Speaker 1: I can't think of a better way to start twenty
twenty three than by signing up for Richard Grove's Autonomy course.
He's going into season nine and every season he's adding
more information in there to help you grow. I've said
this before. I don't think that I could have gotten
through twenty twenty and be where I am right now
if I were not a participant in season one. So
head on over to freemanbyond Thewall dot Com forward Slash Autonomy.
I have a couple of links there for you. Check
it out and get on Richard's level. Thank you. I
want to welcome everyone back to the Pee 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.
Speaker 1: On, Peter, Yeah, no problem. And 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. It was actually a
project with me and my partner, Richard McClure is. We
really wanted to do something that no one had done before,
and that is not just look at a 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 hot spots 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. I'm 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
march 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 geniside by bio
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 at 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 painkillers. 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 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, 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 handed the bottle to her 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 investigative reporter, magazine writer. I wrote
a few really horrible I'm glad they got pulled fiction books,
science fiction that nobody should be four Street, 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
then they get pulled off of it and now they're
hooked and they have to go elsewhere. 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 it sold to doctors.
Really you have to solve it to the doctors first.
Speaker 2: Well you have to understand. To understand that, you have
to go to the background of Stackler family with Produce 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 depress or not anti depressants, anti
anxiety medications, and that sort of thing, and so they
were instrumental in they 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 laws
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, 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 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 in there, how is
your pain at the end of your hospital stay or
your hospital visit. So it became more and more of
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 have 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 oxycotton or whatever it is. And then constantly
you know, uh, and then concurrently with that, Purdue Pharma
came up with oxycottin which they uh 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
oxy cotton 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 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 ebbs 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 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 had 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 enough as it is, But then we also
had the concurrent problem of finnyl starting 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 a 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 fennyl directly. Let it also dangerous. 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 of step overdose deaths, 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 what
would you say inflection points overdoses, overdoses by death, actual
overprescription because we were looking at these all when 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 responders narcan. So you had sort of a
false sense that maybe the problem was going down because
you had fewer overdose death 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 were dying.
I actually had pushback from people yea in particularly even
on the cover title, the part of it where it
says the white working class, because they would say, well,
you know, the opiold 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 then 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 or 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 going to 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 gonna
get to always visit parts of rural America, flower 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 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 repetitives dress injuries. They were targeted bodies 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
I needed to read this directly and 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 hundred residents was sent nine million
opioid pills in two years. Another less than eighteen hundred
citizens received sixteen ze 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 if you look through the emails
between executives at these companies, 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 Sackler
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 it 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'll 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 in profit.
There was an email in the company 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?
Speaker 1: This is?
Speaker 2: 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 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
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 whatever you think the worst of their
motives are, you're probably right.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to take a break and let you
know how you can support the show. Head on over
to Freemanbehaldthwall dot com, Forward slash support, you can see
every way Patreon my website, which is the best way
subscribe star Substack. There's even some crypto addresses there. Also
there is my po box PO Box eight three to two, Auburn,
Alabama three six eight three one. Send me anything you want.
I appreciate all of you and your continued support means
the world to me. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's
interesting that we went through a moving 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 in 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 attorneys general, while they were facing lawsuits and pressure
from the government, knowing that one of the results of
these class action 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 going to save a couple
of millions 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
Sycler family, but really a lot of these other companies,
there was no criminal liability they were with. In the
case of the Sacklers, part of the deal that they
signed was that they would not be liable for future
lawsuits uh you know uh in 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 billions of 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, it 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 it's
I'm not 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 coal 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
that way, 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 a 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 cop
pliants 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, 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 real from
those coal mines. At 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 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
gonna 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 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 mind. 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 is 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 worn't 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. What was I had one 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. Year 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 synthetic heroin.
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, well, all right, 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 and doctors. But you get your wisdom,
teeth and rood and they give you a week's worth
boxic con 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, 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 antrotamine jes yeah, pretty much every
pretty much every athlete in school. And I mean this
is in the eighties that we had access to the
pharmaceutical anpatomy.
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,
spraind just 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 not 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
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 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 a
child in the room, you know, two year old, and
the child when 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 their mom had fixed war before she overdosed,
or there would be you know, I don't know if
you know how bad the explosure of finnel 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 overse 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 they're
stepping on their product and all that, and they're overdosed
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's 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, broadshant 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, you know,
killers of old, conquerors of old. They would straight up
kill you. 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 it'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. Nope,
you mentioned interviewing people who were actually 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 and their family.
People they know, people they've grown up with, people they've
known their whole lives. It's their community. How do they
handle it, 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, she'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 accessory 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 doctors 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 get
these prescriptions and get them filled. And that was her,
you know, her her adolescence, that was her from to
about age fifteen. So it's not just a matter of
like people praying on their ow 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 go
out 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. Just 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 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 within
about three or four five years she was the head
of the house. She was the president 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 fellow 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, I'll never get out of my head
in a bad way. That's one of the things I
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, you know this could cause diarrhea
and death. Hey, you know, so talk a little bit
about that. How do 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. It's like,
could cause diarrhea, could cause explosive diarrhea, could cause death,
could cause high blood pressure, I could cause heart attack,
And you're sitting there thinking that all sounds worse than
this condition I'm dealing with. 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 sold 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 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, yeah, there there were no
pharmaceutical lads whatsoever. None. And in fact, I have some
friends in Europe that we talked about these sort of things.
And I was saying something I need to get I
need to stop the story and gets some title on
I'm having some real lower back problems right now, and
he's like, what the hell is title and all. I
was like, well, it's a non prescription painkiller, you know, 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 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 is what is all this? It's it's just not
part of that culture in the way that it is
with us, the way that they 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 after the publication 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've built. And I say that,
and it looks like I've been drinking. This is a virgin,
bloody marry, by the way, So just for the record,
because it sounds like I'm coming off with some puritan. 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 into
network television, taken a scratch pad the number of prescription
drug commercials and what they're for, and they're all from
things like obesity or dealing with you know, other problems
that arise from overeating, 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 societal 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 through 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 an amount of
personal responsibility. But what you've got to look at is,
particularly when it comes to opioids, and that's my area 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
did 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 have 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 important doctors, the pimmals 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 of 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.
Speaker 1: So it was an.
Speaker 2: 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 off to the
pain 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, and 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 portion 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, 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 want to
seem like they're racist or whatnot. Yeah, my friend boresway
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. The
mention 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 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 future, 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, and.
Speaker 1: 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 multicult? Multiculturalism does a
couple of things. First of all, multiculturalism isn't about, you know,
enhancing cir cultures over others. It's basically about destroying all cultures.
Because if you destroy all cultures, then you know, there's
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. And then when you start noticing,
to use a term as 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. 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
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, but 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 uh
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 regions. 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 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: Appreciate that you having me on, Peter, and it was
a great hour. Thank you. All right,