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 available on YouTube under official Susan Ruth. I'm on patreon at susanruthism. My TikTok and Instagram is susanruthism. Check out susanruth.com to learn more about me and my other artistic endeavors, and find my albums on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, wherever you get your music. Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast on Apple, Iheart, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, and thank you for listening. 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.