Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 437,
and my guest is doctor Robert g Marbot
junior.
He's a Fentanyl
National expert
and former White House homelessness
policy adviser.
He was recently on Hey Human as a
guest for episode 434 discussing the homelessness crisis,
and we discuss his upbringing and and much
more of his background.
This time, we're just going to discuss
the Fentanyl crisis
and the fact that he is an executive
producer on a new documentary called Fentanyl
Death Incorporated.
I wanted to have him back relatively quickly
to the previous episode.
We're gonna discuss,
on this episode, the $1,000,000,000 industry that is
ravaging America
and beyond, but we're obviously focusing on the
United States for this one because that is
what his focus is.
Check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests in the show. Hey Human Podcast is
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Be well,
be kind,
be loved.
Here we go.
Doctor Robert Marvitt junior, welcome to Hey Human
for the second time. 3rd time. 3rd time's
a charm. Oh my god. Half. 2a half,
technically. You didn't say a whole lot in
the Billy Baldwin line. Billy gets a half
billing.
Well, he gets 2 thirds maybe. You get
a Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Billy probably gets, like,
0.99
and Marvin gets 0.01.
How you doing? Good. Very good. You're in
the middle of
another
long run of going to cities and promoting
movies and things. You're a busy man. Yeah.
And and and I try to keep my
consulting job going and my teaching going, which
are my day jobs. And then now these
the the movies,
and and they literally have 3 movies come
out within
days, weeks of each other is just strange
as can be. But, you know, it all
goes back to the actor's strike and the
director's strike because everything was I had everything.
I thought all the homeless would be all
done a year ago, year and a half
ago,
and then you'd separate the documentary
from the theatrical.
Thought that there, and then I'd be working
on Fentanyl. But we start I signed the
Fentanyl agreement,
with distributor
on June 28th,
and,
I call up, my my business partner director,
Steven. I call him up and they go,
alright. We're signed. And he says,
when is it due? And I told him
and he was like, we don't even have
an interview yet. And I said, well, can
we start shooting next Tuesday? So it was
on July 4th weekend.
By literally 5 days later,
we have 7 people on set shooting in
San Diego.
And throughout
what we did a documentary
really different than documentaries are done because that
we had such a compressed timeline.
Normally, a documentary,
you go pick 60, 70 people, and you
fly out and see each one, and you
take the crew, and and it just takes
a lot of time. We did it differently,
and we shot
on Saturdays.
We went to different parts around the country
and like a hub
and brought 7, 8, 10 people in to
shoot on a, like, in a 36 hour
period.
Once we had our set set up. And,
you know, you change the angle, you know,
everybody nobody would know it's the same building,
you know, look out that window, out this
window.
And by doing it that way, we were
able to really compress the shooting timeline,
from what probably would have been
a a year and a half shoot,
easily,
down to 4 weekends in a row where
everybody came in, and that was our principle
of photography. And then we had to do
some pickups and had to we did go
out and shoot in Arkansas.
It it very importantly because of the there's
sort of 2 really key things in the
movie, the Fentanyl Death Incorporated about Arkansas.
So we filmed there, and then we went
up and shot at a rally
in Sacramento and contextual photography,
videography
to Canada, Mexico,
and China. So then we shot those separately.
But that's how you make a movie start
to finish in under 5, you know, a
full one hour in under 5 months.
And it's already screaming.
Yeah. It's a great film. I've seen it.
So congratulations on that. I think it's an
important film.
Usually I start these and I say, tell
me about your growing up life and all
that, but if anybody wants to hear about
Robert's life, go back and listen to the
first half of episode 434.
So let's jump in about
this film. What
brought you to the project?
Clearly,
having seen so much of
the drug addiction through your work with homelessness,
that was something that sparked your
knowledge of the problem. And just being a
a member of society, we can see how
damaging it is. What drew you into making
the documentary?
Well, there were sort of three things converging,
And even while we were still working on
the homelessness project, I kept talking to people
around me. I said, we we need a
whole separate documentary about Fentanyl because Fentanyl is
such an embedded component,
especially on the West Coast
with homelessness.
But that that was that was one, but
there were 2 others,
and I've always been around criminal justice issues.
I have a master's in criminal justice. When
I've worked in the White House, I've done
a lot of cross agency
activities or meetings or groups or initiatives or
whatever
around the criminal justice system. So I've always
sort of,
been around that for a long time. I
was I would chair the crime control district
in Central San Antonio when I was mayor
pro tem.
I had the public safety budget, so I
had the fire, EMS, police. And we're the
1st big city coming out of Mexico up
by 35.
So
when a lot of part of the country
wasn't seeing things, we were seeing it first.
And so that was a second part. And
then the third part
is I've just been
as as a sort of an observer,
and steadier
of human nature.
I've always been just
really worried about the issue in United States
in particular
that why is it we're 4.25
percent of the population
and pretty much every list of drugs since,
PCP and Angel Dust hit in the 1983,
84 time frame,
we have consumed
in United States,
generally, 30 to 40% of every illicit drug
across the board. Like, not it's not just
fentanyl. It's everything.
And with fentanyl, we at times started out
in over 50%,
and then as other countries got into it,
Australia, New Zealand, for example, you know, our
our percent comes down.
But why is it we still hover around
30 to 40%? That is a
I don't know why every president, every senator,
every sociology class, every psychology class
doesn't concentrate on that. Because if you think
about
the list of drugs, not beyond Fentanyl, but
most domestic violence
ties back to to illicit drugs or alcohol.
Almost all robberies and burglaries tie back to
illicit,
drugs,
use.
Put a medical,
cost
in United States that are connected to this
and why
group plans are more expensive here than you
could ever allocate anywhere else in the world.
How much absentee from work, work injury caused
by
people,
under the influence
at work.
And so I really start by pushing back
on the notion
that there's sort of harmless
or victimless
crimes connected to substance abuse. And a lot
of that started out of San Francisco, but
not entirely. It it it's their pockets all
through United States and Canada
that really believe drug use is victimless and
harmless,
and I couldn't disagree more. And I see
the net effect what happens. And so
when you add all that up, it's like,
we need to figure out how United States
it just think if we could cut our
use from
the 30 to 40%
range to 9%,
we're still
consuming
200%
more than the average person does in the
world. And that that is a mind boggling
number, and it's not a fiddle. It's everything.
So why is that?
Do you think it's about the mental health
crisis and self medication? Or do you think
if drugs these illicit drugs were made non
illicit, would that change things?
Well, look at what we did. California tried
decriminalization
of all of it and it got worse.
Same thing happened in Oregon and Washington and
and the fact that California
citizens
over voted their legislature. I mean, these are
not
right wing conservative
middle America red states. This is California,
and I know the voting is still counting
in, you know, California loves to count forever.
There's a lot of people here.
Yeah. Well, there are a lot of people
in New York and Texas, and we can
get the count done in 24 hours and
You also that's because California is is totally
mail in. Right? So I although people do
go in person, I think mailing in slows
stuff down.
Yeah. It slows
stuff in the the way they have the
laws about oversee ballots and such. Almost every
other state, like, you know, you get to
a a voting convention. They all, like, you
know, everybody trashes California. California goes, I know.
I know. I know. But it looks like
the citizen initiative
to overrule the legislature
is a 2 to 1 win. People are
tired of this.
And this this sort of crazy
experiment of let's
decriminalize some of the most dangerous drugs ever
seen to mankind and womankind in the world.
Why would we do that? And so I
think the citizens are pushing back. So that's
not the reason.
I do think
there there's something about
United States culture, one pill for everything.
You you know, you got a knee pain,
got a pill. Got cancer problem, got a
pill.
Got dyslexia,
you got a pill. And I don't mean
to be joking about that. It it's
every
place I go, there's some medicine for
whatever the ailment is. And you start to
wonder in America,
are do we have a bunch of drug
supply in search of a a problem
rather than a problem in search of a
solution? Our drug company
megalith
makes sure to keep America
drugged up as best as possible. Makes people
a lot of money. You can do a
whole podcast and get people way smarter than
me and to talk about that. And,
Purdue Pharma comes along
and and and we jump from organic opioids
to synthetic. It makes it incredibly dangerous. It
makes it a year round supply.
It makes it easy to make. It makes
it where you can't smell it, taste it,
or see it, and for the most cases.
And and then they come along and the
Purdue
Pharma Group, as well as everybody, Sackler family
and all that group comes along and says,
and by the way,
these drugs are not addictive.
And so your doctors were prescribing more. Even
though they knew better. Yeah. I mean, that's
the doctors had a duty to warn and
do duty of care. They knew better. And
all the way down to
how some of the pharmaceutical
companies actually stood up, quote, peer reviewed journals.
Yeah. That is is stalking men, stalking women
journals that that were out there
that you could say this is non addictive.
And I wanna be careful. There are times
that are medical need Sure. Where you need
medicine. There are absolute
times when you need it.
But the go to in America seems to
be a pill
not working out. Seems to be a pill
and not
walk around the neighborhood.
Acupuncture.
Acupuncture,
meditation,
yoga,
taking a nap in the afternoon. I mean,
whatever it is, biological
bodies are different and so people respond differently.
But instead of trying one of those 3
or 4, we go right to the pill.
And, again, there are absolute times where medical
medication
is critical for the survival
of of people.
Absolutely.
I'm talking about the
before we try everything else, we go right
to the pill and get addicted. All the
fentanyl precursor,
or synthetic
opioids where they said they're non addictive.
I asked docs, I said, how can that
be
when the organic is very addictive? And they
go, well, because,
you know, and they were just reading from
the marketing materials. And I just never it
I'd never got that. So that's one issue.
And here's a strange deal that came up
in
sort of behind the scenes of the doing
the movie. We have doctors.
We have anesthesiologists.
We have DEA.
We got at DEA task for people, local
county state. We got big policy, low policies.
We have head of mega departments down to,
people who were the narco undercover
down at the school.
We got parents. We got family members. We
got policy people. I got left, right, center.
I
I got everybody across the board. I mean,
it really is Noah's Ark
on people who care
about
fixing or significantly
addressing
and successfully addressing fentanyl.
And the the strangest deal is we ask
him questions and we go through, and at
the very end, we ask,
the the king or king question. You know,
if you're king or queen, what would you
do? You know, and and we're, you know,
we're expecting people, you know, go after China,
go after the cartels, go after the biker
gangs in Canada, and and we got that.
But
the thing we never directly asked
but came up almost
70%
of the time in our interviews
was
loneliness
and lack of family connectivity,
lack of meaningful
connection
from foreign service intelligence
people
to pastors,
victim and survivor families
to anesthesiologists.
I mean, that that that this is not
a bunch of sappy,
softy, you know, you go up and find
yourself a boulder crowd.
This is I have some of the hardest,
toughest people on this issue, and it was
across the board. We never even asked about
family. We never
once asked about family,
and it came up over and over and
over,
broken family,
lack of family connectivity,
and loneliness.
I was at a dinner the other night
by myself waiting I was going to a
play, my friend's play, and I went and
took myself to a little Japanese restaurant down
the street.
And a family came in,
mom, dad, and 2 kids who were probably,
I don't know, 7 to 8 years old.
And
the minute they sat down,
the minute they sat down, the the screens
came out. The kids had big iPads. The
parents were on their phones.
They I was there for 45 minutes,
and this is not hyperbole.
They did not speak to each other the
entire
meal.
And I was so sad about it. What
can really fix this if if this really
is part of it, you know, and and,
you know, again, we're not
attempting to try to scientifically connect it to
family breakdown,
but we do know there are a lot
of reports on loneliness that the surgeon general
has done at a scientific level.
And if you start going
what happens if every family sat down and
listened to each other, ate dinner together,
and there's no cell phone? We don't allow
cell phones at the dinner table. Period. Just
there's no cell phones. There's no computer.
If somebody wants to look up something because
it comes up in a conversation,
you ask permission. Hey. Does does anybody mind
if I go get a phone to look
up some? Not to get on the phone,
but to help with the conversation.
Well, it's like growing up. We weren't allowed
to watch TV during dinner.
Same same thing. Yeah. Same thing. You didn't
watch TV during dinner. A lot of people
call that old school, and I'm starting to
call it, like, we gotta do this now
school.
Like like, we're in trouble as a society
and look how I mean, your point, I
was gonna bring it up. I was in
a restaurant the other day with our film
crew. We walked in and we almost started
filming, like, we almost went back to get
our our cameras. I said, look around. We
need to reconnect. We need to listen to
each other. We need to not walk by
a person, ignore them. We need to really
listen to your family member and and, you
know, how are you doing?
And we literally walked in this entire restaurant
is packed.
Every table had their iPhone. Every single person
had an iPhone out and nobody was talking
to each other. It's a real problem. I
I was in the airport
walking and, of course, airports are packed,
walking
to go to my gate.
And I see a man pushing a stroller.
The stroller
is empty. His toddler is walking behind him,
but he's on his phone. And he keeps
walking and she got distracted.
And I'm watching this, horrified, this little girl
starts wandering the opposite direction. He has no
clue. He gets maybe
10 yards down and I'm
moving toward the little girl to make sure
she's safe. Another woman scoops up the baby,
and then she's looking around, and these women
sort of form a
a boundary around this child.
And I said, he's over there. And we
and he suddenly looks up, and he's like,
oh my god. And we kind of, on
mass, deliver the baby back to him. Boom.
Like a pack of elephants. What could have
happened had any of us been nefarious?
What what if that lady who picked him
up was not the I wanna reunite? It
was Right. You know, I wanna kidnap. I
wanna write some.
And and so I see stuff like this
all the time. We're so disconnected
from each other, and I think we're disconnected
because we don't know how to touch the
pain of our own loneliness. We can't even
look at our partners and say,
I feel alone
in this, or I feel alone in the
world. You know, it's such a vulnerable
feeling.
One of our themes is
if somebody says all we have to do
is
x
about Fentanyl,
you gotta don't don't trust them. It's not
gonna work. The Fentanyl crisis is so bad
now.
The the answer is really all of the
above. I mean, and and it it it
is getting tough on China. Absolutely.
And precursors
and now pre precursors. And what about Russia?
Isn't Russia also a big part of it
for distribution?
India are also there. China is by far
the number one, but then you got the
assembly
plants for lack of everything, the pill presses.
And and now that that's in Mexico and
now the northern border, Canada. A lot of
people have no idea how much is coming
across Canada.
We have some experts
that believe now that
more is coming across Canada than Mexico. And
there's some reasons for that.
Remember, the Canadian US border is the longest
border between 2 countries in the world. The
northern border is way longer than the southern
border,
that southwest border, but also don't forget the
Canada,
Alaska border. Right. And they hike they drop
off product in the in the woods and
then people hike and get it. And, of
course, the border patrols find
dead people who have died from the elements.
But I have a friend who's now retired
who did border
at the Bellingham
border,
bell you know, or at the the what
do you call it? The peace arch gate.
Yeah. And he said by by the droves,
they were stopping pills coming in by the
droves. That's a wild one because it's literally
a part that sort of United States and
Canada share, and it's done in the old
days before
bad things were going on.
And it's in an Canadian neighborhood goes into
this park that then goes into the American
territory,
and people go in and out and you
don't know what's going on.
And when you have a lot of agents
up there, you can manage it. It it's
hard as pain. It might some might argue
it's a waste of of personnel.
But the problem is
so many agents have been reassigned to the
southwest border.
It's totally opened up the northern border. We
found that a lot of, quote,
northern border agents are supposed to be watching,
you know, a sector of 60 miles or
whatever.
They were actually in their office on their
computer
processing people on the southwest border.
So they're, quote, on the border, they're on
the northern border,
but they're not out doing anything.
They're inside
on a computer
processing somebody on their they have a different
system. It's not Zoom, but a Zoom like
system,
and they're processing
people.
Northern border that people are just walking in
across. And that's why,
you know, there's a we have a little
part in
the
movie, the former head of, all, you know,
the border.
He walks around and he he it's scary.
I think it's one of the most scary
parts of the movie where he goes through
every border. You know, the the he starts
on the west,
Pacific, and then he goes southwest border, then
he goes golf, then he goes sort of
Florida,
then he goes mid Atlantic, then up Canada,
then Canada, then he goes Alaska, Puerto Rico,
and Guam.
And and then you find out we have
a a Canadian
legislator who's like who's the number one person
in Canada
on on addiction and illicit drugs.
And she's saying less than 1% of the
shipping containers that come in from
Asia
or for anywhere in the world that go
into the western ports of Canada are getting
checked.
And so that means 99% of what goes
into Canada is not checked, and we treat
United States like everything from Canada is like
ours. And and it's just not getting checked.
Wow. That shocks me. That shocks me.
That's that's very scary.
Can you explain how Fentanyl
merged with the opioid
where, obviously, in America,
you know, the the people producing
opioids to for people's ailments is one thing,
but then suddenly this massively deadly component is
added.
Is it because there are fake pills coming
through? Or is this something that
can be safely distributed
as well? And my secondary question is,
do you feel, especially as someone who is
as learned as you,
do you feel that this is
the reason why America is flooded with this
and we have such a huge
problem in proportion to the rest of the
world, it's very diabolically on purpose that
China is or and Russia and maybe India,
but China and Russia more specifically are saying,
how do we destroy from within?
This is how. So it's like 3 questions
at once.
So let let's start with the opioids.
And and I always think it's helpful to
start at the opium wars. I know that's
going back, but I'm a student of history
and I really believe
part of what
if we need to understand how opioids and
then now synthetic opioids have become so dangerous,
you have to start with the opioid wars.
And there's gonna be way oversimplifying
it, but we gotta give it context. Great
Britain
wanted to sell opioids
that were being made out of India, you
know, a territory of England.
And they did it by the way, they
didn't wanna sell it in England,
so they were selling it into China. Chinese
population, the Chinese local government said, this stuff's
killing our, you know, we've become the most
unproductive society and we used to be the
most productive. We're now unproductive.
We got problems. We got, you know, all
sorts of family abuse.
Our economy is falling apart.
So China went and said, we're gonna have
0. We're gonna go burn it. They rounded
it up, burned it, and such. In Great
Britain held their government
hostage
because they were destroying the opioids,
you know, the crops, and they were destroying
the product. And they said, we're gonna make
it illegal to have any opioids. And Great
Britain said, you can't do that. We want
a good
can't do that. We want a good supply
chain that goes into you. You're one of
the biggest populations in the world. Well, you
gotta do it. And then when they didn't,
Great Britain took Hong Kong in order to
have a port to make sure they continue
to send illicit drugs into another country,
which by the way, Great Britain did not
let Great Britain take opioids or use opioids.
A revenge plot is coming. I feel like.
They call it the reverse opium wars.
You know, America sat by the side. You
know, we were nominally on the Chinese side
on this barely, like, you know, we could've
done something, we didn't. We were sort of,
like, we gave them rah rah, we agree
with you, China, but we could have done
more and we didn't. France, Portugal, and Spain
all supported Great Britain in that effort.
So the western society
was, like, willing to addict another country
and and by the way, they didn't wanna
be addicted themselves. So so when it comes
around again,
you could see why the Chinese society is
like,
oh, you know, that's pretty rich coming from
you all, like, now you don't want it.
Now we're sending it your way. And and
more precise
medical fentanyl
that gets invented in 1959,
when it comes along,
it makes surgeries,
a lot of surgeries that were not doable
or not successful, like open heart surgery.
Fentanyl is critical for or fentanyl like products,
but fentanyl now
is critical for open heart surgery. That that
that we were losing people on the operating
table because they would go into so much
pain and shock, they would die because of
the,
effects of the surgery, not the actual heart
transplant.
And so Fentanyl comes along and makes heart
transplants
actually
more
successful, safer.
You can pull the breathing tube out and
everything else out. There are a lot of
mechanical reasons why that's there. So that's very
important, but it's an incredibly
powerful medicine. There's a lot of medicines you
use in a hospital that you would never
imagine using on the street, and you would
never imagine not having an anesthesiologist,
a lead surgeon, an attack
monitoring
everything from heart rate to pulse to ox,
you know, to to, you know, all this.
And instead, you do it down the street
and there's no monitoring.
So
what happens,
that starts to get into society, and then
oxycodone
comes along with Purdue Pharma, you know, OxyContin,
and they addict
whole, you know, 100 of 1000, millions of
people in the United States.
And then all the lawsuits come up that
says there's, you
know, an addiction
problem. It's it is addictive.
So suddenly,
everybody gets sued, you know, it wasn't just
Purdue Pharma, you know, they're the
including drugstore chains. And so they all get
sued. Doctors get sued. So they it shuts
down. China
in conjunction with the Mexican cartels said and
there's one very specific guy. He comes in
from China and he goes to the cartels,
and he says,
you got an addicted society
already addicted to this drug. They're wanting the
drug.
Then with all these lawsuits, it's cutting it
back. Very few people spent any time thinking
about what do you do with all these
legally addicted people who got addicted through the
medical,
and how do you take them off? And
and nobody spent any time saying, how do
we unwind that clock? And instead,
the Mexican cartels, while America Medical Society was
asleep,
comes in and says, we're gonna fulfill that
need. And that that addiction and craving is
so powerful.
They came in and and fulfill the need.
And so the way I like to very
simplify it in an elevator sentence is you
can draw a direct line from Purdue Pharma
to the Mexican cartels in China
that filled the void of what got cut
off just just abruptly
with no treatment, no recovery, no how we're
gonna wean you out, how we're gonna bring
you down.
And so that was the first wave of
illicit drugs, and it starts 20
14 ish or so.
And then once they got a beachhead,
then they go, well, we're not just gonna
go to the people who were formally addicted
to OxyContin.
We're gonna go to Xanax. We're gonna go
to all these peripherals
still in the opioid ish family,
and we're gonna get, you know, start serving
their needs. And
you almost can't find
organic,
opioids or heroin, any of those family groups
of the organics.
They almost don't exist. I've talked in a
bunch of prosecutors a couple weeks ago, and
they said, we almost have no heroin cases
left anymore. That used to be their number
one case. They're almost none.
Everything's now gone to synthetic methanol.
The whole Purdue Pharma
is way worse of a story than anybody
can imagine,
and everybody is sort of starts blasting the
Mexican cartel.
I think you and they're bad folks. I
mean, they they are bad folks.
And and the Chinese bad actors who brought
it over, they are bad folks.
But
we this was also done within the American
Medical Society too. Yeah. And leave it to
America to not have a proper plan to
fix something. They just
Yeah. What what once we went over the
cliff and stopped that, like, you know, cold
turkey,
the most addictive
drug ever known to mankind, womankind on planet
Earth ever.
And by the way, it's the most lethal,
and we had no plan other than we're
gonna have lawsuits, stop the stop prescribing,
and everybody goes off the cliff.
And we have a great guy in our
our documentary, you know, Dentanyl Death Incorporated,
Tom Wolf,
who's a person who goes on the street
at this time. He was addicted
to medically addicted. He had a a medical
surgery,
gets inadvertently
addicted,
then
the those drugs are taken away from him.
So he goes to the street to find
his drug
rather than somebody saying,
we know we got you addicted.
Let's get you in a treatment program and
and use all that,
you know, the Purdue Pharma money and all
those other monies, the opioid. And how do
we take people who were already addicted and
get them treated? And we didn't do that.
That's not what was done. Yeah. And there
was a lot of shame around people who
were addicted. They didn't wanna admit that they
had the problem. So there's this huge secret
that
is riding this wave as well. So am
I to understand then then people go they
get
the street drug, and that's what's laced with
the
with the deadly part? How does it go
from, I'm taking this pill, I'm maintaining my
addiction
by
pharmaceutical drug, and now I can't get that
pharmaceutical drug. I'm going to the street, but
it has
it has a more fentanyl thing, and that's
where I'm getting disconnected. Then then go to
the street,
and and it depends on where you are
in the country. In San Francisco,
they they were marketing
fentanyl as 3 or 4 different drug substitutes
still in the broad
synthetic opioid family.
They they meaning the pharmaceuticals or they meaning
the street dealers? The street dealers. Street dealers.
Mexican cartel,
China,
the local distributor, the Guatemalan,
syndicate,
that, you know, who really dominates Bay Area.
And they started
saying,
here it is. And it it was all
fentanyl.
But you needed Percocet, here it is. Synthetic
fentanyl. They don't tell you that.
Xanax, here it is. Fentanyl.
But knowing it's that deadly, aren't they just
killing off their
their people that buy their product, their customer?
That seems like a bad business plan to
murder your
customers.
And that may be sadly how this thing
ends. You know, I I I I've spent
a lot of philosophical
time going,
are we gonna solve this ourselves? Are we
gonna take control of this self?
Or are we gonna it's gonna be like
a forest fire and people just die off
and you run out of fuel because everybody
is gonna be addicted, takes it, and dies.
The amount
of that kills you is literally 2 grains
of salt,
1 15th a grain of rice.
And so when you get that small, it's
very hard. You know, street drug dealers,
the biker gangs in Canada,
the cartel in Mexico. These are not scientists
working in a white glove lab
and getting very precise.
And and so sometimes you take the fentanyl,
and you you get almost no effect because
that part of the batch wasn't evenly mixed.
Then another part is totally lethal
right on for, you know, you're down and
you're down and gone in 10 seconds. So
it it it it it varies so much.
It varies around the country,
but the the reason why
the drug dealers have figured it out,
everybody
who takes Fentanyl, if you go ask the,
you know, a user,
they say this is the biggest high,
the biggest,
emotional
feeling they've ever had in their life.
They say it's, you know, better than eating,
better than sex, better than sleeping,
better than any other drug they've ever had.
And so
the one is so hard that when somebody
dies, there's somebody right behind it to replace
them. Now
if the way we're going,
you know, that we're well over a 100,000
deaths of all types of fentanyl deaths.
And if that continues to climb,
at some point, we're gonna run out of
a population
that that dies, and then it will start
to come down at that point, sadly.
That's per year, a 100,000?
Yeah. 100 dot and and let's go through
that real some real quick that data here.
And I'll just do a bunch of not
a bunch, but some key data download.
Four ways to die of Fentanyl. 1 is
recreational drug use. Think San Francisco.
You go get Fentanyl on the street. You're
looking for Fentanyl. You want Fentanyl.
You wanna get high. Greatest high you ever
have, and then you take one that has
too much or you take too much, you
die. That's one group.
Then there's the Fentanyl poisoning.
Normally, children 0 to 4
who clearly are not going out and getting
a dealer, you know, a park bench in
San Francisco
or mom or dad's boyfriend,
has some fentanyl,
and they literally put a hamburger on dust.
I mean, when you're talking 2 grains of
salt,
it could be just literally fentanyl dust. You
put a hamburger down, sandwich down. By the
way, they also now have fentanyl tablets that
are illicit
that look like skillets. And so
it it one of the quick fastest growing
rates of death in the 0 to 4
nationwide is fentanyl poisoning. They're they're not at
users. They're not getting
a dealer. They're just somewhere in their their
thing of supply. This is not like weed
where
somebody leaves,
you know, a bag of weed on the
table and you accidentally ingest it, your stomach
might get upset. You might have a headache,
you know, depending on what you got in
it, but you're not gonna die most likely.
Fentanyl, you're gonna die, especially when you have
a smaller body
and such. Then you have lacing,
which is think Philadelphia,
Kensington area,
where they actually call it on the street
their trink, and it's mixing 30%
horse tranquilizer
with 70 percent Fentanyl
because because horse tranquilizer is not enough in
itself. So we're gonna put these 2 together,
and that's in Philadelphia.
And the reason why you know a trink
user
is their skin starts to fall off. And
so so you have big open wounds, so
that's where, you know, you got that. And
that is a purposeful drug, and they're wanting
it to last longer. They want the high
to last longer,
and they get that Fentanyl can be deadly
so they wanna reduce the Fentanyl,
replace it with tranquilizer,
and so it makes it less deadly initially
in their mind
and then you put the trinket. But what
really happens
is now you're high on 2 different drugs
simultaneously
and the reversal,
of the Fentanyl
is not reversed by the same agent for
tranquilizer.
So you reverse 1 or the other and
you die from the other. And then there's
the accidental
contamination
where the dealer doesn't know
there's fentanyl. The user doesn't know there's fentanyl.
And think about, like, on Thursday night, we
make Fentanyl on this table right here. Then
on Friday, we make meth, and on Saturday,
we make wheat, k two, spice, some sort
of mix. But we're all using the same
table and the table's not clean.
And if you don't, you
know, thoroughly
sterilize it after Fentanyl,
that poison stays around,
and people there are getting it, and they
don't even know what they're getting. A lot
of people are dying from weed now
and finding out it was Fentanyl and they
had no idea. And those are the 4
ways you die. So when you add all
of them up because the government
doesn't put them all in one box, And
I'll add a 5th if you really want
to go where Fentanyl is being
prescribed,
you know, for medical purpose, medical need. And
when it gets misused,
that group's approaching 20,000,
just that group, where they are prescribed a
Fentanyl,
a synthetic opioid,
and they'd say it's a patch for cancer,
and they're supposed to put one patch on.
But instead, the grandkid goes takes 3 patches
and puts 3 on and die.
And so there's a proper prescription out there,
but there's a misuse of medical.
And so this is how bad fit fennel
is like in every part of this. So
when you take them all together,
it you get easily a 150,000
a year. Some people think it's over 200,000.
It would not surprise me. And so at
this point, if I'm an EMT
or
the fire or police and I'm
I find someone slumped over in the street,
there's really it's anybody's guess
the thing at this point. There's so many
derivatives.
There's so many great, but the what most
people will do, they they're gonna start by
assuming
especially if you're slumped and there's there's that
they call it the fentanyl bin. You're literally
bent over.
And and if you see a person bent
over and you're going,
how are they not falling over?
You know, and they're rocking a little bit
and they're out. That's called the fentanyl bin.
And what it is is fentanyl
paralyzes your chest cavity.
And so that's why
the way fentanyl kills you is by your
paralyzed chest cavity,
your you don't breathe, you run out of
oxygen and you die.
But it also that paralysis
allows you to sort of, like, win the
active ingredient takes effect
wherever you were, you sort of stop there
and your body just autogenically
rocks you
and then you die and fall down.
And you can almost tell a fit for
a user
because they they they they have this fit
in a bin and they almost always have
their paraphernalia still in their hands
because it goes so fast
unlike meth.
Like, if if you see meth users,
normally meth users
take their hit and they're able to put
everything back in because they don't wanna lose
their pipe. They don't wanna lose their wallet.
They don't wanna use their extra supply,
their torch, their foil,
whatever.
So they put all that in their front
pocket, so nobody will go after it. And
then they they slump and other things happen
or they go hyper or whatever.
But Fentanyl is very unique,
because you have this fentanyl bin. And so
soon as a first responder you know, Billy
Baldwin and I have been out
in
dozens of cities now.
In every single city, we've seen somebody
die.
Go down. It it is incredible.
And so once you notice that fentanyl bin
and if you notice they don't, they have
everything in their hands,
that is a really good idea that person
has an opioid, you know,
a synthetic opioid overdose. So you hit them
with Narcan. But what's now happening on the
street, we used to had a person one
time and they came right back. Now we're
having to hit somebody 3 times fit. Billy
and I were with the person the other
day.
We gave with the not the EMT team
we're with. They gave him nose,
hit him with nose again,
and then they gave him an inject and,
did an injection into the thigh, and then
he came back. And this guy had no
heart rate, no breathing for over a minute.
And while we're on NARCAN,
there are a lot of people
sadly
in the harm reduction world who say that
the Narcan's the answer.
Let me dispel that myth. If you take
Narcan and reverse your brain after not breathing
for 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute, 4
minute,
you will have brain damage. Now you're gonna
lie, you're gonna come back alive and such.
So if you're a 4 year old and
and the the the sad kid goes down,
you hit him with Narcon,
That I that's why we should have Narcan
because you bring the kid back, you you
we make sure we clean everything,
teach people don't eat, you know, off the
wrappers and all that other stuff.
But there's a lot of people who think
you can take unlimited Narcan with no harm.
When we know when people have heart attacks
and stroke
and they lose oxygen for 2 or 3
minutes, we know there's the the depreciated
brain capacity. It might be 2 or 3%.
If if you have one stroke, you lose
2 or 3%, you're you're gonna be okay
in the long run.
If you get past the stroke conditions, you'll
be fine.
But if you have 5, 6, 7, 8
strokes in a row and lose 2 or
3% each time,
now it starts to really affect you. Same
with heart attacks, starts to affect you. And
so
it it we have to start thinking more
about
he only went one minute without oxygen
to saying
he's gone 27
minutes of his life without oxygen
in 8 episodes
because that starts to create a a cumulatating
effect of damage to the brain.
And
it I think we gotta be careful
of making this myth that Narcan saves your
life.
Narcan can save your life, but it won't
save your life in the long run. Like,
one of my first early shockers, and I've
been shocked a lot in Fentanyl,
is I've not met anybody yet who's been
on Fentanyl over 18 months.
Yeah. They die.
Yeah. I've not met anybody
who's gone over 18 months with Fentanyl. From
first use,
and
I've only met a handful of people who
beat Fentanyl,
because we're we're not taking it serious. We're
not taking treatment and recovery seriously. Instead,
we tell them, wear your Narcan around you,
you know, put your Narcan on and and,
you know, before you start taking it, and
we're gonna make it in bright orange and
they go green
and put it on your thing. And so
somebody will
reverse you.
That's not a plan. That's not a plan.
That's again, it's the band aid for bullet
holes we talk about all the time.
Exactly.
Yeah. Tell people where they can find the
film.
Well, right now, we're streaming on,
Salem now
dot com. Salem now dot com. It's like
a pre
special deal, and then we'll be doing a
formal release,
in a hook Q1
of 2025,
and it will go out on other platforms.
And but right now, you can go get
on salem now.com.
And I I encourage everybody
because the best thing you can do to
help solve the fentanyl crisis is be informed
and not repeat
bad decision making and start making better decision
making. And if we all as a society
start doing
that, that's first step, you know. And and,
yes, we gotta get tough on China. We
gotta get tough on the cartels. We gotta
we gotta start focusing on Canada, which is
on almost nobody's radar
now we gotta start looking at the northern
border. But
at some point or another,
United States citizenry,
our society
should ask,
why are we 4.25%
of the world's population,
but we're consuming 38%
of the world's Fentanyl supply?
Right. And we have to stop making it
about politics and bring it back to being
about humanity
and the human That that should not be
a right left. It shouldn't be a conservative
democrat.
It shouldn't be a liberal republican issue. This
should be a a USA
red, white, blue issue for all Americans
because it is killing
everybody.
If you look at the numbers, it's killing
rich, it's killing poor, it's killing people who
work with their hands, people who work with,
you know, their brains, people who work, you
know, on the plant floor or inside
a an IT company. It's killing people across
the board.
It's so lethal.
It it and it's the lethality of it
because you can't.
Everybody who starts to play with it, it's
just a matter of time till you get
that bad dose that puts you over. Why
do you think there is such a disconnect?
When we think about for example, when you
were talking before, I I couldn't help but
think of the cigarette companies used to be
like, oh, cigarettes are fine for you. No
worries. No problem.
And they marketed to children, and then huge
legislation was
passed to get rid of things like Joe
the Camel, a camel cigarette, you know, things
that made it enticing for kids because they
knew to get them addicted young to have
lifelong smokers.
So
things like car accidents and seat belts or
motorcycle accidents and helmets, you know, all these
things that
were a response
to save lives.
Why not
this?
Well,
I I love the fact you brought up
cigarettes
because in many ways,
the the cigarettes
the story of cigarettes, especially over the last
50 years,
gives me hope on Fentanyl in a weird
way, and I'll explain that in a second.
But before I go there,
we have to understand
how we're
that how crazy this has gotten. In San
Francisco,
you can get a fine almost update that
I think is $78100
is the max fine if you do some
repetitive
just smoking outside the building. They do give
tickets
for about $250
for and and I've seen them give tickets.
Please give tickets
to smoke a cigarette outside a building. But
in San Francisco,
the health authority
funded, and we got video on this in
our homelessness movie, funded at $28,000,000
a year,
a, quote, safe consumption of Fentanyl site, which
ended up not being safe at all and
not, you know, so called harmless.
But the the they were saying, well, if
we if they do it with us, it
will be better,
which is there's no treatment. There's no recovery.
It's like saying, come do it with us,
and we'll give you the Narcan right here,
and we'll reverse it, and then you do
that 30 times and you have no brain
left.
I'm shocked at how places in, like, Vancouver,
Canada,
San Francisco, a lot of place in United
States, you see no smoking. You know, we
card. We we check.
You know, everybody over 21.
And then when it comes to fentanyl, it's
like, we will actually give you a pipe
so you can safely do fentanyl.
In Canada,
you know, they've really gone off the loony
tune,
and
we found a machine
outside the emergency room. I'm at literally at
the emergency
room door
where you can get safe smoking supply and
they call it safe smoking, which is just
I don't know how you can make fentanyl
safe. It's safe. Fentanyl is the most deadly
thing we've ever seen. You can't make it
safe, but they give you you can go
buy a pipe and then basically the emergency
room
at this the hospitals and and San Francisco
does that. So here's why I'm actually
optimistic.
In 1965,
48%
of all adults in America
smoked cigarettes in 1965.
And now, last year, the last number I
saw, I think was, 2022
was 12%
of adults in America smoked. So if you're
in San Francisco
and you say
you get a fine for $78100
for smoking a cigarette,
why don't we make the same fine for
Fentanyl
rather than the health department giving it to
you and giving you pipes and giving you
foils and giving you the straw and giving
you the Norcan and say, come do it
here with us. And when you pass out
entirely and start not breathing and start not
having a heart rate, we'll hit with Norcan.
Instead saying,
why don't we find you that? Or make
the fine instead of being money, the fine
is mandatory
7 days in a treatment facility.
Mandatory
treatment. Absolutely.
And and in California,
up until
this great citizen sort of revolt
of the decriminalization,
we need to recriminalize
heavy duty drugs. We we absolutely have to
do it, and we have to criminalize
heavy duty drugs that are high volume, you
know, big dealers, wholesale dealers. They need to
get locked up for life. I mean, they
need to like not be in circulation
and there needs to be consequences instead of
these 5 or 6 states that have gone
through this decriminalization.
By the way, all of which have the
worst problems in America.
There's a correlation.
I I think the people who are pushing
these harm reductions, they have blood on their
hands. I I I really
I I used to be a lot plighter
and nicer about it and and now I'm
I'm becoming militant because they're helping to kill
people. I feel the same way about people
that are arguing in our in our government
about who can use a bathroom. It's like,
honey, there are bigger freaking problems in this
country than
where you're going to pee.
It's just it makes me crazy,
how
I I understand the theater circus
and and I get that. I know that
that's what people love to see. They love
the fighting. They love the theater. They love
the circus.
But to what end? And at what cost?
This is an existential threat to America.
And why people are not talking about it,
why we're not ringing the bell that that
the house is on fire.
And on solutions, we need all of the
above. It can't be just 1. We gotta
do it all. Because it affects all of
us. It's something
this is not something to turn one's back
on. And as you eloquently stated,
it's everyone.
It's it's
young, rich, poor, black, white, green, red, whatever.
It's everyone. There is no
there's no running from it.
Drugs don't care what you look like or
who you are or how much money you
make. They don't care.
It's
it's it's a non there's no bias in
that whatsoever.
Doesn't matter how well educated you are.
Most of us, if not all of us,
who know how to
who pay attention to anything. We know that,
for example, meth is an incredibly
dangerous drug, yet people still take it for
the first time.
All these drugs, we know what they'll do.
They still take it for the first time.
It's pretty common knowledge. Cocaine,
I I don't know about these days. These
days, it would probably be pretty scary because
of Fentanyl. But cocaine back in that day,
you know, it was well known
that
there is a percentage of people that they
would drop dead because they didn't have the
receptor in their brain, and it would kill
them. Yet, everybody does it. We see drunk
driving accidents.
We see our, you know, people in our
family who are so addicted to alcohol
that, you know, they're throwing up in sinks
or they're missing work or they're whatever. It's
not like we don't see this stuff and
yet we still
do it. Because I think there is this
feeling of immortality
that humans have
that says, oh, that won't happen to me.
And
the desire to get that high. The whole
drug supply is now contaminated.
It's not 1%
contaminated. It's the majority. It's almost 3 fourths.
And in parts of this country, it's more
than 3 fourths. And and risk something like
that. It it just, you know, that that's
why I want people to know and and
want people to get educated. And this is
not about scaring people.
This is about getting facts out. And if
you get the facts out, maybe you won't
do it the first time.
Yeah. Although, I think scaring them is also
a good tactic. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you
for being on the show again, Robert, and
thank you for continuing to make
these documentaries
to sound the alarm for things. I think
that's so important. There's a million things you
could be doing with your time. The fact
that you have chosen this path in life,
I appreciate it.
Well, thank thank you very much. Encourage everybody
to go watch it. And and
and and thanks to,
our director editor, Sue Woolworth. He's made it
it's it's a very
entertaining
every everybody who's turned it on watches it
all the way through. Yeah. It's really good.
I watched it. Yeah. And and thank you
for watching it. Of course. Robert, thank you
so much.
I appreciate your time, and thank you for
listening everybody. Bye bye. Bye.
Great. Review and subscribe to Hey Human, podcast
on Apple, Iheart, Spotify, wherever you get your
podcasts. Thanks.
Bye.