Heroin: The Drug

It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be. And we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't. Um and you don't have to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre order the book right now everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering, which we're working on right now. That's right, So check

it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. All Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there, and it's just the two of us. Um, we can make it if we try. It's just the two of us, Chuck and I. That's right. Uh, and we are stuff you should know the Heroin addition, Yeah, I haven't covered Heroin yet. No,

we haven't. We have not. Um and Ed helped us out with this, and I love how he just put it straight up. Heroin is a demon. I'm like, Che's way to be objective. You know what occurred to me because I like to think of things that the lens of movies a lot of times. Uh, pot movies rarely, if ever any good. What have you ever seen? Days and Confused? My friend, I don't consider we we talked about this on movie Crush and All and I I don't consider that a weed movie. Although it's featured heavily,

I would call it one of the main characters. I don't call it a weed movie. I consider weed movies like Cheech and Chong movies. What about Half Baked, Half Baked? How High? Like movies where it's literally just about marijuana, Like Days and Confused about a bunch of friends in the seventies and the school fair enough, fair enough. Other people, though, said, no, you know you're wrong. Days confused as a weed movie. But let's say that as a weed movie, that's one

good one. Like Cheech and Chong movies are okay, but they're really not that good. They really uh cocaine movies, I don't are there cocaine movies? Yeah, there's like Blow was a cocaine movie, and yeah about dealing, Yeah for sure blows about as cocaine movie as they get. I can't think of one that's just straight up like following some cocaine users. Yeah, like that because it's probably like

no one wants to see that, right. But heroin movies are great, well, I mean you got what spotting, oh, panic in Needle Park Train, spotting to see um and and you know if even if it's not about heroin stuff like pulp fiction, like I think heroin has been romanticized in film, uh, far more effectively and more often than any other drug, right, which is pretty messed up, because if there is a drug out there where Nancy Reagan actually was right for once in her life and

wasn't just lying through her teeth, it is definitely definitely heroin. Yeah. It is a genuinely bad, bad drug and basically the last thing that should be romanticized. Um, But you're right. I think they've made some pretty good movies about it, and I think people are like, Wow, those jazz cats are really into that that skag man um. And uh, I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine that there aren't people out there who haven't tried heroin because it

was romanticized in the movies. I hate to say, yeah, And I think because in the movies it's you know, it portrays it as it is, which is euphoric and relaxing. And you know, every movie you see when someone does the heroin, uh, what you see right afterward is a big wave of of happiness wash over them. And that's why you don't see movies about people snorting cocaine, is because it's just not fun to see someone snort cocaine and then talk incessantly like a jerk for the next

four hours. You're right, right, depending on how much you got. I've never done heroin, but I do know that its chemical name is diah morphine, And we can't talk about heroin without talking about morphine because it's kind of almost the same thing. Well, it's morphine's baby, Yeah, basically, it's it's you can take morphine. Great band name, run it through morphine, Morphine's baby. It is kind of and I think about it. Remember that band Morphine? They were really good.

I love Morphine. Yeah, they were great. Um what kind of music would they be classified as? They're not quite grunched, They're not quite metal. Now, Morphine was very chill okay, but they had like a real heavy guitar sound, right, lots of feedback and distortion. No, I think you're thinking of a different band. Morphine had the saxophone as like one of the main interest instruments. Unless I'm thinking, yeah, you're thinking of Chicago at any rate. No, morphine is

the parent of heroin. Um. You take morphine and run it through a few hoops with some acids, and all of a sudden you have heroin. And they apparently are so close together, um that the average user couldn't tell the difference between the two, because your body basically takes heroin and turns it into morphine. The biggest differences are

the um, the how long the high lasts. It's much shorter with heroin, but I think it it sets on faster, and then the addictiveness heroin is even more addictive than morphine, and morphine is awfully addictive itself. Heroin is apparently just in a whole different league as far as addictiveness goes. Yeah, that's what I've heard, uh, And that's certainly how they

portrayed in movies as well. To be fair, it's like it's although there are movies that show, like pulp fiction is a good example of a functioning heroin addict, but usually that's not the case in a movie. No, it's true, and I mean m yeah, they usually do show how just kind of gross it gets for heroin addicts. There's it's it's rare. It's rare that it's it's not that part isn't included. Like think about, um, what was the name of that movie. It's Jared Leto and word reccoim

for a Dream. Yeah, that was harrowing. I always say I got pink eye from watching that movie with that dirty dude. Oh man, that's a perfect way to say it. I mean, there's who can forget the one image of the when he injected into that festering sore. Yeah, the abscess of I think I came across something that I think is what it was. It's called wound botulis um uh.

And that's a that's a side effect, a risk of of heroin um, which I mean, if you think Heroine's glamorous, just look up wound botuli is um or gang green or an abscess from injection site. And also fact, if you're thinking about doing heroin, do that um reccoi. And for a Dream is also a good example of why they don't make movies about cocaine and speed because the probably the most unsettling aspect of that movie is the the subplot with or the plot line with Ellen Burr

with Ellen Burst. It was hard to watch. It was very hard to watch, although some parts of it were pretty funny, like when the TV is just straight up talking to her. That was hysterical. That in that movie was nuts. Okay, So back to heroin. UM, there's apparently, uh, there is a very pure form of heroin, which makes sense.

I mean, any kind of processed drug like cocaine or something like that, Um, there's going to be a purest form of it, but far and away the vast majority of people who use that drug are never going to encounter that purest form. It gets cut and there's impurities that are introduced to make it less pure so you can sell more. Um. And so the heroin goes from like this off white kind of slightly grayish color to

everything from like orange and brown to black. Um, like black tar heroin like one of the most famous heroin varieties ever, from what I've heard, is comes from Mexico, and it's just really bottom of the barrel stuff. Like imagine that the purest form is a almost white powder and you're shooting black tar. That kind of gives you an idea of how far from purity black tar heroin is. Yeah, I saw that that black tar heroine is usually cut

with either burned corn starch or lactose. Great. There's also there's cheese heroin too, which is supposedly um, pretty rough as well as far as impurities go. But it also just sounds gross like cheese heroin. Yeah. Why did why take a word that's great like cheese and screw attach it to heroin? That's right? Uh. The other ways it

can be sold, which I didn't know. It can be sold as a salt, which you know how in movies if they're ejecting it, they always cook it up in the spoon, And I think part partially why movies glamorize it is because just cinematically, to shoot, um, to film someone cooking something in the spoon and in the whole process is just you know, it's interesting looking, it looks good on screen, looks so glamorous. It does in a

little in a weird way. Um. But when you sell it as a salt, it does not need to be heated and dissolved. It's just I guess you can just dissolve it like salt will dissolve in water. Um. You can smoke it, you can snort it, you can put it in your butt. You sound like um. Like Chris Farley and Black Sheep, I never saw it. There's this part where he's like shooting, snort and smoke and drop and I've just I've seen too much Chris Farley in my life. He's yeah, he's constantly in my head. Or

you can eat heroin apparently, yeah, especially cheese heroin. Oh really okay. Um, So that's there's like a bunch of different kinds of heroine you can get depending on where you are. It's going to come from different places in the world, which we'll talk about. Um. And there's no denying it gets you super duper high when you when you do Heroin. UM. The problem is is that within a few hours of that, you start to enter Heroin withdrawals.

And we'll talk about exactly what goes on in the brain a little more, but basically your brain is saying, oh, I need more of what you just gave me because I adjusted to life with that UM, with that level of dopamine release that it triggered, UM, and now everything's

just horrid and black. And again, this can start in just a few hours, depending on how many times you've shot Heroin, how much of a dependence you've developed, how much tolerance you've developed, and all these factors come together to determine just how bad your withdrawal symptoms are. Yes, uh, you know, most movies glamorized Heroin for a little while, but then we'll also show the dark side, like you said,

and usually will include a kicking Heroin scene. Yeah, very famously, very famously in Train Spotting when he rattles off that list when he locks himself in his apartment, you and McGregor enlists out all the things that he needs to successfully kick What is the very funny I just pulled it up here music, tomato soup, tint indigo mushroom soup, eight tins of a consumption cold ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of magnesia milk, one bottle pharmacs, uh paracetamal, mouthwash, vitamins,

mineral water, lucas aid, pornography, one mattress, one bucket for urine, one for feces, and one for vomitus. Yes, supposedly, after a while, the withdrawal gets so bad that you just can't get out of bed to to poop or pee or vomit, but you're still going to vomit and poop um withdrawal symptoms kicking, terrible diarrhea, terrible vomiting UM. And it's the thing is is the withdrawal is almost never fatal, but it can be fatal. And it's not from the

withdrawal symptoms themselves, it's secondary to it. Like you're vomiting and peeing and um pooping so much that you can become dehydrated, your electrolite balances can go off, and you can die of heart failure because the electrical impulses in your heart are no longer functioning correctly. But if you know what you're doing, um and you especially do it under medical supervision, you can have a far easier and and um much less life threatening experience of kicking heroin.

The good news is this, even if you are the the person who is most addicted to heroin in the world right now, if you decided to kick it, you have four to five or six really bad days ahead of you before you're free of your heroin addiction. It's that simple. Any heroin, Um, I want to keep saying heroin addict, We definitely don't say that anymore. But any person addicted to heroin walking around today, Chuck is just

a week away from being free of heroin. It's just that that would be the worst week of their entire lives. But they can do it. Every single one of them can do it. An entire physicians practices and um convalescent centers and rehabs have been set up to medically assist in making the withdrawal process, you know, easier and safer, so that it does increase the chance that they're not gonna be like, forget this, I just need some heroin. Everything will be fine again. Yeah, and um, you know

you're probably gonna get if you're under medical supervision. Some sort of sedative or a drug that memics heroin. Um, most commonly, I think methodone. Yeah, it's like subox zone now, which is, yeah, it really binds tightly to your pioid receptors, so it blocks heroin when you're doing it. Um, so you become less and less dependent on heroin. And then the subak zone is just much less addictive or habit form.

And because it's just much less potent, so you can get off of the subok zone after you're off of the heroine. So why heroin makes you feel so good? Um? People, you know, we don't fully understand the brain chemistry, um of exactly how that works. But uh, we do know that the chemicals, you know, once it gets in your brain, the brain breaks it down into other chemicals, and those chemicals um sort of just closed down the things that

normally regulate your dopamine. And so your brain makes a bunch of dopamine right right, So you've got a bunch of dopamine going. But it also affects other parts of your brain too, to where say, um, you're basically imagine your brain chemistry normally is that in this nice kind of harmony? And then heroin comes in and just totally

over whelms it with a tidal wave of a dopamine. Well, your brain says, oh jeez, well, I need to to up all of the production of all these other um neurochemicals so that I reach homeostasis again, so that jack's

all the levels up. UM. And then when the heroine dies back UM, because your dose is wearing off, your dopamine levels drop, but then all these other levels are still up, and all of a sudden, it's like your brain is screaming in a in a crowded room where everybody just stops talking, and it's just your brain screaming now right, or like the music cuts off in your brain was trying to talk loud over the music. It's very much like that. And so some of these other

chemicals can produce some really unpleasant sensations. And the upshot of it is that that dopamine, the one thing that's making you feel really really good, is the one thing that's truly lacking then because your brain isn't making it naturally UM, it's making all this other stuff that makes you feel quite uncomfortable, uh, in much higher amounts. And that's that's when you say, I need some more heroin.

And the other thing is this, as your brain starts making more and more and more of these other neurochemicals, you need more and more and more heroin to release increasing increasingly larger amounts of dopamine just to get to normal. That's what they mean when they say, just to get to normal, I have to do this much heroin, and then I have to do even more to get high. Um. And that is what's called tolerance. And the more tolerance you have, the worshier withdrawal symptoms are going to be.

Because that means when you stop with the heroine, the levels of everything else are really really high, and the dopamine is way back down in the basement. Um. And that's that's basically heroin in a nutshell. Yeah, And you know tolerance. There's tolerance for every drug in the world, uh, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, everything,

but um, it feels like heroine's. Um. It's just such a dangerous game you're playing there with the tolerance levels and then getting off and getting back on or more so a little, probably more so than other drugs even and then the well, the other thing that makes it dangerous too is again, withdrawal itself is very rarely fatal,

especially when it's assystematically. But um heroin itself is extraordinarily dangerous too, because one of the big effects that it has on your body is lowered respiration, so you aren't taking very deep breaths any longer. You can actually die of like carbon monoxide poisoning because you're not exhaling enough carbon monoxides or you're not getting in enough oxygen and you basically just stop breathing, or you die of hypoxia

because you're the heroin overwhelmed your ability to breathe. Basically, when you've done too much, when you've done a fatal dose. Wow. Yeah, alright, let's take a break and we will talk about the

super interesting history of heroin right after this. Okay, okay, so, uh, you know we've I think everyone sort of knows that heroin to sort of big facts about heroin that are super interesting that everyone always says is that heroin is a brand name or a trade name, and that heroin used to be readily prescribed kind of like cocaine was, uh in this case for for pain is a pain medication.

And we're talking about the opium poppy plant, the pep haber somna faron And since ancient Egypt is like at least people have been used sing this to treat pain, this narcotic to treat pain. Yeah. Well, so if we had just held with opium, I mean, it's you know, being an addicted to opium is bad enough, but the world would definitely be a much different place if we just stayed with opium, just kept it natural, you know what I'm saying. But no, no, that's how we do.

We figure out ways to make things even more robust and more amazing. And so I think in uh, oh, I'm not sure exactly when, but in the eighteen hundreds, definitely before the eighteen sixties, the German chemical company merk Uh isolated morphine from opium, so you didn't need all the other stuff anymore. You just head straight up morphine.

And this was good and in one respect, like we now had a genuinely powerful anesthetic, analgesic to where when somebody was in a great deal of pain, say having their leg amputated in a field hospital during the Civil War, you could give them morphine and they wouldn't suffer as much. So in that respect, it was really good. The problem is we didn't understand addiction anywhere near like we do today.

And so a lot of those people who got morphine when their leg was amputated came back from the war like, where can I get some more morphine? I could really use some right now, And morphine addiction became really pronounced by you know, the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties in the United States. Yeah, And there were a couple of big years after this. Big big events happened in eighteen seventy

four and eight. In eighteen seventy four, there was a chemist name C. R. Older, right, and he wanted to transform morphine into something that wasn't as addictive. So he tried this process where he um it was called acetylation, where he basically tried to cause it to react with an acid to change the composition of it to make it less addictive. He created diocetyl morphine, which is heroin, and he gave some to his dog, as you do. And his dog did not fair too well, did not die,

but almost did. He stole a stereo later and he said, you know what, Uh, this stuff is dangerous. I'm gonna put it away. I'm gonna publish this paper. No one really paid much attention to this paper until a man named Einrich Dresser in for the Bear company, picked up this paper and said, let me pick up where he left off. Yeah, and he did and he can't he He basically recreated that um dia morphine concoction and heroin was born. He gave it to some test subjects. One

of them said that it made him feel heroich. Is that how you would say it? Yeah? Hero ish h g r O I almost there s h. Yeah. These are Germans we're talking about here, so they love the sh sound for sure. But but because um, I think one thing we left off is not only does heroin get you high, it also boost your confidence tremendously as well. And that's what that guy was describing. He felt high, he felt confident, and he described it as heroic. And

so that's where the trade name heroin came from. Was um from Dresser basically saying, that's that's a great name for this. Uh So I'm gonna call it heroin and we will cure the world's morphine addicts of their morphine addiction. And funny enough, they did. Because everybody's like heroin is a great way to treat morphine addiction. The problem is is once they kicked morphine, they were super duper addicted to heroin and they were even worse off than they

have been before. Yeah, it's funny the word heroin. It's so so commonplace now you don't really think about it being a trade name, but it totally sounds like a trade name when you think about other drugs at the time, Like it sounds like a modern sort of pharmaceutical and well, actually these days those names are just terrible. Like Dr pinkel Whites feel Good oil was next to it on

the shelf, you know. Yeah, but now like pharmaceutical drug names or they all try and work in uh well, I guess they did that with heroin because it makes you feel heroic, but they try and work in how great it makes you feel into the name itself, Like, well, I don't know if I should name check anybody. I can think of a few on the top of my head. Yeah, And they're like they all have to work the letter X in. If X isn't in there, it's not gonna sell.

That's like the mantra of the pharmaceutical And it's really manipulative when you think about it, it's the dad they teach you how to pronounce it to your doctor. So, um, they did these human trials of heroin, which were about four weeks long of getting heroin as a patient. If you had a cough or a sore throat, you felt pretty great obviously. Um. Can you imagine just going and getting like some heroin laws for a sore throat? Yeah? I wonder if those still exist anywhere. I'm probably not.

I'm sure that everybody took them. I bet you there's, like, you know, buried in some attic drawer somewhere. Somebody's got some heroin lossages from back then. So uh, bear said the drug is safe. Um, it's non habit forming. Will even put that on the label. And here's the downside

is these analgesic effects last a few hours. So if you've got if you're sick and you've got a coffin sore throat, Um, you're you're gonna be taking this stuff like four or five times a day for a couple of weeks because it makes you feel good every time you take it a few hours later it wears off.

You take some more, and before you know it you're addicted to heroin, right, I mean there's probably no drug in the world where you do it just once and you're automatically physically addicted or dependent on it, right, is

do people claim that to be true? Oh? Yeah, they claimed about acid for goodness sake, like they like, yes, they say that about every single drug, Which is the problem because if you are a brave soul and you say, well, it probably won't happen to me, and I'll see, I'll see what it's like, and then you try it and you find you're not addicted, you're like, oh, well they

were lying, I'll just go do some more. But if you say something like you're probably not going to get addicted the first time, but with a drug like heroin in particular, you're really playing with fire every time you do it, because you come that much closer to to

being likely to be addicted to it. Um, I think it would make somebody maybe think twice before trying it even that first time, rather than just trying to scare them off like, um, you know, no, you're gonna be addicted immediately and you're going to kill your parents kind of thing, you know. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally don't don't lie to people. So uh, the next decade kind of comes and goes heroin. It becomes more obvious that it

was dangerous and that it was addictive. Bear continued selling it um until about nineteen thirteen, UM, but as early as nineteen o six that was something called the Council of Farm Recy, UH, Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Metal Medical Association, and it had there were warnings saying

like hey, heroin can get really addictive. Uh. In nineteen o nine, and this is the full seven years before Bear quit selling it um nineteen o six, and then in nineteen o nine, Uh, there were people the lawmakers met in Shanghai with some doctors for the International Opian Commission, which I'm sure it was quite a party. Oh, it was a ranger, and they said that you know what, opium and all these drugs related to opium are really dangerous.

They're prone to abuse, and it's up to all of you countries to regulate this via the International Opium Convention at the Hague in nineteen twelve. But it's up to you how you want to do this in your country. Yeah. It was opium and coca leaves and their derivatives and salts, I think is how they put it. And they basically said, there, yeah, there's some real problems coming from these and we need to we need to do something about it. Go figure out how to do it. And so the United States said, oh,

we've got this covered. We're gonna pass the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which is now these days just called the Harrison Act, and it basically established the War on drugs as we understand it today. Way back in nur UM, do you remember our CIA dosing LSD Unsuspecting Americans with LSD episode one of the best. Do you remember George White, like the guy who was actually running like the the experiments.

He was one of those early UM drug agents, narcotics agents who was you know, beating up addicts because of the Harrison Act basically gave him the permission to um. And one of the things about the Harrison Act that was so insidious, aside from the fact that the the it kind of promoted this whole UM, this air of propaganda, like lying to people like, you know, telling people that if you're if your wife tries hero when she's gonna run off with the UM. You know, a black guy

or something like like that. Kind of that level of propaganda of associating certain groups with certain drugs to scare other people from taking those drugs, just horrific stuff that. Um. It also said almost explicitly, addiction is not a disease, So you can no longer use these drugs to help somebody kick these drugs. So doctors started going to prison like trying to help people kick heroin by giving them like a heroine regimen to to help them ease off

of it. You would land in prison for that kind of thing, and doctors did get thrown in prison for it. Yeah, and Ed made a really good point here, one that I had never considered. Um. Something else about the Harrison Act is you tend to think of like the old days as being super conservative about things like drug use. But before they were made illegal, the drugs were still there, and drug people that were addicted to these drugs were

still there, but there wasn't the same stigma. They were sort of, I mean, they were outcasts of society, but they weren't criminals yet. They were people that still needed help and that you could rehabilitate. Um And there was I think some more compassion even but Harrison that comes along, and all of a sudden, you're a criminal. Uh, And the only way to get these drugs is and keep doing these drugs that you're addicted to, is by being a criminal. And that created almost it almost created the

system that we're with today. Uh, this this war on drugs, which is has shown to not work. Right. It definitely did, and that it's there are some reasons why heroin in particular will always be really hard to eradicate and why the Harrison Act was kind of wrong headed. It set everything out on the wrong foot. Was this idea that if you can just punish people into not using heroin

any longer. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't, And there's some reasons why you can't do that, because as long as heroin is around, they're going to be people who become addicted to heroin and who are addicted to heroin. And then if you couple that with the idea that addiction is not a disease, so you should not get any kind of medical treatment for it, and we're actually going to arrest doctors who try. Then all you've just done is create like a huge legal and moral quagmire

for your society. But that's what it did. But there are some reasons why heroin will probably always stick around, and that is, first of all, it's very easy to make, right. Yeah, I mean you're sort of in a I mean it's like with most drugs, you're in a lose lose situation if you're trying to eradicate it because you can't start at the user end that has shown to not work, like you said. And in the case of most drugs, you can't start at the processing end either, because like

you said, it's easy to make. Um, it's it's just a chemical process at work. It doesn't rek wire super expensive equipment. UM. That's why if you get busted, you can either just ditch your equipment or pack it up pretty quickly and take it with you. Um. It is Uh, it's just difficult to disrupt the process of actually making the heroine. Yeah. Basically, if you could set up a still for whiskey out in the woods, you could probably

make a heroin UM processing operation. The thing is, if you're in like the Smoky mountains or something like that, you might set up your heroine processing operation then go, well, wait, I need some opium poppies. Those are kind of hard to come by in the Smokies, And you're right, it's very hard to find opium poppies in the United States.

That's one thing that the United States government and law enforcement has done, has basically eradicated opium producing poppy plants from the United States, except on the TV show Ozark. But I haven't gotten to the point yet to be quiet. But really now I haven't. The point is because I ended up going on starting better call Saul, and now I'm super into that got you, um. But the problem with that is that yes we are. We kept it out of the United States. It's not here, but pop

poppies grow really well just about everywhere. And as long as you have a country where officials who are supposed to be watching whether people are cultivating poppies or not can be bribed um poor people who can be forced into cultivating poppies, or farmers who can be bought off

to to cultivate poppies. Poppies are going to grow, and over time they have been eradicated from one place or another, but then they just kind of pop up somewhere somewhere else around the world, and that part of the world becomes the global supplier of opium for heroin processing. Yeah. I mean for most of the nineteenth century, China was the big leader and opium exports along with India. And then World War Two comes along the drug train. It

kind of shuts down because shipping is just super restricted. Uh. Communist Party takes over in China and they said no, no, no, we're not gonna We're not gonna do this anymore, and they kind of stopped. It was really effective in China isn't a big opium supplier ever since then. But then it moved to what's called the Golden Triangle, which is Laos, Minimar and Thailand UM as well as Golden Crescent, which is different parts of the Middle East, but mainly if

we're talking opium production, we're talking about Afghanistan. Yeah, And when the United States invaded Afghanistan, like one of the one of the sidelines that was doing was destroying opium opium fields and I guess it worked for a little while, but not really like we were carrying out drone strikes on UM heroin processing facilities and basically did nothing to disrupt the heroin trade. And then as fewer and fewer US troops were in Afghanistan, the heroin just came back.

Opium poppies came back in, heroin processing came back, and even more than the United States military was effective, the Taliban had been more effective before the United States went into Afghanistan. When the Taliban basically ruled Afghanistan, Um, there was very little opium production going on, and it actually

increased whether you the United States was there. And then after the United States basically left Afghanistan, when the Taliban came back, they were it was like Taliban free and easy. They started looking the other way on opium production and exactly. So that's another thing that's actually used kind of frequently, like where if you are buying heroin, you were probably funding a terrorist group. It sounds ridiculous and made up, but it's actually probably true depending on where you are

in the world. Um, if you're in the United States, you're probably funding a vicious drug cartel because most of the the opium that makes its way as heroin into the US comes from Mexico and Colombia, which I didn't right Yeah, and the other of the global heroin supply is coming from Afghanistan right now. But like we said, you know, you you squash it in one area, it's gonna pop up in another. It's um, it's it's very

simple supply and demand, and it's never gonna change. Uh. Ed. In fact, this is he should totally trademark this line. He said, a war on drugs, it's like a war on water when you know what's going to rain tomorrow. Did he make that up? I don't know. I've never heard it before. So let's say he really crystallizes it. Yeah, it's good writer for sure. Should we uh? Should we take our final break here? You betch all right, We'll

be back with more heroin. Right after this, you mentioned World War two, Chuck um, and that almost entirely shut down because shipping was so restricted during World War Two. Everybody was watching every ship, not just the United States, watching stuff that was coming into the country. People were watching it going from one place to another. It might get torpedo. It was just really tough to smuggle things

during World World War Two. And I read that the same thing is going on now because of the coronavirus pandemic, because of things like shelter and place orders um or restricted travel, that it's way way harder to smuggle or

even just ghost gore Um. Then it was before the pandemic, and as a result, they think a heroin drought is is coming on or has already started, and so prices are going to rise, and probably more and more people who were addicted to heroin before the pandemic will come out of the pandemic not not addicted to heroin anymore, but like they gave meth a try, and now they're really into that. Have you ever heard the old kamal anjiohnny bit about the Heroin plus Thailand all cold medicine. Yeah,

refreshed my memory. It's been a while. Well that was I can't remember. I think it has a name like a designer drug or whatever, which was basically heroin and Thailand all cold medicine mixed. And he just says this. It was pretty early in his comedy career when he was just doing stand up. But he just has a very funny bit about the fact that he you know, you're already doing heroin, you're all and then then his voice and everything is just so perfect, You're already doing Heroin. Yeah.

I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people on the planet. He's great he's a big movie star now. He is. Good for him. I'm glad for him. He's he's a good dude. He did our one of our variety shows at that time. He did killed It. Everybody killed it that night if I remember correctly. Yeah, that was a really good show. That was a lot of fun. Josh Bierman and Nick Thune. Maybe Nick Thune performed, Uh so did um Hampton youwt did some killer stand up,

that's right, Gianni. And we had Nate Demo did a little Memory Palace Live too. Yep. And um, what was the UCB group? I want to say Raw High, but it wasn't raw Hide, it wasn't Comanche. Oh Convoy Convoy. Did we have all of them on one stage? Yes, dude, one night. Yeah, that was a great show. That was a great show. They didn't even need us. We were barely there. We launched a million careers that night. Um, all right. So we were talking about supply and demand.

That is always going to be a problem with the war on drugs because, like you said that, you can't arrest people into not wanting to do drugs. This just proven to not be a deterrent when people want to do drugs. They're gonna find them and they're gonna do them. Um, the supply is hard to eradicate because of all the things we mentioned. You can't wipe out all the If the demand is there, then they're going to find places where the government is bribable or weak enough to plant

those poppy fields. And as long as there are desperate people and poor people or people that are addicts, then there will be drug mules and people that are willing to either willing to smuggle the drugs or a cartel who will hold your family hostage to force you to smuggle those drugs. Can you imagine that being your reality today? Like right now, man, Like you're running across like a desert right now with a bunch of heroin on you because your wife is being held hostage, your wife and kid.

Like that's happening to you right this second. That happens to people sometimes, like it's so rare, and especially here like in the United States, it's just like such a remote worry that there's no reason to lose any sleep over it for you, But don't forget about the person that that's actually happening to right now, And like how what what? What? They must be thinking during that run across the desert, like how stressed out are they? Like?

What are what's going through their head? I just I can't imagine what it would be like to actually be in that situation. Like when I imagine it, I imagine it as you do, like experience a movie. It's remote, it's it's fictitious, it's it's um fantasy. These are characters. But when when I can just get my brain just right, it's a little bit of it floods in and it's

just overwhelming. How nuts and horrific that without experience would be. Yeah, and I think that's something that uh well, I mean, I think if you're if you have a problem with drug addiction, you're not considering a lot of things, but certainly one thing that's probably the last thing you're considering is how it got to you, how it got to your dealer, and the devastation that it has wreaked along the way, you know, Right, Yeah, that's a that's absolutely true.

I think that's an excellent point for people to remember. So Ed wrapped up this research with the something I'd never really thought about about marijuana being a gateway drug. Um, we've talked about that, and a lot of people scoff at that notion, but he makes a case here that kind of makes sense that the system with marijuana in the nineteen forties and fifties, especially in the in urban areas, and with with jazz clubs and jazz musicians, it kind of set up a system where heroin could find a

pretty easy entry point. Yeah, because it was coming in largely from in the beginning of the twentieth century up to the first uh well, I guess the forties and fifties. So at the beginning of the twentieth century it was interrupted by World War Two, and then it came back with a vengeance in the forties and fifties, and it was being imported largely by um Asian people who didn't

know people outside of their community. So they figured out how to connect with the jazz musicians who already had pot friends, and the jazz musicians started turning their pop friends on yeah, on onto heroin. And part of the reason why heroin was able to kind of make such entree into American culture, especially through this route, was that all these people were not they weren't drug naive, they'd

used pot before, they smoke pot all the time. They knew for a fact that it wasn't addictive, it didn't turn you into a fiend like had been depicted hysterically in this government propaganda against pot. And so all of the warnings against heroin were probably just as full of hot air too, and it just turns out that they happened to be wrong this time. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the jazz scene was rife with heroin abuse. Uh, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Ray Charles. Yeah, Ray

Charles totally. It's kind of jazz. But yeah, he counts. I remember when Philip Seymour Hoffman Um, when he died of a fatal overdose. I know they tried to pin it on um a jazz guy is his dealer. Oh really Yeah, super kind of throwback thing. But even still today they're like, yeah, jazz people can't be trusted. They love heroin. Billie Holliday was fully addicted to heroin. It

was it was all over the jazz community. Yeah, because again, so this is one of those things where you try once, try twice, and all of a sudden you're doing it a lot more and you have to do more and more and more. And if it's all around you and everybody seems to be having a good time despite puking their guts out first, um, you might give it a try. Uh, that's just super interesting. The idea that that pot was connected as like this this gateway for America to heroin,

because there's just such worlds apart Yeah and alcohol. I mean, if you look at the history of jazz, heroin and cirrhosis are like two of the biggest factors and true killing off jazz musicians, true dad interesting. One thing we didn't really touch on, well two things. One that the epidemic of fentanyl laced heroin, which apparently if you're buying that on purpose it might be sold to you is magic or budd ice o God. But fentanyl is about fifty times stronger than heroin, so the fatal dose is

much much much lower. It takes way less to kill you. But if you don't know that you're buying fentinyl laced heroine, you're doing your regular dose of heroin, that fentinyl can very easily kill you. And that happens a lot. It's happening more and more. Uh, no idea, who's doing it? They think it might be coming from China, but who knows what the deal is with that. But that's one

big problem with heroin addiction is you might overdose. The likelihood of you overdosing with the introduction of fentanyl is way higher than it was before. I think the whole thing really started to pick up steam about two thousand thirteen. And then the whole reason there's a heroin epidemic right now in the United States, Chuck, is because the a few pharma companies got America and a large part of the world hooked on opioid painkillers like oxyconton, and the

government said, well, this is a real problem. We need to get everybody off of opioids. So um Perdue Pharma, you need to make this OxyContin impossible to inject or snort or whatever. And they did. They made oxyconton so that when you crushed it, it turned into a gel that you couldn't do anything with. Um and nobody could get high off boxy cotony more. You couldn't find. It was too expensive. It was just impossible to get. But heroin suddenly made a huge appearance and it was cheaper.

It did the trick. You could find it just about everywhere, and now, all of a sudden, combined with the two thousand and eight recession and all of the despair that that generated, there's a heroin epidemic in the United States that's still raging and going strong. And we have a lot of those pharmaceutical companies and the the agencies that are supposed to regulate them more closely to to blame

for that. Yeah. I remember in college there was a one year and it was probably don't even a year, but like one season where heroin kind of came through town and in my crowd, like not my close friends, none of them did it, but I knew. I knew a person through a person who had, you know, known like very loosely socially that she o'deed and died from

heroin during this like several month period. But I just remember it was being talked about a lot, and it was just around and people were doing it, and uh, it never invaded my inner circle. But I just remember that it was a kind of a scary time in college when it kind of blew through and then kind of blew back out again. It wasn't like a I mean, I'm sure there were always people that we're doing Heroin at some point in Athens. But it was like a

thing for a little while. Yeah, no, it was. It was always very hard to find it just basically non existent. Um when I get the feeling, yeah, you know. And then it started to really pick up steam in like the mid two thousand aughts. I think, yeah, it's weird, but yeah, that's yeah. Heroin is a demon, Chuck, it is a demon. And this girl was she was looking back, probably twenty two years old. What a waste man. Yeah, that's sad. Um, Well that's Heroin. Everybody, don't do it.

Don't do it. Just don't just go your whole life saying I've never done Heroin. Not I'm all good. You're not missing out on that much, Okay, okay. Uh. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This is about We heard a lot about peanut butter, that has proven to be quite a popular and somewhat divisive podcast episode. Uh. We did hear from most people that said, yeah, outside of America, a lot of people think peanut butter

is weird. We did hear from a few people in England and elsewhere they were like, what are you talking about? Josh I love peanut butter like two people. Yeah, it felt fairly anecdotal, but this is about neither of those. So this is from Daniel Volts in Louisville. Did you say, Danielson? Hey, guys, been listening for years, so all the great podcasts are recently recently listen to peanut Butter and was greatly entertained as a lifelong peanut butter lover. Jeff is my brand

of choice. Even convinced me to try peanut butter mayo sandwich, which was okay, definitely to put more mayo on there next time. Yes you do. We heard from some butter mayonnaise people who tried it, and we're like, man, I didn't really like it, or I didn't get it so right.

Maybe it's just me. While listening, I couldn't help but think of the color blindness podcast you did, and how cool it was to hear something uh be explained to me because frankly, nobody ever cared to do so, and as much as I love to learn, it never crossed my mind to learn about it. You may be wondering why I show about peanut butter triggered color blindness. Turns out the rest of the world thinks peanut butter is brown.

I cannot imagine opening a jar of delicious green peanut butter and seeing a nasty brown substance, uh, resembling something I don't want to think about eating sometimes. Somehow I thought this for eighteen years for anyone knew the true color of peanut butter was green before anyone told him that. I still get teased about thinking peanut butter as green, but to me, it's as green as green gets. Reality

really is just perception. It's amazing to me that the world can be seen so differently through every single person's eyes. Who know is how many different colors of peanut butter there are out there. Thanks for the show, guys, you keep my days interesting and entertaining. H p S. Your marathon podcast help me uh know what to expect from my first marathon and scared me to death, but I did finish without the unfortunate issues that some people go

through during a race. Congratulations and that is Daniel Volts from Louisville, Kentucky. Nice work, Daniel, Um, I don't know about green peanut butter. I don't. I think the weird orangey brown it is normally is my preference for sure, a K A peanut colored right. Well, if you want to let us know how, um, something we talked about triggered some interesting memory. That kind of thing really fascinates us, so we want to hear it. You can send it to us in an email address it to stuff podcast

did iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works from what Podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M h m hm