April 30, 2026 • 42 mins
More than 100,000 Americans die of drug overdose every year. The solution—or at least part of it—might be dorky as hell.
Sam Quinones spent 12 years reporting on America’s drug crisis and how — heroin, fentanyl, meth have reshaped the country. In this episode, l he unpacks how Mexican cartels replaced poppy fields with chemicals, lowered the price of meth by 90%, and unintentionally created a schizophrenia crisis. Since then, Sam has been on a mission to find the antidote to modern day addiction. And he found it in an unlikely source: the tuba. yes, the musical instrument. Sam explains why marching band may very well be the best anti-drug program in America and how we can help our children avoid a life of addiction and suffering.
Even if you have no interest in playing the tuba, the lessons from marching band can help anyone build a better life. This episode is about the value of hard work without fanfare, the power of community, and how to find hope in a broken world.
Sam is the author of Dreamland, The Least of Us, and his new book The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work.
Two Percent is hosted by Michael Easter. Today’s episode was produced by Joey Fischground, Robbie Hiser, Dana Brawer and Julia Nutter. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Mangesh Hattikudur and Kate Osborn and Julia Nutter. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Nikki Ettore. Our Head of Video is Maria Paz Mendez Hodes. This episode was edited by Joey Fischground. Our theme music is by the Heater Manager.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:24):
In today's episode of two Percent, I am speaking with
Sam ki Yonas. Sam as a journalist and author. He
is probably best known for his work covering drug addiction,
the opioid and meth epidemics, and the unraveling of American communities.
But he recently got a bit burnt out on all
that sort of negative, depressing stuff and he started looking
(00:44):
for people finding fulfillment through hard work that doesn't offer
a quick reward, a quick payoff, money, or fame. And
he found it in the Tuba, of all places. So
I wanted to speak to Sam because his books, I
think are a big metaphor for this modern world we
live in where we can get all these rewarding things quickly, cheaply,
(01:06):
but they often heard us in the long run.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Sam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Michael, great to be with you.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Thank you so much for having me on and for
your support of the Tuba book.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
How did you start reporting on drugs?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Well, it really it's a strange thing, but I mean
I lived in Mexico for ten years.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I was a reporter down there.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
My first two books were about Mexico, so my job
was really to go out into the provinces to the
states far away, the Mexican villages and stuff where particular,
they began to focus on immigration. And then I came
back to work for the La Times in two thousand
and four, and it was a year after that that
the Savage drug War kicked off. But I was really
(01:49):
writing about immigration because I thought that was most important story,
really much more important than drugs at that time. And
I also didn't want to write about drugs because it
was very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I didn't have anybody backing me up.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
So when I was at the La Times and I
had people back me up, began to write about this.
And at one point I remember a woman, a DEA agent,
supervising agent in Phoenix, told me, we are now seeing
this would have been two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Or nine, I think nine.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
We are now seeing huge amounts, new amounts of heroin.
We're seizing new amounts of we haven't seized these quantities
of heroin in thirty years.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
And I'm like, Wow, that's wild. Who would be using
heroin again? And why you know?
Speaker 4 (02:34):
And that's really what got me into my first book, Dreamland,
about the opioid epidemic, because what I learned along the
way was the reason why we had so much addiction
to heroin was because of this brand new revolution really
(02:55):
in pain management in American medicine that said you now
should use almost unrestricted amounts of opioid painkillers, narcotic pain
prescription painkillers in a way that medicine.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Never ever used before.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
And also seemed to me that no one had written
in a comprehensive way about the opioid epidemic at the
time and how addiction to these pain pills, which include
opioid painkillers, would then lead to heroin, which is another
opioid drug.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You know, beyond the fact that we had this sort
of revolution and how pain was treated in the US,
do you feel like there were underlying cultural conditions in
the US at the time that made people want to
do drugs in the first place.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Yes, answer your question.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
One is the most basic was a kind of a
shredding of community that did that had been happening probably
since the eighties, but really kind of accelerat and that
is uh. And and this was in rich areas and
poor areas and middle class it didn't it didn't really matter.
It's kind of pretty much across the board in the
United States, where you had all these people, all Americans,
(04:13):
just got gradually got used to not being with each
other in one way or another. And this was a
gradual thing, took some time, but we stopped investing in
things that brought us together cost too much tax money. Uh.
In some areas, job loss and disintegration of a community.
People atomized that way. But whatever it was, we became
(04:35):
a far more lonely isolated country. One of the symptoms
then was a drug drug addiction. However, I would say
also we were watching the development of a of a
corporate economy of isolating an addictive products and services. Of course,
(05:00):
junk food and all of that is number one. Starts
with that, I think probably sodas and all that kind
of stuff. But by the time I was writing Dreamland,
and then certainly by the time I wrote my next
book about this topic, The Least of Us, you began
to see smartphone media and apps and the very toxic
algorithms that seem to be almost diabolical sometimes honestly to me.
(05:25):
You began to see a widespread addiction to pornography, to
video games. Most recently obviously it's gambling apps, and the
transformation of the gambling industry you wrote about in the
Scarcity Brain. And then on top of that you add
massive prescribing of the most addictive drugs.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Known to the human species, which are opioids.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, you need a population.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
There needs to be some underlying problem or discomfort that
the substance temporarily fixes. Right, it provides some sort of comfort,
whatever it might be. If if the society has no problems,
you're probably not going to have as much of an
addiction problem. But if there's also not that supply, then
(06:14):
there's nothing fueling that. So it's like this this collision
of these two things.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Yes, I think also if you if you allow economic forces,
meaning corporations and whoever free reign to do all that,
then you are you are you know, you're going to
pay a significant price. I would say that we did
not learn our lesson, and we have legalized marijuana in
(06:41):
a in a way that kind of almost replicates the
opioid epidemic.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Now, marijuana should be.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Legal, but there are ways of legalizing it. The details
are the thing, you know, Devils in the details and
all this, and and so we we have we have
not been good at standing in the way of people
who want to make money.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
It's almost like almost in our cultural to.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Say, oh you want to make money, create jobs, Oh
go go for it. You know, no matter what damage
that that activity it may actually be creating.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
And in the In the Least of Us you write
about how the drug industry changes in a way where
things become faster, stronger, easier to make. It almost becomes
drugs used to have to be grown in fields and processed,
and then it goes into this sort of more lab
(07:31):
based that really accelerates things.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
So tell us about that a little bit.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Mexicans figured out the Mexican trafficking world in particular is
very sophisticated, very deeply very uh uh you know, wide,
and have kind of like a lot of division of
labor and been going for for a number of years.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Figured out that there was this new market.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Before that, trafficers in Mexico never wanted to deal heroine ever, it.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Was the scuzziest drug.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Nobody liked heroine and they want to do cocaine and
that kind of thing. But now they figured out own
there's this new heroin market out there and they began
to supply that. The guys that I wrote about is
from this one little village were pretty quickly, well within
a within about ten years, overwhelmed by the big cartels.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
And you know.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
That's a whole other long story, but but but basically
you saw that that that transition happened all of a sudden, Wow, heroin,
we got to.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Get into that.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Along the way, uh, they discover that that there is
actually a synthetic way of making a very very powerful opioid,
which is known as funnannel. They don't really know what
that's that's what it's called. When they discover it. They
think it's called eroina synthetico, which is what they call it.
(08:46):
But they figure out that the and and they have
already figured out through the production of metham fetament, that
is far more profitable and far less risky to make
your own drugs with chemicals rather than.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Grow them.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
They're like, oh wow, we don't have to harvest poppies
grow poppies, and oh great, this is better. They begin
to shift and so what you begin to see. Really
it takes a few years, but by the twenty thirteen
fourteen fifteen, you see the entire United States become inundated.
Gradually over the next six five, six, seven years with
two synthetic drugs, which is still the case. Fentanyl may
(09:25):
again no plants involved in either one of these. And
then methem fetament, which they figure out ways to make
that are and the potent that the real thing is.
The supplies are massive, they cover the country and also
highly highly potent. Fentanyl has always been way more potent heroin,
and any form of fentinal you provide is going to
(09:46):
be way far far more more potent and very very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Methum fetament becomes.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
More and more potent because they are able to control
the amount of the chemicals they get in through the ports.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Now that's all you care about. Can we get access
to the.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
World, come local markets through the shipping ports China principally great, okay.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
And they begin to make.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Quantities of metham fetament that we have never seen. They
run out of business, all those little meth cooks across
the United States and they take over the entire market,
and they cover the country and drop the price by
ninety percent and reached levels of purity and potency and
metham fetament that the drug has had never equalled.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And it feels to me, I mean from anecdotes and
you've written about this that with the potency rising, so
do the effects on a person's life. So I have
friends that were meth addicts, and you know, they've done
it for years, and it was something they often started
because they had a job that had crazy hours, demanding hours.
(10:52):
So they're a truck driver there, you know, graveyard shift worker,
and they would do math. You know, they knew it
wasn't good for them, but they're going, well, it helps
me work more than I can earn an income. And yeah,
there's some repercussions, but okay, and then when you see
this shift to this new form of math, they wind
up with mes psychosis, living on the streets for a
(11:13):
handful of years. They're like, there was this moment where
you just started. That started happening, happening to everyone, and
even getting off of it was harder.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
What did you what did you hear about that?
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Well, that was in two thousand and eight and nine
is when that really happened. And before that, the meth
the myth that they made in Mexico, the myth they
learned to make meth on used a chemical known as
a federan, which is a decongestant. You find it in
suda fed pil dey congestant pills. It's why you can't
after a while, you couldn't just go into a Costco
(11:43):
or a Walgreens and get suit of fed pills. You
had to sign your life away and all that because
meth dealers would take those pills. It was very laborious,
not terribly efficient, and distill those pills down into a vegerant,
and from a veterant, combined with other chemicals, they would
make metham futtament. Down in Mexico, they gotten effan from
(12:05):
the pharmaceutical industry that was diverted. It was really headed
to the pharmaceutical companies in Mexico. In some portion of
that went to the trafficking world. And then in two
thousand and eight the Mexican government really restricted effteran importations.
The trafficking world shifted to this new it's not a
new method, it's an old method, but it was new
to them, a method of making metham fetament that evolved chemical.
(12:29):
The principal precursor was no longer a fteran. It was
a chemical called phenal to propein oonne P two P.
Just the P two P method is how it's basically known.
And this method was not a great way of making
metham fetterm. It was smelly, and it tended to explode
more easily than the Federan method. However, it did have
one benefit, and that was you could make P two
(12:49):
P many different ways with different combinations of legal, toxic, cheap.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Very liberally easily available chemicals.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
That meant that the government could not easily crack down
on your production the way it did with a federant
and so you could shift. If the government cracked down
on this method of making PTP, you could shift to
this and to that. There's probably twenty thirty ways of
making PTP, according to chemists I talked to with the DEEA.
So they shifted, and that shift really began in two
(13:21):
thousand and nine. And this is the time when you
begin to see the first cases of the people you're
referring to. I've met few like that as well, where
I was a Matthewser and then all of a sudden
and it was a party drug. It was like I
was everybody's best friend and yak and away all night,
and then all of a sudden, it was sinister, and
I was seeing demons coming out of there, and I
(13:42):
was talking to people who weren't there, and this began
to happen as that myth exploded in quantity, and so many, many,
many people in New Mexico got into it.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
The chemicals were never ending, almost.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Limitless quantities of metham fetament, and they came in and
people began to make it Mexico, and it just marched
across the country. And you see again the price drop,
the potency rise. But as you say, you also began
to see this transformation of you know, a huge rise
in mental illness, huge rise in homelessness.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
To me, this was the remarkable idea.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I started the least of us thinking I'm going to
write about how these guys have been able to produce
so much metham fetament.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
That they cover the country and drop the price.
Speaker 4 (14:28):
And then along the way, towards the end of the manuscript,
about to finish it, maybe three four months from finishing it,
I came upon this other element, which was that it's
not only doing that, it's also creating rapid descent into
essentially symptoms of schizophrenia so much that people in doctors
(14:49):
and nurses and eers cannot tell when you come in
if you were an organically schizophrenic, or you are a
meth induced schizophrenic. But it began to happen all over
the country, and and doing my research then, but then
after the book came out too, I continue, it's clear
that it is happening all over the country.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, so it feels like there's this ingredient of more, faster, stronger, cheaper,
And to me, that is almost a metaphor for our
times and all these other behaviors substances that people overdo
that provide some sort of short term relief but get
them in trouble in the long run. I mean, we'll
(15:29):
use gambling as an example here. Right, it's I live
in Las Vegas. If you lived in the country and
you wanted to gamble, you had to get your butt
on a plane and you had to fly to Las Vegas.
You had to go into the casino to make that
sports bet, and then you had to sit and wait
for the game to finish three hours and you go, okay,
I won or I lost, and then you go back
to Des Moines or wherever the hell it was. Today though,
(15:53):
to continue this example, sports betting has been spread across
the country. It's now in phones, so you don't have
to do the physical act of going somewhere. And even
the speed of betting has increased in the sense that
sports betting places, they start to go, oh well, a
game takes three hours. That's a lot of time between
(16:15):
when people are making bets. What if we just did
oh well, now you can bet on like will this
guy make the next shot? What will the score be
at the end of this quarter? And so it's just
this rapid, more faster, stronger and cheaper. And I feel
like that extends to so many different areas. Where do
you see this and how do you see this affecting us?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
It's really part of what we are seeing that I
was talking about earlier, which is simply the ultra processesation.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
That's a bad term.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
I got to figure out on another one, but it's
ultra processing of supply. You know, you are constantly being prodded.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
To be distracted, which we naturally we.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Evolved to do because if you're not distracted until you
get eaten, you get killed, right, you know, back millions
of years ago whatever, and so gambling new gambling apps
or absolutely that. But then you also get pornography. So
no longer do you have to be in a movie theater,
you know, dared to be to feel the shame of
people watching go into the movie theater. And now you
(17:14):
can constantly watch the most graphic stuff. And we see
it with marijuana too. So now marijuana that used to
be like seven percent, three percent whatever THC it was
back thirty years ago. Now it's ultra processed into THC.
Evapes and wax and can and gummies and all of
(17:34):
these things, all with the idea of massive hits, immediate, immediate, immediate,
all of this kind of thing. There is an entire
segment of our economy. I think, as I was saying earlier,
it just seems to me to be devoted to creating
(17:55):
the tendency, not creating drug addicts, but creating the tendency
for addiction necessary.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, So The Least of Us has this subtitle True
Tales of America and Hope in the time of fentanyl
and meth.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
So the word hope, why hope?
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Part of this was really about me trying to tell
stories of people as bulwarks against what we were just discussing,
this whole you know, processed version of of consumer and
goods and services to make them more addictive. And the
way I wanted I thought was important to highlight was
that people were working in very small ways, nothing magical
(18:38):
or big, solving all our problems. It just solve this
one issue in your neighborhood, or you know, do something
with this old parking lot and turn it into a
baseball field, you know that kind of thing. It's small
steps together with other people together that take a time
to do.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
It's not overnight, it is in no way overnight.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
And and and that this is the way you come
to true social change, without without the unintended consequences that rapid.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Sexy, magical answers would give you. That's true.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
True social change comes small steps, just the way small
human innovation comes usually in small steps, just the way
human improvement comes usually in small steps, with lots of
hard work and practice and all that. You know. I
wrote about the threat fatonal, math, synthetics, all that kind
of stuff, the addictive qualities of so many products and
so on. I wanted to write about people in the
(19:36):
smallest way, unnoticed, not sexy, just moving forward towards repairing
or rebuilding community in various towns.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
All right, so you just released a new book the
perfect tube of forging, fulfillment from the base horn band
and hard work. And let me just say to the listeners,
I didn't know what to expect when I opened this book.
I'm not the type of person that reads books about tubas,
but this book was awesome. So how did you go
from covering drugs to tubas of all instruments and topics?
(20:10):
And I will say, let me hearry and say for
listeners before we start, the book is fantastic. It's so fascinating.
It was one of those where I read it, I
go and go tubas, huh, I'm not even sure what
a tuba looks like or sounds like. And then I
start reading, I'm like this, this is one of those
things where you found this subculture and you just went
(20:30):
all in and you made it something that I would
never picture myself reading.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
I was just turning pages. It was unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
So how'd you get thank you? First of all, I
don't play the tuba. I was never in marching band.
I grew up in the seventies man playing guitar like
every single other guy I knew, okay at the La Times,
having a deep background in Mexico speaking Spanish and all
this my job. Part of my job was to write
about the Mexican immigrant community in LA. And one of
the stories I wrote about was how huge and important
(21:01):
the tuba was in the Mexican immigrant world in Los Angeles.
Hit very important, and mostly because a lot of social
life takes place in backyard parties. And one way of
showing you have arrived, you know, kind of a certain
way of economically, certainly socially, is you have a band
with a tuba in it. And the tuba is enormous,
big gold thing, you know. And so it became like
(21:22):
this hugely popular instrument in Mexican LA. And I wrote
that story and then the day came out, a band
director called me. He says, you know what, yeah, so
much so your story is right on the money. We
have been losing. People have been stealing our tubas for
the last whatever had been three or four months. By then,
(21:43):
I had not heard this. I wrote another story about
tubas being stolen from these high schools because it was
so popular. Eventually began to just interview tuba players of
all kinds, nice of Mexicans, but all kinds of tuba players.
Why because I could see that most tuba players loved
what they did, but they loved it without, as you said,
(22:06):
the expectation of any you know, applause, any wealth or
fame or any of that kind of stuff. And generally,
as a journalist, I find if you can find people
like that doing something absolutely for the love of it,
you will find if you stick with them, you will
find some great stories. So as I was writing the
Dreamland book about the opioid epidemic and then fentanyl and
(22:26):
mathma in the Least of Us, I was periodically I
would periodically do interviews so tuba players.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Why I had no plan to write a book.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
I just thought, if I stick with it, something good
is going to happen. And so I interviewed over the
next few years, probably fifteen to twenty eight tuba players.
It wasn't like constant, but and there was this big
file at the back of my computer called Tuba and
I just put all my notes and my tapes and
all that stuff in there. And then The Least of
Us came out, and that was twelve years. That marked
(22:57):
twelve years of writing about grim stuff like addiction and
drug profiteering and all the rest that you would write
about and.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
I felt like I needed like I love writing about
that stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
I still love writing about that I still find it
a fascinating topic. But there is a point where I
want to say, I think I need to do something
totally new. And my agent said, well, why don't you
see what kind of book you might be able to
write about that tuba project. You've been kind of half working,
half assed working. I mean it was really not very
focused on it. Just wanted to see what kind of
could learn.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I had remembered this conversation that I had with this
guy named Bob Carpenter years before in Orlando, Florida, a
NASA scientist and a tuba player for the Orlando Symphony,
who told me about these two perfect tubas, these two
tubas made in York Instrument Company in nineteen thirties and
(23:53):
Grand Rapids, Michigan for a very famous tuba player who
ended up not being able to play them and it
was too fat, basically, and he sold him to one
of them to his student, and his student using this
tuba went on to be one of the greatest tuba
players in the history of the instrument. Arnold Jacobs, who
then was forty years at the Chicago Symphony and sold
(24:13):
that horn, and then he bought the other two.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
These were two prototypes.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
There was only two of them, and the York Instrument
Company went out of business not long after the story
of the Search for the Perfect tuba because nine companies
have tried to make these tubas, replicate these tubas and
really kind of succeeded, but not exactly. It just overtook
my life in this beautiful way. So its not writing
(24:38):
about people pimping out their sister or their girlfriend for dope.
It was people practicing endlessly to get this eight measured.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Part of this A two Just right, I'm going to
read you a quote from the book. I found it
hard to avoid the conclusion that a root of our
epidemic of drug addiction was a s running of community
in America, which left us isolated and a loaned and
vulnerable to addiction. I came to see how marching bands
in fact create community in this country. They find a
(25:10):
place for kids of all kinds to thrive, not based
on their side or speed, but instead on their willingness
to work hard. What did you learn from some of
those kids? And I will say, as you're saying this,
when you think about. You know, if I pick up
a guitar and start playing when I'm twelve, I can
go well, if I do that, I could end up
on some big stage in front of one hundred thousand
people a tuba player.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
No, no one's.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Going to know the name of the tuba player in
our current society. But they keep at it. And there's
lessons in.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
There, absolutely, And I think a lot of the lessons
of what we've already talked about, the importance of hard work,
the importance of attention to detail, and a time of distraction,
focus and attention to detail. Right, it's a collaboration and
time of isolation. Even with people collaborating with people you know,
maybe don't like all the time, still keep on doing.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
It's hard work.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
It's discipline, postponed gratification, and a time when immediate gratifications
we all crave.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Apparently I began.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
To see too that that is how we evolved as
a species to find that inner feeling that we call
fulfillment or contentment. We don't, you know, we want that
immediate gratification, but it's so transitory, it just passes quickly.
Every you get a new iPhone, two days later, you
(26:31):
don't really care, right, you know, And and there is
instead this feeling of working very hard without much applause,
until finally you create something, say a big concert you've
been practicing for, and you play it once, really really well,
and it's over and you feel the applause. You have
(26:53):
people coming up slapping you on the back. Wonderful thing,
and then it's over. But it's it's It leaves you
this feeling like of achieved something through hard work. It's
not like buying something which didn't, you know, as somebody
else did the hard work.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
You just bought it, you know. And to me all
of this, I began.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
To realize that what I had stumbled into and was
writing about fully and fully focused on now was in
fact the opposite of what I had written spent twelve
years writing about.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
The addition is about an opioid, is about the drug.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
Stifling that your ability to breathe. That's how you overdose
on an opioid. It just the brain stops breathing. Basically,
Tuba is about nurturing that beautiful column of air so
that you can force it through this big, enormous metal
beast and out. And it comes starts with this horrible
sound through the mouthpiece, going like that, and it comes
(27:52):
out the bell, this gorgeous, powerful sound that will rock
your world, you know, and the bones of everybody in
the listening to it. It seemed to me strangely that
I was writing about something that was like the bulwark
against the thing that I'd spent the last twelve years
writing about isolation and distraction and craving a pleasure, all
(28:18):
leading to addiction on one hand. And here you have
these people who we ignore, we don't pay any attention to.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We plot the athletes on the field.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
The kids who are really learning the great lessons are
in the stands playing for those guys out on the field.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
This is so beautiful.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
It's about sustaining community, about working with others. It's about
working hard and accepting that every progress will be hard
earned and will be small.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
But then you keep on and you keep on.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
And there was this one part about a band from
Lopez High School in Real Grand Valley in South Texas
and Brownsville, and they practiced they were selected the first
honor band for all of Texas for from the Rio
Grand Valley, and which was an honor that and they
were terrified that they wouldn't be able to pull it
off and show and represent the value well. And they
(29:10):
practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced for six months
on this program that they were going to perform before
all these music teachers at this big conference and everything.
It was just so powerful what these kids, thirty five
kids or something like that create, And it's still remembered
twenty years later, and all this kind of stuff. But
(29:30):
then I remember this one kid who was late leader
of the French horn section that a week later on campus,
sees the band director. He goes, hey, hey, hey, what's next.
And the guy goes, no, that's it, nothing else. We're done.
He goes, what do you mean we're done? We need
to keep going. We need to practice hard. You know,
he had gotten so enamored with the process of making
(29:54):
sound sound better by small, small increments that he couldn't believe.
He just got used to the beauty of hard work.
And that's what they say. And the one guy said
in the book, don't ever tell the kids this is hard.
They'll rise to whatever level you set, Just don't tell
them it's hard. And what he said later this kid,
now I'm talking to him twenty years later about that concert,
(30:15):
and he says, you know, they wanted that we were
trying to make everything perfect.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I'm not sure if we actually did it.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
We did our best, but the idea was we were
working towards something. We got used to working hard towards
that perfection, and what were we trying to do?
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Play one thing? Once?
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Really well, I used to not know what to say
when parents would come up to me and say, how
do I keep my kid away from drugs? And I
didn't really have a good answer for that. Now what
I tell him is, well, you know, I don't know.
I'm no expert, but high school band seems to do
a pretty damn good job.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Am I want to try that? You know? Anyway? I
get carried away on this stuff sometimes.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You wrote the two gives kids an unnoticed middle class
life of nurturing your abilities. But that's why it's the
same thing. It's pairing life to what we need, not
what we're told to want and insistently demand. And I
think what you just said it actually played out in
this Texas border town you wrote about where there's this
band director's names al Cortinas, and he arrives down there
(31:22):
and there's all these kids who are getting sort of
sucked into the Sinaloon cartel.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Is that right, the golf cartel actually, but yeah, it's
the same idea golf cartel.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
They're almost acting as lookouts. They're making a few hundred
bucks just providing eyes for the cartels. And he starts
trying to grab these kids into band, and it saves
so many of them.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So tell us about that.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Yes, he Al Cortinez is a wonderful, wonderful guy, not
even is still still around. Seventy eight now seventy nine.
He came up in a town that was mightily segregated
Latino white, and it was helped to go to college
and got into band and it changed his life and
he lived he still lives the rest of his life
(32:06):
with this fervent belief in the transformative power of band
to change kids' lives, particularly poor Latino kids. And so
he is teaching at another school in the real Grand
Valley and the band. The superintendent from a school district
nearby Roma, Texas, wants to really revamp the band. The
(32:28):
band is really not good, they've never been any good.
They're really like old beat up instruments on it. They
hire Al and al says, you know, I've been teaching
on the real Grand Valley for a long time. The
economic realities are that most of your kids, almost all
your kids, really will not have enough money to afford
music lessons.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
So we need to design a band system that will make.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
That will offer lessons as the primary way of getting better.
And the superintendent's all for it, and they devote a
ton of money to the Courtinas what I call the
Courtina system, which is too higher for the entire district.
Ten teachers, each one focusing on one instrument, you know, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, etc.
(33:12):
And over a period of years, this system with one
teacher guiding kids through from six to twelfth grade. By
the time these kids are in ninth tenth grade, they
are really getting good. And over this, over a period
of years, the Cortinas system transforms Roma, Dinky little Roma Texas,
eleven thousand people in this town. No one in Texas
(33:35):
knows where on the map Roma Texas is. Transforms the
band from Roma Texas into a band that competes head
to head with the white tech suburbs of Boston and Dallas,
Fort Worth and Houston. It's in a remarkable, remarkable story.
Do they ever win outright? Do they ever win top
(33:55):
band of all is Marching Vandiba. No, they still based
hurdles with regard to size of the band, the amount
of money they have, stuff like that. But that is
not the point. Band is about winning later because band
is only tangentially about It's about music, obviously, and it's
(34:16):
about the difficulties of playing music well together in a group.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
But it's not about churning out musicians. It's about turning.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Out kids who who are able to navigate life productively, positively,
with a community basis and so on.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
And that's really what you found. I interviewed a bunch of.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Kids from the two thousand and three two thousand and
four Lopez High School band.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
I think eight or ten kids.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
Every one of them twenty years later was doing really well,
a couple of PhDs. Everybody had a positive point. They
had families, they had they had careers. No one was
about involved in drugs. It was it was just this
wonderful story. They were the middle class. They rose up
out of like migrant poverty. It's these activities you engage
(35:05):
in that at the time seem extraordinarily hard to do,
and we should not hover over kids and so oh yeah, no, no,
no no, don't don't do.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That'll be too hard for you. No no, no.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Let them go through heart, let them go through difficult
let them let them work together.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
To go through all of that. Very very important.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It seems to me, what do you think the sort
of practical advice for the average listener is, if they're gone,
I'm probably not going to pick up a tuba.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
So I think for most people, I would say it's
don't ask for easy, don't demand easy, you might get it.
That would be a damaging thing for you. And parents,
don't insist that your kids like this. One one woman,
a parent in Roma, Texas, said, my all, my all,
my friends, They say, doesn't it bother you that your
(35:56):
kids out there practicing marching in the rain, And she said,
as long as.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
There's no lightning, I'm good with it.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
You know that there's a reason why they are where
they are, and it's because they practice their butts off.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
So you go from.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
The opioid epidemic to writing about meth and fentanyl to
tubas and so, what is the next project for you?
Because I feel like the trajectory is just who knows
where it's going to go.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
So I want to hear what's next.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Yeah, well, the next book is going to be a
biography of Chalino Sanchez, who was the Mexican narco singer
in who started his career really in Los Angeles, not
in Mexico, and.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Very much a punk rock kind of guy. He just
starts singing.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
Everyone tells me he can't sing, and in Mexican context,
you know.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It's very velvety, operatic voices. He sounds like battery acid.
You know. He isn't not very good, but he keeps going.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
But he rises out of nowhere, unlettered, no English immigrant,
illegally in the country, and creates this phenomenon of ballads
about drug villages and drug drug involved people, mostly from
his own village or ones nearby, stories he knew, and
(37:19):
he transforms Mexican music becomes one of the most important
musical figures come out of Los Angeles, right up there
with n WA and some.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Of the punk rock bands.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
I think that that became very very popular in Los Angeles.
And so he goes back to Mexico to for a
gig where later on after the show, there's a famous meme.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Where he's looking at a note during his show.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
The meme is that the note is supposed to say
something like sing well, because it's gonna be your last time.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Someone threatened to kill him, and that.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
Night they cops take him out and anyway he gets
he gets abducted and is found murdered that morning in
an irrigation canal. And after that his his his fame
post mortem fame just explodes. And to this day he
remains the most important musical Mexican musical singer come out
(38:13):
of Los Angeles and one of the most important really
in Mexican, in Mexican music, and it's I got the
In the Tuba book, I wrote one chapter about him,
because he is really responsible for making the tuba so popular.
The tuba was a corny, old fashioned instrument and a
(38:33):
lot of kids before Chalino started singing these really riveting,
almost cinematic stories of how people died and shootouts and
whatnot back in Mexico, and a lot of the times
he recorded those songs with a BANDA banda is is
a form of Mexican music that plays dance music with
marching band instruments, and so the tuba is a very
(38:55):
big deal and that he really transformed the tuba into
this popular instrument that it was not before him, and
it became after his after his death. So that's kind
of how all of this kind of weirdly fits together.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Before we go, what are three narco courido bands people
should check out?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
Well, the very best band of all all time is
not specifically exclusively a narco corrido band, but I would
say that that Losis del Norte are the best. I
spent a lot of time with those guys when I
was in Mexico. They are the best Mexican binational band
that you can.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Possibly listen to.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
And if you want to understand Mexican immigration and the
feelings of Mexican emmorants, just check out the lyrics to Thesigurs.
A certain number of their songs are also narco corridos,
although they don't really focus on that exclusively by any means.
They are the best, and I actually learned a lot
of when I went down to Mexico. I didn't really
speak Spanish, and uh, part of my homework every night
(40:03):
was to take a ticket is a Norte sung home
and transcribe it and and learn it. And this kind
of thing because they're singing very clear. It's actually very
good to use that. I would say. Another good band
to pay attention to only because it teaches, not because
it's narco Corridos, but but because it's right out of
(40:23):
saying Aloa is Banda Perricodo, which is probably like the
top banda. You know, a lot of times the narco
corrido stuff is really vile. I'm not gonna lie. It
is absolutely pornographic. Has become pornographic lately in the last
ten years or so. Charlino had a different approach to it,
which was more reserved spare, you know. But and so
(40:47):
I think much far prefer prefer him. But one band
that you can listen to that I think is reflective
of all this is those Kanes the Tijuana, who were
I'm not sure how much they're around anymore, but they
were in their time, kind of like the up and
comers after Chelley, you know, was killed.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Awesome, great recommendations.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
I love those.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Tea Grace, Sam, Yeah the best.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Thanks so much for coming on the show. This is
an awesome conversation.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, I really had a great time, Michael.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Thank you very much for the invitation. It's wonderful you
to do that. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Thank you for watching and listening, and thanks to Sam
for coming on the show. We are in your feeds
twice a week, so keep an eye out for more.
As a reminder, we are always open for questions for
our Ask Michael Anything section, so please drop in any
questions you have into the comments. You can even email
them to media media at twopct dot com. Even better,
(41:46):
if you want to send us a voice memo or
a video of yourself asking the question, we would absolutely
love that. We will try to answer as many of
your questions as possible as always, have fun, don't die,
class back
In today's episode of two Percent, I am speaking with
Sam ki Yonas. Sam as a journalist and author. He
is probably best known for his work covering drug addiction,
the opioid and meth epidemics, and the unraveling of American communities.
But he recently got a bit burnt out on all
that sort of negative, depressing stuff and he started looking
(00:44):
for people finding fulfillment through hard work that doesn't offer
a quick reward, a quick payoff, money, or fame. And
he found it in the Tuba, of all places. So
I wanted to speak to Sam because his books, I
think are a big metaphor for this modern world we
live in where we can get all these rewarding things quickly, cheaply,
(01:06):
but they often heard us in the long run.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Sam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Michael, great to be with you.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Thank you so much for having me on and for
your support of the Tuba book.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
How did you start reporting on drugs?
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Well, it really it's a strange thing, but I mean
I lived in Mexico for ten years.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I was a reporter down there.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
My first two books were about Mexico, so my job
was really to go out into the provinces to the
states far away, the Mexican villages and stuff where particular,
they began to focus on immigration. And then I came
back to work for the La Times in two thousand
and four, and it was a year after that that
the Savage drug War kicked off. But I was really
(01:49):
writing about immigration because I thought that was most important story,
really much more important than drugs at that time. And
I also didn't want to write about drugs because it
was very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
I didn't have anybody backing me up.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
So when I was at the La Times and I
had people back me up, began to write about this.
And at one point I remember a woman, a DEA agent,
supervising agent in Phoenix, told me, we are now seeing
this would have been two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Or nine, I think nine.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
We are now seeing huge amounts, new amounts of heroin.
We're seizing new amounts of we haven't seized these quantities
of heroin in thirty years.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
And I'm like, Wow, that's wild. Who would be using
heroin again? And why you know?
Speaker 4 (02:34):
And that's really what got me into my first book, Dreamland,
about the opioid epidemic, because what I learned along the
way was the reason why we had so much addiction
to heroin was because of this brand new revolution really
(02:55):
in pain management in American medicine that said you now
should use almost unrestricted amounts of opioid painkillers, narcotic pain
prescription painkillers in a way that medicine.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Never ever used before.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
And also seemed to me that no one had written
in a comprehensive way about the opioid epidemic at the
time and how addiction to these pain pills, which include
opioid painkillers, would then lead to heroin, which is another
opioid drug.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You know, beyond the fact that we had this sort
of revolution and how pain was treated in the US,
do you feel like there were underlying cultural conditions in
the US at the time that made people want to
do drugs in the first place.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Yes, answer your question.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
One is the most basic was a kind of a
shredding of community that did that had been happening probably
since the eighties, but really kind of accelerat and that
is uh. And and this was in rich areas and
poor areas and middle class it didn't it didn't really matter.
It's kind of pretty much across the board in the
United States, where you had all these people, all Americans,
(04:13):
just got gradually got used to not being with each
other in one way or another. And this was a
gradual thing, took some time, but we stopped investing in
things that brought us together cost too much tax money. Uh.
In some areas, job loss and disintegration of a community.
People atomized that way. But whatever it was, we became
(04:35):
a far more lonely isolated country. One of the symptoms
then was a drug drug addiction. However, I would say
also we were watching the development of a of a
corporate economy of isolating an addictive products and services. Of course,
(05:00):
junk food and all of that is number one. Starts
with that, I think probably sodas and all that kind
of stuff. But by the time I was writing Dreamland,
and then certainly by the time I wrote my next
book about this topic, The Least of Us, you began
to see smartphone media and apps and the very toxic
algorithms that seem to be almost diabolical sometimes honestly to me.
(05:25):
You began to see a widespread addiction to pornography, to
video games. Most recently obviously it's gambling apps, and the
transformation of the gambling industry you wrote about in the
Scarcity Brain. And then on top of that you add
massive prescribing of the most addictive drugs.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Known to the human species, which are opioids.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, you need a population.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
There needs to be some underlying problem or discomfort that
the substance temporarily fixes. Right, it provides some sort of comfort,
whatever it might be. If if the society has no problems,
you're probably not going to have as much of an
addiction problem. But if there's also not that supply, then
(06:14):
there's nothing fueling that. So it's like this this collision
of these two things.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
Yes, I think also if you if you allow economic forces,
meaning corporations and whoever free reign to do all that,
then you are you are you know, you're going to
pay a significant price. I would say that we did
not learn our lesson, and we have legalized marijuana in
(06:41):
a in a way that kind of almost replicates the
opioid epidemic.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Now, marijuana should be.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Legal, but there are ways of legalizing it. The details
are the thing, you know, Devils in the details and
all this, and and so we we have we have
not been good at standing in the way of people
who want to make money.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
It's almost like almost in our cultural to.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Say, oh you want to make money, create jobs, Oh
go go for it. You know, no matter what damage
that that activity it may actually be creating.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
And in the In the Least of Us you write
about how the drug industry changes in a way where
things become faster, stronger, easier to make. It almost becomes
drugs used to have to be grown in fields and processed,
and then it goes into this sort of more lab
(07:31):
based that really accelerates things.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
So tell us about that a little bit.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
Mexicans figured out the Mexican trafficking world in particular is
very sophisticated, very deeply very uh uh you know, wide,
and have kind of like a lot of division of
labor and been going for for a number of years.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Figured out that there was this new market.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Before that, trafficers in Mexico never wanted to deal heroine ever, it.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Was the scuzziest drug.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Nobody liked heroine and they want to do cocaine and
that kind of thing. But now they figured out own
there's this new heroin market out there and they began
to supply that. The guys that I wrote about is
from this one little village were pretty quickly, well within
a within about ten years, overwhelmed by the big cartels.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
And you know.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
That's a whole other long story, but but but basically
you saw that that that transition happened all of a sudden, Wow, heroin,
we got to.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Get into that.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Along the way, uh, they discover that that there is
actually a synthetic way of making a very very powerful opioid,
which is known as funnannel. They don't really know what
that's that's what it's called. When they discover it. They
think it's called eroina synthetico, which is what they call it.
(08:46):
But they figure out that the and and they have
already figured out through the production of metham fetament, that
is far more profitable and far less risky to make
your own drugs with chemicals rather than.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Grow them.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
They're like, oh wow, we don't have to harvest poppies
grow poppies, and oh great, this is better. They begin
to shift and so what you begin to see. Really
it takes a few years, but by the twenty thirteen
fourteen fifteen, you see the entire United States become inundated.
Gradually over the next six five, six, seven years with
two synthetic drugs, which is still the case. Fentanyl may
(09:25):
again no plants involved in either one of these. And
then methem fetament, which they figure out ways to make
that are and the potent that the real thing is.
The supplies are massive, they cover the country and also
highly highly potent. Fentanyl has always been way more potent heroin,
and any form of fentinal you provide is going to
(09:46):
be way far far more more potent and very very dangerous.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Methum fetament becomes.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
More and more potent because they are able to control
the amount of the chemicals they get in through the ports.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Now that's all you care about. Can we get access
to the.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
World, come local markets through the shipping ports China principally great, okay.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
And they begin to make.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Quantities of metham fetament that we have never seen. They
run out of business, all those little meth cooks across
the United States and they take over the entire market,
and they cover the country and drop the price by
ninety percent and reached levels of purity and potency and
metham fetament that the drug has had never equalled.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And it feels to me, I mean from anecdotes and
you've written about this that with the potency rising, so
do the effects on a person's life. So I have
friends that were meth addicts, and you know, they've done
it for years, and it was something they often started
because they had a job that had crazy hours, demanding hours.
(10:52):
So they're a truck driver there, you know, graveyard shift worker,
and they would do math. You know, they knew it
wasn't good for them, but they're going, well, it helps
me work more than I can earn an income. And yeah,
there's some repercussions, but okay, and then when you see
this shift to this new form of math, they wind
up with mes psychosis, living on the streets for a
(11:13):
handful of years. They're like, there was this moment where
you just started. That started happening, happening to everyone, and
even getting off of it was harder.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
What did you what did you hear about that?
Speaker 4 (11:23):
Well, that was in two thousand and eight and nine
is when that really happened. And before that, the meth
the myth that they made in Mexico, the myth they
learned to make meth on used a chemical known as
a federan, which is a decongestant. You find it in
suda fed pil dey congestant pills. It's why you can't
after a while, you couldn't just go into a Costco
(11:43):
or a Walgreens and get suit of fed pills. You
had to sign your life away and all that because
meth dealers would take those pills. It was very laborious,
not terribly efficient, and distill those pills down into a vegerant,
and from a veterant, combined with other chemicals, they would
make metham futtament. Down in Mexico, they gotten effan from
(12:05):
the pharmaceutical industry that was diverted. It was really headed
to the pharmaceutical companies in Mexico. In some portion of
that went to the trafficking world. And then in two
thousand and eight the Mexican government really restricted effteran importations.
The trafficking world shifted to this new it's not a
new method, it's an old method, but it was new
to them, a method of making metham fetament that evolved chemical.
(12:29):
The principal precursor was no longer a fteran. It was
a chemical called phenal to propein oonne P two P.
Just the P two P method is how it's basically known.
And this method was not a great way of making
metham fetterm. It was smelly, and it tended to explode
more easily than the Federan method. However, it did have
one benefit, and that was you could make P two
(12:49):
P many different ways with different combinations of legal, toxic, cheap.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Very liberally easily available chemicals.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
That meant that the government could not easily crack down
on your production the way it did with a federant
and so you could shift. If the government cracked down
on this method of making PTP, you could shift to
this and to that. There's probably twenty thirty ways of
making PTP, according to chemists I talked to with the DEEA.
So they shifted, and that shift really began in two
(13:21):
thousand and nine. And this is the time when you
begin to see the first cases of the people you're
referring to. I've met few like that as well, where
I was a Matthewser and then all of a sudden
and it was a party drug. It was like I
was everybody's best friend and yak and away all night,
and then all of a sudden, it was sinister, and
I was seeing demons coming out of there, and I
(13:42):
was talking to people who weren't there, and this began
to happen as that myth exploded in quantity, and so many, many,
many people in New Mexico got into it.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
The chemicals were never ending, almost.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Limitless quantities of metham fetament, and they came in and
people began to make it Mexico, and it just marched
across the country. And you see again the price drop,
the potency rise. But as you say, you also began
to see this transformation of you know, a huge rise
in mental illness, huge rise in homelessness.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
To me, this was the remarkable idea.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I started the least of us thinking I'm going to
write about how these guys have been able to produce
so much metham fetament.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
That they cover the country and drop the price.
Speaker 4 (14:28):
And then along the way, towards the end of the manuscript,
about to finish it, maybe three four months from finishing it,
I came upon this other element, which was that it's
not only doing that, it's also creating rapid descent into
essentially symptoms of schizophrenia so much that people in doctors
(14:49):
and nurses and eers cannot tell when you come in
if you were an organically schizophrenic, or you are a
meth induced schizophrenic. But it began to happen all over
the country, and and doing my research then, but then
after the book came out too, I continue, it's clear
that it is happening all over the country.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah, so it feels like there's this ingredient of more, faster, stronger, cheaper,
And to me, that is almost a metaphor for our
times and all these other behaviors substances that people overdo
that provide some sort of short term relief but get
them in trouble in the long run. I mean, we'll
(15:29):
use gambling as an example here. Right, it's I live
in Las Vegas. If you lived in the country and
you wanted to gamble, you had to get your butt
on a plane and you had to fly to Las Vegas.
You had to go into the casino to make that
sports bet, and then you had to sit and wait
for the game to finish three hours and you go, okay,
I won or I lost, and then you go back
to Des Moines or wherever the hell it was. Today though,
(15:53):
to continue this example, sports betting has been spread across
the country. It's now in phones, so you don't have
to do the physical act of going somewhere. And even
the speed of betting has increased in the sense that
sports betting places, they start to go, oh well, a
game takes three hours. That's a lot of time between
(16:15):
when people are making bets. What if we just did
oh well, now you can bet on like will this
guy make the next shot? What will the score be
at the end of this quarter? And so it's just
this rapid, more faster, stronger and cheaper. And I feel
like that extends to so many different areas. Where do
you see this and how do you see this affecting us?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
It's really part of what we are seeing that I
was talking about earlier, which is simply the ultra processesation.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
That's a bad term.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
I got to figure out on another one, but it's
ultra processing of supply. You know, you are constantly being prodded.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
To be distracted, which we naturally we.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Evolved to do because if you're not distracted until you
get eaten, you get killed, right, you know, back millions
of years ago whatever, and so gambling new gambling apps
or absolutely that. But then you also get pornography. So
no longer do you have to be in a movie theater,
you know, dared to be to feel the shame of
people watching go into the movie theater. And now you
(17:14):
can constantly watch the most graphic stuff. And we see
it with marijuana too. So now marijuana that used to
be like seven percent, three percent whatever THC it was
back thirty years ago. Now it's ultra processed into THC.
Evapes and wax and can and gummies and all of
(17:34):
these things, all with the idea of massive hits, immediate, immediate, immediate,
all of this kind of thing. There is an entire
segment of our economy. I think, as I was saying earlier,
it just seems to me to be devoted to creating
(17:55):
the tendency, not creating drug addicts, but creating the tendency
for addiction necessary.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, So The Least of Us has this subtitle True
Tales of America and Hope in the time of fentanyl
and meth.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
So the word hope, why hope?
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Part of this was really about me trying to tell
stories of people as bulwarks against what we were just discussing,
this whole you know, processed version of of consumer and
goods and services to make them more addictive. And the
way I wanted I thought was important to highlight was
that people were working in very small ways, nothing magical
(18:38):
or big, solving all our problems. It just solve this
one issue in your neighborhood, or you know, do something
with this old parking lot and turn it into a
baseball field, you know that kind of thing. It's small
steps together with other people together that take a time
to do.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
It's not overnight, it is in no way overnight.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
And and and that this is the way you come
to true social change, without without the unintended consequences that rapid.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Sexy, magical answers would give you. That's true.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
True social change comes small steps, just the way small
human innovation comes usually in small steps, just the way
human improvement comes usually in small steps, with lots of
hard work and practice and all that. You know. I
wrote about the threat fatonal, math, synthetics, all that kind
of stuff, the addictive qualities of so many products and
so on. I wanted to write about people in the
(19:36):
smallest way, unnoticed, not sexy, just moving forward towards repairing
or rebuilding community in various towns.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
All right, so you just released a new book the
perfect tube of forging, fulfillment from the base horn band
and hard work. And let me just say to the listeners,
I didn't know what to expect when I opened this book.
I'm not the type of person that reads books about tubas,
but this book was awesome. So how did you go
from covering drugs to tubas of all instruments and topics?
(20:10):
And I will say, let me hearry and say for
listeners before we start, the book is fantastic. It's so fascinating.
It was one of those where I read it, I
go and go tubas, huh, I'm not even sure what
a tuba looks like or sounds like. And then I
start reading, I'm like this, this is one of those
things where you found this subculture and you just went
(20:30):
all in and you made it something that I would
never picture myself reading.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
I was just turning pages. It was unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
So how'd you get thank you? First of all, I
don't play the tuba. I was never in marching band.
I grew up in the seventies man playing guitar like
every single other guy I knew, okay at the La Times,
having a deep background in Mexico speaking Spanish and all
this my job. Part of my job was to write
about the Mexican immigrant community in LA. And one of
the stories I wrote about was how huge and important
(21:01):
the tuba was in the Mexican immigrant world in Los Angeles.
Hit very important, and mostly because a lot of social
life takes place in backyard parties. And one way of
showing you have arrived, you know, kind of a certain
way of economically, certainly socially, is you have a band
with a tuba in it. And the tuba is enormous,
big gold thing, you know. And so it became like
(21:22):
this hugely popular instrument in Mexican LA. And I wrote
that story and then the day came out, a band
director called me. He says, you know what, yeah, so
much so your story is right on the money. We
have been losing. People have been stealing our tubas for
the last whatever had been three or four months. By then,
(21:43):
I had not heard this. I wrote another story about
tubas being stolen from these high schools because it was
so popular. Eventually began to just interview tuba players of
all kinds, nice of Mexicans, but all kinds of tuba players.
Why because I could see that most tuba players loved
what they did, but they loved it without, as you said,
(22:06):
the expectation of any you know, applause, any wealth or
fame or any of that kind of stuff. And generally,
as a journalist, I find if you can find people
like that doing something absolutely for the love of it,
you will find if you stick with them, you will
find some great stories. So as I was writing the
Dreamland book about the opioid epidemic and then fentanyl and
(22:26):
mathma in the Least of Us, I was periodically I
would periodically do interviews so tuba players.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Why I had no plan to write a book.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
I just thought, if I stick with it, something good
is going to happen. And so I interviewed over the
next few years, probably fifteen to twenty eight tuba players.
It wasn't like constant, but and there was this big
file at the back of my computer called Tuba and
I just put all my notes and my tapes and
all that stuff in there. And then The Least of
Us came out, and that was twelve years. That marked
(22:57):
twelve years of writing about grim stuff like addiction and
drug profiteering and all the rest that you would write
about and.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
I felt like I needed like I love writing about
that stuff.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
I still love writing about that I still find it
a fascinating topic. But there is a point where I
want to say, I think I need to do something
totally new. And my agent said, well, why don't you
see what kind of book you might be able to
write about that tuba project. You've been kind of half working,
half assed working. I mean it was really not very
focused on it. Just wanted to see what kind of
could learn.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I had remembered this conversation that I had with this
guy named Bob Carpenter years before in Orlando, Florida, a
NASA scientist and a tuba player for the Orlando Symphony,
who told me about these two perfect tubas, these two
tubas made in York Instrument Company in nineteen thirties and
(23:53):
Grand Rapids, Michigan for a very famous tuba player who
ended up not being able to play them and it
was too fat, basically, and he sold him to one
of them to his student, and his student using this
tuba went on to be one of the greatest tuba
players in the history of the instrument. Arnold Jacobs, who
then was forty years at the Chicago Symphony and sold
(24:13):
that horn, and then he bought the other two.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
These were two prototypes.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
There was only two of them, and the York Instrument
Company went out of business not long after the story
of the Search for the Perfect tuba because nine companies
have tried to make these tubas, replicate these tubas and
really kind of succeeded, but not exactly. It just overtook
my life in this beautiful way. So its not writing
(24:38):
about people pimping out their sister or their girlfriend for dope.
It was people practicing endlessly to get this eight measured.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Part of this A two Just right, I'm going to
read you a quote from the book. I found it
hard to avoid the conclusion that a root of our
epidemic of drug addiction was a s running of community
in America, which left us isolated and a loaned and
vulnerable to addiction. I came to see how marching bands
in fact create community in this country. They find a
(25:10):
place for kids of all kinds to thrive, not based
on their side or speed, but instead on their willingness
to work hard. What did you learn from some of
those kids? And I will say, as you're saying this,
when you think about. You know, if I pick up
a guitar and start playing when I'm twelve, I can
go well, if I do that, I could end up
on some big stage in front of one hundred thousand
people a tuba player.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
No, no one's.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Going to know the name of the tuba player in
our current society. But they keep at it. And there's
lessons in.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
There, absolutely, And I think a lot of the lessons
of what we've already talked about, the importance of hard work,
the importance of attention to detail, and a time of distraction,
focus and attention to detail. Right, it's a collaboration and
time of isolation. Even with people collaborating with people you know,
maybe don't like all the time, still keep on doing.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
It's hard work.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
It's discipline, postponed gratification, and a time when immediate gratifications
we all crave.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Apparently I began.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
To see too that that is how we evolved as
a species to find that inner feeling that we call
fulfillment or contentment. We don't, you know, we want that
immediate gratification, but it's so transitory, it just passes quickly.
Every you get a new iPhone, two days later, you
(26:31):
don't really care, right, you know, And and there is
instead this feeling of working very hard without much applause,
until finally you create something, say a big concert you've
been practicing for, and you play it once, really really well,
and it's over and you feel the applause. You have
(26:53):
people coming up slapping you on the back. Wonderful thing,
and then it's over. But it's it's It leaves you
this feeling like of achieved something through hard work. It's
not like buying something which didn't, you know, as somebody
else did the hard work.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
You just bought it, you know. And to me all
of this, I began.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
To realize that what I had stumbled into and was
writing about fully and fully focused on now was in
fact the opposite of what I had written spent twelve
years writing about.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
The addition is about an opioid, is about the drug.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
Stifling that your ability to breathe. That's how you overdose
on an opioid. It just the brain stops breathing. Basically,
Tuba is about nurturing that beautiful column of air so
that you can force it through this big, enormous metal
beast and out. And it comes starts with this horrible
sound through the mouthpiece, going like that, and it comes
(27:52):
out the bell, this gorgeous, powerful sound that will rock
your world, you know, and the bones of everybody in
the listening to it. It seemed to me strangely that
I was writing about something that was like the bulwark
against the thing that I'd spent the last twelve years
writing about isolation and distraction and craving a pleasure, all
(28:18):
leading to addiction on one hand. And here you have
these people who we ignore, we don't pay any attention to.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
We plot the athletes on the field.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
The kids who are really learning the great lessons are
in the stands playing for those guys out on the field.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
This is so beautiful.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
It's about sustaining community, about working with others. It's about
working hard and accepting that every progress will be hard
earned and will be small.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
But then you keep on and you keep on.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
And there was this one part about a band from
Lopez High School in Real Grand Valley in South Texas
and Brownsville, and they practiced they were selected the first
honor band for all of Texas for from the Rio
Grand Valley, and which was an honor that and they
were terrified that they wouldn't be able to pull it
off and show and represent the value well. And they
(29:10):
practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced for six months
on this program that they were going to perform before
all these music teachers at this big conference and everything.
It was just so powerful what these kids, thirty five
kids or something like that create, And it's still remembered
twenty years later, and all this kind of stuff. But
(29:30):
then I remember this one kid who was late leader
of the French horn section that a week later on campus,
sees the band director. He goes, hey, hey, hey, what's next.
And the guy goes, no, that's it, nothing else. We're done.
He goes, what do you mean we're done? We need
to keep going. We need to practice hard. You know,
he had gotten so enamored with the process of making
(29:54):
sound sound better by small, small increments that he couldn't believe.
He just got used to the beauty of hard work.
And that's what they say. And the one guy said
in the book, don't ever tell the kids this is hard.
They'll rise to whatever level you set, Just don't tell
them it's hard. And what he said later this kid,
now I'm talking to him twenty years later about that concert,
(30:15):
and he says, you know, they wanted that we were
trying to make everything perfect.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I'm not sure if we actually did it.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
We did our best, but the idea was we were
working towards something. We got used to working hard towards
that perfection, and what were we trying to do?
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Play one thing? Once?
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Really well, I used to not know what to say
when parents would come up to me and say, how
do I keep my kid away from drugs? And I
didn't really have a good answer for that. Now what
I tell him is, well, you know, I don't know.
I'm no expert, but high school band seems to do
a pretty damn good job.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Am I want to try that? You know? Anyway? I
get carried away on this stuff sometimes.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You wrote the two gives kids an unnoticed middle class
life of nurturing your abilities. But that's why it's the
same thing. It's pairing life to what we need, not
what we're told to want and insistently demand. And I
think what you just said it actually played out in
this Texas border town you wrote about where there's this
band director's names al Cortinas, and he arrives down there
(31:22):
and there's all these kids who are getting sort of
sucked into the Sinaloon cartel.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Is that right, the golf cartel actually, but yeah, it's
the same idea golf cartel.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
They're almost acting as lookouts. They're making a few hundred
bucks just providing eyes for the cartels. And he starts
trying to grab these kids into band, and it saves
so many of them.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So tell us about that.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Yes, he Al Cortinez is a wonderful, wonderful guy, not
even is still still around. Seventy eight now seventy nine.
He came up in a town that was mightily segregated
Latino white, and it was helped to go to college
and got into band and it changed his life and
he lived he still lives the rest of his life
(32:06):
with this fervent belief in the transformative power of band
to change kids' lives, particularly poor Latino kids. And so
he is teaching at another school in the real Grand
Valley and the band. The superintendent from a school district
nearby Roma, Texas, wants to really revamp the band. The
(32:28):
band is really not good, they've never been any good.
They're really like old beat up instruments on it. They
hire Al and al says, you know, I've been teaching
on the real Grand Valley for a long time. The
economic realities are that most of your kids, almost all
your kids, really will not have enough money to afford
music lessons.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
So we need to design a band system that will make.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
That will offer lessons as the primary way of getting better.
And the superintendent's all for it, and they devote a
ton of money to the Courtinas what I call the
Courtina system, which is too higher for the entire district.
Ten teachers, each one focusing on one instrument, you know, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, etc.
(33:12):
And over a period of years, this system with one
teacher guiding kids through from six to twelfth grade. By
the time these kids are in ninth tenth grade, they
are really getting good. And over this, over a period
of years, the Cortinas system transforms Roma, Dinky little Roma Texas,
eleven thousand people in this town. No one in Texas
(33:35):
knows where on the map Roma Texas is. Transforms the
band from Roma Texas into a band that competes head
to head with the white tech suburbs of Boston and Dallas,
Fort Worth and Houston. It's in a remarkable, remarkable story.
Do they ever win outright? Do they ever win top
(33:55):
band of all is Marching Vandiba. No, they still based
hurdles with regard to size of the band, the amount
of money they have, stuff like that. But that is
not the point. Band is about winning later because band
is only tangentially about It's about music, obviously, and it's
(34:16):
about the difficulties of playing music well together in a group.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
But it's not about churning out musicians. It's about turning.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Out kids who who are able to navigate life productively, positively,
with a community basis and so on.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
And that's really what you found. I interviewed a bunch of.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Kids from the two thousand and three two thousand and
four Lopez High School band.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
I think eight or ten kids.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
Every one of them twenty years later was doing really well,
a couple of PhDs. Everybody had a positive point. They
had families, they had they had careers. No one was
about involved in drugs. It was it was just this
wonderful story. They were the middle class. They rose up
out of like migrant poverty. It's these activities you engage
(35:05):
in that at the time seem extraordinarily hard to do,
and we should not hover over kids and so oh yeah, no, no,
no no, don't don't do.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That'll be too hard for you. No no, no.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Let them go through heart, let them go through difficult
let them let them work together.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
To go through all of that. Very very important.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It seems to me, what do you think the sort
of practical advice for the average listener is, if they're gone,
I'm probably not going to pick up a tuba.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
So I think for most people, I would say it's
don't ask for easy, don't demand easy, you might get it.
That would be a damaging thing for you. And parents,
don't insist that your kids like this. One one woman,
a parent in Roma, Texas, said, my all, my all,
my friends, They say, doesn't it bother you that your
(35:56):
kids out there practicing marching in the rain, And she said,
as long as.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
There's no lightning, I'm good with it.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
You know that there's a reason why they are where
they are, and it's because they practice their butts off.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
So you go from.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
The opioid epidemic to writing about meth and fentanyl to
tubas and so, what is the next project for you?
Because I feel like the trajectory is just who knows
where it's going to go.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
So I want to hear what's next.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Yeah, well, the next book is going to be a
biography of Chalino Sanchez, who was the Mexican narco singer
in who started his career really in Los Angeles, not
in Mexico, and.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Very much a punk rock kind of guy. He just
starts singing.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
Everyone tells me he can't sing, and in Mexican context,
you know.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
It's very velvety, operatic voices. He sounds like battery acid.
You know. He isn't not very good, but he keeps going.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
But he rises out of nowhere, unlettered, no English immigrant,
illegally in the country, and creates this phenomenon of ballads
about drug villages and drug drug involved people, mostly from
his own village or ones nearby, stories he knew, and
(37:19):
he transforms Mexican music becomes one of the most important
musical figures come out of Los Angeles, right up there
with n WA and some.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Of the punk rock bands.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
I think that that became very very popular in Los Angeles.
And so he goes back to Mexico to for a
gig where later on after the show, there's a famous meme.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Where he's looking at a note during his show.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
The meme is that the note is supposed to say
something like sing well, because it's gonna be your last time.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Someone threatened to kill him, and that.
Speaker 4 (37:50):
Night they cops take him out and anyway he gets
he gets abducted and is found murdered that morning in
an irrigation canal. And after that his his his fame
post mortem fame just explodes. And to this day he
remains the most important musical Mexican musical singer come out
(38:13):
of Los Angeles and one of the most important really
in Mexican, in Mexican music, and it's I got the
In the Tuba book, I wrote one chapter about him,
because he is really responsible for making the tuba so popular.
The tuba was a corny, old fashioned instrument and a
(38:33):
lot of kids before Chalino started singing these really riveting,
almost cinematic stories of how people died and shootouts and
whatnot back in Mexico, and a lot of the times
he recorded those songs with a BANDA banda is is
a form of Mexican music that plays dance music with
marching band instruments, and so the tuba is a very
(38:55):
big deal and that he really transformed the tuba into
this popular instrument that it was not before him, and
it became after his after his death. So that's kind
of how all of this kind of weirdly fits together.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Before we go, what are three narco courido bands people
should check out?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
Well, the very best band of all all time is
not specifically exclusively a narco corrido band, but I would
say that that Losis del Norte are the best. I
spent a lot of time with those guys when I
was in Mexico. They are the best Mexican binational band
that you can.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Possibly listen to.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
And if you want to understand Mexican immigration and the
feelings of Mexican emmorants, just check out the lyrics to Thesigurs.
A certain number of their songs are also narco corridos,
although they don't really focus on that exclusively by any means.
They are the best, and I actually learned a lot
of when I went down to Mexico. I didn't really
speak Spanish, and uh, part of my homework every night
(40:03):
was to take a ticket is a Norte sung home
and transcribe it and and learn it. And this kind
of thing because they're singing very clear. It's actually very
good to use that. I would say. Another good band
to pay attention to only because it teaches, not because
it's narco Corridos, but but because it's right out of
(40:23):
saying Aloa is Banda Perricodo, which is probably like the
top banda. You know, a lot of times the narco
corrido stuff is really vile. I'm not gonna lie. It
is absolutely pornographic. Has become pornographic lately in the last
ten years or so. Charlino had a different approach to it,
which was more reserved spare, you know. But and so
(40:47):
I think much far prefer prefer him. But one band
that you can listen to that I think is reflective
of all this is those Kanes the Tijuana, who were
I'm not sure how much they're around anymore, but they
were in their time, kind of like the up and
comers after Chelley, you know, was killed.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Awesome, great recommendations.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
I love those.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Tea Grace, Sam, Yeah the best.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Thanks so much for coming on the show. This is
an awesome conversation.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, I really had a great time, Michael.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
Thank you very much for the invitation. It's wonderful you
to do that. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Thank you for watching and listening, and thanks to Sam
for coming on the show. We are in your feeds
twice a week, so keep an eye out for more.
As a reminder, we are always open for questions for
our Ask Michael Anything section, so please drop in any
questions you have into the comments. You can even email
them to media media at twopct dot com. Even better,
(41:46):
if you want to send us a voice memo or
a video of yourself asking the question, we would absolutely
love that. We will try to answer as many of
your questions as possible as always, have fun, don't die,
class back
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