
[00:16:31]  So that sort of constitutive paradox at the heart of American drug policy, it was there at the late 19th century.
[00:16:40]  You see it with like American attitudes about drugs, too.
[00:16:43]  Like I think that one thing that's great about your book is that you really describe, you know, like Brace, how you say this tension, but it's also this sort of like, it's like two sides of one coin almost, right?
[00:16:53]  Like there's the people who really like fearmonger about drugs and then the people who really are like pushing to normalize all drug use or push this kind of like libertarian spirit of you know free for all everyone can have whatever they want and and that both of these sides of the kind of quote unquote drug debate depending on even what What specific drug you're talking about, like that they kind of like feed into one another, right?
[00:17:18]  It's like you have these sort of like moments of prohibition of one thing, which leads to a kind of carving out of a regulatory regime of another, which allows for industries to kind of open up,
[00:17:32]  whether that's in like drugs, the history of drug scheduling, or as I think we'll talk about a little bit later, like the kind of diagnostic revolution that leads to the explosion of pharmacology in the United States as a massive drug industry.
[00:17:48]  And so it's like one thing I think that's so great about your book is that it's so easy when you're kind of trying to track this history to kind of take a like moralizing side on either, you know, on or a moralizing position on either side of that debate and kind of you know, forget to kind of like step back and just try to look at this history a little bit more dispassionately.
[00:18:11]  Because really, when you're talking about drugs in America, it really traces the kind of history of the development of American capitalism like really significantly.
[00:18:18]  I mean, it's a big, significant chunk of kind of American enterprise is like the, you know, the drug industry, whether licit or illicit.
[00:18:29]  Yeah, I mean, I think it's right to see both drug enthusiasm and drug prohibitionism as kind of two sides of the same coin.
[00:18:38]  That, you know, the title quick fixes, it kind of refers both to drugs themselves, but also drug policy.
[00:18:45]  Drug policy has been a convenient way to deal with a lot of problems of American society without calling them by their name.
[00:18:53]  And so in both senses, they're a kind of unique fix for the problems that we have.
[00:18:58]  It's a way of both providing some sort of immediate remedy for our social ills, but also, you know, delaying dealing with the kind of structural transformations needed to really address the causes at play there.
[00:19:13]  So let's talk a little bit about drugs specifically.
[00:19:17]  Let's wrap, Liz.
[00:19:19]  Let's talk about one of Brace's old faves, but not current phase.
[00:19:24]  Barney the dinosaur.
[00:19:25]  No.
[00:19:26]  Let's talk about meth.
[00:19:27]  Yeah.
[00:19:28]  Because I think you have a whole chapter in here about meth, methamphetamine.
[00:19:33]  But some people might know some of the history of the development of meth, but I think it's like, you know, how did it get from basically like Nazi labs to every kid in America being prescribed Adderall?
[00:19:48]  You know, how does that history happen?
[00:19:51]  Yeah, so amphetamines began to be marketed in the interwar period, and then they were really popularized on both sides in the Second World War.
[00:20:02]  I think a lot of people know that the Nazi war machine was really fueled by methamphetamine under the name purvitin.
[00:20:10]  And then actually it sort of switched.
[00:20:12]  The Germans started to understand the kinds of problems that follow from prolonged amphetamine use.
[00:20:18]  And that's sort of the moment when the Allies really ramped it up.
[00:20:21]  So there's an interesting history of World War II to be told through drug use.
[00:20:25]  But then in the post-war period, amphetamines were licit and very popular substances.
[00:20:32]  I mean, you could get amphetamine inhalers over the counter until 1959.
[00:20:38]  You could actually get methamphetamine inhalers over the counter until 1965.
[00:20:43]  And one, you know, there's a picture of the old kind of inhaler in the book.
[00:20:49]  But as you might guess, the sort of regularized dose inhalers are a fairly recent invention.
[00:20:55]  Inhalers used to just be tubes with a piece of cotton soaked in the drug, put in the tube.
[00:21:02]  Simple.
[00:21:02]  So you just like, yeah, very simple.
[00:21:04]  You pop off the cap, you take a whiff, you put the cap back on.
[00:21:07]  It didn't take long for industrious teenagers to figure out that you could take out the cotton filler and either soak it in a beverage or swallow it and get a much stronger high.
[00:21:18]  So basically since the inception of amphetamine, people knew that it could be abused.
[00:21:22]  But it was only with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act that it was finally scheduled and amphetamine use, the sort of great amphetamine boom of the post-war period ended.
[00:21:34]  And into that void, well, I mean, cocaine was the thing that really filled that void.
[00:21:39]  It's really the drug of the neoliberal period.
[00:21:42]  But you also started to get methamphetamine production on the West Coast.
[00:21:47]  The Hells Angels are sort of well known to be distributors of meth.
[00:21:52]  And they were kind of overtaken by Mexican super labs in the 90s.
[00:21:57]  And today we're at a kind of interesting moment.
[00:22:02]  So there were various crackdowns on the precursor chemicals of methamphetamine, ephedrine in particular, and pseudophedrine.
[00:22:11]  And as a result, methamphetamine manufacturers have gone back to the old, what's called the P2P method of methamphetamine production.
[00:22:21]  And this has led to the appearance of a different kind of methamphetamine in recent years.
[00:22:27]  This is the subject of some debate, actually.
[00:22:30]  Sam Kinonis wrote a book recently.
[00:22:34]  Yeah, I know.
[00:22:34]  I read that Sam.
[00:22:35]  I don't know how Keone's?
[00:22:37]  What is it?
[00:22:39]  The article about P2P.
[00:22:41]  Yeah.
[00:22:41]  And I know he wrote, I haven't read the book that he wrote about it.
[00:22:45]  I will say, you know, no idea.
[00:22:47]  I'm not a science guy, but I've been around a lot of tweakers and they get fucking nuts in a way that I don't think was happening in the 1980s.
[00:22:56]  I mean, certainly tweakers have caused their fair share of havoc.
[00:23:00]  Certainly in the like late 1960s when sort of methamphetamine or amphetamines replaced LSD as sort of the hippie drug of choice, that's kind of when like the social perception of, or the public perception rather, of hippies changed from this like, I mean, along obviously with Manson, from this like peaceful, you know, peace kind of guy thing to like a scary, you know, fucking psycho-murderer.
[00:23:23]  But yeah, meth is insane now.
[00:23:27]  Yeah, it's difficult to know what to make of that debate.
[00:23:31]  I'm not that close to it, but for those of your listeners who are interested, Sam Kiñonis wrote a piece for the Atlantic about it, where he talked about this new form of methamphetamine, and a lot of people faulted him for bringing up the same kind of tropes that were used in the crack scare.
[00:23:48]  Zachary Siegel, a drug journalist, wrote a good response to it, if anyone's interested.
[00:23:53]  But one facet of the debate is the different composition of the kind of meth that's available today.
[00:24:01]  So because of crackdowns on various precursor chemicals, older methods of methamphetamine production are coming back.
[00:24:09]  And in the traditional Benzedrine and also in Adderall today, there's what's called racemic amphetamine, which is a balance of the left and right-handed isomers of the drug.
[00:24:21]  And there's other kinds of amphetamine, like in dexedrine, for instance, that's dextramphetamine.
[00:24:27]  That's predominantly the isolated right-hand isomer of the drug.
[00:24:31]  And the right-handed isomer is generally said to lead to more euphoria.
[00:24:36]  It's just a more pleasant drug, less of the harshness, whereas the left-handed isomer of the drug leads to more sort of twitchiness and irritability.
[00:24:46]  So it's thought, and part of Kinonis' claim rests upon this, that the new P2P method of producing meth is more of the left-handed isomer.
[00:24:57]  So I don't know exactly what to make of that.
[00:25:00]  I trust parts of his reporting.
[00:25:02]  So yeah, it's definitely an ongoing debate, though.
[00:25:06]  It is astounding to me, though, because part of your book really kind of breaks down the distinction between legal and illegal drugs, right?
[00:25:14]  Like, I mean, there's both legal and illegal drugs that are on the sort of the scheduled drugs list.
[00:25:19]  And while a distinction is made between them, whereas like some drugs that may be more powerful than others are scheduled, you know, lower than, you know, they might be.
[00:25:28]  At the end of the day, I think meth is really, along with opiates, is really, or amphetamines rather than meth, is really like, is the most interesting aspect, right?
[00:25:38]  Because there's a lot of people out there who are basically self-medicating or just taking fentanyl, which was a legal and scheduled drug for when it was prescribed.
[00:25:50]  And there's also, on the other hand, a ton of people who are taking methamphetamine, also made in labs, sometimes, you know, sold by the same people who might sell that fentanyl.
[00:26:00]  And on the other hand, there's millions of people who are totally legally taking amphetamines that are prescribed to them.
[00:26:07]  I mean, there's, you know, we have a really tweaked out population, right?
[00:26:10]  I get fucking ads on Instagram that are basically like advertising amphetamines to me, right?
[00:26:17]  They're advertising like, come take this, like, go to this focus site.
[00:26:21]  You know, you meet with some doctor or whatever on an e-visit for like 10 minutes and then they give you 60 milligrams of Adderall a day.
[00:26:29]  And it's really just like, we have, and this is, you make this point several times in your book.
[00:26:34]  It's just like everyone's really fucking high.
[00:26:38]  And just some people are high in this way that's like, you know, legally acceptable.
[00:26:43]  And then some people are high in a way that's legally unacceptable.
[00:26:47]  Yeah, I mean, in those particular two cases with fentanyl and methamphetamine, those are still used in medical settings.
[00:26:56]  So fentanyl is a very effective surgical anesthetic.
[00:27:00]  And methamphetamine is still a prescription drug under the name, I think it's dysoxin.
[00:27:05]  I think it's used to be methadrine, but now dysoxone.
[00:27:07]  Yeah, no, I mean, in those cases, it's just, you know, the connection is quite direct, right?
[00:27:12]  It's not just there's some stimulants and some downers that are legal and some illegal.
[00:27:16]  It's that the ones that are at the forefront of people's minds, those are still legal, legal medications.
[00:27:22]  And yeah, I mean, in general, the book does try to break down that barrier, you know, in the opening or in the introduction, I sort of talk a little bit about why it is that we separate the licit from the illicit so much.
[00:27:38]  And part of the claim there is that it really is a kind of CD class politics, right?

=== Serotonin and Drug Revolution (15:40) ===

[00:27:44]  It's a way of judging people, but judging them through the drugs that they take.
[00:27:48]  Though there are different institutional purviews for the DEA and FDA that, you know, make illicit drugs inevitably subject to the sort of romance of the illegal.
[00:27:58]  But, you know, at the end of the day, the wide range of psychoactive substances that Americans are taking, they have to do with not wanting to tolerate our experience sober for a lot of good reasons.
[00:28:13]  And I think it's sometimes confusing to so rigidly separate the licit from the illicit there.
[00:28:19]  Yeah, at one point, I think in the end of the chapter on opiates, you basically say that heroin doesn't treat the pain and dislocation of capitalist subjectivity.
[00:28:28]  I think that's the actual part you said.
[00:28:29]  Or alienation, but they do very efficiently relieve the feelings associated with it, which is true.
[00:28:35]  I mean, I think people look at bums and think like, how the fuck could you live like that?
[00:28:40]  I mean, you see some junkies and they're like completely bent over at the waist, you know, like ragged clothes, they stink.
[00:28:47]  And, you know, you wonder, like, or a lot of people wonder, like, how the fuck could anyone tolerate that?
[00:28:52]  Like, what could be worth that?
[00:28:54]  And something that makes that tolerable and also causes it in some ways is heroin.
[00:29:00]  Or in this case, it's been almost entirely replaced by fentanyl.
[00:29:03]  Just real quick on this, like, I mean, it does, like a lot of people talk about meth and opiates as if people only take them because of some childhood trauma they're dealing with or because of something in their past.
[00:29:16]  But there are very present concerns that heroin and methamphetamine solve for people, especially people dealing with a lot in their present lives.
[00:29:24]  Yeah, I mean, and the fact of the matter is, is like, at the end of the day, people take these drugs because they make them feel good, right?
[00:29:30]  I mean, that's the long and short of it.
[00:29:32]  And that encompasses a whole lot of shit.
[00:29:35]  Absolutely.
[00:29:35]  But like, the reason that people get high is because it feels better than not being high.
[00:29:40]  And whether that means you're sick if you're not high or that means like you're depressed if you're not high or whatever if you're not high, it feels better to be high than not.
[00:29:48]  And like people try to like gussy it up with all of that.
[00:29:50]  Or you feel like your brain doesn't work if you're not high.
[00:29:53]  Or you feel like you can't get the work done that you need to get done if you're not high, right?
[00:29:58]  I mean, that's a huge component of the American experience with drugs, which you talk about in the book a lot.
[00:30:04]  Yeah, I mean, especially since the biological revolution in psychiatry when everyone started talking about neurotransmitters, a lot of people dress up what drugs do for us in really fancy language.
[00:30:14]  But how you just put it, Brace, is basically the sum total of our drug knowledge.
[00:30:18]  Drugs make us feel better.
[00:30:20]  That's it.
[00:30:20]  It's not very complicated.
[00:30:22]  But having said that, you know, well, then a lot of interesting questions arise.
[00:30:27]  Well, like, why do they make us feel better?
[00:30:29]  And what are the conditions under which, you know, what are the things that we're trying to feel better about?
[00:30:34]  So I think drug discourse is oftentimes an interesting point of departure for talking about a lot of things about American society that drugs touch upon.
[00:30:44]  Totally.
[00:30:45]  It's a way of getting around talking about those things, actually, right?
[00:31:01]  You just mentioned the biological revolution, and I think we should talk about that a little bit.
[00:31:07]  I think you say in the book that like, you know, it's the publication of the DSM-3, which I think that was like 1980, kind of really inaugurates this new way of thinking about how our brains work,
[00:31:22]  how we kind of process our like social pressures, whatever that is, like historically traumas, depression, anxiety, all of these kind of different diagnoses that were all a bit disparate are kind of all getting pathologized in one big diagnostic manual.
[00:31:41]  And that kind of serves as this big marker that ushers in this new, I don't know, era, I guess it feels like, right?
[00:31:50]  Yeah.
[00:31:51]  It was definitely a paradigm shift.
[00:31:54]  In the book, I include some advertisements for psychiatric drugs from the 50s and 60s.
[00:32:00]  And people look back at those and are pretty creeped out by them in a lot of ways.
[00:32:06]  You know, they reflect the times.
[00:32:08]  Well, there's lots of women bent over of men's laps, which is always a bit shy.
[00:32:13]  There's one psychiatric drug advertisement that you have in there.
[00:32:17]  I can't remember what it's for, but that is about the 60s and about the anxiety of the 60s and how this, I can't remember, I think it's Librium maybe, is going to be the drug of the 70s because it relieves you from all those neuroses that you accumulated over the past decade.
[00:32:31]  Yeah, all those worries about Cuba and Czechoslovakia, you can forget all those when you take Librium.
[00:32:37]  And that was the essential promise.
[00:32:38]  And it's a little bit creepy to have it stated so directly, but there was something very honest about drug advertising at the time, which is to say, society has presented you with a variety of stressors that have led to different kinds of anxiety.
[00:32:54]  Here are a wide variety of drugs to help you make yourself feel better about those facts.
[00:32:59]  And it's disturbing to have it presented that directly, but it's kind of even more disturbing to have all of those things brushed to the side.
[00:33:08]  And I think that that's sort of what the biological revolution in psychiatry accomplished.
[00:33:12]  It said, forget all the social stressors.
[00:33:15]  It's not society that's causing these problems.
[00:33:17]  It's your brain.
[00:33:18]  It's serotonin, it's norepinephrine.
[00:33:21]  It's these various different neurotransmitters that we've discovered.
[00:33:25]  And what happens when you take this specific drug?
[00:33:28]  Well, it targets a specific serotonin reuptake mechanism that affects your brain in this way.
[00:33:34]  And when you take the drug, your problems are solved.
[00:33:37]  It's just a very reductive way to see drug taking.
[00:33:40]  And I think, you know, really makes it difficult to talk about why people are taking drugs today.
[00:33:48]  Yeah, I mean, I think that's a point that you made.
[00:33:50]  And really, I didn't know that.
[00:33:54]  The inefficacy, I guess, of a lot of SSRIs was really surprising to me.
[00:34:00]  And I want to be clear because I feel like every time we've talked about SSRIs on this show, people get very, I guess, precious about it.
[00:34:07]  I've been on SSRIs.
[00:34:09]  Like, you know, it's a pretty common thing.
[00:34:12]  I'm not saying people shouldn't be on SSRIs, but they're hugely widely prescribed.
[00:34:19]  And I think it's worth talking about what exactly they fucking are.
[00:34:22]  Because I got to be honest with you, I know a lot about drugs and I have a brain, which I assume has serotonin on it, in it, rather.
[00:34:30]  I can't be entirely certain of that.
[00:34:32]  I don't really get what's going on.
[00:34:33]  People are always talking about dopamine, serotonin.
[00:34:35]  I don't know what the hell any of those things are, right?
[00:34:38]  And I feel like a lot of people have this sort of more than myself, but sort of pop understanding of it, which I believe me, I have sub-pop understanding of what serotonin is.
[00:34:49]  But I was shocked to find that you basically make the claim that SSRIs don't really work as good as they're presented.
[00:34:58]  Yeah, and that's not a novel claim.
[00:35:00]  I'm relying upon a lot of other research there.
[00:35:03]  But it's generally thought now that in roughly two-thirds of cases, people would have improved on a placebo alone.
[00:35:11]  They're just not very effective drugs.
[00:35:13]  And they really speak to the nature of the sort of randomized clinical trials that led to these supposedly new drug discoveries in the 80s.
[00:35:24]  You only need two studies proving the efficacy of the drugs in improving people's conditions.
[00:35:31]  And you can run an infinite number of trials to get those two positive results.
[00:35:38]  So it does speak to the flawed nature of the randomized clinical trial.
[00:35:44]  But yeah, they're not that effective.
[00:35:48]  They also have pretty intense side effects for a lot of people.
[00:35:55]  The Prozac, Zoloft, a lot of these SSRIs, they have side effects for a small number of people, but which are pretty intense and are often at times not sort of advertised beforehand.
[00:36:09]  So there's no doubt a lot of people who have been helped by SSRIs.
[00:36:16]  I do think to sort of like forecast to our later discussion about psychedelics that the psychedelic renaissance really will replace a lot of the SSRIs, that a lot of the things that people are taking for depression right now, they're just kind of not as good as the stuff that's going to be on the market soon.
[00:36:34]  Well, I think to kind of piggyback a little bit on what Brace is saying, like, I think you do a great job again in the book of kind of not taking the bait on the kind of like moralizing discussion of this stuff, which is that like, you know, all of these things, all of these, these things, all these, you know, developments or drug developments, they're all kind of like historically, they historically emerge, right?
[00:36:56]  There's this, the kind of like, you know, there's a time in history when Americans were obsessed with anxiety.
[00:37:02]  And, you know, you call it the age of anxiety.
[00:37:05]  And that was the kind of like diagnosis du jour.
[00:37:08]  And the idea of depression even being a diagnosis was like completely unheard of.
[00:37:12]  It was like didn't exist.
[00:37:14]  And then that kind of emerges as this new thing.
[00:37:16]  I think you can make an argument in the most recent one that like, you know, a lot of people, you know, there's been a huge rise in diagnosing bipolar disorder.
[00:37:28]  And all of these things kind of correspond with either emergence of, you know, new developments in psychoactives or new developments in markets for new, you know, pharmaceuticals.
[00:37:42]  All of this stuff all kind of, it's all historically determined.
[00:37:46]  Like none of this is really like, oh, this doesn't work, try this, or that doesn't work, try this.
[00:37:52]  It's all attempting to kind of map on to a larger kind of history here, I think.
[00:37:57]  Yeah, I think that psychiatric drugs, despite what I just said about Prozac, are very effective pharmacologically in helping a lot of people.
[00:38:06]  I think that the thing that they really address is they provide explanatory relief for people.
[00:38:12]  When people don't know how to make sense of the problems that they're going through, that they can name a condition and take a drug.
[00:38:19]  That just does a lot of meaning-making work in their lives.
[00:38:23]  And I think it's really important work.
[00:38:26]  I mean, one thing I also want to add, though, is that the contemporary moment, it's, yeah, I mean, we always should understand it historically.
[00:38:35]  I think there is a pharmacological story to tell there as well, which is that antidepressants, like most drugs, their efficacy wears off over time.
[00:38:44]  And so with the SSRIs, for the people that they do help, you know, if you're on SSRIs for two decades, they're just not going to work in the same way.
[00:38:54]  And when they stop working, people have been increasingly turning to what used to be called major tranquilizers or like the thorazine kind of drugs, and they're now called antipsychotics.
[00:39:06]  And the antipsychotics market has really ballooned in the last decade.
[00:39:11]  And there's a direct connection there.
[00:39:13]  It's when a lot of people's antidepressant drugs stop working, that antipsychotics sort of begin to fill in.
[00:39:19]  And that barrier or that divide between antidepressants, what used to be called kind of minor tranquilizers and antipsychotics, that's been really eroded over time.
[00:39:30]  And so people talk about, you know, Lexapro and Prozac on like a spectrum where before there was a much starker divide.
[00:39:38]  Yeah, I've actually, I was once prescribed low-dose Seraquil for sleep, which I think you mentioned in the book as being given to soldiers sometimes.
[00:39:47]  And let me tell you, it felt, it worked really well.
[00:39:51]  It worked better than Trazodone, the other sleeping medication they gave me.
[00:39:54]  However, I was always very nervous that someone would come over to my house and see that I had Seraquil and think that I had psychotic episodes.
[00:40:00]  But thankfully, they just, I lost my insurance.
[00:40:15]  You mentioned psychedelics, and we should talk about that because it does feel like we are on the precipice of another, I guess, drug revolution.
[00:40:25]  And that there's huge, I mean, many, many states.
[00:40:29]  big pushes to legalize and open up markets for psilocybin.
[00:40:35]  There's like, I think it's like Peter Thiel has some company that's like synthetic psilocybin.
[00:40:42]  It's not just psilocybin.
[00:40:43]  making like synthetic LSD variants or whatever.
[00:40:48]  I mean, I know there's a huge push to like use MDMA, small doses of MDMA in like therapeutic environments.
[00:40:58]  There's obviously the big like very, very hot and popular in the old San Francisco Bay Area of micro dosing culture.
[00:41:07]  This all feels like of one new thing that is about to kind of take America by storm.
[00:41:15]  I can't wait for, I feel like goop is all over it, to be honest.
[00:41:18]  This shit is all gooped up.
[00:41:21]  Yeah, we're in a new era.
[00:41:23]  I think it's appropriate that the era really was inaugurated with the election of Donald Trump.
[00:41:28]  It was in 2016 that you got FDA approval of phase three trials of MDMA.
[00:41:33]  It's also that same year where there were like new major studies in the effectiveness of psilocybin for treating trauma and depression.
[00:41:43]  And yeah, it's taken off pretty quickly.
[00:41:46]  I try to follow it for now and then, but it seems like MDMA will be approved for medical use either later this year or early 2024.
[00:41:58]  So that's coming pretty soon.
[00:42:00]  I imagine that psilocybin and LSD will follow shortly thereafter.
[00:42:04]  And you just mentioned Peter Thiel.
[00:42:06]  So psilocybin being a natural substance, it's not patentable or they can't maintain exclusive patents over it.
[00:42:12]  And so there's this rush amongst Peter Thiel's Compass Pathways and other psychedelic startups to corner the market on different synthetic versions of better known drugs because the synthetic versions, like once you change a little molecule here, you can now patent it and have an exclusive patent on it for five years or however long it is.
[00:42:32]  So there's this rush to make sense of the new psychedelics market.
[00:42:36]  And it does sort of seem like it's going to, you know, take over psychiatry in a few years' time.
[00:42:43]  I mean, they're kind of just, I mean, I don't want to make it too simple, but they're kind of just better drugs than things that psychiatrists have available to them right now.
[00:42:52]  And I think that given, yeah, given the real mental health crisis we're going through, a lot of people are going to see their utility pretty quickly.
[00:43:02]  Yeah, one big thing too that wasn't mentioned yet is ketamine that I think is sort of of a piece with the rest of this stuff.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  I've only taken ketamine once and I would, I did what I guess you would describe as more of a mega dose than a micro dose.
[00:43:17]  So I can't really speak to its therapeutic effects.
[00:43:20]  In fact, I did not have what would traditionally be seen as a good time.

=== Ketamine And The New Psychedelic Age (11:16) ===

[00:43:25]  But I do know that like alongside the rest of the stuff getting really big is also ketamine getting really big.
[00:43:31]  And it's interesting that like the way that all of these things are sort of presented as being used, right?
[00:43:37]  Is they're almost like it's like a cure-all.
[00:43:38]  It's like the psychedelic revolution that cures all the ills.
[00:43:41]  You have MDMA to treat your PTSD.
[00:43:44]  You have ketamine to treat your depression.
[00:43:47]  You have low-dose acid or mushrooms in order to make yourself a more efficient tech worker, which is almost entirely how I see it being presented.
[00:43:57]  Recently, I don't know if recently it came out, but there's been talk about how Elon Musk takes ketamine every so often, which makes a lot of sense.
[00:44:06]  And this stuff is really big with tech people.
[00:44:09]  And I guess it's just interesting that it seems to me, and I always get really suspicious about anything like this.
[00:44:15]  It seems to me that all of these drugs are sort of being marketed as essentially a cure for all of the modern anxieties and depressions and psychosis of kind of the internet age, right?
[00:44:27]  And so one thing that you do in your book that's really makes a lot of sense to me is that essentially there's drugs that are like the big drugs of every age, right?
[00:44:36]  Like prior to World War II, it was like mostly alcohol.
[00:44:38]  You know, you talk about cocaine for the neoliberal era.
[00:44:41]  And it seems like this new era where everything is confusing and psychedelic and like nightmarish, kind of reality itself becomes this bad trip.
[00:44:50]  The solution to that is taking these very potent psychedelics in sometimes small doses, sometimes big ones.
[00:44:59]  Well, I think too, on top of that, it's not just coping, but like you say, you said, was it being a better tech worker or whatever?
[00:45:09]  I would say it's not just tech workers.
[00:45:10]  I think the like the massive demands on what I guess, I mean, some people used to call it knowledge workers or whatever.
[00:45:18]  I think we should just start calling them creators because that's what it is.
[00:45:22]  But this sort of like creator class or creativity class, whatever that is, to come up with new ideas for new companies and new content and new exciting stuff.
[00:45:32]  And it's more advertising and more ways to advertise and more things.
[00:45:37]  There's a lot of people doing kind of histories or genealogies of what you would call like creativity studies.
[00:45:42]  And it's a really interesting aspect of, I would say, modern capitalist development of trying to kind of divine how much creative thinking you can get out of these new knowledge workers.
[00:45:55]  And microdosing and getting on psychedelics and opening up your mind is kind of a classic way of like farming yourself for new creative ideas, which would fit in perfectly with the demands of the kind of new internet creator age, which is a bit creepy considering, and I think this is something you point out in your book, that all these kind of initial research in psychedelics was from the military, right?
[00:46:22]  Yeah, on the sort of Silicon Valley tech bro sort of subculture now, it's funny reading accounts of their psychedelic use because you kind of think that that's why they're taking it, right?
[00:46:36]  They need to be creative at work.
[00:46:37]  And so they're experimenting with different drugs to sort of like push the envelope of creativity.
[00:46:42]  But you read actual accounts of why they're taking them and they like take them before they go to parties because they have because they're antisocial and they don't want to talk to their awful friends at these parties.
[00:46:52]  So it is, you know, as with a lot of things with like the new tech culture, it's much more mundane than it might seem.
[00:46:59]  Just quickly on ketamine, it is a very strange drug to be kind of leading the way with the psychedelic renaissance because a lot of people are preparing for MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, like other drugs to be legal soon.
[00:47:16]  And there are even, you know, active training institutes that are preparing people for this to happen.
[00:47:22]  It's a very strange moment where they're actively training people to work with drugs that are still, in the opinion of the federal government, completely illegal and have no medical use.
[00:47:33]  But ketamine is the one exception to this, right?
[00:47:35]  And so in a lot of ways, it's become the model upon which different therapies are being tried out because it is legal right now and you can use it.
[00:47:45]  But as you said, Bruce, it's a very strange comparison to MDMA and LSD and psilocybin.
[00:47:53]  It's in many ways a sort of bad model drug upon which these new practices are being built.
[00:47:59]  But everything's sort of situated around ketamine for better or worse.
[00:48:05]  Yeah, one point, I mean, more specifically, this has to deal with LSD and psychedelics rather than ketamine.
[00:48:12]  But one point that repeatedly comes up in your book, which Liz touched on a little earlier, is the pioneering of a lot of these substances in a military environment.
[00:48:20]  I mean, speed is, I mean, that is obviously very connected to World War II and, you know, like Benz, you know, taking pills or whatever to go, I don't know, storm the beaches or burn a village.
[00:48:32]  But speaking of burning villages in Vietnam, you know, speed was really, I mean, people think about LSD as sort of being like the Vietnam drug, but really a lot of these guys were just fucking blitzed out of their mind on amphetamines.
[00:48:46]  And it creates, you know, as somebody who's been there, I mean, meth changes you more than any other drug that I've ever encountered.
[00:48:53]  Like meth really can change you.
[00:48:55]  And like it had this military utility and then it's almost like gets put stateside for civilian use.
[00:49:02]  And at the same time, LSD was also, I mean, it was being synthesized in these sort of labs, but then immediately taken under more the intelligence wing of the United States, you know, the government apparatus.
[00:49:19]  And of course, famously used in MKUltra experiments and things like that.
[00:49:24]  And now, I mean, there's just something that sort of, there's something rhyming about that with it sort of being unleashed now.
[00:49:32]  So this sort of like mass, I don't know what to call it.
[00:49:36]  I don't know what I would even diagnose society with right now, but it's this like mass neuroses and insanity and anxiety and depression and schizophrenia that like LSD and all these other sort of psychedelics are kind of being trotted out to treat, whereas in the past and not so recent past, or somewhat recent past rather, they were actually being used to induce.
[00:50:02]  And so I guess like, I don't even know if I really have like a question or a point with that.
[00:50:06]  It's just it's striking to me how many of these things originally had essentially like military applications and then are kind of offloaded to the civilian market to, I mean, we can see the effects of a lot of it now.
[00:50:19]  I think that World War II really created a particular dream or fantasy that human beings could be completely manipulable, that we could crack the secrets of the human psyche and make people do exactly what we want them to do.
[00:50:35]  And this found different expressions with different drugs.
[00:50:39]  So with amphetamines, as you said, by the end of the Second World War, the Allies were pretty clear that amphetamines were really important drugs.
[00:50:48]  They understood the negative consequences of prolonged amphetamine usage.
[00:50:52]  And that's actually spurred a lot of experimentation with different new kinds of stimulants.
[00:50:59]  So the one that the U.S. military has most recently, really sort of intensively experimented with is modafinil.
[00:51:07]  And the promise of modafinil is that unlike with amphetamines, where you kind of get jittery when you take a lot of them and then you kind of crash afterwards.
[00:51:17]  With modafinil, it's a much calmer high.
[00:51:21]  And supposedly you only need, after staying up for a really long time, you only need like a normal night's sleep before you're fully recovered and ready to go back into combat.
[00:51:32]  So on modafinil, I think soldiers have been kept up in experiments for like 85 hours straight.
[00:51:39]  They've broken records for like sleep deficits with modafinil.
[00:51:42]  And that's really been the dream of amphetamines.
[00:51:46]  You know, you don't need to eat as much.
[00:51:47]  You stay alert if a little bit jittery.
[00:51:51]  The story of psychedelics, as you say, is a little bit more insidious.
[00:51:56]  You know, the sort of nascent American deep state learned about truly unthinkable practices that the Germans were committing in their biological warfare division that the Japanese were doing with Shiro Ishi and Unit 731.
[00:52:12]  I mean, really, it's stuff that it's impossible to read about.
[00:52:18]  It's sort of the most abominable acts that human beings have committed on other human beings.
[00:52:23]  And the sort of new CIA saw that and they're like, this is great.
[00:52:29]  Let's do that.
[00:52:31]  And so that was the beginning of Project Bluebird and then eventually MK Ultra.
[00:52:37]  And the kinds of experiments they ran with MKUltra is, you know, it just churns your stomach.
[00:52:41]  It's, yeah, some of the most awful things to read about.
[00:52:45]  There was one guy, Ewan Cameron, who was a psychiatrist.
[00:52:48]  I think he was at McGill.
[00:52:50]  He was.
[00:52:50]  And he had this technique.
[00:52:54]  You might have heard of it.
[00:52:55]  He called it psychic driving, where he would use electroshock therapy at like 30 to 40 times the amount of shock you're supposed to use and then give patients LSD in solitary confinement.
[00:53:10]  And he had these recordings made that were on loop with like phrases such as, my mother hates me, like repeated hundreds of thousands of times.
[00:53:20]  Like this was this was MKUltra.
[00:53:22]  They were trying to break human beings and make them into something totally manipulable.
[00:53:28]  And yeah, you know, it was part of the whole sort of Cold War hysteria.
[00:53:32]  It's a difficult moment to look back at.
[00:53:35]  Yeah, I think anyone interested, especially in the Ewan Cameron stuff, should look up the case of Gene Steele, who I believe sued him, or rather sued the government of Canada five or six years ago.
[00:53:47]  But I mean, there was a lot of people who were basically rendered like brain dead after those experiments.
[00:53:52]  There's kind of a dream of like making people plastic, basically, right?
[00:53:56]  Infinitely moldable.
[00:53:57]  Yeah, I mean, that was very much the dream.
[00:54:00]  And they, you know, it's difficult to tell how much they believed in their own ideology, but the official justification was that the communists had figured out how to brainwash, right?
[00:54:12]  Like there were a bunch of Korean vets who came back and, you know, God forbid, they were critical of the American government.
[00:54:18]  They wanted to stay behind in Korea.
[00:54:19]  They're like, how could good American soldiers say these things?
[00:54:24]  And the story that Alan Dulles and others repeated was that the communists had figured out how to have kind of master slave controls over the human psyche.
[00:54:36]  And so we needed to do the same thing.
[00:54:37]  And that was really the driving justification for projects like MKUltra.

=== Why We Needed Mind Control Drugs (03:50) ===

[00:54:42]  Which I guess is why it's so crazy now that we're finding ourselves in a situation kind of wanting and needing and finding use in those drugs that were originally kind of deployed for those means.
[00:54:53]  I mean, I don't think it means, I don't think it's like a bit necessarily like a bad thing or a pox on us, But it says, you know, like they like to say, it says something about society, you know, that we need to kind of take these military grade fucking drugs in order to sort of tolerate the world that we've created.
[00:55:12]  Well, that's one thing that like a point that really comes up several times in your book.
[00:55:16]  And definitely, you know, you talk about the conclusion, but like.
[00:55:20]  And we were asking, we were talking about this yesterday, like on the phone, like why, why, you know, there's other advanced industrial capitalist societies that have, you know, followed a somewhat different trajectory than the U.S. and obviously have different, you know, social histories and political, blah, blah, blah.
[00:55:36]  But like, we're so much more wasted than everybody.
[00:55:40]  I'm sorry.
[00:55:40]  If you're one of those Europeans who listens to this podcast, let me tell you, you can never make it at an American party.
[00:55:47]  People are going to be snorting shit you have never even thought about.
[00:55:50]  It's looking like it's like the fucking, I'm telling you, it's like the lady with the three breasts from that movie on Mars.
[00:55:57]  Yeah, I mean, it has to do, I think, with the particular contours of the American exception.
[00:56:04]  I think Americans amongst other industrialized countries, we're kind of uniquely subject to the predations of capitalist society.
[00:56:13]  And there aren't really the same kinds of countervailing forces or structures to protect us from the predations of the market.
[00:56:24]  So I sort of chart this in different periods in the book.
[00:56:29]  But in the first, with industrialization, American temperance movements were kind of uniquely successful.
[00:56:36]  I mean, there were experiments with prohibition in various European countries, I think during the First World War, but there was nothing on the scale of American prohibition.
[00:56:47]  I mean, it should be a remarkable fact to people that Americans who have traditionally loved alcohol, it was totally prohibited for a full 13 years.
[00:56:57]  It's a pretty wild social experiment.
[00:57:00]  And so why was that?
[00:57:01]  Why did we have this unique zeal for prohibition?
[00:57:04]  And I sort of tie that in the book to the fact that we didn't have the takeoff of mass working class organizations or political parties.
[00:57:14]  There was really no countervailing force.
[00:57:16]  And so in the absence of some political pushback to industrialized capitalism, we got a predominantly moral response, right?
[00:57:25]  Like all the reformers saw the various social ills that were becoming increasingly visible with urbanization.
[00:57:34]  And they said that, right?
[00:57:36]  That you need some kind of paternalistic moral response to make that stuff go away.
[00:57:40]  And in the absence of actual political structures that could mitigate the effects of capitalism in some way, moral responses seem really appealing.
[00:57:52]  I think at root, that's really what makes America particular.
[00:57:57]  But there's a lot of other factors as well.
[00:58:00]  I think one big one is that, again, during the Second World War, it became clear to a lot of people that taking control over international drug flows was going to be a top priority.
[00:58:11]  And this was both licit drugs and illicit drugs.
[00:58:14]  The government was like, we need a handle on all the drugs in the world.
[00:58:18]  And that's one of the reasons why we have a uniquely large and very profitable pharmaceutical industry because of those decisions in the post-war period that we are going to control all the drugs in the world.

=== Get in the Uber (04:55) ===

[00:58:32]  Yeah.
[00:58:33]  Yeah.
[00:58:33]  That makes sense to me.
[00:58:34]  And you know what?
[00:58:34]  We do.
[00:58:35]  Yeah.
[00:58:36]  We do.
[00:58:36]  We do.
[00:58:38]  Well, the book is fantastic.
[00:58:40]  We really recommend it.
[00:58:41]  We'll link to it in the show notes.
[00:58:43]  It's called Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge out on Verso.
[00:58:52]  The Verso Jacobin collaboration.
[00:58:54]  We don't get to say very often.
[00:58:55]  No.
[00:58:57]  But yeah, it's a good book.
[00:59:00]  And it's also, for those of you out there who might have wasted your brain, Swiss cheese from all the drugs you did, especially weed, especially weed, which is bad for you.
[00:59:11]  I think it's okay to say that now that it's legal in a lot of places.
[00:59:14]  It's obviously not a medicine for most of you.
[00:59:17]  You don't have glaucoma and you're 35.
[00:59:21]  But it is a good book with it.
[00:59:26]  You don't have to get all, it's not all crazy to read.
[00:59:29]  Yeah.
[00:59:29]  And it has great appendix too, by the way.
[00:59:31]  Lots of great footnotes and graphs.
[00:59:33]  I used to say that about me before my surgery.
[00:59:36]  Benjamin, thank you so much.
[00:59:38]  Hey, thanks so much for having me.
[00:59:52]  Wake up, wake up, wake up.
[00:59:54]  I think the Xanax is maybe hitting you a little hard, buddy.
[00:59:57]  Why don't you just get in my car with me and we'll disappear for a couple days?
[01:00:01]  What character is that?
[01:00:02]  Me?
[01:00:03]  That's me.
[01:00:04]  That's the real part.
[01:00:05]  That's you at a party.
[01:00:06]  What you've been hearing, like me talking right now, is the fake me.
[01:00:09]  This isn't the real car.
[01:00:10]  Just get in the Uber with me, man.
[01:00:12]  That's so scary.
[01:00:13]  Let's go to my house.
[01:00:14]  Get in the Uber with you.
[01:00:16]  Get in the Uber with you, man.
[01:00:17]  Get in the Uber with me.
[01:00:20]  I'm going to tell you this.
[01:00:21]  Guys love it if they're all fucked up at a party and you go up to them, like, get in the Uber with me, man.
[01:00:26]  And they're like, where are we going?
[01:00:27]  Like, all good.
[01:00:28]  And just always say, all good.
[01:00:30]  Yeah.
[01:00:30]  All good.
[01:00:31]  Don't ever say destiny.
[01:00:32]  Well, the great thing about that is, you know, you control the destination on your phone.
[01:00:35]  I control the destination on the phone.
[01:00:37]  And oftentimes, if someone just gets in the back of a car with you, they don't even realize that it's your boy driving and not an Uber driver anyways.
[01:00:43]  It's just open a random car door.
[01:00:45]  It is an Uber driver in the sense that any car can be an Uber.
[01:00:49]  So it's just like an unactivated Uber.
[01:00:52]  Sure.
[01:00:52]  Just get in with me.
[01:00:53]  Yeah.
[01:00:53]  We're just going to go to that.
[01:00:54]  It's about Uber potential.
[01:00:55]  Yeah.
[01:00:56]  It's about, it's exactly it's always about potential.
[01:00:59]  It is about potential.
[01:01:00]  Um, just get in the Uber.
[01:01:04]  We gotta change, we gotta just get in the Uber, man.
[01:01:06]  Just get it, please.
[01:01:08]  I'm not getting in any Uber with you anywhere.
[01:01:10]  I don't get in Ubers with females.
[01:01:12]  I don't know if you heard the intro to this podcast, but that is low-class behavior.
[01:01:17]  All right, everyone.
[01:01:18]  I'm Lars.
[01:01:19]  My name is Dr. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da-da, baby.
[01:01:24]  You can't add that.
[01:01:25]  That's how Irish I am.
[01:01:27]  And of course, we are joined by Young O'Shaughnessy.
[01:01:31]  Young O'Shaughnessy, who came over?
[01:01:33]  Yeah.
[01:01:34]  What the fuck says, though?
[01:01:36]  I don't know how Irish people really sound.
[01:01:38]  That is not how they sound.
[01:01:39]  To me, they're like ethereal beasts like the leprechaun, right?
[01:01:42]  What's he sound like?
[01:01:43]  You're doing a little exotic.
[01:01:46]  Me, lucky charms.
[01:01:47]  There you go.
[01:01:48]  Me, lucky, means, me, lucky charms.
[01:01:50]  Get in the Uber with me, man.
[01:01:52]  He's kind of a white goblin.
[01:01:53]  Come get my lucky charm.
[01:01:54]  He's a white goblin.
[01:01:55]  Okay, you gotta marry the two.
[01:01:57]  A goblin and the lucky charms cat?
[01:01:59]  No, do the lucky charms voice get in the uber.
[01:02:03]  Get in the uber with me, man.
[01:02:05]  Oh, oh, oh, you look like you took a little too much cocaine at this party.
[01:02:11]  Why don't you get in the uber with me, bro?
[01:02:13]  It's awful.
[01:02:14]  Get in the uber.
[01:02:15]  You have to say the lucky charms.
[01:02:17]  I have some lucky charms at my house.
[01:02:19]  I ate all of the actual cereal parts, so it's only the marshmallows for you.
[01:02:24]  Come on, brother.
[01:02:25]  Well, that's got that got a little racial there, but I didn't mean it like that.
[01:02:28]  That's just, I don't know how they sound, the Irish.
[01:02:31]  And I'm not good at impressions, but I do.
[01:02:33]  Well, there's that big part of it.
[01:02:35]  And I know I'm just trying to charm you, man.
[01:02:37]  But like, and I know I'm trying to do these impressions to make you laugh and feel disarmed, but just like, please get in the fucking Ubuntu.
[01:02:42]  But what you lack in abilities, you really make up for in, you know, verve.
[01:02:49]  Yeah, I'm trying.
[01:02:50]  Because the original version of that is the Boston get in the fucking car.
[01:02:54]  No, that's not getting a fucking car.
[01:02:57]  They're humiliating me.
[01:02:59]  You know how important this meeting is.
[01:03:00]  How fucking important this is.
[01:03:03]  You're embarrassing me.
[01:03:04]  You're drunk.
[01:03:05]  You're drunk.
[01:03:06]  Get in the car.
[01:03:08]  The VP is there.
[01:03:09]  Oh, God.
[01:03:10]  You're up for a promotion.
[01:03:12]  You've been working on this for years.
[01:03:14]  And she's an hour late and she's drunk and she's just like, oh, come in there, bottle in hand.
[01:03:19]  It's like, cool.
[01:03:20]  I'm trying to make a detective.
[01:03:21]  Cool.
[01:03:22]  Wow.
[01:03:23]  Cool.
[01:03:23]  Wow.
[01:03:24]  Cool.
[01:03:24]  Wow.
[01:03:25]  And this has been Truan.
[01:03:27]  We'll see you next time.