June 2, 2020 • 52 mins
We've covered a lot of drugs in our history, and today we tackle heroin, one of the most dangerous of all.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck your friends, and we
are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's
coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff you Should
Know book, Chuck. That's right. What's the cool, super cool
title we came up with. It's Stuff you Should Know colon,
an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and
(00:21):
it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys.
The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.
It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be.
And we cannot wait for you to get your hands
on it. Yes, we can't. Um and you don't have
to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but
you don't have to wait to order. You can go
pre order the book right now everywhere you get books,
(00:43):
and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering,
which we're working on right now. That's right, So check
it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
All Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark
(01:05):
and there's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there, and it's
just the two of us. Um, we can make it
if we try. It's just the two of us, Chuck
and I. That's right. Uh, and we are stuff you
should know the Heroin addition, Yeah, I haven't covered Heroin yet. No,
we haven't. We have not. Um and Ed helped us
(01:28):
out with this, and I love how he just put
it straight up. Heroin is a demon. I'm like, Che's
way to be objective. You know what occurred to me
because I like to think of things that the lens
of movies a lot of times. Uh, pot movies rarely,
if ever any good. What have you ever seen? Days
(01:49):
and Confused? My friend, I don't consider we we talked
about this on movie Crush and All and I I
don't consider that a weed movie. Although it's featured heavily,
I would call it one of the main characters. I
don't call it a weed movie. I consider weed movies
like Cheech and Chong movies. What about Half Baked, Half Baked?
How High? Like movies where it's literally just about marijuana,
(02:11):
Like Days and Confused about a bunch of friends in
the seventies and the school fair enough, fair enough. Other people, though, said, no,
you know you're wrong. Days confused as a weed movie.
But let's say that as a weed movie, that's one
good one. Like Cheech and Chong movies are okay, but
they're really not that good. They really uh cocaine movies,
I don't are there cocaine movies? Yeah, there's like Blow
(02:35):
was a cocaine movie, and yeah about dealing, Yeah for
sure blows about as cocaine movie as they get. I
can't think of one that's just straight up like following
some cocaine users. Yeah, like that because it's probably like
no one wants to see that, right. But heroin movies
(02:57):
are great, well, I mean you got what spotting, oh,
panic in Needle Park Train, spotting to see um and
and you know if even if it's not about heroin
stuff like pulp fiction, like I think heroin has been
romanticized in film, uh, far more effectively and more often
(03:18):
than any other drug, right, which is pretty messed up,
because if there is a drug out there where Nancy
Reagan actually was right for once in her life and
wasn't just lying through her teeth, it is definitely definitely heroin. Yeah.
It is a genuinely bad, bad drug and basically the
(03:40):
last thing that should be romanticized. Um, But you're right.
I think they've made some pretty good movies about it,
and I think people are like, Wow, those jazz cats
are really into that that skag man um. And uh,
I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine that there
aren't people out there who haven't tried heroin because it
(04:02):
was romanticized in the movies. I hate to say, yeah,
And I think because in the movies it's you know,
it portrays it as it is, which is euphoric and relaxing.
And you know, every movie you see when someone does
the heroin, uh, what you see right afterward is a
big wave of of happiness wash over them. And that's
(04:24):
why you don't see movies about people snorting cocaine, is
because it's just not fun to see someone snort cocaine
and then talk incessantly like a jerk for the next
four hours. You're right, right, depending on how much you got.
I've never done heroin, but I do know that its
chemical name is diah morphine, And we can't talk about
(04:48):
heroin without talking about morphine because it's kind of almost
the same thing. Well, it's morphine's baby, Yeah, basically, it's
it's you can take morphine. Great band name, run it
through morphine, Morphine's baby. It is kind of and I
think about it. Remember that band Morphine? They were really good.
I love Morphine. Yeah, they were great. Um what kind
(05:10):
of music would they be classified as? They're not quite grunched,
They're not quite metal. Now, Morphine was very chill okay,
but they had like a real heavy guitar sound, right,
lots of feedback and distortion. No, I think you're thinking
of a different band. Morphine had the saxophone as like
(05:30):
one of the main interest instruments. Unless I'm thinking, yeah,
you're thinking of Chicago at any rate. No, morphine is
the parent of heroin. Um. You take morphine and run
it through a few hoops with some acids, and all
of a sudden you have heroin. And they apparently are
so close together, um that the average user couldn't tell
(05:54):
the difference between the two, because your body basically takes
heroin and turns it into morphine. The biggest differences are
the um, the how long the high lasts. It's much
shorter with heroin, but I think it it sets on faster,
and then the addictiveness heroin is even more addictive than morphine,
and morphine is awfully addictive itself. Heroin is apparently just
(06:20):
in a whole different league as far as addictiveness goes. Yeah,
that's what I've heard, uh, And that's certainly how they
portrayed in movies as well. To be fair, it's like
it's although there are movies that show, like pulp fiction
is a good example of a functioning heroin addict, but
usually that's not the case in a movie. No, it's true,
and I mean m yeah, they usually do show how
(06:43):
just kind of gross it gets for heroin addicts. There's
it's it's rare. It's rare that it's it's not that
part isn't included. Like think about, um, what was the
name of that movie. It's Jared Leto and word reccoim
for a Dream. Yeah, that was harrowing. I always say
(07:05):
I got pink eye from watching that movie with that
dirty dude. Oh man, that's a perfect way to say it.
I mean, there's who can forget the one image of
the when he injected into that festering sore. Yeah, the
abscess of I think I came across something that I
think is what it was. It's called wound botulis um uh.
(07:30):
And that's a that's a side effect, a risk of
of heroin um, which I mean, if you think Heroine's glamorous,
just look up wound botuli is um or gang green
or an abscess from injection site. And also fact, if
you're thinking about doing heroin, do that um reccoi. And
for a Dream is also a good example of why
(07:50):
they don't make movies about cocaine and speed because the
probably the most unsettling aspect of that movie is the
the subplot with or the plot line with Ellen Burr
with Ellen Burst. It was hard to watch. It was
very hard to watch, although some parts of it were
pretty funny, like when the TV is just straight up
talking to her. That was hysterical. That in that movie
(08:13):
was nuts. Okay, So back to heroin. UM, there's apparently, uh,
there is a very pure form of heroin, which makes sense.
I mean, any kind of processed drug like cocaine or
something like that, Um, there's going to be a purest
form of it, but far and away the vast majority
of people who use that drug are never going to
(08:34):
encounter that purest form. It gets cut and there's impurities
that are introduced to make it less pure so you
can sell more. Um. And so the heroin goes from
like this off white kind of slightly grayish color to
everything from like orange and brown to black. Um, like
black tar heroin like one of the most famous heroin
(08:57):
varieties ever, from what I've heard, is comes from Mexico,
and it's just really bottom of the barrel stuff. Like
imagine that the purest form is a almost white powder
and you're shooting black tar. That kind of gives you
an idea of how far from purity black tar heroin is. Yeah,
(09:17):
I saw that that black tar heroine is usually cut
with either burned corn starch or lactose. Great. There's also
there's cheese heroin too, which is supposedly um, pretty rough
as well as far as impurities go. But it also
just sounds gross like cheese heroin. Yeah. Why did why
take a word that's great like cheese and screw attach
(09:39):
it to heroin? That's right? Uh. The other ways it
can be sold, which I didn't know. It can be
sold as a salt, which you know how in movies
if they're ejecting it, they always cook it up in
the spoon, And I think part partially why movies glamorize
it is because just cinematically, to shoot, um, to film
someone cooking something in the spoon and in the whole
(10:00):
process is just you know, it's interesting looking, it looks
good on screen, looks so glamorous. It does in a
little in a weird way. Um. But when you sell
it as a salt, it does not need to be
heated and dissolved. It's just I guess you can just
dissolve it like salt will dissolve in water. Um. You
can smoke it, you can snort it, you can put
(10:23):
it in your butt. You sound like um. Like Chris
Farley and Black Sheep, I never saw it. There's this
part where he's like shooting, snort and smoke and drop
and I've just I've seen too much Chris Farley in
my life. He's yeah, he's constantly in my head. Or
you can eat heroin apparently, yeah, especially cheese heroin. Oh
(10:46):
really okay. Um, So that's there's like a bunch of
different kinds of heroine you can get depending on where
you are. It's going to come from different places in
the world, which we'll talk about. Um. And there's no
denying it gets you super duper high when you when
you do Heroin. UM. The problem is is that within
(11:08):
a few hours of that, you start to enter Heroin withdrawals.
And we'll talk about exactly what goes on in the
brain a little more, but basically your brain is saying, oh,
I need more of what you just gave me because
I adjusted to life with that UM, with that level
of dopamine release that it triggered, UM, and now everything's
(11:30):
just horrid and black. And again, this can start in
just a few hours, depending on how many times you've
shot Heroin, how much of a dependence you've developed, how
much tolerance you've developed, and all these factors come together
to determine just how bad your withdrawal symptoms are. Yes, uh,
you know, most movies glamorized Heroin for a little while,
(11:53):
but then we'll also show the dark side, like you said,
and usually will include a kicking Heroin scene. Yeah, very famously,
very famously in Train Spotting when he rattles off that
list when he locks himself in his apartment, you and
McGregor enlists out all the things that he needs to
successfully kick What is the very funny I just pulled
(12:15):
it up here music, tomato soup, tint indigo mushroom soup,
eight tins of a consumption cold ice cream, vanilla, one
large tub of magnesia milk, one bottle pharmacs, uh paracetamal, mouthwash, vitamins,
mineral water, lucas aid, pornography, one mattress, one bucket for urine,
(12:40):
one for feces, and one for vomitus. Yes, supposedly, after
a while, the withdrawal gets so bad that you just
can't get out of bed to to poop or pee
or vomit, but you're still going to vomit and poop
um withdrawal symptoms kicking, terrible diarrhea, terrible vomiting UM. And
(13:01):
it's the thing is is the withdrawal is almost never fatal,
but it can be fatal. And it's not from the
withdrawal symptoms themselves, it's secondary to it. Like you're vomiting
and peeing and um pooping so much that you can
become dehydrated, your electrolite balances can go off, and you
can die of heart failure because the electrical impulses in
(13:23):
your heart are no longer functioning correctly. But if you
know what you're doing, um and you especially do it
under medical supervision, you can have a far easier and
and um much less life threatening experience of kicking heroin.
The good news is this, even if you are the
(13:45):
the person who is most addicted to heroin in the
world right now, if you decided to kick it, you
have four to five or six really bad days ahead
of you before you're free of your heroin addiction. It's
that simple. Any heroin, Um, I want to keep saying
heroin addict, We definitely don't say that anymore. But any
(14:07):
person addicted to heroin walking around today, Chuck is just
a week away from being free of heroin. It's just
that that would be the worst week of their entire lives.
But they can do it. Every single one of them
can do it. An entire physicians practices and um convalescent
centers and rehabs have been set up to medically assist
(14:30):
in making the withdrawal process, you know, easier and safer,
so that it does increase the chance that they're not
gonna be like, forget this, I just need some heroin.
Everything will be fine again. Yeah, and um, you know
you're probably gonna get if you're under medical supervision. Some
sort of sedative or a drug that memics heroin. Um,
(14:51):
most commonly, I think methodone. Yeah, it's like subox zone now,
which is, yeah, it really binds tightly to your pioid receptors,
so it blocks heroin when you're doing it. Um, so
you become less and less dependent on heroin. And then
the subak zone is just much less addictive or habit form.
And because it's just much less potent, so you can
(15:13):
get off of the subok zone after you're off of
the heroine. So why heroin makes you feel so good? Um? People,
you know, we don't fully understand the brain chemistry, um
of exactly how that works. But uh, we do know
that the chemicals, you know, once it gets in your brain,
the brain breaks it down into other chemicals, and those
(15:34):
chemicals um sort of just closed down the things that
normally regulate your dopamine. And so your brain makes a
bunch of dopamine right right, So you've got a bunch
of dopamine going. But it also affects other parts of
your brain too, to where say, um, you're basically imagine
your brain chemistry normally is that in this nice kind
(15:57):
of harmony? And then heroin comes in and just totally
over whelms it with a tidal wave of a dopamine. Well,
your brain says, oh jeez, well, I need to to
up all of the production of all these other um
neurochemicals so that I reach homeostasis again, so that jack's
all the levels up. UM. And then when the heroine
dies back UM, because your dose is wearing off, your
(16:21):
dopamine levels drop, but then all these other levels are
still up, and all of a sudden, it's like your
brain is screaming in a in a crowded room where
everybody just stops talking, and it's just your brain screaming
now right, or like the music cuts off in your
brain was trying to talk loud over the music. It's
very much like that. And so some of these other
chemicals can produce some really unpleasant sensations. And the upshot
(16:42):
of it is that that dopamine, the one thing that's
making you feel really really good, is the one thing
that's truly lacking then because your brain isn't making it
naturally UM, it's making all this other stuff that makes
you feel quite uncomfortable, uh, in much higher amounts. And
that's that's when you say, I need some more heroin.
And the other thing is this, as your brain starts
(17:04):
making more and more and more of these other neurochemicals,
you need more and more and more heroin to release
increasing increasingly larger amounts of dopamine just to get to normal.
That's what they mean when they say, just to get
to normal, I have to do this much heroin, and
then I have to do even more to get high. Um.
And that is what's called tolerance. And the more tolerance
(17:28):
you have, the worshier withdrawal symptoms are going to be.
Because that means when you stop with the heroine, the
levels of everything else are really really high, and the
dopamine is way back down in the basement. Um. And
that's that's basically heroin in a nutshell. Yeah, And you
know tolerance. There's tolerance for every drug in the world, uh, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, everything,
(17:53):
but um, it feels like heroine's. Um. It's just such
a dangerous game you're playing there with the tolerance levels
and then getting off and getting back on or more
so a little, probably more so than other drugs even
and then the well, the other thing that makes it
dangerous too is again, withdrawal itself is very rarely fatal,
(18:13):
especially when it's assystematically. But um heroin itself is extraordinarily
dangerous too, because one of the big effects that it
has on your body is lowered respiration, so you aren't
taking very deep breaths any longer. You can actually die
of like carbon monoxide poisoning because you're not exhaling enough
(18:34):
carbon monoxides or you're not getting in enough oxygen and
you basically just stop breathing, or you die of hypoxia
because you're the heroin overwhelmed your ability to breathe. Basically,
when you've done too much, when you've done a fatal dose. Wow. Yeah, alright,
let's take a break and we will talk about the
super interesting history of heroin right after this. Okay, okay, so, uh,
(19:24):
you know we've I think everyone sort of knows that
heroin to sort of big facts about heroin that are
super interesting that everyone always says is that heroin is
a brand name or a trade name, and that heroin
used to be readily prescribed kind of like cocaine was,
uh in this case for for pain is a pain medication.
(19:48):
And we're talking about the opium poppy plant, the pep
haber somna faron And since ancient Egypt is like at
least people have been used sing this to treat pain,
this narcotic to treat pain. Yeah. Well, so if we
had just held with opium, I mean, it's you know,
(20:09):
being an addicted to opium is bad enough, but the
world would definitely be a much different place if we
just stayed with opium, just kept it natural, you know
what I'm saying. But no, no, that's how we do.
We figure out ways to make things even more robust
and more amazing. And so I think in uh, oh,
I'm not sure exactly when, but in the eighteen hundreds,
(20:31):
definitely before the eighteen sixties, the German chemical company merk
Uh isolated morphine from opium, so you didn't need all
the other stuff anymore. You just head straight up morphine.
And this was good and in one respect, like we
now had a genuinely powerful anesthetic, analgesic to where when
(20:54):
somebody was in a great deal of pain, say having
their leg amputated in a field hospital during the Civil War,
you could give them morphine and they wouldn't suffer as much.
So in that respect, it was really good. The problem
is we didn't understand addiction anywhere near like we do today.
And so a lot of those people who got morphine
when their leg was amputated came back from the war like,
(21:14):
where can I get some more morphine? I could really
use some right now, And morphine addiction became really pronounced
by you know, the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties in the
United States. Yeah, And there were a couple of big
years after this. Big big events happened in eighteen seventy
four and eight. In eighteen seventy four, there was a
(21:35):
chemist name C. R. Older, right, and he wanted to
transform morphine into something that wasn't as addictive. So he
tried this process where he um it was called acetylation,
where he basically tried to cause it to react with
an acid to change the composition of it to make
(21:55):
it less addictive. He created diocetyl morphine, which is heroin,
and he gave some to his dog, as you do.
And his dog did not fair too well, did not die,
but almost did. He stole a stereo later and he said,
you know what, Uh, this stuff is dangerous. I'm gonna
(22:16):
put it away. I'm gonna publish this paper. No one
really paid much attention to this paper until a man
named Einrich Dresser in for the Bear company, picked up
this paper and said, let me pick up where he
left off. Yeah, and he did and he can't he
He basically recreated that um dia morphine concoction and heroin
(22:39):
was born. He gave it to some test subjects. One
of them said that it made him feel heroich. Is
that how you would say it? Yeah? Hero ish h
g r O I almost there s h. Yeah. These
are Germans we're talking about here, so they love the
sh sound for sure. But but because um, I think
one thing we left off is not only does heroin
(23:01):
get you high, it also boost your confidence tremendously as well.
And that's what that guy was describing. He felt high,
he felt confident, and he described it as heroic. And
so that's where the trade name heroin came from. Was
um from Dresser basically saying, that's that's a great name
for this. Uh So I'm gonna call it heroin and
we will cure the world's morphine addicts of their morphine addiction.
(23:24):
And funny enough, they did. Because everybody's like heroin is
a great way to treat morphine addiction. The problem is
is once they kicked morphine, they were super duper addicted
to heroin and they were even worse off than they
have been before. Yeah, it's funny the word heroin. It's
so so commonplace now you don't really think about it
being a trade name, but it totally sounds like a
(23:45):
trade name when you think about other drugs at the time,
Like it sounds like a modern sort of pharmaceutical and well,
actually these days those names are just terrible. Like Dr
pinkel Whites feel Good oil was next to it on
the shelf, you know. Yeah, but now like pharmaceutical drug
names or they all try and work in uh well,
(24:05):
I guess they did that with heroin because it makes
you feel heroic, but they try and work in how
great it makes you feel into the name itself, Like, well,
I don't know if I should name check anybody. I
can think of a few on the top of my head. Yeah,
And they're like they all have to work the letter
X in. If X isn't in there, it's not gonna sell.
That's like the mantra of the pharmaceutical And it's really
(24:25):
manipulative when you think about it, it's the dad they
teach you how to pronounce it to your doctor. So, um,
they did these human trials of heroin, which were about
four weeks long of getting heroin as a patient. If
you had a cough or a sore throat, you felt
pretty great obviously. Um. Can you imagine just going and
(24:49):
getting like some heroin laws for a sore throat? Yeah?
I wonder if those still exist anywhere. I'm probably not.
I'm sure that everybody took them. I bet you there's, like,
you know, buried in some attic drawer somewhere. Somebody's got
some heroin lossages from back then. So uh, bear said
(25:09):
the drug is safe. Um, it's non habit forming. Will
even put that on the label. And here's the downside
is these analgesic effects last a few hours. So if
you've got if you're sick and you've got a coffin
sore throat, Um, you're you're gonna be taking this stuff
like four or five times a day for a couple
of weeks because it makes you feel good every time
(25:29):
you take it a few hours later it wears off.
You take some more, and before you know it you're
addicted to heroin, right, I mean there's probably no drug
in the world where you do it just once and
you're automatically physically addicted or dependent on it, right, is
do people claim that to be true? Oh? Yeah, they
claimed about acid for goodness sake, like they like, yes,
(25:51):
they say that about every single drug, Which is the
problem because if you are a brave soul and you say, well,
it probably won't happen to me, and I'll see, I'll
see what it's like, and then you try it and
you find you're not addicted, you're like, oh, well they
were lying, I'll just go do some more. But if
you say something like you're probably not going to get
addicted the first time, but with a drug like heroin
(26:12):
in particular, you're really playing with fire every time you
do it, because you come that much closer to to
being likely to be addicted to it. Um, I think
it would make somebody maybe think twice before trying it
even that first time, rather than just trying to scare
them off like, um, you know, no, you're gonna be
addicted immediately and you're going to kill your parents kind
(26:34):
of thing, you know. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally don't don't
lie to people. So uh, the next decade kind of
comes and goes heroin. It becomes more obvious that it
was dangerous and that it was addictive. Bear continued selling
it um until about nineteen thirteen, UM, but as early
(26:56):
as nineteen o six that was something called the Council
of Farm Recy, UH, Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American
Metal Medical Association, and it had there were warnings saying
like hey, heroin can get really addictive. Uh. In nineteen
o nine, and this is the full seven years before
Bear quit selling it um nineteen o six, and then
(27:17):
in nineteen o nine, Uh, there were people the lawmakers
met in Shanghai with some doctors for the International Opian Commission,
which I'm sure it was quite a party. Oh, it
was a ranger, and they said that you know what,
opium and all these drugs related to opium are really dangerous.
They're prone to abuse, and it's up to all of
(27:39):
you countries to regulate this via the International Opium Convention
at the Hague in nineteen twelve. But it's up to
you how you want to do this in your country. Yeah.
It was opium and coca leaves and their derivatives and salts,
I think is how they put it. And they basically said, there, yeah,
there's some real problems coming from these and we need
to we need to do something about it. Go figure
(28:00):
out how to do it. And so the United States said, oh,
we've got this covered. We're gonna pass the Harrison Narcotics
Tax Act, which is now these days just called the
Harrison Act, and it basically established the War on drugs
as we understand it today. Way back in nur UM,
do you remember our CIA dosing LSD Unsuspecting Americans with
(28:20):
LSD episode one of the best. Do you remember George White,
like the guy who was actually running like the the experiments.
He was one of those early UM drug agents, narcotics
agents who was you know, beating up addicts because of
the Harrison Act basically gave him the permission to um.
And one of the things about the Harrison Act that
(28:42):
was so insidious, aside from the fact that the the
it kind of promoted this whole UM, this air of propaganda,
like lying to people like, you know, telling people that
if you're if your wife tries hero when she's gonna
run off with the UM. You know, a black guy
or something like like that. Kind of that level of
propaganda of associating certain groups with certain drugs to scare
(29:06):
other people from taking those drugs, just horrific stuff that. Um.
It also said almost explicitly, addiction is not a disease,
So you can no longer use these drugs to help
somebody kick these drugs. So doctors started going to prison
(29:27):
like trying to help people kick heroin by giving them
like a heroine regimen to to help them ease off
of it. You would land in prison for that kind
of thing, and doctors did get thrown in prison for it. Yeah,
and Ed made a really good point here, one that
I had never considered. Um. Something else about the Harrison
Act is you tend to think of like the old
days as being super conservative about things like drug use.
(29:52):
But before they were made illegal, the drugs were still there,
and drug people that were addicted to these drugs were
still there, but there wasn't the same stigma. They were
sort of, I mean, they were outcasts of society, but
they weren't criminals yet. They were people that still needed
help and that you could rehabilitate. Um And there was
(30:12):
I think some more compassion even but Harrison that comes along,
and all of a sudden, you're a criminal. Uh, And
the only way to get these drugs is and keep
doing these drugs that you're addicted to, is by being
a criminal. And that created almost it almost created the
system that we're with today. Uh, this this war on drugs,
(30:34):
which is has shown to not work. Right. It definitely did,
and that it's there are some reasons why heroin in
particular will always be really hard to eradicate and why
the Harrison Act was kind of wrong headed. It set
everything out on the wrong foot. Was this idea that
(30:54):
if you can just punish people into not using heroin
any longer. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't, And
there's some reasons why you can't do that, because as
long as heroin is around, they're going to be people
who become addicted to heroin and who are addicted to heroin.
And then if you couple that with the idea that
addiction is not a disease, so you should not get
(31:15):
any kind of medical treatment for it, and we're actually
going to arrest doctors who try. Then all you've just
done is create like a huge legal and moral quagmire
for your society. But that's what it did. But there
are some reasons why heroin will probably always stick around,
and that is, first of all, it's very easy to make, right. Yeah,
(31:36):
I mean you're sort of in a I mean it's
like with most drugs, you're in a lose lose situation
if you're trying to eradicate it because you can't start
at the user end that has shown to not work,
like you said. And in the case of most drugs,
you can't start at the processing end either, because like
you said, it's easy to make. Um, it's it's just
(31:57):
a chemical process at work. It doesn't rek wire super
expensive equipment. UM. That's why if you get busted, you
can either just ditch your equipment or pack it up
pretty quickly and take it with you. Um. It is Uh,
it's just difficult to disrupt the process of actually making
the heroine. Yeah. Basically, if you could set up a
(32:19):
still for whiskey out in the woods, you could probably
make a heroin UM processing operation. The thing is, if
you're in like the Smoky mountains or something like that,
you might set up your heroine processing operation then go, well, wait,
I need some opium poppies. Those are kind of hard
to come by in the Smokies, And you're right, it's
(32:39):
very hard to find opium poppies in the United States.
That's one thing that the United States government and law
enforcement has done, has basically eradicated opium producing poppy plants
from the United States, except on the TV show Ozark.
But I haven't gotten to the point yet to be quiet.
But really now I haven't. The point is because I
(33:02):
ended up going on starting better call Saul, and now
I'm super into that got you, um. But the problem
with that is that yes we are. We kept it
out of the United States. It's not here, but pop
poppies grow really well just about everywhere. And as long
as you have a country where officials who are supposed
(33:22):
to be watching whether people are cultivating poppies or not
can be bribed um poor people who can be forced
into cultivating poppies, or farmers who can be bought off
to to cultivate poppies. Poppies are going to grow, and
over time they have been eradicated from one place or another,
but then they just kind of pop up somewhere somewhere
else around the world, and that part of the world
(33:44):
becomes the global supplier of opium for heroin processing. Yeah.
I mean for most of the nineteenth century, China was
the big leader and opium exports along with India. And
then World War Two comes along the drug train. It
kind of shuts down because shipping is just super restricted. Uh.
Communist Party takes over in China and they said no, no, no,
(34:07):
we're not gonna We're not gonna do this anymore, and
they kind of stopped. It was really effective in China
isn't a big opium supplier ever since then. But then
it moved to what's called the Golden Triangle, which is Laos,
Minimar and Thailand UM as well as Golden Crescent, which
is different parts of the Middle East, but mainly if
(34:28):
we're talking opium production, we're talking about Afghanistan. Yeah, And
when the United States invaded Afghanistan, like one of the
one of the sidelines that was doing was destroying opium
opium fields and I guess it worked for a little while,
but not really like we were carrying out drone strikes
on UM heroin processing facilities and basically did nothing to
(34:51):
disrupt the heroin trade. And then as fewer and fewer
US troops were in Afghanistan, the heroin just came back.
Opium poppies came back in, heroin processing came back, and
even more than the United States military was effective, the
Taliban had been more effective before the United States went
(35:13):
into Afghanistan. When the Taliban basically ruled Afghanistan, Um, there
was very little opium production going on, and it actually
increased whether you the United States was there. And then
after the United States basically left Afghanistan, when the Taliban
came back, they were it was like Taliban free and easy.
(35:33):
They started looking the other way on opium production and exactly.
So that's another thing that's actually used kind of frequently,
like where if you are buying heroin, you were probably
funding a terrorist group. It sounds ridiculous and made up,
but it's actually probably true depending on where you are
in the world. Um, if you're in the United States,
(35:55):
you're probably funding a vicious drug cartel because most of
the the opium that makes its way as heroin into
the US comes from Mexico and Colombia, which I didn't
right Yeah, and the other of the global heroin supply
is coming from Afghanistan right now. But like we said,
you know, you you squash it in one area, it's
(36:18):
gonna pop up in another. It's um, it's it's very
simple supply and demand, and it's never gonna change. Uh. Ed.
In fact, this is he should totally trademark this line.
He said, a war on drugs, it's like a war
on water when you know what's going to rain tomorrow.
Did he make that up? I don't know. I've never
heard it before. So let's say he really crystallizes it. Yeah,
(36:42):
it's good writer for sure. Should we uh? Should we
take our final break here? You betch all right, We'll
be back with more heroin. Right after this, you mentioned
(37:20):
World War two, Chuck um, and that almost entirely shut
down because shipping was so restricted during World War Two.
Everybody was watching every ship, not just the United States,
watching stuff that was coming into the country. People were
watching it going from one place to another. It might
get torpedo. It was just really tough to smuggle things
(37:42):
during World World War Two. And I read that the
same thing is going on now because of the coronavirus pandemic,
because of things like shelter and place orders um or
restricted travel, that it's way way harder to smuggle or
even just ghost gore Um. Then it was before the pandemic,
(38:03):
and as a result, they think a heroin drought is
is coming on or has already started, and so prices
are going to rise, and probably more and more people
who were addicted to heroin before the pandemic will come
out of the pandemic not not addicted to heroin anymore,
but like they gave meth a try, and now they're
really into that. Have you ever heard the old kamal
(38:24):
anjiohnny bit about the Heroin plus Thailand all cold medicine. Yeah,
refreshed my memory. It's been a while. Well that was
I can't remember. I think it has a name like
a designer drug or whatever, which was basically heroin and
Thailand all cold medicine mixed. And he just says this.
It was pretty early in his comedy career when he
(38:45):
was just doing stand up. But he just has a
very funny bit about the fact that he you know,
you're already doing heroin, you're all and then then his
voice and everything is just so perfect, You're already doing Heroin. Yeah.
I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people
on the planet. He's great he's a big movie star now.
He is. Good for him. I'm glad for him. He's
(39:06):
he's a good dude. He did our one of our
variety shows at that time. He did killed It. Everybody
killed it that night if I remember correctly. Yeah, that
was a really good show. That was a lot of fun.
Josh Bierman and Nick Thune. Maybe Nick Thune performed, Uh
so did um Hampton youwt did some killer stand up,
that's right, Gianni. And we had Nate Demo did a
(39:31):
little Memory Palace Live too. Yep. And um, what was
the UCB group? I want to say Raw High, but
it wasn't raw Hide, it wasn't Comanche. Oh Convoy Convoy.
Did we have all of them on one stage? Yes, dude,
one night. Yeah, that was a great show. That was
(39:53):
a great show. They didn't even need us. We were
barely there. We launched a million careers that night. Um,
all right. So we were talking about supply and demand.
That is always going to be a problem with the
war on drugs because, like you said that, you can't
arrest people into not wanting to do drugs. This just
(40:14):
proven to not be a deterrent when people want to
do drugs. They're gonna find them and they're gonna do them. Um,
the supply is hard to eradicate because of all the
things we mentioned. You can't wipe out all the If
the demand is there, then they're going to find places
where the government is bribable or weak enough to plant
those poppy fields. And as long as there are desperate
(40:37):
people and poor people or people that are addicts, then
there will be drug mules and people that are willing
to either willing to smuggle the drugs or a cartel
who will hold your family hostage to force you to
smuggle those drugs. Can you imagine that being your reality today?
Like right now, man, Like you're running across like a
desert right now with a bunch of heroin on you
(40:59):
because your wife is being held hostage, your wife and kid.
Like that's happening to you right this second. That happens
to people sometimes, like it's so rare, and especially here
like in the United States, it's just like such a
remote worry that there's no reason to lose any sleep
over it for you, But don't forget about the person
(41:20):
that that's actually happening to right now, And like how
what what? What? They must be thinking during that run
across the desert, like how stressed out are they? Like?
What are what's going through their head? I just I
can't imagine what it would be like to actually be
in that situation. Like when I imagine it, I imagine
it as you do, like experience a movie. It's remote,
(41:42):
it's it's fictitious, it's it's um fantasy. These are characters.
But when when I can just get my brain just right,
it's a little bit of it floods in and it's
just overwhelming. How nuts and horrific that without experience would be. Yeah,
and I think that's something that uh well, I mean,
(42:02):
I think if you're if you have a problem with
drug addiction, you're not considering a lot of things, but
certainly one thing that's probably the last thing you're considering
is how it got to you, how it got to
your dealer, and the devastation that it has wreaked along
the way, you know, Right, Yeah, that's a that's absolutely true.
I think that's an excellent point for people to remember.
(42:24):
So Ed wrapped up this research with the something I'd
never really thought about about marijuana being a gateway drug. Um,
we've talked about that, and a lot of people scoff
at that notion, but he makes a case here that
kind of makes sense that the system with marijuana in
the nineteen forties and fifties, especially in the in urban areas,
(42:47):
and with with jazz clubs and jazz musicians, it kind
of set up a system where heroin could find a
pretty easy entry point. Yeah, because it was coming in
largely from in the beginning of the twentieth century up
to the first uh well, I guess the forties and fifties.
So at the beginning of the twentieth century it was
interrupted by World War Two, and then it came back
(43:08):
with a vengeance in the forties and fifties, and it
was being imported largely by um Asian people who didn't
know people outside of their community. So they figured out
how to connect with the jazz musicians who already had
pot friends, and the jazz musicians started turning their pop
friends on yeah, on onto heroin. And part of the
(43:32):
reason why heroin was able to kind of make such
entree into American culture, especially through this route, was that
all these people were not they weren't drug naive, they'd
used pot before, they smoke pot all the time. They
knew for a fact that it wasn't addictive, it didn't
turn you into a fiend like had been depicted hysterically
in this government propaganda against pot. And so all of
(43:55):
the warnings against heroin were probably just as full of
hot air too, and it just turns out that they
happened to be wrong this time. Yeah, and I mean,
you know, the jazz scene was rife with heroin abuse. Uh,
Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Ray Charles. Yeah, Ray
Charles totally. It's kind of jazz. But yeah, he counts.
(44:16):
I remember when Philip Seymour Hoffman Um, when he died
of a fatal overdose. I know they tried to pin
it on um a jazz guy is his dealer. Oh
really Yeah, super kind of throwback thing. But even still
today they're like, yeah, jazz people can't be trusted. They
love heroin. Billie Holliday was fully addicted to heroin. It
(44:40):
was it was all over the jazz community. Yeah, because again,
so this is one of those things where you try once,
try twice, and all of a sudden you're doing it
a lot more and you have to do more and
more and more. And if it's all around you and
everybody seems to be having a good time despite puking
their guts out first, um, you might give it a try. Uh,
(45:00):
that's just super interesting. The idea that that pot was
connected as like this this gateway for America to heroin,
because there's just such worlds apart Yeah and alcohol. I mean,
if you look at the history of jazz, heroin and
cirrhosis are like two of the biggest factors and true
killing off jazz musicians, true dad interesting. One thing we
(45:23):
didn't really touch on, well two things. One that the
epidemic of fentanyl laced heroin, which apparently if you're buying
that on purpose it might be sold to you is
magic or budd ice o God. But fentanyl is about
fifty times stronger than heroin, so the fatal dose is
much much much lower. It takes way less to kill you.
(45:49):
But if you don't know that you're buying fentinyl laced heroine,
you're doing your regular dose of heroin, that fentinyl can
very easily kill you. And that happens a lot. It's
happening more and more. Uh, no idea, who's doing it?
They think it might be coming from China, but who
knows what the deal is with that. But that's one
big problem with heroin addiction is you might overdose. The
(46:12):
likelihood of you overdosing with the introduction of fentanyl is
way higher than it was before. I think the whole
thing really started to pick up steam about two thousand thirteen.
And then the whole reason there's a heroin epidemic right
now in the United States, Chuck, is because the a
few pharma companies got America and a large part of
(46:34):
the world hooked on opioid painkillers like oxyconton, and the
government said, well, this is a real problem. We need
to get everybody off of opioids. So um Perdue Pharma,
you need to make this OxyContin impossible to inject or
snort or whatever. And they did. They made oxyconton so
that when you crushed it, it turned into a gel
(46:54):
that you couldn't do anything with. Um and nobody could
get high off boxy cotony more. You couldn't find. It
was too expensive. It was just impossible to get. But
heroin suddenly made a huge appearance and it was cheaper.
It did the trick. You could find it just about everywhere,
and now, all of a sudden, combined with the two
thousand and eight recession and all of the despair that
(47:15):
that generated, there's a heroin epidemic in the United States
that's still raging and going strong. And we have a
lot of those pharmaceutical companies and the the agencies that
are supposed to regulate them more closely to to blame
for that. Yeah. I remember in college there was a
one year and it was probably don't even a year,
(47:36):
but like one season where heroin kind of came through
town and in my crowd, like not my close friends,
none of them did it, but I knew. I knew
a person through a person who had, you know, known
like very loosely socially that she o'deed and died from
heroin during this like several month period. But I just
(47:57):
remember it was being talked about a lot, and it
was just around and people were doing it, and uh,
it never invaded my inner circle. But I just remember
that it was a kind of a scary time in
college when it kind of blew through and then kind
of blew back out again. It wasn't like a I mean,
I'm sure there were always people that we're doing Heroin
at some point in Athens. But it was like a
(48:19):
thing for a little while. Yeah, no, it was. It
was always very hard to find it just basically non existent.
Um when I get the feeling, yeah, you know. And
then it started to really pick up steam in like
the mid two thousand aughts. I think, yeah, it's weird,
but yeah, that's yeah. Heroin is a demon, Chuck, it
(48:40):
is a demon. And this girl was she was looking back,
probably twenty two years old. What a waste man. Yeah,
that's sad. Um, Well that's Heroin. Everybody, don't do it.
Don't do it. Just don't just go your whole life
saying I've never done Heroin. Not I'm all good. You're
not missing out on that much, Okay, okay. Uh. And
(49:01):
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This
is about We heard a lot about peanut butter, that
has proven to be quite a popular and somewhat divisive
podcast episode. Uh. We did hear from most people that said, yeah,
outside of America, a lot of people think peanut butter
is weird. We did hear from a few people in
(49:23):
England and elsewhere they were like, what are you talking about?
Josh I love peanut butter like two people. Yeah, it
felt fairly anecdotal, but this is about neither of those.
So this is from Daniel Volts in Louisville. Did you say, Danielson? Hey, guys,
been listening for years, so all the great podcasts are
(49:44):
recently recently listen to peanut Butter and was greatly entertained
as a lifelong peanut butter lover. Jeff is my brand
of choice. Even convinced me to try peanut butter mayo sandwich,
which was okay, definitely to put more mayo on there
next time. Yes you do. We heard from some butter
mayonnaise people who tried it, and we're like, man, I
didn't really like it, or I didn't get it so right.
(50:06):
Maybe it's just me. While listening, I couldn't help but
think of the color blindness podcast you did, and how
cool it was to hear something uh be explained to
me because frankly, nobody ever cared to do so, and
as much as I love to learn, it never crossed
my mind to learn about it. You may be wondering
why I show about peanut butter triggered color blindness. Turns
out the rest of the world thinks peanut butter is brown.
(50:28):
I cannot imagine opening a jar of delicious green peanut
butter and seeing a nasty brown substance, uh, resembling something
I don't want to think about eating sometimes. Somehow I
thought this for eighteen years for anyone knew the true
color of peanut butter was green before anyone told him that.
I still get teased about thinking peanut butter as green,
(50:50):
but to me, it's as green as green gets. Reality
really is just perception. It's amazing to me that the
world can be seen so differently through every single person's eyes.
Who know is how many different colors of peanut butter
there are out there. Thanks for the show, guys, you
keep my days interesting and entertaining. H p S. Your
marathon podcast help me uh know what to expect from
(51:13):
my first marathon and scared me to death, but I
did finish without the unfortunate issues that some people go
through during a race. Congratulations and that is Daniel Volts
from Louisville, Kentucky. Nice work, Daniel, Um, I don't know
about green peanut butter. I don't. I think the weird
orangey brown it is normally is my preference for sure,
(51:34):
a K A peanut colored right. Well, if you want
to let us know how, um, something we talked about
triggered some interesting memory. That kind of thing really fascinates us,
so we want to hear it. You can send it
to us in an email address it to stuff podcast
did iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is
(51:57):
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works from what Podcasts.
For my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M h m hm
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck your friends, and we
are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's
coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff you Should
Know book, Chuck. That's right. What's the cool, super cool
title we came up with. It's Stuff you Should Know colon,
an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and
(00:21):
it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys.
The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.
It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be.
And we cannot wait for you to get your hands
on it. Yes, we can't. Um and you don't have
to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but
you don't have to wait to order. You can go
pre order the book right now everywhere you get books,
(00:43):
and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering,
which we're working on right now. That's right, So check
it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
All Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark
(01:05):
and there's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there, and it's
just the two of us. Um, we can make it
if we try. It's just the two of us, Chuck
and I. That's right. Uh, and we are stuff you
should know the Heroin addition, Yeah, I haven't covered Heroin yet. No,
we haven't. We have not. Um and Ed helped us
(01:28):
out with this, and I love how he just put
it straight up. Heroin is a demon. I'm like, Che's
way to be objective. You know what occurred to me
because I like to think of things that the lens
of movies a lot of times. Uh, pot movies rarely,
if ever any good. What have you ever seen? Days
(01:49):
and Confused? My friend, I don't consider we we talked
about this on movie Crush and All and I I
don't consider that a weed movie. Although it's featured heavily,
I would call it one of the main characters. I
don't call it a weed movie. I consider weed movies
like Cheech and Chong movies. What about Half Baked, Half Baked?
How High? Like movies where it's literally just about marijuana,
(02:11):
Like Days and Confused about a bunch of friends in
the seventies and the school fair enough, fair enough. Other people, though, said, no,
you know you're wrong. Days confused as a weed movie.
But let's say that as a weed movie, that's one
good one. Like Cheech and Chong movies are okay, but
they're really not that good. They really uh cocaine movies,
I don't are there cocaine movies? Yeah, there's like Blow
(02:35):
was a cocaine movie, and yeah about dealing, Yeah for
sure blows about as cocaine movie as they get. I
can't think of one that's just straight up like following
some cocaine users. Yeah, like that because it's probably like
no one wants to see that, right. But heroin movies
(02:57):
are great, well, I mean you got what spotting, oh,
panic in Needle Park Train, spotting to see um and
and you know if even if it's not about heroin
stuff like pulp fiction, like I think heroin has been
romanticized in film, uh, far more effectively and more often
(03:18):
than any other drug, right, which is pretty messed up,
because if there is a drug out there where Nancy
Reagan actually was right for once in her life and
wasn't just lying through her teeth, it is definitely definitely heroin. Yeah.
It is a genuinely bad, bad drug and basically the
(03:40):
last thing that should be romanticized. Um, But you're right.
I think they've made some pretty good movies about it,
and I think people are like, Wow, those jazz cats
are really into that that skag man um. And uh,
I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine that there
aren't people out there who haven't tried heroin because it
(04:02):
was romanticized in the movies. I hate to say, yeah,
And I think because in the movies it's you know,
it portrays it as it is, which is euphoric and relaxing.
And you know, every movie you see when someone does
the heroin, uh, what you see right afterward is a
big wave of of happiness wash over them. And that's
(04:24):
why you don't see movies about people snorting cocaine, is
because it's just not fun to see someone snort cocaine
and then talk incessantly like a jerk for the next
four hours. You're right, right, depending on how much you got.
I've never done heroin, but I do know that its
chemical name is diah morphine, And we can't talk about
(04:48):
heroin without talking about morphine because it's kind of almost
the same thing. Well, it's morphine's baby, Yeah, basically, it's
it's you can take morphine. Great band name, run it
through morphine, Morphine's baby. It is kind of and I
think about it. Remember that band Morphine? They were really good.
I love Morphine. Yeah, they were great. Um what kind
(05:10):
of music would they be classified as? They're not quite grunched,
They're not quite metal. Now, Morphine was very chill okay,
but they had like a real heavy guitar sound, right,
lots of feedback and distortion. No, I think you're thinking
of a different band. Morphine had the saxophone as like
(05:30):
one of the main interest instruments. Unless I'm thinking, yeah,
you're thinking of Chicago at any rate. No, morphine is
the parent of heroin. Um. You take morphine and run
it through a few hoops with some acids, and all
of a sudden you have heroin. And they apparently are
so close together, um that the average user couldn't tell
(05:54):
the difference between the two, because your body basically takes
heroin and turns it into morphine. The biggest differences are
the um, the how long the high lasts. It's much
shorter with heroin, but I think it it sets on faster,
and then the addictiveness heroin is even more addictive than morphine,
and morphine is awfully addictive itself. Heroin is apparently just
(06:20):
in a whole different league as far as addictiveness goes. Yeah,
that's what I've heard, uh, And that's certainly how they
portrayed in movies as well. To be fair, it's like
it's although there are movies that show, like pulp fiction
is a good example of a functioning heroin addict, but
usually that's not the case in a movie. No, it's true,
and I mean m yeah, they usually do show how
(06:43):
just kind of gross it gets for heroin addicts. There's
it's it's rare. It's rare that it's it's not that
part isn't included. Like think about, um, what was the
name of that movie. It's Jared Leto and word reccoim
for a Dream. Yeah, that was harrowing. I always say
(07:05):
I got pink eye from watching that movie with that
dirty dude. Oh man, that's a perfect way to say it.
I mean, there's who can forget the one image of
the when he injected into that festering sore. Yeah, the
abscess of I think I came across something that I
think is what it was. It's called wound botulis um uh.
(07:30):
And that's a that's a side effect, a risk of
of heroin um, which I mean, if you think Heroine's glamorous,
just look up wound botuli is um or gang green
or an abscess from injection site. And also fact, if
you're thinking about doing heroin, do that um reccoi. And
for a Dream is also a good example of why
(07:50):
they don't make movies about cocaine and speed because the
probably the most unsettling aspect of that movie is the
the subplot with or the plot line with Ellen Burr
with Ellen Burst. It was hard to watch. It was
very hard to watch, although some parts of it were
pretty funny, like when the TV is just straight up
talking to her. That was hysterical. That in that movie
(08:13):
was nuts. Okay, So back to heroin. UM, there's apparently, uh,
there is a very pure form of heroin, which makes sense.
I mean, any kind of processed drug like cocaine or
something like that, Um, there's going to be a purest
form of it, but far and away the vast majority
of people who use that drug are never going to
(08:34):
encounter that purest form. It gets cut and there's impurities
that are introduced to make it less pure so you
can sell more. Um. And so the heroin goes from
like this off white kind of slightly grayish color to
everything from like orange and brown to black. Um, like
black tar heroin like one of the most famous heroin
(08:57):
varieties ever, from what I've heard, is comes from Mexico,
and it's just really bottom of the barrel stuff. Like
imagine that the purest form is a almost white powder
and you're shooting black tar. That kind of gives you
an idea of how far from purity black tar heroin is. Yeah,
(09:17):
I saw that that black tar heroine is usually cut
with either burned corn starch or lactose. Great. There's also
there's cheese heroin too, which is supposedly um, pretty rough
as well as far as impurities go. But it also
just sounds gross like cheese heroin. Yeah. Why did why
take a word that's great like cheese and screw attach
(09:39):
it to heroin? That's right? Uh. The other ways it
can be sold, which I didn't know. It can be
sold as a salt, which you know how in movies
if they're ejecting it, they always cook it up in
the spoon, And I think part partially why movies glamorize
it is because just cinematically, to shoot, um, to film
someone cooking something in the spoon and in the whole
(10:00):
process is just you know, it's interesting looking, it looks
good on screen, looks so glamorous. It does in a
little in a weird way. Um. But when you sell
it as a salt, it does not need to be
heated and dissolved. It's just I guess you can just
dissolve it like salt will dissolve in water. Um. You
can smoke it, you can snort it, you can put
(10:23):
it in your butt. You sound like um. Like Chris
Farley and Black Sheep, I never saw it. There's this
part where he's like shooting, snort and smoke and drop
and I've just I've seen too much Chris Farley in
my life. He's yeah, he's constantly in my head. Or
you can eat heroin apparently, yeah, especially cheese heroin. Oh
(10:46):
really okay. Um, So that's there's like a bunch of
different kinds of heroine you can get depending on where
you are. It's going to come from different places in
the world, which we'll talk about. Um. And there's no
denying it gets you super duper high when you when
you do Heroin. UM. The problem is is that within
(11:08):
a few hours of that, you start to enter Heroin withdrawals.
And we'll talk about exactly what goes on in the
brain a little more, but basically your brain is saying, oh,
I need more of what you just gave me because
I adjusted to life with that UM, with that level
of dopamine release that it triggered, UM, and now everything's
(11:30):
just horrid and black. And again, this can start in
just a few hours, depending on how many times you've
shot Heroin, how much of a dependence you've developed, how
much tolerance you've developed, and all these factors come together
to determine just how bad your withdrawal symptoms are. Yes, uh,
you know, most movies glamorized Heroin for a little while,
(11:53):
but then we'll also show the dark side, like you said,
and usually will include a kicking Heroin scene. Yeah, very famously,
very famously in Train Spotting when he rattles off that
list when he locks himself in his apartment, you and
McGregor enlists out all the things that he needs to
successfully kick What is the very funny I just pulled
(12:15):
it up here music, tomato soup, tint indigo mushroom soup,
eight tins of a consumption cold ice cream, vanilla, one
large tub of magnesia milk, one bottle pharmacs, uh paracetamal, mouthwash, vitamins,
mineral water, lucas aid, pornography, one mattress, one bucket for urine,
(12:40):
one for feces, and one for vomitus. Yes, supposedly, after
a while, the withdrawal gets so bad that you just
can't get out of bed to to poop or pee
or vomit, but you're still going to vomit and poop
um withdrawal symptoms kicking, terrible diarrhea, terrible vomiting UM. And
(13:01):
it's the thing is is the withdrawal is almost never fatal,
but it can be fatal. And it's not from the
withdrawal symptoms themselves, it's secondary to it. Like you're vomiting
and peeing and um pooping so much that you can
become dehydrated, your electrolite balances can go off, and you
can die of heart failure because the electrical impulses in
(13:23):
your heart are no longer functioning correctly. But if you
know what you're doing, um and you especially do it
under medical supervision, you can have a far easier and
and um much less life threatening experience of kicking heroin.
The good news is this, even if you are the
(13:45):
the person who is most addicted to heroin in the
world right now, if you decided to kick it, you
have four to five or six really bad days ahead
of you before you're free of your heroin addiction. It's
that simple. Any heroin, Um, I want to keep saying
heroin addict, We definitely don't say that anymore. But any
(14:07):
person addicted to heroin walking around today, Chuck is just
a week away from being free of heroin. It's just
that that would be the worst week of their entire lives.
But they can do it. Every single one of them
can do it. An entire physicians practices and um convalescent
centers and rehabs have been set up to medically assist
(14:30):
in making the withdrawal process, you know, easier and safer,
so that it does increase the chance that they're not
gonna be like, forget this, I just need some heroin.
Everything will be fine again. Yeah, and um, you know
you're probably gonna get if you're under medical supervision. Some
sort of sedative or a drug that memics heroin. Um,
(14:51):
most commonly, I think methodone. Yeah, it's like subox zone now,
which is, yeah, it really binds tightly to your pioid receptors,
so it blocks heroin when you're doing it. Um, so
you become less and less dependent on heroin. And then
the subak zone is just much less addictive or habit form.
And because it's just much less potent, so you can
(15:13):
get off of the subok zone after you're off of
the heroine. So why heroin makes you feel so good? Um? People,
you know, we don't fully understand the brain chemistry, um
of exactly how that works. But uh, we do know
that the chemicals, you know, once it gets in your brain,
the brain breaks it down into other chemicals, and those
(15:34):
chemicals um sort of just closed down the things that
normally regulate your dopamine. And so your brain makes a
bunch of dopamine right right, So you've got a bunch
of dopamine going. But it also affects other parts of
your brain too, to where say, um, you're basically imagine
your brain chemistry normally is that in this nice kind
(15:57):
of harmony? And then heroin comes in and just totally
over whelms it with a tidal wave of a dopamine. Well,
your brain says, oh jeez, well, I need to to
up all of the production of all these other um
neurochemicals so that I reach homeostasis again, so that jack's
all the levels up. UM. And then when the heroine
dies back UM, because your dose is wearing off, your
(16:21):
dopamine levels drop, but then all these other levels are
still up, and all of a sudden, it's like your
brain is screaming in a in a crowded room where
everybody just stops talking, and it's just your brain screaming
now right, or like the music cuts off in your
brain was trying to talk loud over the music. It's
very much like that. And so some of these other
chemicals can produce some really unpleasant sensations. And the upshot
(16:42):
of it is that that dopamine, the one thing that's
making you feel really really good, is the one thing
that's truly lacking then because your brain isn't making it
naturally UM, it's making all this other stuff that makes
you feel quite uncomfortable, uh, in much higher amounts. And
that's that's when you say, I need some more heroin.
And the other thing is this, as your brain starts
(17:04):
making more and more and more of these other neurochemicals,
you need more and more and more heroin to release
increasing increasingly larger amounts of dopamine just to get to normal.
That's what they mean when they say, just to get
to normal, I have to do this much heroin, and
then I have to do even more to get high. Um.
And that is what's called tolerance. And the more tolerance
(17:28):
you have, the worshier withdrawal symptoms are going to be.
Because that means when you stop with the heroine, the
levels of everything else are really really high, and the
dopamine is way back down in the basement. Um. And
that's that's basically heroin in a nutshell. Yeah, And you
know tolerance. There's tolerance for every drug in the world, uh, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, everything,
(17:53):
but um, it feels like heroine's. Um. It's just such
a dangerous game you're playing there with the tolerance levels
and then getting off and getting back on or more
so a little, probably more so than other drugs even
and then the well, the other thing that makes it
dangerous too is again, withdrawal itself is very rarely fatal,
(18:13):
especially when it's assystematically. But um heroin itself is extraordinarily
dangerous too, because one of the big effects that it
has on your body is lowered respiration, so you aren't
taking very deep breaths any longer. You can actually die
of like carbon monoxide poisoning because you're not exhaling enough
(18:34):
carbon monoxides or you're not getting in enough oxygen and
you basically just stop breathing, or you die of hypoxia
because you're the heroin overwhelmed your ability to breathe. Basically,
when you've done too much, when you've done a fatal dose. Wow. Yeah, alright,
let's take a break and we will talk about the
super interesting history of heroin right after this. Okay, okay, so, uh,
(19:24):
you know we've I think everyone sort of knows that
heroin to sort of big facts about heroin that are
super interesting that everyone always says is that heroin is
a brand name or a trade name, and that heroin
used to be readily prescribed kind of like cocaine was,
uh in this case for for pain is a pain medication.
(19:48):
And we're talking about the opium poppy plant, the pep
haber somna faron And since ancient Egypt is like at
least people have been used sing this to treat pain,
this narcotic to treat pain. Yeah. Well, so if we
had just held with opium, I mean, it's you know,
(20:09):
being an addicted to opium is bad enough, but the
world would definitely be a much different place if we
just stayed with opium, just kept it natural, you know
what I'm saying. But no, no, that's how we do.
We figure out ways to make things even more robust
and more amazing. And so I think in uh, oh,
I'm not sure exactly when, but in the eighteen hundreds,
(20:31):
definitely before the eighteen sixties, the German chemical company merk
Uh isolated morphine from opium, so you didn't need all
the other stuff anymore. You just head straight up morphine.
And this was good and in one respect, like we
now had a genuinely powerful anesthetic, analgesic to where when
(20:54):
somebody was in a great deal of pain, say having
their leg amputated in a field hospital during the Civil War,
you could give them morphine and they wouldn't suffer as much.
So in that respect, it was really good. The problem
is we didn't understand addiction anywhere near like we do today.
And so a lot of those people who got morphine
when their leg was amputated came back from the war like,
(21:14):
where can I get some more morphine? I could really
use some right now, And morphine addiction became really pronounced
by you know, the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties in the
United States. Yeah, And there were a couple of big
years after this. Big big events happened in eighteen seventy
four and eight. In eighteen seventy four, there was a
(21:35):
chemist name C. R. Older, right, and he wanted to
transform morphine into something that wasn't as addictive. So he
tried this process where he um it was called acetylation,
where he basically tried to cause it to react with
an acid to change the composition of it to make
(21:55):
it less addictive. He created diocetyl morphine, which is heroin,
and he gave some to his dog, as you do.
And his dog did not fair too well, did not die,
but almost did. He stole a stereo later and he said,
you know what, Uh, this stuff is dangerous. I'm gonna
(22:16):
put it away. I'm gonna publish this paper. No one
really paid much attention to this paper until a man
named Einrich Dresser in for the Bear company, picked up
this paper and said, let me pick up where he
left off. Yeah, and he did and he can't he
He basically recreated that um dia morphine concoction and heroin
(22:39):
was born. He gave it to some test subjects. One
of them said that it made him feel heroich. Is
that how you would say it? Yeah? Hero ish h
g r O I almost there s h. Yeah. These
are Germans we're talking about here, so they love the
sh sound for sure. But but because um, I think
one thing we left off is not only does heroin
(23:01):
get you high, it also boost your confidence tremendously as well.
And that's what that guy was describing. He felt high,
he felt confident, and he described it as heroic. And
so that's where the trade name heroin came from. Was
um from Dresser basically saying, that's that's a great name
for this. Uh So I'm gonna call it heroin and
we will cure the world's morphine addicts of their morphine addiction.
(23:24):
And funny enough, they did. Because everybody's like heroin is
a great way to treat morphine addiction. The problem is
is once they kicked morphine, they were super duper addicted
to heroin and they were even worse off than they
have been before. Yeah, it's funny the word heroin. It's
so so commonplace now you don't really think about it
being a trade name, but it totally sounds like a
(23:45):
trade name when you think about other drugs at the time,
Like it sounds like a modern sort of pharmaceutical and well,
actually these days those names are just terrible. Like Dr
pinkel Whites feel Good oil was next to it on
the shelf, you know. Yeah, but now like pharmaceutical drug
names or they all try and work in uh well,
(24:05):
I guess they did that with heroin because it makes
you feel heroic, but they try and work in how
great it makes you feel into the name itself, Like, well,
I don't know if I should name check anybody. I
can think of a few on the top of my head. Yeah,
And they're like they all have to work the letter
X in. If X isn't in there, it's not gonna sell.
That's like the mantra of the pharmaceutical And it's really
(24:25):
manipulative when you think about it, it's the dad they
teach you how to pronounce it to your doctor. So, um,
they did these human trials of heroin, which were about
four weeks long of getting heroin as a patient. If
you had a cough or a sore throat, you felt
pretty great obviously. Um. Can you imagine just going and
(24:49):
getting like some heroin laws for a sore throat? Yeah?
I wonder if those still exist anywhere. I'm probably not.
I'm sure that everybody took them. I bet you there's, like,
you know, buried in some attic drawer somewhere. Somebody's got
some heroin lossages from back then. So uh, bear said
(25:09):
the drug is safe. Um, it's non habit forming. Will
even put that on the label. And here's the downside
is these analgesic effects last a few hours. So if
you've got if you're sick and you've got a coffin
sore throat, Um, you're you're gonna be taking this stuff
like four or five times a day for a couple
of weeks because it makes you feel good every time
(25:29):
you take it a few hours later it wears off.
You take some more, and before you know it you're
addicted to heroin, right, I mean there's probably no drug
in the world where you do it just once and
you're automatically physically addicted or dependent on it, right, is
do people claim that to be true? Oh? Yeah, they
claimed about acid for goodness sake, like they like, yes,
(25:51):
they say that about every single drug, Which is the
problem because if you are a brave soul and you say, well,
it probably won't happen to me, and I'll see, I'll
see what it's like, and then you try it and
you find you're not addicted, you're like, oh, well they
were lying, I'll just go do some more. But if
you say something like you're probably not going to get
addicted the first time, but with a drug like heroin
(26:12):
in particular, you're really playing with fire every time you
do it, because you come that much closer to to
being likely to be addicted to it. Um, I think
it would make somebody maybe think twice before trying it
even that first time, rather than just trying to scare
them off like, um, you know, no, you're gonna be
addicted immediately and you're going to kill your parents kind
(26:34):
of thing, you know. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally don't don't
lie to people. So uh, the next decade kind of
comes and goes heroin. It becomes more obvious that it
was dangerous and that it was addictive. Bear continued selling
it um until about nineteen thirteen, UM, but as early
(26:56):
as nineteen o six that was something called the Council
of Farm Recy, UH, Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American
Metal Medical Association, and it had there were warnings saying
like hey, heroin can get really addictive. Uh. In nineteen
o nine, and this is the full seven years before
Bear quit selling it um nineteen o six, and then
(27:17):
in nineteen o nine, Uh, there were people the lawmakers
met in Shanghai with some doctors for the International Opian Commission,
which I'm sure it was quite a party. Oh, it
was a ranger, and they said that you know what,
opium and all these drugs related to opium are really dangerous.
They're prone to abuse, and it's up to all of
(27:39):
you countries to regulate this via the International Opium Convention
at the Hague in nineteen twelve. But it's up to
you how you want to do this in your country. Yeah.
It was opium and coca leaves and their derivatives and salts,
I think is how they put it. And they basically said, there, yeah,
there's some real problems coming from these and we need
to we need to do something about it. Go figure
(28:00):
out how to do it. And so the United States said, oh,
we've got this covered. We're gonna pass the Harrison Narcotics
Tax Act, which is now these days just called the
Harrison Act, and it basically established the War on drugs
as we understand it today. Way back in nur UM,
do you remember our CIA dosing LSD Unsuspecting Americans with
(28:20):
LSD episode one of the best. Do you remember George White,
like the guy who was actually running like the the experiments.
He was one of those early UM drug agents, narcotics
agents who was you know, beating up addicts because of
the Harrison Act basically gave him the permission to um.
And one of the things about the Harrison Act that
(28:42):
was so insidious, aside from the fact that the the
it kind of promoted this whole UM, this air of propaganda,
like lying to people like, you know, telling people that
if you're if your wife tries hero when she's gonna
run off with the UM. You know, a black guy
or something like like that. Kind of that level of
propaganda of associating certain groups with certain drugs to scare
(29:06):
other people from taking those drugs, just horrific stuff that. Um.
It also said almost explicitly, addiction is not a disease,
So you can no longer use these drugs to help
somebody kick these drugs. So doctors started going to prison
(29:27):
like trying to help people kick heroin by giving them
like a heroine regimen to to help them ease off
of it. You would land in prison for that kind
of thing, and doctors did get thrown in prison for it. Yeah,
and Ed made a really good point here, one that
I had never considered. Um. Something else about the Harrison
Act is you tend to think of like the old
days as being super conservative about things like drug use.
(29:52):
But before they were made illegal, the drugs were still there,
and drug people that were addicted to these drugs were
still there, but there wasn't the same stigma. They were
sort of, I mean, they were outcasts of society, but
they weren't criminals yet. They were people that still needed
help and that you could rehabilitate. Um And there was
(30:12):
I think some more compassion even but Harrison that comes along,
and all of a sudden, you're a criminal. Uh, And
the only way to get these drugs is and keep
doing these drugs that you're addicted to, is by being
a criminal. And that created almost it almost created the
system that we're with today. Uh, this this war on drugs,
(30:34):
which is has shown to not work. Right. It definitely did,
and that it's there are some reasons why heroin in
particular will always be really hard to eradicate and why
the Harrison Act was kind of wrong headed. It set
everything out on the wrong foot. Was this idea that
(30:54):
if you can just punish people into not using heroin
any longer. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't, And
there's some reasons why you can't do that, because as
long as heroin is around, they're going to be people
who become addicted to heroin and who are addicted to heroin.
And then if you couple that with the idea that
addiction is not a disease, so you should not get
(31:15):
any kind of medical treatment for it, and we're actually
going to arrest doctors who try. Then all you've just
done is create like a huge legal and moral quagmire
for your society. But that's what it did. But there
are some reasons why heroin will probably always stick around,
and that is, first of all, it's very easy to make, right. Yeah,
(31:36):
I mean you're sort of in a I mean it's
like with most drugs, you're in a lose lose situation
if you're trying to eradicate it because you can't start
at the user end that has shown to not work,
like you said. And in the case of most drugs,
you can't start at the processing end either, because like
you said, it's easy to make. Um, it's it's just
(31:57):
a chemical process at work. It doesn't rek wire super
expensive equipment. UM. That's why if you get busted, you
can either just ditch your equipment or pack it up
pretty quickly and take it with you. Um. It is Uh,
it's just difficult to disrupt the process of actually making
the heroine. Yeah. Basically, if you could set up a
(32:19):
still for whiskey out in the woods, you could probably
make a heroin UM processing operation. The thing is, if
you're in like the Smoky mountains or something like that,
you might set up your heroine processing operation then go, well, wait,
I need some opium poppies. Those are kind of hard
to come by in the Smokies, And you're right, it's
(32:39):
very hard to find opium poppies in the United States.
That's one thing that the United States government and law
enforcement has done, has basically eradicated opium producing poppy plants
from the United States, except on the TV show Ozark.
But I haven't gotten to the point yet to be quiet.
But really now I haven't. The point is because I
(33:02):
ended up going on starting better call Saul, and now
I'm super into that got you, um. But the problem
with that is that yes we are. We kept it
out of the United States. It's not here, but pop
poppies grow really well just about everywhere. And as long
as you have a country where officials who are supposed
(33:22):
to be watching whether people are cultivating poppies or not
can be bribed um poor people who can be forced
into cultivating poppies, or farmers who can be bought off
to to cultivate poppies. Poppies are going to grow, and
over time they have been eradicated from one place or another,
but then they just kind of pop up somewhere somewhere
else around the world, and that part of the world
(33:44):
becomes the global supplier of opium for heroin processing. Yeah.
I mean for most of the nineteenth century, China was
the big leader and opium exports along with India. And
then World War Two comes along the drug train. It
kind of shuts down because shipping is just super restricted. Uh.
Communist Party takes over in China and they said no, no, no,
(34:07):
we're not gonna We're not gonna do this anymore, and
they kind of stopped. It was really effective in China
isn't a big opium supplier ever since then. But then
it moved to what's called the Golden Triangle, which is Laos,
Minimar and Thailand UM as well as Golden Crescent, which
is different parts of the Middle East, but mainly if
(34:28):
we're talking opium production, we're talking about Afghanistan. Yeah, And
when the United States invaded Afghanistan, like one of the
one of the sidelines that was doing was destroying opium
opium fields and I guess it worked for a little while,
but not really like we were carrying out drone strikes
on UM heroin processing facilities and basically did nothing to
(34:51):
disrupt the heroin trade. And then as fewer and fewer
US troops were in Afghanistan, the heroin just came back.
Opium poppies came back in, heroin processing came back, and
even more than the United States military was effective, the
Taliban had been more effective before the United States went
(35:13):
into Afghanistan. When the Taliban basically ruled Afghanistan, Um, there
was very little opium production going on, and it actually
increased whether you the United States was there. And then
after the United States basically left Afghanistan, when the Taliban
came back, they were it was like Taliban free and easy.
(35:33):
They started looking the other way on opium production and exactly.
So that's another thing that's actually used kind of frequently,
like where if you are buying heroin, you were probably
funding a terrorist group. It sounds ridiculous and made up,
but it's actually probably true depending on where you are
in the world. Um, if you're in the United States,
(35:55):
you're probably funding a vicious drug cartel because most of
the the opium that makes its way as heroin into
the US comes from Mexico and Colombia, which I didn't
right Yeah, and the other of the global heroin supply
is coming from Afghanistan right now. But like we said,
you know, you you squash it in one area, it's
(36:18):
gonna pop up in another. It's um, it's it's very
simple supply and demand, and it's never gonna change. Uh. Ed.
In fact, this is he should totally trademark this line.
He said, a war on drugs, it's like a war
on water when you know what's going to rain tomorrow.
Did he make that up? I don't know. I've never
heard it before. So let's say he really crystallizes it. Yeah,
(36:42):
it's good writer for sure. Should we uh? Should we
take our final break here? You betch all right, We'll
be back with more heroin. Right after this, you mentioned
(37:20):
World War two, Chuck um, and that almost entirely shut
down because shipping was so restricted during World War Two.
Everybody was watching every ship, not just the United States,
watching stuff that was coming into the country. People were
watching it going from one place to another. It might
get torpedo. It was just really tough to smuggle things
(37:42):
during World World War Two. And I read that the
same thing is going on now because of the coronavirus pandemic,
because of things like shelter and place orders um or
restricted travel, that it's way way harder to smuggle or
even just ghost gore Um. Then it was before the pandemic,
(38:03):
and as a result, they think a heroin drought is
is coming on or has already started, and so prices
are going to rise, and probably more and more people
who were addicted to heroin before the pandemic will come
out of the pandemic not not addicted to heroin anymore,
but like they gave meth a try, and now they're
really into that. Have you ever heard the old kamal
(38:24):
anjiohnny bit about the Heroin plus Thailand all cold medicine. Yeah,
refreshed my memory. It's been a while. Well that was
I can't remember. I think it has a name like
a designer drug or whatever, which was basically heroin and
Thailand all cold medicine mixed. And he just says this.
It was pretty early in his comedy career when he
(38:45):
was just doing stand up. But he just has a
very funny bit about the fact that he you know,
you're already doing heroin, you're all and then then his
voice and everything is just so perfect, You're already doing Heroin. Yeah.
I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people
on the planet. He's great he's a big movie star now.
He is. Good for him. I'm glad for him. He's
(39:06):
he's a good dude. He did our one of our
variety shows at that time. He did killed It. Everybody
killed it that night if I remember correctly. Yeah, that
was a really good show. That was a lot of fun.
Josh Bierman and Nick Thune. Maybe Nick Thune performed, Uh
so did um Hampton youwt did some killer stand up,
that's right, Gianni. And we had Nate Demo did a
(39:31):
little Memory Palace Live too. Yep. And um, what was
the UCB group? I want to say Raw High, but
it wasn't raw Hide, it wasn't Comanche. Oh Convoy Convoy.
Did we have all of them on one stage? Yes, dude,
one night. Yeah, that was a great show. That was
(39:53):
a great show. They didn't even need us. We were
barely there. We launched a million careers that night. Um,
all right. So we were talking about supply and demand.
That is always going to be a problem with the
war on drugs because, like you said that, you can't
arrest people into not wanting to do drugs. This just
(40:14):
proven to not be a deterrent when people want to
do drugs. They're gonna find them and they're gonna do them. Um,
the supply is hard to eradicate because of all the
things we mentioned. You can't wipe out all the If
the demand is there, then they're going to find places
where the government is bribable or weak enough to plant
those poppy fields. And as long as there are desperate
(40:37):
people and poor people or people that are addicts, then
there will be drug mules and people that are willing
to either willing to smuggle the drugs or a cartel
who will hold your family hostage to force you to
smuggle those drugs. Can you imagine that being your reality today?
Like right now, man, Like you're running across like a
desert right now with a bunch of heroin on you
(40:59):
because your wife is being held hostage, your wife and kid.
Like that's happening to you right this second. That happens
to people sometimes, like it's so rare, and especially here
like in the United States, it's just like such a
remote worry that there's no reason to lose any sleep
over it for you, But don't forget about the person
(41:20):
that that's actually happening to right now, And like how
what what? What? They must be thinking during that run
across the desert, like how stressed out are they? Like?
What are what's going through their head? I just I
can't imagine what it would be like to actually be
in that situation. Like when I imagine it, I imagine
it as you do, like experience a movie. It's remote,
(41:42):
it's it's fictitious, it's it's um fantasy. These are characters.
But when when I can just get my brain just right,
it's a little bit of it floods in and it's
just overwhelming. How nuts and horrific that without experience would be. Yeah,
and I think that's something that uh well, I mean,
(42:02):
I think if you're if you have a problem with
drug addiction, you're not considering a lot of things, but
certainly one thing that's probably the last thing you're considering
is how it got to you, how it got to
your dealer, and the devastation that it has wreaked along
the way, you know, Right, Yeah, that's a that's absolutely true.
I think that's an excellent point for people to remember.
(42:24):
So Ed wrapped up this research with the something I'd
never really thought about about marijuana being a gateway drug. Um,
we've talked about that, and a lot of people scoff
at that notion, but he makes a case here that
kind of makes sense that the system with marijuana in
the nineteen forties and fifties, especially in the in urban areas,
(42:47):
and with with jazz clubs and jazz musicians, it kind
of set up a system where heroin could find a
pretty easy entry point. Yeah, because it was coming in
largely from in the beginning of the twentieth century up
to the first uh well, I guess the forties and fifties.
So at the beginning of the twentieth century it was
interrupted by World War Two, and then it came back
(43:08):
with a vengeance in the forties and fifties, and it
was being imported largely by um Asian people who didn't
know people outside of their community. So they figured out
how to connect with the jazz musicians who already had
pot friends, and the jazz musicians started turning their pop
friends on yeah, on onto heroin. And part of the
(43:32):
reason why heroin was able to kind of make such
entree into American culture, especially through this route, was that
all these people were not they weren't drug naive, they'd
used pot before, they smoke pot all the time. They
knew for a fact that it wasn't addictive, it didn't
turn you into a fiend like had been depicted hysterically
in this government propaganda against pot. And so all of
(43:55):
the warnings against heroin were probably just as full of
hot air too, and it just turns out that they
happened to be wrong this time. Yeah, and I mean,
you know, the jazz scene was rife with heroin abuse. Uh,
Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Ray Charles. Yeah, Ray
Charles totally. It's kind of jazz. But yeah, he counts.
(44:16):
I remember when Philip Seymour Hoffman Um, when he died
of a fatal overdose. I know they tried to pin
it on um a jazz guy is his dealer. Oh
really Yeah, super kind of throwback thing. But even still
today they're like, yeah, jazz people can't be trusted. They
love heroin. Billie Holliday was fully addicted to heroin. It
(44:40):
was it was all over the jazz community. Yeah, because again,
so this is one of those things where you try once,
try twice, and all of a sudden you're doing it
a lot more and you have to do more and
more and more. And if it's all around you and
everybody seems to be having a good time despite puking
their guts out first, um, you might give it a try. Uh,
(45:00):
that's just super interesting. The idea that that pot was
connected as like this this gateway for America to heroin,
because there's just such worlds apart Yeah and alcohol. I mean,
if you look at the history of jazz, heroin and
cirrhosis are like two of the biggest factors and true
killing off jazz musicians, true dad interesting. One thing we
(45:23):
didn't really touch on, well two things. One that the
epidemic of fentanyl laced heroin, which apparently if you're buying
that on purpose it might be sold to you is
magic or budd ice o God. But fentanyl is about
fifty times stronger than heroin, so the fatal dose is
much much much lower. It takes way less to kill you.
(45:49):
But if you don't know that you're buying fentinyl laced heroine,
you're doing your regular dose of heroin, that fentinyl can
very easily kill you. And that happens a lot. It's
happening more and more. Uh, no idea, who's doing it?
They think it might be coming from China, but who
knows what the deal is with that. But that's one
big problem with heroin addiction is you might overdose. The
(46:12):
likelihood of you overdosing with the introduction of fentanyl is
way higher than it was before. I think the whole
thing really started to pick up steam about two thousand thirteen.
And then the whole reason there's a heroin epidemic right
now in the United States, Chuck, is because the a
few pharma companies got America and a large part of
(46:34):
the world hooked on opioid painkillers like oxyconton, and the
government said, well, this is a real problem. We need
to get everybody off of opioids. So um Perdue Pharma,
you need to make this OxyContin impossible to inject or
snort or whatever. And they did. They made oxyconton so
that when you crushed it, it turned into a gel
(46:54):
that you couldn't do anything with. Um and nobody could
get high off boxy cotony more. You couldn't find. It
was too expensive. It was just impossible to get. But
heroin suddenly made a huge appearance and it was cheaper.
It did the trick. You could find it just about everywhere,
and now, all of a sudden, combined with the two
thousand and eight recession and all of the despair that
(47:15):
that generated, there's a heroin epidemic in the United States
that's still raging and going strong. And we have a
lot of those pharmaceutical companies and the the agencies that
are supposed to regulate them more closely to to blame
for that. Yeah. I remember in college there was a
one year and it was probably don't even a year,
(47:36):
but like one season where heroin kind of came through
town and in my crowd, like not my close friends,
none of them did it, but I knew. I knew
a person through a person who had, you know, known
like very loosely socially that she o'deed and died from
heroin during this like several month period. But I just
(47:57):
remember it was being talked about a lot, and it
was just around and people were doing it, and uh,
it never invaded my inner circle. But I just remember
that it was a kind of a scary time in
college when it kind of blew through and then kind
of blew back out again. It wasn't like a I mean,
I'm sure there were always people that we're doing Heroin
at some point in Athens. But it was like a
(48:19):
thing for a little while. Yeah, no, it was. It
was always very hard to find it just basically non existent.
Um when I get the feeling, yeah, you know. And
then it started to really pick up steam in like
the mid two thousand aughts. I think, yeah, it's weird,
but yeah, that's yeah. Heroin is a demon, Chuck, it
(48:40):
is a demon. And this girl was she was looking back,
probably twenty two years old. What a waste man. Yeah,
that's sad. Um, Well that's Heroin. Everybody, don't do it.
Don't do it. Just don't just go your whole life
saying I've never done Heroin. Not I'm all good. You're
not missing out on that much, Okay, okay. Uh. And
(49:01):
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This
is about We heard a lot about peanut butter, that
has proven to be quite a popular and somewhat divisive
podcast episode. Uh. We did hear from most people that said, yeah,
outside of America, a lot of people think peanut butter
is weird. We did hear from a few people in
(49:23):
England and elsewhere they were like, what are you talking about?
Josh I love peanut butter like two people. Yeah, it
felt fairly anecdotal, but this is about neither of those.
So this is from Daniel Volts in Louisville. Did you say, Danielson? Hey, guys,
been listening for years, so all the great podcasts are
(49:44):
recently recently listen to peanut Butter and was greatly entertained
as a lifelong peanut butter lover. Jeff is my brand
of choice. Even convinced me to try peanut butter mayo sandwich,
which was okay, definitely to put more mayo on there
next time. Yes you do. We heard from some butter
mayonnaise people who tried it, and we're like, man, I
didn't really like it, or I didn't get it so right.
(50:06):
Maybe it's just me. While listening, I couldn't help but
think of the color blindness podcast you did, and how
cool it was to hear something uh be explained to
me because frankly, nobody ever cared to do so, and
as much as I love to learn, it never crossed
my mind to learn about it. You may be wondering
why I show about peanut butter triggered color blindness. Turns
out the rest of the world thinks peanut butter is brown.
(50:28):
I cannot imagine opening a jar of delicious green peanut
butter and seeing a nasty brown substance, uh, resembling something
I don't want to think about eating sometimes. Somehow I
thought this for eighteen years for anyone knew the true
color of peanut butter was green before anyone told him that.
I still get teased about thinking peanut butter as green,
(50:50):
but to me, it's as green as green gets. Reality
really is just perception. It's amazing to me that the
world can be seen so differently through every single person's eyes.
Who know is how many different colors of peanut butter
there are out there. Thanks for the show, guys, you
keep my days interesting and entertaining. H p S. Your
marathon podcast help me uh know what to expect from
(51:13):
my first marathon and scared me to death, but I
did finish without the unfortunate issues that some people go
through during a race. Congratulations and that is Daniel Volts
from Louisville, Kentucky. Nice work, Daniel, Um, I don't know
about green peanut butter. I don't. I think the weird
orangey brown it is normally is my preference for sure,
(51:34):
a K A peanut colored right. Well, if you want
to let us know how, um, something we talked about
triggered some interesting memory. That kind of thing really fascinates us,
so we want to hear it. You can send it
to us in an email address it to stuff podcast
did iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is
(51:57):
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works from what Podcasts.
For my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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