Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Conona Show.
I am here today with Trey Garrison and a beautiful view.
Speaker 2: Yes, there we go.
Speaker 1: How are you doing, Trey?
Speaker 2: I am doing great. How are you doing, sir? Thank
you for having me on, Peter, Yeah, no problem.
Speaker 1: Tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm a journalist, podcaster and an author. I have
been in our kind of in our thing, I guess
going on going on eight years now. And one of
the biggest projects, in the most rewarding projects I was
able to participate in, was writing this book, Opioids for
the Masses, Big Farmer's War on the middle class and
the working white class. It was a nine month research project,
probably about six month writing project, and the good folks
analop Phill Publishing, analot Pill Publishing dot Com, we're able
to turn it into this one of my favorite I
love the cover, I love the book, and I'm not
just blowing to smoke up my own butt. It was
actually a project with me and my partner, Richard McClure,
because we really wanted to do something that no one
had done before, and that is not just look at
certain Uh, there's that airplane I told you about. Maybe
it's not picking up on your end. We wanted to
take a look at the hotspots hit hardest by the
opioid epidemic and the people hit hardest by the opioid epidemic,
which is the white working class, and no one had
done it. They'd look at statistics, they drop somebody into
some little small town where you know, there's been a
number of overdoses, some hot spot for overdoses. The guy
would stay for two or three days and then just file,
you know, a simple report that really didn't look at
the big problems going on. And we were able to
fund a project where I was able to go into
the Rust Belt, into Appalachia, the Deep South. I started
actually here in Florida, of all places, my research and
worked our way up through the Midwest, and I got
to spend upwards of maybe you know, three, four or
five weeks at a time in particular small towns talking
to the people on the front lines, whether it was
cops or judges or lawyers or healthcare workers or reformed
addicts or you know, actual current addicts and dealing with
the problem. And we interwove that story, the narrative there
and telling their human stories about the struggles they were facing.
With a bigger picture, look at not only the involvement
of the pharmaceutical companies, particularly the Purdue Pharma and the
Sackler family, who really paved the way for this in
a way that should they should be frog marched to
jail and facing with due process, actual capital punishment for
the crimes they have committed. These are these are this
was This was a soft genisid by by by a
chemical weapon, essentially. And then we were also able to
talk to experts in the field of pharmacology at various universities, Brandeis,
University of Colorado, a few others that explained to us
in a way that no one has talked about, which is,
these opioids, for the most part, and I'm not saying
that they're never necessary, but for the most part, the
way they are prescribed, and the way they had been
prescribed going on the last thirty years, was not only
unnecessary but criminal. Now, obviously, if somebody is in some
sort of you know, dealing with some sort of bone
cancer or some sort of post op situation, obviously you
need stronger pain killers. You know, we understand the issue
of emergent pain. I myself in twenty twelve had shoulder
surgery and it was orthoscopic, but it was a pain
in the butt. And then I had to have this
big ice pack thing that flowed cold water over and
I was stuck in my chair for like four days,
and they gave me these opioids and there but for
the grace of God. Because at the time my ex
wife or my wife at the time, was a psychiatric
nurse practitioner, and she was very well versed on the
addiction issues, on mental health issues, and I had always
had sort of that rug, you know, well, if you're depressed,
just go out and do something. Oh if you're if
you're addicted to something, just shake it off, you know,
white knuckle it. And she actually made me more sensitive
and more understanding of the issues involved. And it was
three days into taking vicodin on I think every six
hours that I was sitting there going, well, I'm bored,
I can't do anything. Maybe I'll have one at three hours,
because they do really make you feel good. Somebody that
I talked to and interviewed said that the first time
you have an opioid, it's like being kissed on the
lipspot God, and they're not entirely wrong, even if that's
a little bit of a blasphemous comparison. But I realized that,
you know, if I wasn't careful, I was going to
this could become my full time job. My full time
job could become taking opioids. So I hated them model too,
and I said, you need to treat me like a
patient and only give this to me as prescribed, and
maybe in about three days we need to look at
just getting me off this, because I can easily see
how I can get addicted. This was long before this
became a passion for me. This was just my own
personal experience with it, and I just got lucky to
be honest. So that's what I've been doing. That's that's
what my background is. My background. I was a investigative reporter,
magazine writer. I wrote a few really horrible I'm glad
they got pulled fiction books, science fiction that nobody should
be forced to read. And in fact, maybe that should
be punishment for you know, when for minor crimes, is
you have to read those books that I wrote. But
this one I'm particularly proud of, and I really feel
like the work we did was important because no one
had done that before.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for doing it, because I have done
episodes on the opioid epidemic before, but mostly from a
the economics of it. And we've talked about what we're
going to talk about, how people get prescribed it and
they get pulled off of it and now they're hooked
and they have to go elsewhere, and they eventually go
to the streets. But one of the things that you
talked about right off the bat in the book is
that oxy was sold as a safer painkiller even though
it was opium based, and they said that there was
they immediately said there were no addiction problems with it.
So and also just throw this out there right away
so people know you wrote this. I believe this was
published in twenty twenty one, and in twenty twenty one
you had said at that point there was an estimate
four hundred to five hundred thousand deaths associated with this,
which I assume has climbed, and not only due to
what has been prescribed, but the fact that people get
off of it and then they go to heroin, fentanyl,
things like that. So talk a little bit about how
it was sold to people. Or the soul to doctors. Really,
you had to sell to the doctors first. Well you
have to understand.
Speaker 2: To understand that, you have to go to the background
of Sackler family with Purdue Pharma. They were Eastern European
immigrants Jewish family that came over in the I think
the twenties or thirties. You'll have to forgive me on
a few if I get a few details a little
bit off. It was four years ago that we actually
did the research on this book, twenty nineteen, and I've
kept myself reasonably refreshed, but I don't have every stat
in my head anymore. But they were they brought, what's
the kindest way to say this, they brought innovative marketing
strategies to pharmaceuticals that had previously been looked upon by
the medical industry as entirely unethical and entirely detrimental to
the patients that they took care of. And one of
the early projects that they did was in the sixties
with you know, Mother's Little Helper, the early xanax type
anti depressed or not anti depressants, anti anxiety medications and
that sort of thing. And so they were instrumental in
they didn't have at the law at the time did
not allow for the advertising direct to consumer of these products.
But they went really hard with the doctors and they
were they started their plan of they'd buy up these
medical journals and put their own people in charge, and
then they issued these studies and arguments that doctors need
to prescribe this, they need to prescribe this more, there's
nothing harmful in doing this, and so in the early
sixties they sort of laid out the template for this,
but it was in the nineteen nineties of the late
eighties nineteen nineties that they really went hardcore with this.
They set up the American Pain Management Association, the American
Pain Association again, I'm sorry, it's one of those two names,
and it was an advocacy lobby group that pushed for
changes in the law. So that you know, it was
only in the nineties that you started seeing direct advertising
on television for pharmacy, for prescription pharmaceuticals, and in particular,
they lobbied for various changes in the medical industry. One
of them was adding pain as a fifth vital sign.
Doctors always check you know your blood pressure, your heart rate, uh, pulse, socks,
that sort of thing. They said pain has to be
part of that, that that should be an integral part
of what a doctor deals with. And they also issued
UH or lobbied for these changes where on exits from hospitals,
patients would you know, you can normally fill out these
UH surveys how they you know, how they perceived their care,
how they perceived, you know, what was done. And these
surveys were in part used or remuneration through insurance companies
as well as through Medicare and Medicaid. They had been there,
how was your pain at the end of your hospital
stay or your hospital visit. So it became more and
more or a thing where doctors started getting it in
their heads, we have to make sure that the person's
not in pain. And that's really if you think about
it from a philosophical even the medical standpoint, that's a
silly idea because while you know, no one wants to
see another person in pain, pain is often a warning sign.
It's a it's a thing that keeps you from doing
the same thing so that you don't injure yourself further.
So like if you've sprain, if you've dislocated your patella,
if you've dislocated your shoulder, if you've broken this or that,
the pain is what keeps you from stressing it until
it's better. Now, obviously I'm just talking of broad things,
and so like again, postop somebody who's had a serious surgery,
somebody's dealing with the pain of certain cancers. That's not
what I'm talking about. I'm talking about They've made it
to where it was the ordinary daily visits. It was
the ordinary routine sort of things where oh, well, so
you're in pain, well before you let me go, let
me let me give you a prescription for ten various
you know, vicodin or or oxycoton or whatever it is.
And then constant, you know. And then concurrent with that,
Purdue Pharma came up with oxycotton, which they just blatantly
lied in their research and in their marketing materials to
the doctors, which was, oh, well, this we have a
time release coding on these, and this thing is not
as addictive as regular We've processed in a way that
it's not as addictive as regular opioid, so don't worry
about it. So in nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety six,
they launched oxycotton and within two years had the market
share of the painkiller market. And that was sort of
the we had been started trending towards the idea of
pain management and overprescription of opioids. But that was the
watershed moment. And since that time, since I think it
was nineteen ninety nine and you cited the statistics that
we quoted from twenty twenty of five hundred seven hundred
thousand deaths, it has we're breaching a million, a lot
sooner than we thought. Because what has happened is over
the last twenty years, since this has become such a
common practice, is there have been and flows. There have
been attempts to correct the ship. In particular, it got
really bad in the late twenty tens, early two thousand teens,
and by then you had some movements within government, within
certain regulatory bodies to curtail the prescription of these opioids.
And you know, I'm not saying that they there. Maybe
maybe their hearts were in the right place, and maybe
some of the policies were decent but didn't go far
enough or went too far, But there was a downtick
twenty seventeen, I think was the high point, high water
mark at the time we were doing the research, and
are twenty seventeen in nineteen twenty nineteen. We looked at
twenty seventeen as the high water market and we thought
even though it was a minor decline, it was starting
to tick down as a result of these policies. But
what we found on the street, on what we found
in our research, and what has since emerged since the
publication of the book, is these where they had curtailed it,
you have actually an increase in overdoses because, as you said,
people will turn to the street version of opioids, which
is heroin, and heroin is dangerous enuff as it is,
but then we also have the concurrent problem of fentnyl
started coming to the country, and that's a synthetic opioid
that's far more dangerous, far more in control, usually made
in sheep Chinese labs with no oversight, so that you know,
you don't know if you're getting you know what strength,
what garbage goes into it. But it is just the
high number of overdoses that has since happened is in
part because of the addition of opioids to these street drugs.
Or the opioid the fentnyl directly. Let me also dangerous, sorry,
let me let me.
Speaker 1: Let me quote you. You said in the book, you said,
every once in a while, you come across a number
that crystallizes reality and it can stop you cold. For us,
it was this. According to data from the CDC, overdoses
involving opioids killed more than forty seven thousand Americans in
twenty seventeen. More than a third of those depths involved
the legal prescription opioids. In twenty nineteen, there were eighty
one thousand drug over drug overdose depths, of which the
CDC estimates more than seventy percent were opioid related YEP.
Speaker 2: One of the problems with measuring this is that there
are multiple different factors that go into and into how
we measure it, as well as the various high would
you say, inflection points, overdoses, overdoses by death, actual overprescription.
Because we were looking at these all and we were
targeting what communities we wanted to go into. And you
also had concurrent with the around the twenty sixteen, when
government was starting to occasionally you know, at state levels,
crack down on this. You had the movement to give
all first respond narcan. So you had sort of a
false sense that maybe the problem was going down because
you have fewer overdose deaths, But if you look deeper
into the data, you had a rising number of actual overdoses.
So while the narcan thing was good for saving lives,
it masked the problem. And what we've seen since the
publication of the book, with the COVID lockdowns and all that,
we saw an increase in the number of deaths of SPARE.
We saw an increase in the number of people recidivating,
recidivating on you know, drinking and using drugs because you know,
they're locked in their house, they have nothing to do,
nowhere to go, you know, they couldn't go to their meetings,
they couldn't you know, do their sobriety steps or whatever.
And so we had a huge increase. And then last year,
I think, and I don't have the numbers in front
of me, but we hit another high water mark over
one hundred thousand deaths by overdose. And it's only going
to get worse. It's only going to get worse because
there's no serious concern about the people who are dying.
I actually had pushback from people, and particularly even on
the cover title, the part of it work, it says
the white working class because they would say, well, you know,
the opioid crisis affects all Americans. Well, sure it does,
but it disproportionately affects white Americans, and particularly working class
white Americans. And if you sit there and say that
white people don't have unique interests, if you say that
white people don't have unique challenges and problems that need
to be addressed by government or by society, well you
sound like an asshole. You know that's what you are.
I mean, you're sitting there denying an entire people and
in denying the problems that they're facing. What does that
make you? That makes you an asshole.
Speaker 1: Here's another quote from the book. It says, we now
live in America where working class, predominantly white, rural people
whose parents and grandparents would have spat at the idea
of shooting up are now living and dying with needles
in their arms.
Speaker 2: Yes, I got to spend I This was a like
I said, this was a passion project for me and Richard.
But I'm not gonna lie and say that there weren't
some enjoyable moments of doing the research, I got to
go to parts of the country that it doesn't matter
where you are, what you're doing. If you have a vacation,
if you have a couple of weeks off, if you
have a little bit saved up, you're going to go
to the beach, You're gonna go snow skiing, You're gonna
do those kind of things. You're not going to get
to always visit parts of rural America, fly for America,
whatever the elites want to call it. And I had
not actually spent much time in Kentucky, out in the hollers,
or in West Virginia, and I got to meet some
of the most amazing people. These are the quote unquote hillbillies.
These are the you know, people who just you know,
have in rural Appalaysia that don't really give a damn
about the world's problems. They worry about their own communities
or their own hollers, and they would welcome us into
their homes, give us real moonshine. And these are you know,
these are country boys and some of smoked weed, that
sort of thing. Nothing that you would not expect. But
what we found was because I dealt with some folks
who had beaten their addiction, people who had been drug
mules driving down to Florida back during the heyday of
the pill mills in Florida. They would put them on
a bus and send you know, a dozen people down
there to hit to doctor shop and then hit a
whole bunch of pharmacies and bring it all back to
Kentucky or to West Virginia, that's those locations, and fled
the area with it. But they were dealing with this,
and like I said, these are people that you know,
a couple of generations ago. Even when they came, you know,
their sons and daughters came back from Vietnam. You know,
there was moonshine, there was weed. But you take that
heroin stuff, you take those needles, and that's the city problem.
That's not for us. But they come along and it's
almost like this story of like Elvis, if you don't
know some of the stories about him, he would say,
you know, I don't take drugs. I've never taken drugs.
I take medicine. And so these people who had previously worked,
you know, when they could still work, they you know,
worked at the coal mines, and that's repetitive and that's
a hard job and you get a lot of repetitive
stress injuries. They were targeted by these companies to be flooded,
to to market to their doctors in the local areas,
or to bring in doctors. As I found out, there's
a whole lot of doctors from India that set up
shop that have absolutely no compulsion about writing all these
destructive prescriptions because they're getting paid. And it changed the
attitude of these folks, people who, like I said, had
never who would have chased you out of town if
you had said, you know, I want to bring heroin
to this this part of the country. They've been like
no and no. But their attitude now was, well, no,
the doctor gave it to me. It's it's in medicine,
and that's that's really. That's to me, Like one of
the biggest crimes is the redefinition of these words in
a way that makes the unacceptable acceptable.
Speaker 1: Before I get into talking about and asking about whether
this was targeted or not, you had already brought up
West Virginia and I copy and pasted this that I
needed to read this directly, and you said, and yet
no alarm sounded at either the CDC or FDA. Even
as prescriptions and refills spiral beyond plausible numbers, distributors simply
loaded up pharmacies with more pills and collected record profits
on the burgeoning sales. Records in congressional testimony from twenty
eighteen show that from two thousand and seven to twenty twelve,
distributors sent more than seven hundred and eighty million hydrocodon
and oxycodon pills into West Virginia. Not into the country,
this is into West Virginia. And that broke down to
four hundred and thirty three pills for every man, woman,
and child. And then you break it down even further.
One town of four one hundred residents was sent nine
million opioid pills in two years. Another less than eighteen
hundred citizens received sixteen point five million in ten years.
Another population twenty nine hundred received almost twenty one million
pills during that decade.
Speaker 2: Was this.
Speaker 1: Was this on purpose? Was this about profit? Was it
about targeting a population that is I mean openly demonized
on TV now, I mean on the evening news white people.
Were they targeted?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And I've gone back and forth on the issue
of whether it was a malicious targeting in the sense
of we just want to do this to destroy these people,
or was it for profits? And I guess I've come
to the conclusion that it was both and kind of interlinked.
If we can make a profit and be harmful to
you know, this population that we either you know, on
the on the one hand, don't care about, or on
the other hand, we actively dislike like I said, they
use terms like flyover country. They see rural America, white
America as a problem. They see this as an impediment
to their agendas, and we if you look through the
emails between executives at these companies, they they view white
people as an alien population, as a lesser population. And
like I said, a lot of these companies have these
like the Sackle of Family or various Jewish CEOs and
all that that. You know, they see profit first. They
see this as we're another tribe. So what is done
to us if it's harmful? Oh, well, you know, I
still made my buck, right. You see the emails between
them talking about how when certain states would make changes
and make more difficult for them to peddle their wares,
they would make jokes about, well, it looks like old
Jed's gonna have to be a pillbilly somewhere else, will
have to go Instead of Florida, he will have to
go to Tennessee to get his drugs. The callousness was
absolutely criminal and outrageous, and it shows that it was intentional.
It was not a matter of, oh, well, we're trying
to provide this, you know, helpful service and some people
are abusing it. It was we know what's going on,
We know exactly what's going on, and we don't care,
and we are going to turn billions some profit. There
was an email in the company h short like a
year after the launch of Oxycon in the nineteen nineties
where they said, we're going to blanket this country with this.
Who says that? Who says that this is you know,
something we know is dangerous, it can be abused. Our
attitude is we're gonna blanket the country because it'll make
us billions, and it did. So. I went back and forth.
I you know, I'm a human being. I don't like
to There's there's some part of me that doesn't like
to ascribe the worst intense to people who are doing
the worst things that I always want to try to
like what's the real thing going on here? Because I
don't like to live in a world where everybody's a
cartoon villain or cartoon hero. It's silly. I've come to conclusions.
These are These are worse than cartoon villains. These are
like bond villains. These are these are people that human
life means nothing, profits mean everything, And they still to
this day deny any culpability or what little that they've
admitted to. They've done under the most intense retigious pressure
and criminal pressure. So I don't think that there's anything
positive that you can say about what their motives were.
And I think it. Whatever you think the worst of
their motives are, you're probably right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting that we went through a living on
through two years and almost it will be three years soon.
Of you could say, some people make the argument that
that happened naturally, that that was it came from nature,
it came from a bat. Okay, okay, I'll give that
this didn't This didn't happen by accident. This was planned.
This was put together and propagandized by people with the
money and the power and the influence to do it.
Speaker 2: You can see that. And what I don't know, if
we want to skip to the end in the sense
of what little justice has happened, They the deals they
cut to avoid culpability, the things they were allowed to
do to preserve their profits in particularly like the Sackler
family while they were under investigation, while they were facing
multiple class action lawsuits from the various states attorney generals, sorry,
attorney's general, while they were facing lawsuits and pressure from
the government, knowing that one of the results of the
these classiction lawsuits could be, you know, a siege of
their funds and that sort of thing. They were allowed
to ship offshore to offshore banks, billions of personal funds. Billions,
not just oh well, I'm gonna save a couple of
million from my retirement or you know, set aside my
little skape fund. We're talking billions. It's insane. And then
the actual judgments that they got in particularly the Cycler family,
but really a lot of these other companies, there was
no criminal liability they were. Within the case of the Sacklers,
part of the deal that they signed was that they
would not be liable for future lawsuits, you know, and
other criminal, criminal or civil liabilities. And they would have
and they would give over a small token billion or two.
But we're talking about a company that I think at
its high point it was over twenty billion dollars and
a family that had you know, banked a lot of
that and set it aside away from the company. It's
easy to look at some of the judgments they got
and say, well, justice was done because we're talking billion dollars.
But that's not restorative. That's not that made no one hole.
That money was you know, whatever was done with it
by the states, you know, got redirected. It's not going
back into those communities that I would visited that were
shattered by this. And it's not gonna even if some
of it trickled down in some small amounts of damages
to some of the worst cases, and it's not I'm saying,
even if it did, but it's not. It doesn't restore
entire communities that were stored by this. And in particular,
what story I like to tell is about Jasper, Alabama.
I'm actually from the Deep South, and I had no
idea that Jasper was a cold town. I grew up
not too far from there. I just didn't know, didn't
know when I was a kid, and I spent about
a month there, and one of the most amazing things
I learned. I was talking to a drug court judge
who was one of the University of Alabama, my alma mater,
who was actually younger than me. And well, that's a
weird moment when you're talking to a judge and you
realize he's younger than you. This is one of those
maturity things where it's just like, oh my god, this
guy's he's a kid, but he's a judge. But no,
he's wonderful guy. But he told me about the history
of what had happened in the mid twenty tens in
that community in Jasper in the late nineties early two thousands,
the coal my coppliants had shut down and it was
devastating to the community, as it was with a lot
of others throughout the throughout Appalaysia. In the mid twenty
ten teens are around twenty thirteen twenty fifteen, a company
came in and said because of the weight energy prices
were and fracking and this and that going on in
the ups and downs of the energy market, it was
economically viable to reopen those coal mines. That meant fifteen
hundred direct jobs in a town of like fifteen thousand.
That's ten percent. You know, that's ten percent job growth instantly,
and that's direct jobs. Because a lot of people don't
like to you know, I think about these things because
I'm a former business journalist. But when you bring in
a tent, you know, when you increase your workforce by
ten percent, that also has economic implications for the rest
of the town. It's good. You're gonna have a whole
bunch of indirect jobs. Drivers, You're going to have business growth.
You're gonna have restaurants, you're gonna have service industry, You're
gonna have all these things that will, you know, cause
a town to flourish. And Jasper is a wonderful little town.
Parts of it. The downtown is just gorgeous. It's very historical.
I really enjoyed being there. But you know, you go
outside of the downtown and you're talking about abject poverty
among white people, third world poverty. I mean, it was
just heartbreaking to see what I saw. And what he
told me was they came to the town, the company
did they wanted to hire and reopen the minds. They
could not find fifteen hundred people who could pass a
drug test, so they had to show their plans. What
do you think that does that community? It continues its
death it's death spiral. This is a lost opportunity to
reignite this, to reinvigorate this town is gone. And you
tell me that some part of the settlement with the
various class action lawsuits, you know, none of that money's
going to that community. And what could go to that
community to make it whole again, because none of this
would have happened if it wasn't for them in the
first place. And there's no there's no remuneration, there's no
making it whole, there's no In what we've seen, there's
still has not been justice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm looking at Jasper right now and
it's just looks like a very typical Alabama town. And yeah,
I mean, my mother's family is all from western Pennsylvania
coal mine towns. My grandfather did coal mining when he
was young. Yeah, those very easy people to target. I mean,
you're talking about people who you work in a coal
mine for ten years, You're going to have pain the
rest of your life, and it's just hey, take this,
it's non addictive. And then it's like okay, I can't
live without this. I had one written written here it
said some people who were living through this. You mentioned
that there were videos of people who just like overdosed
in public, like on benches and things like that, and
this one was insane. Even the survival stories can make
you feel a bone deep kind of sadness. In Jacksonville, Florida,
a young woman candidly told the local news station of
her struggles with opioids that started when she was prescribed
them at the age of sixteen to alleviate the pain
of ovarian cysts. Twelve years later, she was still fighting addiction.
And this is quoting her. I remember doing the pregnancy test,
putting it on the ground and shooting up while I
was waiting for the test results to come back. Crystal
Harrison sold First Coast News. I was prescribed them for
about two months, and when the prescription ran out, I
started looking in the street for them. I went from
lortab to oxacoton, to heroin to fentanyl, and it was
just and all it was just. It's been a downhill
effect since I was sixteen until now eighteen. And that
was a sixteen year old being prescribed. Basically said that
a Carolin.
Speaker 2: One of the things we found was the first exposure
to opioid painkillers for the majority of people who end
up for the majority of people who end up using them,
but also those who end up abusing them. There's a difference. Obviously.
Some people are like I was lucky, Like I said,
I took it for a couple of days and that
was it, that was done. But the first exposure for
people who both use them as well as those who
end up being addicted, comes from their dentist and their
family doctor. And you know, let's assume the best case
scenario that the best motives on the part of these
denist doctors. But you get your wisdom, teeth and rood
and they give you a week sports boxic cotton or
they did back in the day. What do you think
that's going to do to a sixteen year old? You know,
they're still trying to figure themselves out. Who you know, uh,
all the troubles that you go through in high school,
all the you know, oh here's something better than you.
I'm not gonna call it with this, but you know,
as I would with beer or whatever.
Speaker 1: When I was in high school, I mean, I was
on the hockey team, and we had access to quote
unquote black beauties, this amphetamine jez yeah, pretty much every
pretty much every athlete in school. And I mean this
is in the eighties. We had access to the pharmaceutical amphetamine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And one of the things that we discovered was
experts in pharmacology that we discussed, we talked about when
we interviewed for this book told us that there's no
reason for things like wisdom teeth, removal of sprained you know, sprainds,
located limb or something like that, no reason for those
kind of levels of pain relief. And in fact, if
you stack advil or ibuprofen with tail and all, it
actually gives you like a thirty percent better pain relief
than actual opioence. So there was really no reason for
this had to happen in the first place. It's just
all these doctors and Dennis were sold on the idea
that you need to give true pain relief and this
is the only way to do it, and don't worry,
it's not addictive. It's it's not addictive, don't worry about it.
And it's it's I don't want to I have had
a very career. One of the early things that I
did was working in West Memphis, Arkansas as a reporter,
and this was back in the nineties, and we had
very little budget as well as the sheriff's department also
had very little budget. And the town was at an
intersection of two different interstates, so you had a lot
of trucking coming through. Consequently, a lot of accidents, and
the Sheriff's apartment would use us sometimes as reporters would
go to the scene of an accident, but they'd also
have us take photos of the scene for the actual
criminal record or the accent reports and that sort of thing.
So I saw a whole lot of horrible, horrible things
in the sense of mangled bodies, you know, semi truck
and car wrecks, never going to be something you want
to think about. And it left a lot of haunting
memories of some of the worst things I had seen
up until we started doing the research for this book,
and when I spent some time bedded with the police
in Kentucky in various small towns as well as in Lexington. Lexington,
by the way, again one of those places I might
not have ever visited. Loved the place, great place, great people,
But we went on calls and they would discover things
like and I've described some of it in my book
or in the book with me and Richard, and a
lady would be overdosed on the floor, dead with the
child in the room, you know, two year old and
the child when they were they were looking at the
body trying to figure out exactly, you know, the sequence
of events. You know, the child's already been taken away
by Child protective Services were at the actual scene, and
they realized there's milk around the mom's mouth and so
she's blue or she's dead on the floor. She's been overdosed,
and they're like, why is there milk around her mouth?
The child, the baby had thought, well, this is how
we get mommy to wake up, and she started trying
to give it her mom, her milk that you know,
the last bottle of milk that their mom had fixed
for before she overdosed. Or there would be you know,
I don't know if you know how bad the exposure
of fennel can be when it's in its concentrated form.
Actual you know, officers like opening a trunk with it
stored in the trunk. Just the fumes itself could send
them into an overness situation, and that actually happened as well.
But one of the sites that we went to, here's
a baby in a crib. Here's the table they're doing
their sorting, and they're stepping on their product and all that,
and they're overdose on the floor. They're dead, the parents
and then here's the baby's crib, all of two feet
away from this big stack of fentanyl. Things like that.
I mean, I'm not going to ever get that out
of my brain. And that's the depravity, the horror that
the stuff can bring upon people. And so while I
said earlier that I like to try to find, you know,
assume that, you know, the motives are a little more
complex than simple super villain versus you know, broad shant hero.
When I think of those scenes, I'm thinking, these really
people are worse than anything. And you know, we can
come up with in fiction as a stand in for
a villain. These people prey upon their fellow man in
a way that you know, conquerors of old, you know,
killers of old, conquerors of old. They would straight up kill. Okay,
and that's horrible, but there's at least some honor in that.
But to string you out on something like this to
promise you that's good for you to use the people
you trust most in your life, the doctors, your healthcare providers,
to create situations like this, these scenes of horrible depravity,
like almost biblical evil. No, you don't get any more
benefit of the doubt from me on these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're just going to take a financial hit and
they'll never have to suffer like the people who are suffering.
Speaker 2: Nope, you mentioned.
Speaker 1: Interviewing people who were actually dealing opioids, people who are
making the runs of the states and bringing them back.
I would have to assume in a lot of cases,
the people they're dealing to are people in their family,
people they know, people they've grown up with, people they've
known their whole lives.
Speaker 2: It's the community.
Speaker 1: How do they handle it now? How do they I mean,
how do they get past it once they realize exactly
what they're doing.
Speaker 2: I think that that motivates a lot of these people,
because it's not just a matter of getting clean yourself.
You know, that's a hard enough struggle, and I think
we all should be trying to be more understanding towards
people dealing with this. I think that when they start
to realize that that's what really kicks them into high gear.
And that's why I saw so many wonderful stories of
people who had overcome their addiction, and then we're reaching
out and trying to help in their own communities. One
lady I interviewed actually in Jasper as well. She ran
she was the head of a women's recovery home. And
if you had met her on the street, if you
had met her in any other social situation, you thought, Okay,
she's maybe thirty's. She looks like a former Alabama sorority girl,
you know, slightly conservative, you know, very well put together outfit,
you know, has a kind of cute Alabama sorority girl
look to her whatever. And one of the first things
she told me was about how she went to prison
for to murder in her twenties. She told me about
how her parents had actually taught her how to fake injuries.
They would load them up in the car and take
them around doctor shopping throughout northern Alabama, through southern Tennessee
and through east northeastern Mississippi, and go doctor shopping and
go to you know, sit there and fake their way
through you know, this injury, knowing exactly what to tell
the doctors that they could get these prescriptions and get
them filled. And that was her, you know, her adolescence.
That was her from age ten to about age fifteen.
So it's not just a matter of like people praying
on their own communities. People were praying on their own
families when they're caught up in this. And then she
went to prison as accessory to murder. She it was
one of those situations and I don't recall all the details,
but the long and the short of it was she
was present and her boyfriend committed the murder, and so
she did a couple of years, but obviously she wasn't
as culpable. And when she got out, she was clean
and she you know, she'd gone through a program within
the prison and she was clean. And when her mom
picked her up from prison to take her home, she said,
I need to make a stop. She was going to
pick up drugs and then make another stop on the
way home to sell. And she thought, if I don't
get out of this now right now, they don't get
out of this car, I'm going right back into this
because my parents are you know, imagine picking up your
child who says I'm finally clean. I've been in prison, mom,
because of this this lifestyle you got me into and
you pick them up and you're like, oh, I need
to take you to a drug deal on the way home.
I mean, that's the depravity this stuff makes possible. And
in turn, she had taken all that pain, she had
taken all that you know, that realization of what she
was caught up in, and had first gone to this
program as a member and then went in about three
or four five years. She was the head of the house.
She was the prison of the organization. So there are
stories of victories out there, and there are stories of
people who realize the damage they've done for the communities
and to their families, to their people, to their fellow
working class white people. They're fell a little middle Americans,
and they're actually doing something about it. And that's one
of the few things that when I think about some
of the images that I'll never get out of my
head in a bad way, that's one of the things
I've always try to hold on to and think, Yeah,
we can still overcome this, We can conquer anything, and
these people are proving it.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about tv ads because I know
there are countries in Europe where it's illegal for pharmaceutical
companies to advertise on TV. Yet Oh it's I mean
here every I don't have I haven't had a network
TV in years, so I don't know, but I remember.
I mean, I think I cut the court in twenty
fourteen or twenty fifteen, but I remember all the ads.
I remember that, Hey, this could cause diarrhea and death. Hey,
you know, so let's talk a little bit about that.
How did they manipulate that and use those.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm old enough to actually remember. I went to
high school in the eighties as well. I'm old enough
to remember when there were no pharmaceutical ads on television,
and when the first ones came on, they seemed so clumsy,
and in fact, they seemed like they would scare you
away from the prescription more so than towards it. And
we're not talking about painkillers per se. We're talking about oh,
this lifestyle thing that you know, your allergies or your
you know, some chronic problem that you have, and here's
something that could help it. But also, you know, there
was always that long disclaimer at the end.
Speaker 3: It's like, could cause diarrhea, could cause explosive diarrhea, could
cause death, could cause high blood pressure, could cause heart attack,
and you're sitting there thinking that all sounds worse than
this condition I'm dealing with.
Speaker 2: But they were clumsy at first, but they've gotten very
refined since then, and you really see it for everything.
We are so overprescribed. Americans have been so this idea
that if everything in their life is not perfect, that
there's a pill for it, that there's a shortcut that
if you're you know, I'll get to this point a minute.
But but going back to what you say about Europe,
I was fortunate enough to live in Europe for about
a year and I noticed when I did catch broadcast
television that yeah, there were there were no pharmaceutical lads whatsoever. None.
And in fact, I have some friends in Europe that
we talk about these sort of things. And I was
saying something like, I need to get h I need
to stop the story and gets some talent on. I'm
having some real lower back problems right now. And he's like,
what the hell is titlan All. I was like, well,
it's a non prescription painkiller, you know, uh, anti anti
inflammatory whatnot. He's like, why do Americans know the names
of all these different drugs they have no I mean,
he's he's a very well educated, very plugged in person
that this guy I'm talking about he had. He was like, advil,
What are you talking about? You know, they're a flu what? What?
What is? What is all this? It's just not part
of that culture in the way that it is with us,
the way that they've sold it to Americans. And not
that Europe doesn't have its problems, but this kind of
made me sit back and think for a while. And
I've come to this conclusion that after the publication of book,
which is when you look around at our society, American society,
Western society in general, American in particular, when you have
over half of your population going on two thirds is
on some sort of prescription drug, and not all of
these are painkillers, but some sort of prescription drug for
dealing with the either the effects or trying to ameliorate obesity,
drinking drugs, for dealing with the fact that you're an
ex smoker. You know, all these different drugs are out there,
and sixty percent of Americans are on prescription drugs of
some sort if they're not seeking relief from the painkillers, themselves.
They're seeking relief from other self medications that they are
indulging in, and that could be overeating, that could be sloth,
that could be alcoholism, that could be all of these
different things that you know, people try to do to escape.
When you have six out of ten of your populations
on prescription drugs, it's not those people that are necessarily sick,
it's your society. Those people are trying to They're they're
medicating themselves against the society you built. And I say that,
and it looks like I've been drinking. This is a
virgin bloody Mary by the way, So just for the record,
because it sound like I'm coming off with some puritan
but no, everybody enjoys a good beer once in a while.
Everybody enjoys a small advice. But you know, look, if
you keep account, I've actually, when I've made myself tune
in to network television taking a scratch pad the number
of prescription drug commercials and what they're for, and they're
all from things like obesity or or dealing with you know,
other problems that arise from overreading, that arise from all
these different bad behaviors that are escapes from the society
that we live in. So the fundamental fix is not
going to come at the individual addict level. It's going
to have to happen at the sidal level. We have
to fix our six society before we do anything else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, mentioning Europe and how Europe doesn't really have
the opioid problem we do, Well, they needed to destroy Europe,
so they just imported rapists and murders proof. Yeah, they
just made it a lot worse. And I assume that's
exactly what they're trying to do here as well, you know,
just to add a little insult to injury. Even some
people in our sphere will say, yeah, I mean I
see the targeting, I see what they did. But people
need to take some responsibility for themselves that they allowed
this to happen to them.
Speaker 2: I'm not against that. I don't disagree on the one level,
because you know, the recovery for the addict has to
start with them. They have to realize that they have
to make a change, and there is amount of personal responsibility.
But what you've got to look at is, particularly when
it comes to opioids, and that's my area of specialty,
the majority of people who become addicts did not start
because they were thrill seeking pill poppers who are just
looking to have fun, looking to zone out me in
like we used to talk about the hippies or whatever.
Like I said, they get it from their doctor. They
get it sometimes as early as age sixteen, for wisdom
teeth removal. Once you hand somebody something that is so
powerfully addictive, particularly to a developing mind that young, what
do you expects going to happen? And how much responsibility
do they have because they trusted their parents, they trusted
their health care provider to have their best interest to heart.
But they don't, or either the health care provider or
their parent is ignorant and should should have done a
better job in educating themselves, or they don't care. And
that's the case with too many of these important Speaking
of imports, these imported doctors, the piminals that I was
able to come across, the doctors that would write these
prescriptions even in the face of the restrictions that were
at the state and federal level. Invariably they were imports.
Invariably they were Indians who had no stake in the
communities they were setting up shop in, and we didn't
experiment because there was this thing like, oh, you know,
obviously we've changed the rules here in Kentucky that you
can't get these prescriptions anymore the way that you used to. Okay,
so well let's see if we can do that. And
all it did, all that they had done, was really
at a step in particularly in the case in Kentucky
at the time that we did the experiment, which was
you could go to a pain management clinic and get
your regular prescriptions, but first you had to have a
referral from your family doctor. So it was an extra
you know, assuming you had either whether you had insurance
or not, maybe extra one hundred and fifty out of
pocket one extra visit. Then you're often paying clinic where
they're going to get you onto a cycle, they're going
to renew it for three hundred a month. I think
was the you know, it was the monthly visit fee
and it was cash. It was like, no insurance necessary.
Who do you think that they're catering to? Who do
you think that doctor Gupta is catering to? In this
small town in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: One of the quotes I took from the book, it said,
the full cost, the full human cost is not simply
an accounting of the dead, but includes the impact of
despair and hopelessness that follows in the wake of opiate
opiate addiction and abuse. Now, I mean this is taking.
This is extreme because this is also taking your health,
and it's destroying health, it's destroying lives, it is ending lives.
But I mean, we see this despair and hopelessness. In
my opinion. You know, when Joe Biden goes on TV
in front of a red background and basically calls you know,
a significant poor, most almost all white, you know, basically terrorists,
people that need semi fascist, people who need to be watched,
you know, looked at people who need you know what
I meant. Paul Gottfried might even invoke the therapeutic state,
where there's something there's something innately wrong with them that
needs to be repaired. People ask about that. I always say,
it's to give us to spare and hopelessness. It's too
when you see these TikTok videos of these kindergarten teachers
talking about wanting to teach anal sex to their gay
anal sex to their kids. That's to beat us. It's
to give us despair and hopelessness. But you know, all
of this, all of this is and you know, I
would say the same thing about you know, sending rapists
into Sweden and just basically changing their culture. That women
don't even know what rape is anymore. They don't even
know how to define it. They don't know if they've
been raped, when they've been raped, or.
Speaker 2: They're scared to report it because they don't when it
seems like they're racists or whatnot. Yeah, my friend Borzoway
going to term for this, it's the humiliation a ritual,
and that's what you see with the TikTok videos and
that sort of thing. I think there was a story
just a couple of weeks ago, and I think it
illustrates it. Think about every reference you see to within
the mainstream media to white people, to white women, to
white people in general, invariably it is a negative. There
is there is no mentioning of white people unless it's
a negative. Even Republicans do this. Their biggest their favorite
attack these days is well, this is the problem, well
white liberals, and that's why we need a coalition of
multicultural working class people. It's all a bunch of crap.
But they're only the only time they ever mentioned white
people as a group that might have, you know, its
own unique identity and its own interests and its own
needs that we expect that the government will meet to protect,
to provide for. That's the whole purpose of government. Dimension
of white people about any of these it's always invariably
a negative. It's always morally suspect. If you talk about
white people in any positive way, you are morally suspect.
And that, as much as anything I can think, contributes
to this sense of despair, the sense of hopelessness. I mean,
if we continue down this track, and I'm not trying
to make the grandiose predictions on anything in particular, but
if we continue on the track that we're on, then
we can look at our future by looking at what's
left of the Indian tribes in America living on these
little reservations. And I'm not mean physically, but they live
on these little reservations. They have absolutely no pride left.
What little pride that they get is from grifters coming
in who claim to be Indian and want to set
up a casino, but you know, dealing with addiction, dealing
with just this despair because their culture is gone and
that's what they would like to see, you of white people.
And they want to see that in Europe, they want
to see that in America, and we have to say no,
we have to start fighting back otherwise. I mean, this
is this is about our futures, This is about our people,
and we deserve better. They deserve better. We owe it
to our ancestors and we know it to our progeny.
Speaker 1: And it seems like what they want to kill is
they want to kill that Fastian spirit that goes forward
and seeks to conquer, that seeks to overcome. And multiculturalism
people are like, oh, multicultural, what is multicul Multiculturalism does
a couple of things. First of all, multiculturalism isn't about,
you know, enhancing certain cultures over others. It's basically about
destroying all cultures. Because if you destroy all cultures, then
you know there is there's nothing, there's no foundation for
somebody to rest upon. Multiculturalism also definitely allows a certain
segment of the population to be able to hide mm hmm.
And then when you start noticing to use in term,
once you start noticing, it's like, well, we can't hide
any we can't hide anymore. I mean we have. There's
twenty different cultures in this country, and holy crap, why
are they seeing only ours? I mean because two percent
of the population and you know, half of the world's
billionaires and controlled pretty much every single industry, especially anyone
that helps to create culture m and eventually you're going
to start someone's going to start noticing.
Speaker 2: And that's the biggest fear that they have. And that's
why bringing awareness to this problem, waking up a big
using the expression but the expression big normy, waking them
up to what's going on. Like you know the old saying,
if they if these people were painted blue, everyone would notice. Hell,
if they were just Asian, everyone would notice. Exactly who
we're talking about. We all know who we're talking about.
And it's it's by design, like you said, it's it's
you know, throw all the paints into one big bucket.
And then you have this sort of lower IQ mix,
mystery meat kind of population that pretty compliant, doesn't have
that spirit to overcome and in fact, you know, you
even demonize the idea of the Faustian spirit as stealing.
You know, we didn't conquer, we didn't explore, we didn't pioneer,
we stole all this we stole this land and that
sort of thing, and you may morally suspect any defense
of yourself. And I mean, in a way, if you
could completely remove yourself from a moral judgment of it,
you could say, well, that is a unique way and
almost an admirable way that you conquered in other people.
You made them once commit suicide, you made them want
to just fade off into nothingness. But it's horror, horrifying
to anybody with the moral center. And that's that's what's
going on. And multiculturalism. You know, obviously my only interest
is for myself, is for my people, for white people.
Multiculturism destroys that. But I actually do recognize that multiculturalism
destroys other cultures. It destroys other cultures that deserve to
have a right to be themselves, to be who they are,
and they just need to do that in their own countries,
in their own reasons. I have no problem with that.
We get painted with so many negative stereotypes. Just because
we say I want to stand up for white people,
I want to stand up for white interests, they seem
to want to graft onto that automatically. It's some sort
of superiority, some sort of anger, some sort of need
to destroy. It's like, no, absolutely not. I just want
what's best for my people. And actually, if those people
over there also flourish, then we can have an exchange.
We can trade, we can disit each other. But then
we go home. You know, we have the recipes. You
can stay over there. We'll stay over here. We won't
come visit. We might exchange, but there's no reason for
this idea that everything's got to be top down destruction
and conquer. That's just how they demonize the idea of
white people standing up for themselves.
Speaker 1: Well let's end it right there before we get in
any more trouble.
Speaker 2: And sorry, I hope I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you're good.
Speaker 2: No, you're good.
Speaker 1: But the talk a little bit about Antelope Hill, because
I mean they're doing amazing work, and absolutely some of
the books they're putting out, I mean just like Burnings,
like to Grell, just reprinting some of his books is
like people don't even never even heard that name, and
they need to go read like a Burning Souls or something.
But also they're putting out poetry, and then they're putting
out investigative reports like yours an hill.
Speaker 2: Again, our enemies always want to project onto us the
worst things about themselves, and so they look at say
the nights have I forgot what year was? I think
nineteen thirty four, the burning of the books from the
from the in Germany of.
Speaker 1: I've done a podcast going down exactly whose books they
burn and believe they don't want you to know whose
books they burned exactly.
Speaker 2: That's what I was going with that they would like,
you know, to think the idea that what we want
to do is we would want to burn books. We
want to ban things, and there are certain things that
may obviously we would want to ban certain things that
are completely and wholly destructive. But the reality is they
want a complete silence of any information that is harmful
to their their their narrative, to their regime, their power structure.
And analo Pill Publishing, analo pill Publishing dot Com has
come together and they pluck from obscurity, intentional marginalization works
by great authors affecting you know, whether it was they're
historical or current, and they translate them, they bring them
back into production. They spread these ideas because ideas is
exactly what we're trying to do. We're spreading ideas. We're
not trying to spread structure. We're not terrorists, we're not
any of these negative things. We're creating a political movement
and we're pushing ideas and a low pill. Wonderful people.
I loved working with them. I look forward to working
with them again on another project and hopefully I'll be
able to talk about that. But yeah, they the work
that they do is just the yeoman's work of bringing
an intellectual theft to a movement that is matured over
the over the course of my lifetime, from just initial
knee jerk reactions and you know, to online ship posting
to actual real world activism and actually engaging in real
world politics. And the work they've done is can't be
You can't bring a measure to how important it is
to have that sort of intellectual theft. And that's you know,
they're wonderful. People buy their books and read them, read them.
The joke in our circles is we buy the books
and they're like funko pops. We just put them on
the shelf. No, read the books. Those are there's a
reason that we want you to see these ideas.
Speaker 1: Did you want to talk about what your next project
is now, or you want to come back, or.
Speaker 2: It's still in the planning stages. I mean, I haven't
even talked to them about it. It's more like that, Okay,
myself and Richard and a few others, we just talked
about some we're banding about ideas. But I'm definitely definitely
not done with dealing with my good friends at a
local publishing.
Speaker 1: Appreciate it, trade, Thank you so much. You take care all.
Speaker 2: Right, Appreciate you having me on Peter and it was
a great hour. Thank you all right.