February 15, 2023 • 34 mins
Sam Quinones, bestselling author of The Least of Us, tells Clayton and Greg the harrowing story of how one man known as el Cerebro (the Brain) introduced the Sinaloa Drug cartel to fentanyl in 2005. The cartel’s discovery of synthetic opioids forever changed the illicit drug market and sparked a crisis that has contributed to over 100,000 deaths a year in the United States alone.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Clayton. What if I told you in a few years
there wasn't going to be any heroine on the streets
like none. Okay, that's a good thing, right, What if
I told you that was a bad thing for who
people that do heroin? Now you got to explain this.
Four suspected drug dealers are under arrest for allegedly supplying
the fentnyl laced heroine that killed actor Michael K. Williams.
(00:23):
Someone overdoses on your dope. That is to the rest
of a consumer population in Sellington, not a warning. That
is an advertisement, almost like a purity check. I guess
guys exactly they're trying to find arcanics. Possibly he is
a country were never faced with massive industrial quantities of
(00:43):
fennel until the time when the Sun of Law drug
cartel first figured out that finel existed. This is an
existential threat to the United States, China, Mexico are flooding
on c streets to important these elements within the Sun
of Law drug cartel get pretty mad at him. Not
a good idea, get the sent a long drug. Hurt
mad at you, but he down, He sits him down
(01:07):
and explains to him, look, I have made for you,
the most profitable, the most potent trug that you are
ever going to encounter, and it's called functional. I'm Greg Glad.
I'm Clayton, English and this is the War on drugs.
(01:29):
Clay Man, how's it going. Oh man, it's good, it's good.
Were broadcast them from the right place. Yeah, we're in Atlanta. Yeah,
we're on Boulevard. Yeah. Yeah, interesting little area over here,
East Atlanta area. Yeah, it's definitely. Uh, the War on
drugs is hit this area repeatedly and heatedly. But yeah,
(01:50):
I'm glad. I'm glad we're here. Though. I think we
shed light on stuff. That's why I'm glad you down
here in my city. Yeah, we're gonna talk about today.
I think is is really prevalent to a lot of listeners,
and I hope we all get something out of this.
We're gonna talk to this guy. Sam Keionis wrote this
book called The Least of Us. It's about the fentnyl
epidemic and how it's taken over. And the thing that
scared me was that, you know, Sam was just like,
(02:11):
heroin won't be a thing anymore, it'll be a vestige
of the past. And when you say heroin, like you
think order the real bowin, like math, it's heroin, and
and you're just and that's like going to be an
old timey drug, right, That's right, that's terrifying. That was
one for me when he said that. At first, I thought, oh, good, yeah,
(02:33):
we got it. Yeah, but I didn't realize that it's
all gonna be replaced with finnel, something more powerful, more deadly,
and something that it's already happening. And the crazy thing
is like things that you're able to do to help yourself,
like narcane to you know that can override and opioid
you know, overdose, or fentnyl strips where you're able to
test substances and see if it has fentyl and it
(02:56):
highly highly accurate. They're illegal in a lot of states.
They're dru paraphernalia. You can't own it or actually give
it to someone narcn or you can't even have it
in you. And so it's like it's it's crazy that
the one thing that can actually maybe prevent some of
these things, we're also causing it to be drug paraphernalia
some way. It's like that's the smallest step, Like that's
(03:16):
the smallest step you could take, like just allow test
strips to be available. It's it's a crazy thing. So yeah,
I mean Sam really opened my eyes to what this
all looks like. And if you thought that trying to
fight the war on drugs when you had drugs that
needed like you know, poppy fields or field you need people,
you need You're not to worry about rabbits and yeah,
(03:39):
the other cartail exactly. Shoot, like your pets become bigger
and they have automatic work. You can just be in
a room. What are We're in an eight by eight
room right now? Yeah, this could be a place where
you could do twenty million dollars worth of fentanyl in
a day and that could happen all of the country
and process it not do it. Yeah yeah, if you
do it, you you I don't think you're gonna make it. Now.
(04:02):
If you did it, then we need to do some
tests on you. Yeah. This is one of these topics,
the fentinyl epidemic that you kind of have to laugh
so you don't cry when you look at the the
numbers of overdoses. It's just staggering. I get text vocations
and you know, look on Twitter and it feels like, yeah,
every every month, every month a prominent person. It feels like,
(04:24):
you know, and that's not it. And you can only
imagine what's going on, like you said, in the streets
in your city and my city and all across the country.
And you know, we joke a lot around a lot
m and we will during this episode, but we know
that this is an incredibly serious topic and this is
impacting the lives of so many people across the country everywhere.
We really got to get to the root of the problem.
And the root of the problem is the war on drugs,
(04:45):
the prohibition, the way that we have criminalized um, you know,
the drugs and put so many people in prison, and
the ramifications that has had and the lack of actual
you know, solving addiction in this country because of the
war on drugs. Is wife fentinyl so ramping the streets.
This is the reason. This is the root cause. And
so we get into that, you know, with um, with
(05:07):
Sam and I think it's just going to be a
really great episode of informative one on something that's really
not you know, well known, like, yeah, we know what
the word fentanyl, but it's kind of okay, what is it,
How do we stop? What's what's going on? Yeah? One
of the things I really got out of this episode
was just, uh, you actually see how the war on
drugs actually fuels the whole fitting al epidemic. And then
(05:28):
I think it's important for people to listen to this
episode because Sam answers so many questions that I hear
just talking to people in day to day conversation about
Fenton Al is what is it? Why is it? Why
would they do this? And I think he answers so
many of those in such a playing and simple way
(05:48):
that everybody can understand. So let's get into it with
Sam Key on this, Yeah, without any further ado, let's
let's kick it to Sam and figure out where fentinyl
came from and where we're at right now with this.
All right, Sam, welcome to the War on Drugs. How
are you pretty well? Greg? Thank you? Yeah, great to
(06:09):
have you. Oh it's good to be here. Yeah. Going
through your book, it was just absolutely fascinating. And one
thing that really stuck out that you had said was
there's not going to be any recreational drug use pretty soon.
M clayton. Thoughts and prayers to you on that. I
don't do it recreationally anyway. I have a purpose when
I use drugs to get high. Yeah. Yeah, So what
(06:33):
did you mean by that? Well, I think it's we're
already at the end of the era of recreational drug use,
and Frontal has put an end to that, well almost
at an end of heroin. Don't have really much heroin
on the streets anymore in the United States. I think
we're about a year or two away from seeing no
heroin at all. And so everything that's out there can
(06:56):
have front on online. You can't trust anything really to
not have fentyl in it, unless it's pills that you've
got from a pharmacist that they filled in front of you,
almost And so now it's in everything. It's in cocaine,
it's in the methamphetam that is also everywhere in the country,
and it's being put into counterfeit pills that look like
(07:19):
percosets or xanax bars or even the illegal pills ecstasy
and what have you. And all of this is really
because the ease of which the Mexican drug trafficking world
can make fentanyl, and the enormous quantities it can make.
All of that is why You've got so much of
the stuff around and it's being added to everything. And
(07:41):
what that has done, I think is really put an
end to risk free recreational drug use in America. And
now every time you used ope, it's a it's a
game of Russian roulette. Wow, you said in a year,
you don't think there'll be any here, When on the streets,
I'd say we're about a year or two away from that.
Every place I go, I see less and less heroin
(08:03):
being seized. People call it heroin by the way they
call whatever they're buying on the street. I found this
in eastern Tennessee, for example, people will still call it heroin.
There's no heroine in it. It tests for fentanyl, A
tests from math at, tests for thhc, AT, tests for
all kinds of things. But but there's very little heroin
(08:25):
in it. And this is all because of economics. A
basic idea is that fentanyl is simply more efficient, more competitive,
if you like, form of getting people addicted to opioids
and then keeping them strung out. It makes a lot
of sense from a drug dealer's perspective, a drug trafficker's perspective.
(08:47):
You don't have to grow poppies anymore. You just make
it in a lab. Yeah, yeah, let's I'd love to
kind of boil down on that, is you kind of
think about these things and is that the big instant fennel.
Obviously we can get back to like kind of like
what fennel is and what the potency is. But from
a pure economic standpoint, you don't need a poppy field anymore.
(09:08):
You don't need a marijuana field anymore. You know, you
can just have a guy pretty much in a kiss
the chef's schmock in his bedroom, just whipping this stuff up. Yes,
all of this is supplied driven. Virtually none of it
is demand driven. In my opinion, it's all about what
benefits traffickers, and traffickers are enormously benefited by switching from
(09:31):
plant based drugs to synthetic drugs made only in a
lab with no plant involved. It's easier to make, it's
cheaper to make, and all that you really need. You
don't need land, you don't need sunlight, You're gonna need irrigation.
All you need now is access to shipping ports. Shipping
ports get you access to the entire world chemical market,
(09:56):
and all of this means that they can produce quantities
of these drugs that are simply staggering, simply unprecedented, the
quantities of the drugs that we're seeing now coming out
of Mexico. Because they don't have any more seat, there's
no more seasons, you're not limited by what the When
the plant can actually grow, you can make it every week,
(10:18):
every two weeks. You know. The other thing that's interesting
I think about all this is if you if you
look at how corporate America, particularly of products that you
would you know, like that have some addictive capacity, stuff
with sugar in it, fast food, all that kind of stuff.
What they're mostly looking for is to reduce friction of use.
(10:41):
It's all about supply again. It's like, you want to
get as much of this stuff out there as easily
accessible to your consumers as you possibly can. So you
find fast food at every interstate off ramp. You find
battles over space in grocery stores for sodas and whatnot.
It's all this idea, like I want to make it
(11:01):
as easy for my consumers to buy and use this
stuff as possible. Well, if you think about it in
a kind of an unarticulated way, that's really what the
trafficking world out of Mexico has created with these synthetic
drugs that can make ye a round no more seasons
all across the America. Yeah, and similar to almost like
(11:22):
a McDonalds than anyone else where. It's just like keep
drolling fatties at this like meat and sugar and fat.
Literally the names of some of these bills are like
drop dead, You're gonna die, Like these are like this
is the good stuff. Yeah. Well, I think this plays
into another idea that is very common, has been true
for a long time, and that is that when you
use an opioid, say heroin or whatever it happens to me,
(11:47):
and someone overdoses on your dope, that is to the
rest of the consumer population you're selling to, not a warning.
That is an advertisement. That's like, go get that dope.
That's really good. That's that's the stuff that you want
to get, And so branding it makes that even easier. Yeah,
the overdose is like to them, that's like almost like
(12:10):
a purity check. I guess exactly correct. They're like, oh,
he overdose. That means it was so much in there,
you know, like it can't be cut. So that's that's crazy.
That's that's how it works in their brains. We got
a couple of bills to pay, but we'll be right back.
Money money, money. Hi. I'm Jason Flom, CEO and founder
(12:37):
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(14:06):
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(14:28):
let's get back to kind of like the history of fentanyl,
because I think a lot of folks probably think like
it's like the new designer drug on the street that
just came out of nowhere. But why did it come from? Yeah? Yeah,
like there's so many people in this like it's hitting
the streets. But now, fentanyl has a long history. It's
a magnificent drug and surgery. I've had fentanyl and when
I had a heart attack. It revolutionized surgery. We're able
(14:50):
to do all kinds of surgery now that we're not
able to do before. Funnel Funnel was invented by Paul Jansen,
my opinion, one of the great scientific of minds of
the twentieth century. He invented many many drugs. Is from
Belgium on the company Jansen Pharmacunica, and he invented all
kinds of drugs and it was a really fertile scientific mind.
(15:12):
In nineteen sixty he invented fentanyl, which was based on
the phuentel molecule, which is able to enter the bloodstream
and enter the brain much more quickly than say the
earlier morphine and so on. And it didn't last long,
and that's what made it effective as a surgical tool.
You went into anesthesia and then very quickly you could
(15:33):
come out of it once they stopped administering it to you,
and so you didn't stay doped up for a long
time as you would on morphine. And that became kind
of how surgery was done. And so, but what makes
it a fantastic drug in the surgical setting is what
makes it a torment for users on the street and
a huge benefit for dealers, and that is that it
(15:56):
takes you in and out very quickly. So when addicted
to fentyl, you gotta always be using, right you got
to you use, and then three or four hours later
you got to use again. You were never more than
a few hours away from the dope sickness taking over
with fentanyl, and now what they're looking for is fentanyl.
You can't be the only dealer in the area who
(16:19):
does not add fentanyl to his math or his cocaine
or whatever, because very quickly word will spread and you
will be out of customers. No one will come to you.
I spoke with a dealer, a kind of a mid
level dealer out in eastern Tennessee, and she told me
she would go every day to her wholesaler in Knoxville
and buy dope and then come back to her area
(16:40):
and sell it to a bunch of different folks. And
at one point the wholesaler was going to go re
up and buy a whole bunch more and she gave
him fentanyl test strips. Now, these are strips you're supposed
to as a user's stick into whatever it is you're
about to use to make sure to see whether it
has fentyl or not, and the idea being that you
would not use it if it had had fentyl in it.
(17:01):
But she gave him fentyl test trips to test whatever
it was he was going to buy to make sure
sure that it had had fentanyl in it. That's that's
the whole point. You don't you don't want to come
back here with stuff that doesn't have fentanyl already mixed
into it. She told him, we're not going to buy that.
When we got we got no use for that. But
that gives you an idea of what actually happens after
(17:22):
the fentyl market has matured. And I would say that
in many, many parts of this country, perhaps all of them,
but certainly many parts of the country. Now you are
seeing an increasing number of people just addicted to fentanyl
and demanding fentyl. Now that's crazy. So there's no market
for somebody with the organic heroine. I was in a
(17:44):
Nashville tent encauntment about three or four months ago, and
I was speaking with this guy, longtime heroine user, got
them transitioned over to fentanyl, and a guy came through.
He said a week before I was there and he said, um,
he got this black tar heroine and it looked to
be legitimate, good quality blacked our heroin. But the guy
told him, what use do I have of heroin? I
need fentanyl. I'm not so. Fentanyl is taking over the
(18:07):
market and they need it. Heroin is almost worthless now.
That's why it's very soon will be I think, if
things continue as they are, will be non existent on
the streets of the United States. So fentanyl existed for
decades and it was just kind of us in a
medical setting. And what happened during that gap, when did
(18:29):
this kind of like realization from drug cartels and things
like that kind of spur over to the illicit narcotic ray. Yeah,
Fentyl for a lot of years just existed as an anesthetic.
You would occasionally see some you know, underground chemist come
up with a batch of it, and you would see
these little spurts and deaths in some area. Orange County,
(18:52):
California had a San Francisco and San Diego had them
for a bid. Sacramento area had one for a while.
But we as a country were never really faced with
massive industrial quantities of fentanyl until two thousand and five
and six, and that's the time when the Senelow drug
(19:13):
cartel first figured out that fentyl existed. And this came
from an underground chemist that they had hired, Mexican guy
that had grown up in San Diego, learned somehow and
I still don't know how to cook some version of fentanyl.
Was arrested for that, went to prison for many years,
(19:33):
during which time he took lots of notes and met
all the chemists in every prison he went to and
got out of there much better able to make fentanyl,
and then was deported in about two thousand and four.
Two thousand and five, he was approached by what he
said later were members of the Senelo A drug cartel
(19:53):
who wanted him to make not fentanyl, but if federan.
If Ederan is the crucial ingredient in one method of
making methamphetamen. Right, yes, it's it's it's a natural chemical
that's found in the Sudafid pills and all that kind
of stuff. And they had been making, really industrializing methamphetomen
(20:18):
based on if ederan. But there were signs now in
two thousand and five and six that the Mexican government
was going to get rid of or at least cracked
down on the importations. And so they wanted another source,
somebody who who could make this stuff. And this guy said, yeah,
I think I could make it. But in the back
(20:38):
of his mind it was a strange thing. The back
of his mind, he says, yeah, I'm not going to
make that. I mean, I know better. This was a
guy who always thought he was kind of the smartest
guy in the room. So they buy him all these
very high quality chemical laboratory equipment and glassware and all
the rest, and he sets out, but he really sets
out to make phentomyl. When they just discover this these
(21:01):
elements within the cinealoid, Joe Cartel get pretty mad at him.
Not a good idea, get the cinaloa. Joe Cartel mad
at you. But he sits him down, right, He sits
him down and explains to him, look, I have made
for you the most profitable, the most potent drug that
you are ever going to encounter. And it's called sentinel.
And he explained fentanyl's benefits from a trafficking perspective to them,
(21:25):
and the lights go on. This is the first time
that we have record of the cinaloid drug cartel or
some elements within it, understanding that there's actually a synthetic
way of producing a substitute for harrow. No more poppies,
you don't have to grow poppies anymore, bingo, we can
make this stuff. And he begins to make it at
that lab and they begin to ship it and test it.
(21:48):
Literally there's wire tabs of these guys saying, we tested
it up in Chicago or we tested it up in Detroit,
and you know it worked. These guys are like all excited, like,
oh my god, they've at this devastatingly potent drug. And
what ends up happening is people begin to die in
large numbers. That's the first mass mortality moment that we
(22:09):
see it go several thousand people over the next nine months.
When is that time period that's too end of a
Fall of two thousand and five until April of two
thousand and six, which is when he is busted. But
still after he's busted, there's another ten kilos that he
has just sold into the market that kill people for
another must be three four five months until it all
(22:33):
tapers off. So you see about a year's worth of death,
very very pronounced death in the areas where this takes
place are very very easily identified. Chicago's first, he's selling
it to the gangs in South Chicago at the time,
it goes to Detroit, down to Saint Louis, it goes
out to Philadelphia to begin to see an enormous new
(22:54):
burst of mortality out of nowhere, and then after he's busted,
it tapers off and to normal. But in the back
of their minds, they never forgot fentyl. You know, they
had this one guy who accluded him into it. He
wasn't around long enough to really teach everybody how to
do it, but they found other There's lots of chemists
in Mexico, There's lots of professors at universities and various
(23:17):
people that end up doing that. The knowledge base begins
to spread, particularly in the drug producing regions of western
Mexico on the Pacific coast, and you begin to see
that's when you begin to see the production levels that
allow fentyl to reach beyond just Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Tennessee,
(23:38):
Southern Virginia, et cetera, which is where they opioid epidemic
really started and where the big market for fentyl began
because the quantities being produced are so staggering. In Mexico,
they have all these chemicals coming in and they're shipping
it not in little Manila envelopes, They're shipping it in truckloads.
(23:59):
They're shipping it and enormous quantities. They have an enormous
sophistication and getting it across the border. It's they share
a two thousand mile border and a free trade agreement
with the United States, so none of these trucks are
really being check sufficiently. It would cripple our economy if
they were, you know. And so you begin to see
(24:19):
these quantities of fentyl just flooding and covering everything and
then being added to everything as well. Yeah, and you
kind of think, like, you know, we've all seen like
the Narco Show, or you're watching like blow or something
like that, and you hear like these quantities of like cocaine,
it seems like the same amount of quantity, but the
intensity and the actual like pound for pound punches much
(24:41):
hundred times a thousand times, it's much. Yeah, exactly, you
have enormous quantities. But with fentanyl. One of the benefits
of the many benefits to a trafficker is that you
don't You could smuggle a few kilos and it's massively profitable.
You know, you don't need truckloads of funnel. I spoke
(25:02):
with a kid who's in federal prison at the moment
for doing a number of years in prison, but he
was out of Orange County, and he said that he
would buy quarter killers or a half pound of funnel
from Chinese manufacturers and then produce through the mail again
and make tens of thousands of counterfeit percocets. And he
(25:24):
ended up spending per load of funnel that he would get.
He would spend five thousand dollars for the fentanel and
generally his profit was on the order of two million.
You see, the profit is just staggering. Yeah, that's and
that's your eyes light up with Dallas science. Would you
hear that if you are drug dealer, five thousand into
(25:45):
two million? And that's what I say. I mean it
feels to a lot of people once they begin to
figure the fentnel out, it feels like they could win
the lottery with this stuff. You know, It's like and
then anyone can be a kingpin at that point. That's
exactly right. Everybody can be a kingpin whether you're not
you're in your your boxer shorts and your mom's basement,
you could still be this major mover what would have
(26:07):
been considered a kingpin sized quantities ten fifteen years earlier.
Now like anybody can get a hold of it, and
anybody can be selling it. You see, all kinds of
people get into the drug business who really have no
business being in the drug business. They're idiots, they or
they just don't know. And then when those folks get prosecuted,
(26:28):
they face kingpin sized prison terms too, right, and then
the cost as well, margin of air is so much smaller.
And something that you were discussing the book as well
is like how the magic bullet that blender that's for
smoothies that became like the way dealers would mix this
thing up. Can you talk a little bit about the
prevalence of the magic bullet in like the overdoses of fentyl,
(26:50):
Like in that connection, it's amazing to the prom with
fentyl from a dealer's perspective is it's very potent. So
what the equivalent of a few grains of salt of
fentyl will get you high. A couple more will kill you.
And so you can't just sell that small amount of
fentanyl on the street. It's not logistically possible to sell
a few grains of so you have to mix it
(27:11):
with some other powder that doesn't do anything. It's just
a cheap powder. So that means that all those lottery
size profits that fentanyl promises are dependent on your ability
to actually mix it with something else at which you
can actually sell it on the street. That's when the
magic bullet takes over. The problem with the magic bullet
is it's it's an awful machine with which to mix
(27:34):
fentanyl because it only mixes liquids. Fentanyl isn't usually in
a powder, and if you try to mix you you
cannot mix powder with a blade. But all these folks
would kind of get into this thinking, oh great, I'm magmillions.
I'm going to go down to Target buy me a
twenty nine ninety five Magic bullet blender. And because of that,
there were so many of those clusters of overdoses who
(27:56):
which you'll see forty fifty, sixty seventy a weekend. And
I would say with their are of the drug war too,
you know, the drug war, the reason it failed in
a lot of ways is not because we use law enforcement.
It's because we only use law enforcement, and to me,
that was the major failing of the drug war up
to now. So we tried to deal with a problem
(28:19):
rooted in the brain chemistry with one tool. And the
truth is we need a variety of things and in
each community. I think one of the most radical, beautiful,
revolutionary ideas is you are now seeing people who are
coming together and like sometimes that is very low tech stuff.
It's being outside, it's holding a barbecue, it's holding a
(28:41):
block party. It's not high tech stuff I'm talking about here.
It's what people have always done. But in America we
decided in the last forty years it was not necessary
and we could get away without it because it is difficult,
it is messy. But the truth is when we try
to do that, as we have in this country, we
end up crippling ourselves. And that's what we're seeing. Though. Well, Sam,
(29:02):
this this is amazing. I highly recommend M. Sam's books.
You know, Dreamland New York Times bestseller, A fantastic pick
it up in his newest book that we were just
talking about today. A lot the least of us True
Tales of America and Hope in the time of fentanyl
and meth Sam, thank you again for joining us. I
love to love to talk about this more um as
(29:22):
we move forward. I think this could have gone yeah,
for a very long time and just fascinated by this
subject and where we're headed. So yeah, I appreciate again,
thank you every time. Thank you. My pleasure follows. Thanks
very much for the interest on the book. Yeah, night
and Greg. Good to talk with you. Thank you for
breaking it down for us. Appreciate my pleasure. We'll be
right back with the War on Drugs podcast. You've you've
(29:55):
worked on some superhero shows and you know origin stories
are important. It's definitely a good villain origin story or
it feels like os are breaking bad. Any of those
shows where you gotta figure your way out the snowfall,
any of those shows. That's great. So we did a
little digging, right, what what would we be if we
(30:15):
couldn't find out some information. Yeah, so we really wanted
to dive more into like this guy, Harto Valdez Tori
is right. Yeah, he was called like a cerebro, the brain,
the cooker, this guy who essentially was given a task
by the Cineloa cartel, and he says, in his own head,
(30:37):
I think I can just do this better. I mean
that those always those people that they they're like, all right,
I'm gonna outsmart them. But you gotta see it all
the way through, like when he was probably like, yeah,
I'm not making the fuck veteran. I'm not doing that shit.
You know how good at kim as I am. I'm
about to make this fitting off. They don't even know
what this shit is. Watches it? Then, I want to
(30:57):
see that song and dance number. How did you pitch
that to down? Yeah? You know what I'm saying, like,
did you have a PowerPoint presentation? You better have had
some shit, man, you better started singing like uh. But
he was pitching that Monareil the Springfield on that old episode.
Ye gotta got the old Timmy Broadway number about this
(31:18):
ship because hey, we said do this and you gave
us this, and basically that's what he did. He negotiated
a focus group. He literally did. Yeah, he was like, hey,
look at all our customers in there. They love this
new what in Chicago? Yeah, just try it in Chicago.
It was probably like one of them Bill Gates or
Steve Jobs presentations probably had on a black turtle. You
(31:42):
know what if I could get you twice as high
for half as long, would that be something? You're interesting?
What yah to the cartel? Like these are not okay? Hey? Yeah,
he held his nuts on that one and he was,
you know, kind of patient zero this whole thing. This
went on for a few years and they was blowing
(32:04):
up and they were bringing in the chemicals like they
were using a street gang called the Mickey Cobers that
was big in Chicago at least at that time, and
essentially using them as the middleman to bring this through.
They're mixing fentinyl with with heroin and other things. They
had all these names like Reaper and penicill And that's
the thing, like they're not even like hiding it, like
this will kill you. And that was like the attractiveness
of it. That's what Sam was talking about. Yeah, a
(32:25):
lot of these people want It's everywhere right now, and
just you hear too many people die, you hear too
many people overdose, yet anything out there. Well, I want
to thank our guests Sam for taking the time to
talk about this. That was awesome. So with that, I
appreciate listening to War on Drugs. Yes, thank you. Make
(32:47):
sure you follow the War on Drugs podcast so you
don't miss any new episodes or any of our quick
fixed bonus content. I don't know if it actually helps them.
Maybe if you follow it and unfollow it and then
follow it again, and if we get two that don't count,
I don't know. Maybe you never know. You can that
trick the algorithm. We'll see, they just give it a shot.
(33:08):
What's what's the harm? But we'll be back next week
with another episode of War on Drugs. Until then, thanks
for listening. Executive producers for War on Drugs are Jason
Flom and Kevin Wards. Senior producer is Michael Epstein. Editing
by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein. Associate producer and mix
and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production by Jeff Claiburne
(33:30):
and Anna mcintick. All them people made it happen, man. Yeah, Nick, Nick,
they might gotta get you a bigger check. You got
about five things you're doing then, buddy, be sure to
follow the show on all social media accounts you know
what they are, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, at lava like molten
lava for good You can follow me on Twitter at
(33:51):
Greg Glode and Clayton on Instagram at Clayton English. The
War on Drugs is a production of Lava for Good
podcast and association with Signal Company Number One. I'm your host,
Greg Glode and I'm your host Clayton Ing. Thanks for
listening until next time.
Clayton. What if I told you in a few years
there wasn't going to be any heroine on the streets
like none. Okay, that's a good thing, right, What if
I told you that was a bad thing for who
people that do heroin? Now you got to explain this.
Four suspected drug dealers are under arrest for allegedly supplying
the fentnyl laced heroine that killed actor Michael K. Williams.
(00:23):
Someone overdoses on your dope. That is to the rest
of a consumer population in Sellington, not a warning. That
is an advertisement, almost like a purity check. I guess
guys exactly they're trying to find arcanics. Possibly he is
a country were never faced with massive industrial quantities of
(00:43):
fennel until the time when the Sun of Law drug
cartel first figured out that finel existed. This is an
existential threat to the United States, China, Mexico are flooding
on c streets to important these elements within the Sun
of Law drug cartel get pretty mad at him. Not
a good idea, get the sent a long drug. Hurt
mad at you, but he down, He sits him down
(01:07):
and explains to him, look, I have made for you,
the most profitable, the most potent trug that you are
ever going to encounter, and it's called functional. I'm Greg Glad.
I'm Clayton, English and this is the War on drugs.
(01:29):
Clay Man, how's it going. Oh man, it's good, it's good.
Were broadcast them from the right place. Yeah, we're in Atlanta. Yeah,
we're on Boulevard. Yeah. Yeah, interesting little area over here,
East Atlanta area. Yeah, it's definitely. Uh, the War on
drugs is hit this area repeatedly and heatedly. But yeah,
(01:50):
I'm glad. I'm glad we're here. Though. I think we
shed light on stuff. That's why I'm glad you down
here in my city. Yeah, we're gonna talk about today.
I think is is really prevalent to a lot of listeners,
and I hope we all get something out of this.
We're gonna talk to this guy. Sam Keionis wrote this
book called The Least of Us. It's about the fentnyl
epidemic and how it's taken over. And the thing that
scared me was that, you know, Sam was just like,
(02:11):
heroin won't be a thing anymore, it'll be a vestige
of the past. And when you say heroin, like you
think order the real bowin, like math, it's heroin, and
and you're just and that's like going to be an
old timey drug, right, That's right, that's terrifying. That was
one for me when he said that. At first, I thought, oh, good, yeah,
(02:33):
we got it. Yeah, but I didn't realize that it's
all gonna be replaced with finnel, something more powerful, more deadly,
and something that it's already happening. And the crazy thing
is like things that you're able to do to help yourself,
like narcane to you know that can override and opioid
you know, overdose, or fentnyl strips where you're able to
test substances and see if it has fentyl and it
(02:56):
highly highly accurate. They're illegal in a lot of states.
They're dru paraphernalia. You can't own it or actually give
it to someone narcn or you can't even have it
in you. And so it's like it's it's crazy that
the one thing that can actually maybe prevent some of
these things, we're also causing it to be drug paraphernalia
some way. It's like that's the smallest step, Like that's
(03:16):
the smallest step you could take, like just allow test
strips to be available. It's it's a crazy thing. So yeah,
I mean Sam really opened my eyes to what this
all looks like. And if you thought that trying to
fight the war on drugs when you had drugs that
needed like you know, poppy fields or field you need people,
you need You're not to worry about rabbits and yeah,
(03:39):
the other cartail exactly. Shoot, like your pets become bigger
and they have automatic work. You can just be in
a room. What are We're in an eight by eight
room right now? Yeah, this could be a place where
you could do twenty million dollars worth of fentanyl in
a day and that could happen all of the country
and process it not do it. Yeah yeah, if you
do it, you you I don't think you're gonna make it. Now.
(04:02):
If you did it, then we need to do some
tests on you. Yeah. This is one of these topics,
the fentinyl epidemic that you kind of have to laugh
so you don't cry when you look at the the
numbers of overdoses. It's just staggering. I get text vocations
and you know, look on Twitter and it feels like, yeah,
every every month, every month a prominent person. It feels like,
(04:24):
you know, and that's not it. And you can only
imagine what's going on, like you said, in the streets
in your city and my city and all across the country.
And you know, we joke a lot around a lot
m and we will during this episode, but we know
that this is an incredibly serious topic and this is
impacting the lives of so many people across the country everywhere.
We really got to get to the root of the problem.
And the root of the problem is the war on drugs,
(04:45):
the prohibition, the way that we have criminalized um, you know,
the drugs and put so many people in prison, and
the ramifications that has had and the lack of actual
you know, solving addiction in this country because of the
war on drugs. Is wife fentinyl so ramping the streets.
This is the reason. This is the root cause. And
so we get into that, you know, with um, with
(05:07):
Sam and I think it's just going to be a
really great episode of informative one on something that's really
not you know, well known, like, yeah, we know what
the word fentanyl, but it's kind of okay, what is it,
How do we stop? What's what's going on? Yeah? One
of the things I really got out of this episode
was just, uh, you actually see how the war on
drugs actually fuels the whole fitting al epidemic. And then
(05:28):
I think it's important for people to listen to this
episode because Sam answers so many questions that I hear
just talking to people in day to day conversation about
Fenton Al is what is it? Why is it? Why
would they do this? And I think he answers so
many of those in such a playing and simple way
(05:48):
that everybody can understand. So let's get into it with
Sam Key on this, Yeah, without any further ado, let's
let's kick it to Sam and figure out where fentinyl
came from and where we're at right now with this.
All right, Sam, welcome to the War on Drugs. How
are you pretty well? Greg? Thank you? Yeah, great to
(06:09):
have you. Oh it's good to be here. Yeah. Going
through your book, it was just absolutely fascinating. And one
thing that really stuck out that you had said was
there's not going to be any recreational drug use pretty soon.
M clayton. Thoughts and prayers to you on that. I
don't do it recreationally anyway. I have a purpose when
I use drugs to get high. Yeah. Yeah, So what
(06:33):
did you mean by that? Well, I think it's we're
already at the end of the era of recreational drug use,
and Frontal has put an end to that, well almost
at an end of heroin. Don't have really much heroin
on the streets anymore in the United States. I think
we're about a year or two away from seeing no
heroin at all. And so everything that's out there can
(06:56):
have front on online. You can't trust anything really to
not have fentyl in it, unless it's pills that you've
got from a pharmacist that they filled in front of you,
almost And so now it's in everything. It's in cocaine,
it's in the methamphetam that is also everywhere in the country,
and it's being put into counterfeit pills that look like
(07:19):
percosets or xanax bars or even the illegal pills ecstasy
and what have you. And all of this is really
because the ease of which the Mexican drug trafficking world
can make fentanyl, and the enormous quantities it can make.
All of that is why You've got so much of
the stuff around and it's being added to everything. And
(07:41):
what that has done, I think is really put an
end to risk free recreational drug use in America. And
now every time you used ope, it's a it's a
game of Russian roulette. Wow, you said in a year,
you don't think there'll be any here, When on the streets,
I'd say we're about a year or two away from that.
Every place I go, I see less and less heroin
(08:03):
being seized. People call it heroin by the way they
call whatever they're buying on the street. I found this
in eastern Tennessee, for example, people will still call it heroin.
There's no heroine in it. It tests for fentanyl, A
tests from math at, tests for thhc, AT, tests for
all kinds of things. But but there's very little heroin
(08:25):
in it. And this is all because of economics. A
basic idea is that fentanyl is simply more efficient, more competitive,
if you like, form of getting people addicted to opioids
and then keeping them strung out. It makes a lot
of sense from a drug dealer's perspective, a drug trafficker's perspective.
(08:47):
You don't have to grow poppies anymore. You just make
it in a lab. Yeah, yeah, let's I'd love to
kind of boil down on that, is you kind of
think about these things and is that the big instant fennel.
Obviously we can get back to like kind of like
what fennel is and what the potency is. But from
a pure economic standpoint, you don't need a poppy field anymore.
(09:08):
You don't need a marijuana field anymore. You know, you
can just have a guy pretty much in a kiss
the chef's schmock in his bedroom, just whipping this stuff up. Yes,
all of this is supplied driven. Virtually none of it
is demand driven. In my opinion, it's all about what
benefits traffickers, and traffickers are enormously benefited by switching from
(09:31):
plant based drugs to synthetic drugs made only in a
lab with no plant involved. It's easier to make, it's
cheaper to make, and all that you really need. You
don't need land, you don't need sunlight, You're gonna need irrigation.
All you need now is access to shipping ports. Shipping
ports get you access to the entire world chemical market,
(09:56):
and all of this means that they can produce quantities
of these drugs that are simply staggering, simply unprecedented, the
quantities of the drugs that we're seeing now coming out
of Mexico. Because they don't have any more seat, there's
no more seasons, you're not limited by what the When
the plant can actually grow, you can make it every week,
(10:18):
every two weeks. You know. The other thing that's interesting
I think about all this is if you if you
look at how corporate America, particularly of products that you
would you know, like that have some addictive capacity, stuff
with sugar in it, fast food, all that kind of stuff.
What they're mostly looking for is to reduce friction of use.
(10:41):
It's all about supply again. It's like, you want to
get as much of this stuff out there as easily
accessible to your consumers as you possibly can. So you
find fast food at every interstate off ramp. You find
battles over space in grocery stores for sodas and whatnot.
It's all this idea, like I want to make it
(11:01):
as easy for my consumers to buy and use this
stuff as possible. Well, if you think about it in
a kind of an unarticulated way, that's really what the
trafficking world out of Mexico has created with these synthetic
drugs that can make ye a round no more seasons
all across the America. Yeah, and similar to almost like
(11:22):
a McDonalds than anyone else where. It's just like keep
drolling fatties at this like meat and sugar and fat.
Literally the names of some of these bills are like
drop dead, You're gonna die, Like these are like this
is the good stuff. Yeah. Well, I think this plays
into another idea that is very common, has been true
for a long time, and that is that when you
use an opioid, say heroin or whatever it happens to me,
(11:47):
and someone overdoses on your dope, that is to the
rest of the consumer population you're selling to, not a warning.
That is an advertisement. That's like, go get that dope.
That's really good. That's that's the stuff that you want
to get, And so branding it makes that even easier. Yeah,
the overdose is like to them, that's like almost like
(12:10):
a purity check. I guess exactly correct. They're like, oh,
he overdose. That means it was so much in there,
you know, like it can't be cut. So that's that's crazy.
That's that's how it works in their brains. We got
a couple of bills to pay, but we'll be right back.
Money money, money. Hi. I'm Jason Flom, CEO and founder
(12:37):
of Lava for Good podcasts, Home to Bone Valley, Wrongful Conviction,
The War on Drugs, and many other great podcasts. Today
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(13:01):
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to tackle the root causes of our country's biggest problems.
Weldon Angelos is one of those change makers. At the
(13:22):
age of twenty three, Weldon was arrested for a first
time offense for selling weed to a confidential informant. At
the time, he was a budding musician spending time with
artists like Tupacs, Snoop Dogg, Pink, and Nas. His entire
life was ahead of him when he was sentenced to
a mandatory fifty five years in federal prison without the
possibility of early release. After serving thirteen years, a bipartisan
(13:45):
effort led to him getting officially pardoned. Upon his release,
he founded the Weldon Project, a nonprofit working to create
a better outcome for those still in prison that funds
social change and provides financial aid for all those who
are still serving time for cannabis related offenses. Welldon Angelos
is one of many entrepreneurs partnering will Stand Together to
(14:06):
drive solutions and education, healthcare, poverty, and criminal justice. To
learn more about Stand Together their Partners or how you
can partner Will Stand Together, go to Stand Together dot org. Yeah,
(14:28):
let's get back to kind of like the history of fentanyl,
because I think a lot of folks probably think like
it's like the new designer drug on the street that
just came out of nowhere. But why did it come from? Yeah? Yeah,
like there's so many people in this like it's hitting
the streets. But now, fentanyl has a long history. It's
a magnificent drug and surgery. I've had fentanyl and when
I had a heart attack. It revolutionized surgery. We're able
(14:50):
to do all kinds of surgery now that we're not
able to do before. Funnel Funnel was invented by Paul Jansen,
my opinion, one of the great scientific of minds of
the twentieth century. He invented many many drugs. Is from
Belgium on the company Jansen Pharmacunica, and he invented all
kinds of drugs and it was a really fertile scientific mind.
(15:12):
In nineteen sixty he invented fentanyl, which was based on
the phuentel molecule, which is able to enter the bloodstream
and enter the brain much more quickly than say the
earlier morphine and so on. And it didn't last long,
and that's what made it effective as a surgical tool.
You went into anesthesia and then very quickly you could
(15:33):
come out of it once they stopped administering it to you,
and so you didn't stay doped up for a long
time as you would on morphine. And that became kind
of how surgery was done. And so, but what makes
it a fantastic drug in the surgical setting is what
makes it a torment for users on the street and
a huge benefit for dealers, and that is that it
(15:56):
takes you in and out very quickly. So when addicted
to fentyl, you gotta always be using, right you got
to you use, and then three or four hours later
you got to use again. You were never more than
a few hours away from the dope sickness taking over
with fentanyl, and now what they're looking for is fentanyl.
You can't be the only dealer in the area who
(16:19):
does not add fentanyl to his math or his cocaine
or whatever, because very quickly word will spread and you
will be out of customers. No one will come to you.
I spoke with a dealer, a kind of a mid
level dealer out in eastern Tennessee, and she told me
she would go every day to her wholesaler in Knoxville
and buy dope and then come back to her area
(16:40):
and sell it to a bunch of different folks. And
at one point the wholesaler was going to go re
up and buy a whole bunch more and she gave
him fentanyl test strips. Now, these are strips you're supposed
to as a user's stick into whatever it is you're
about to use to make sure to see whether it
has fentyl or not, and the idea being that you
would not use it if it had had fentyl in it.
(17:01):
But she gave him fentyl test trips to test whatever
it was he was going to buy to make sure
sure that it had had fentanyl in it. That's that's
the whole point. You don't you don't want to come
back here with stuff that doesn't have fentanyl already mixed
into it. She told him, we're not going to buy that.
When we got we got no use for that. But
that gives you an idea of what actually happens after
(17:22):
the fentyl market has matured. And I would say that
in many, many parts of this country, perhaps all of them,
but certainly many parts of the country. Now you are
seeing an increasing number of people just addicted to fentanyl
and demanding fentyl. Now that's crazy. So there's no market
for somebody with the organic heroine. I was in a
(17:44):
Nashville tent encauntment about three or four months ago, and
I was speaking with this guy, longtime heroine user, got
them transitioned over to fentanyl, and a guy came through.
He said a week before I was there and he said, um,
he got this black tar heroine and it looked to
be legitimate, good quality blacked our heroin. But the guy
told him, what use do I have of heroin? I
need fentanyl. I'm not so. Fentanyl is taking over the
(18:07):
market and they need it. Heroin is almost worthless now.
That's why it's very soon will be I think, if
things continue as they are, will be non existent on
the streets of the United States. So fentanyl existed for
decades and it was just kind of us in a
medical setting. And what happened during that gap, when did
(18:29):
this kind of like realization from drug cartels and things
like that kind of spur over to the illicit narcotic ray. Yeah,
Fentyl for a lot of years just existed as an anesthetic.
You would occasionally see some you know, underground chemist come
up with a batch of it, and you would see
these little spurts and deaths in some area. Orange County,
(18:52):
California had a San Francisco and San Diego had them
for a bid. Sacramento area had one for a while.
But we as a country were never really faced with
massive industrial quantities of fentanyl until two thousand and five
and six, and that's the time when the Senelow drug
(19:13):
cartel first figured out that fentyl existed. And this came
from an underground chemist that they had hired, Mexican guy
that had grown up in San Diego, learned somehow and
I still don't know how to cook some version of fentanyl.
Was arrested for that, went to prison for many years,
(19:33):
during which time he took lots of notes and met
all the chemists in every prison he went to and
got out of there much better able to make fentanyl,
and then was deported in about two thousand and four.
Two thousand and five, he was approached by what he
said later were members of the Senelo A drug cartel
(19:53):
who wanted him to make not fentanyl, but if federan.
If Ederan is the crucial ingredient in one method of
making methamphetamen. Right, yes, it's it's it's a natural chemical
that's found in the Sudafid pills and all that kind
of stuff. And they had been making, really industrializing methamphetomen
(20:18):
based on if ederan. But there were signs now in
two thousand and five and six that the Mexican government
was going to get rid of or at least cracked
down on the importations. And so they wanted another source,
somebody who who could make this stuff. And this guy said, yeah,
I think I could make it. But in the back
(20:38):
of his mind it was a strange thing. The back
of his mind, he says, yeah, I'm not going to
make that. I mean, I know better. This was a
guy who always thought he was kind of the smartest
guy in the room. So they buy him all these
very high quality chemical laboratory equipment and glassware and all
the rest, and he sets out, but he really sets
out to make phentomyl. When they just discover this these
(21:01):
elements within the cinealoid, Joe Cartel get pretty mad at him.
Not a good idea, get the cinaloa. Joe Cartel mad
at you. But he sits him down, right, He sits
him down and explains to him, look, I have made
for you the most profitable, the most potent drug that
you are ever going to encounter. And it's called sentinel.
And he explained fentanyl's benefits from a trafficking perspective to them,
(21:25):
and the lights go on. This is the first time
that we have record of the cinaloid drug cartel or
some elements within it, understanding that there's actually a synthetic
way of producing a substitute for harrow. No more poppies,
you don't have to grow poppies anymore, bingo, we can
make this stuff. And he begins to make it at
that lab and they begin to ship it and test it.
(21:48):
Literally there's wire tabs of these guys saying, we tested
it up in Chicago or we tested it up in Detroit,
and you know it worked. These guys are like all excited, like,
oh my god, they've at this devastatingly potent drug. And
what ends up happening is people begin to die in
large numbers. That's the first mass mortality moment that we
(22:09):
see it go several thousand people over the next nine months.
When is that time period that's too end of a
Fall of two thousand and five until April of two
thousand and six, which is when he is busted. But
still after he's busted, there's another ten kilos that he
has just sold into the market that kill people for
another must be three four five months until it all
(22:33):
tapers off. So you see about a year's worth of death,
very very pronounced death in the areas where this takes
place are very very easily identified. Chicago's first, he's selling
it to the gangs in South Chicago at the time,
it goes to Detroit, down to Saint Louis, it goes
out to Philadelphia to begin to see an enormous new
(22:54):
burst of mortality out of nowhere, and then after he's busted,
it tapers off and to normal. But in the back
of their minds, they never forgot fentyl. You know, they
had this one guy who accluded him into it. He
wasn't around long enough to really teach everybody how to
do it, but they found other There's lots of chemists
in Mexico, There's lots of professors at universities and various
(23:17):
people that end up doing that. The knowledge base begins
to spread, particularly in the drug producing regions of western
Mexico on the Pacific coast, and you begin to see
that's when you begin to see the production levels that
allow fentyl to reach beyond just Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Tennessee,
(23:38):
Southern Virginia, et cetera, which is where they opioid epidemic
really started and where the big market for fentyl began
because the quantities being produced are so staggering. In Mexico,
they have all these chemicals coming in and they're shipping
it not in little Manila envelopes, They're shipping it in truckloads.
(23:59):
They're shipping it and enormous quantities. They have an enormous
sophistication and getting it across the border. It's they share
a two thousand mile border and a free trade agreement
with the United States, so none of these trucks are
really being check sufficiently. It would cripple our economy if
they were, you know. And so you begin to see
(24:19):
these quantities of fentyl just flooding and covering everything and
then being added to everything as well. Yeah, and you
kind of think, like, you know, we've all seen like
the Narco Show, or you're watching like blow or something
like that, and you hear like these quantities of like cocaine,
it seems like the same amount of quantity, but the
intensity and the actual like pound for pound punches much
(24:41):
hundred times a thousand times, it's much. Yeah, exactly, you
have enormous quantities. But with fentanyl. One of the benefits
of the many benefits to a trafficker is that you
don't You could smuggle a few kilos and it's massively profitable.
You know, you don't need truckloads of funnel. I spoke
(25:02):
with a kid who's in federal prison at the moment
for doing a number of years in prison, but he
was out of Orange County, and he said that he
would buy quarter killers or a half pound of funnel
from Chinese manufacturers and then produce through the mail again
and make tens of thousands of counterfeit percocets. And he
(25:24):
ended up spending per load of funnel that he would get.
He would spend five thousand dollars for the fentanel and
generally his profit was on the order of two million.
You see, the profit is just staggering. Yeah, that's and
that's your eyes light up with Dallas science. Would you
hear that if you are drug dealer, five thousand into
(25:45):
two million? And that's what I say. I mean it
feels to a lot of people once they begin to
figure the fentnel out, it feels like they could win
the lottery with this stuff. You know, It's like and
then anyone can be a kingpin at that point. That's
exactly right. Everybody can be a kingpin whether you're not
you're in your your boxer shorts and your mom's basement,
you could still be this major mover what would have
(26:07):
been considered a kingpin sized quantities ten fifteen years earlier.
Now like anybody can get a hold of it, and
anybody can be selling it. You see, all kinds of
people get into the drug business who really have no
business being in the drug business. They're idiots, they or
they just don't know. And then when those folks get prosecuted,
(26:28):
they face kingpin sized prison terms too, right, and then
the cost as well, margin of air is so much smaller.
And something that you were discussing the book as well
is like how the magic bullet that blender that's for
smoothies that became like the way dealers would mix this
thing up. Can you talk a little bit about the
prevalence of the magic bullet in like the overdoses of fentyl,
(26:50):
Like in that connection, it's amazing to the prom with
fentyl from a dealer's perspective is it's very potent. So
what the equivalent of a few grains of salt of
fentyl will get you high. A couple more will kill you.
And so you can't just sell that small amount of
fentanyl on the street. It's not logistically possible to sell
a few grains of so you have to mix it
(27:11):
with some other powder that doesn't do anything. It's just
a cheap powder. So that means that all those lottery
size profits that fentanyl promises are dependent on your ability
to actually mix it with something else at which you
can actually sell it on the street. That's when the
magic bullet takes over. The problem with the magic bullet
is it's it's an awful machine with which to mix
(27:34):
fentanyl because it only mixes liquids. Fentanyl isn't usually in
a powder, and if you try to mix you you
cannot mix powder with a blade. But all these folks
would kind of get into this thinking, oh great, I'm magmillions.
I'm going to go down to Target buy me a
twenty nine ninety five Magic bullet blender. And because of that,
there were so many of those clusters of overdoses who
(27:56):
which you'll see forty fifty, sixty seventy a weekend. And
I would say with their are of the drug war too,
you know, the drug war, the reason it failed in
a lot of ways is not because we use law enforcement.
It's because we only use law enforcement, and to me,
that was the major failing of the drug war up
to now. So we tried to deal with a problem
(28:19):
rooted in the brain chemistry with one tool. And the
truth is we need a variety of things and in
each community. I think one of the most radical, beautiful,
revolutionary ideas is you are now seeing people who are
coming together and like sometimes that is very low tech stuff.
It's being outside, it's holding a barbecue, it's holding a
(28:41):
block party. It's not high tech stuff I'm talking about here.
It's what people have always done. But in America we
decided in the last forty years it was not necessary
and we could get away without it because it is difficult,
it is messy. But the truth is when we try
to do that, as we have in this country, we
end up crippling ourselves. And that's what we're seeing. Though. Well, Sam,
(29:02):
this this is amazing. I highly recommend M. Sam's books.
You know, Dreamland New York Times bestseller, A fantastic pick
it up in his newest book that we were just
talking about today. A lot the least of us True
Tales of America and Hope in the time of fentanyl
and meth Sam, thank you again for joining us. I
love to love to talk about this more um as
(29:22):
we move forward. I think this could have gone yeah,
for a very long time and just fascinated by this
subject and where we're headed. So yeah, I appreciate again,
thank you every time. Thank you. My pleasure follows. Thanks
very much for the interest on the book. Yeah, night
and Greg. Good to talk with you. Thank you for
breaking it down for us. Appreciate my pleasure. We'll be
right back with the War on Drugs podcast. You've you've
(29:55):
worked on some superhero shows and you know origin stories
are important. It's definitely a good villain origin story or
it feels like os are breaking bad. Any of those
shows where you gotta figure your way out the snowfall,
any of those shows. That's great. So we did a
little digging, right, what what would we be if we
(30:15):
couldn't find out some information. Yeah, so we really wanted
to dive more into like this guy, Harto Valdez Tori
is right. Yeah, he was called like a cerebro, the brain,
the cooker, this guy who essentially was given a task
by the Cineloa cartel, and he says, in his own head,
(30:37):
I think I can just do this better. I mean
that those always those people that they they're like, all right,
I'm gonna outsmart them. But you gotta see it all
the way through, like when he was probably like, yeah,
I'm not making the fuck veteran. I'm not doing that shit.
You know how good at kim as I am. I'm
about to make this fitting off. They don't even know
what this shit is. Watches it? Then, I want to
(30:57):
see that song and dance number. How did you pitch
that to down? Yeah? You know what I'm saying, like,
did you have a PowerPoint presentation? You better have had
some shit, man, you better started singing like uh. But
he was pitching that Monareil the Springfield on that old episode.
Ye gotta got the old Timmy Broadway number about this
(31:18):
ship because hey, we said do this and you gave
us this, and basically that's what he did. He negotiated
a focus group. He literally did. Yeah, he was like, hey,
look at all our customers in there. They love this
new what in Chicago? Yeah, just try it in Chicago.
It was probably like one of them Bill Gates or
Steve Jobs presentations probably had on a black turtle. You
(31:42):
know what if I could get you twice as high
for half as long, would that be something? You're interesting?
What yah to the cartel? Like these are not okay? Hey? Yeah,
he held his nuts on that one and he was,
you know, kind of patient zero this whole thing. This
went on for a few years and they was blowing
(32:04):
up and they were bringing in the chemicals like they
were using a street gang called the Mickey Cobers that
was big in Chicago at least at that time, and
essentially using them as the middleman to bring this through.
They're mixing fentinyl with with heroin and other things. They
had all these names like Reaper and penicill And that's
the thing, like they're not even like hiding it, like
this will kill you. And that was like the attractiveness
of it. That's what Sam was talking about. Yeah, a
(32:25):
lot of these people want It's everywhere right now, and
just you hear too many people die, you hear too
many people overdose, yet anything out there. Well, I want
to thank our guests Sam for taking the time to
talk about this. That was awesome. So with that, I
appreciate listening to War on Drugs. Yes, thank you. Make
(32:47):
sure you follow the War on Drugs podcast so you
don't miss any new episodes or any of our quick
fixed bonus content. I don't know if it actually helps them.
Maybe if you follow it and unfollow it and then
follow it again, and if we get two that don't count,
I don't know. Maybe you never know. You can that
trick the algorithm. We'll see, they just give it a shot.
(33:08):
What's what's the harm? But we'll be back next week
with another episode of War on Drugs. Until then, thanks
for listening. Executive producers for War on Drugs are Jason
Flom and Kevin Wards. Senior producer is Michael Epstein. Editing
by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein. Associate producer and mix
and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production by Jeff Claiburne
(33:30):
and Anna mcintick. All them people made it happen, man. Yeah, Nick, Nick,
they might gotta get you a bigger check. You got
about five things you're doing then, buddy, be sure to
follow the show on all social media accounts you know
what they are, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, at lava like molten
lava for good You can follow me on Twitter at
(33:51):
Greg Glode and Clayton on Instagram at Clayton English. The
War on Drugs is a production of Lava for Good
podcast and association with Signal Company Number One. I'm your host,
Greg Glode and I'm your host Clayton Ing. Thanks for
listening until next time.
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