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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should Know about PCP.
And yes, we're talking about the PCP. You think we're.
Talking the one from the if you were a child of the seventies and eighties, where you heard that your friend's friend's cousin did it and they carve their face off with a butcher knife and then jumped off a building so they thought they could fly.
Yes, as a matter of fact, that's exactly the PCP we're talking about, Yeah, which stands for By the way, I'm gonna attempt this chemical name.
You're ready, This one's easy, no pressure.
Okay, I don't know how to say the ones. So I'm just gonna that's I think it's kind of important chemically speaking. I think they didn't just put part of it in parentheses for nothing. But I'm just gonna call it one one fennel cyclo hexel, pepper dye and those in the number dye pipper dye, piper dye, probably piper dyne. I think it's those in the know who don't smoke PCP. But oh, I actually took out a syllable this time.
Oh man, this is gold.
So the people who study it call it fen cyclodine, okay, with a pH because it's fat.
Yeah. And if you if you're wondering, like, oh, why do people even study this old street drug from the seventies, it's because it wasn't always that. It was kind of the precursor to the ketamine in a lot of ways, which we'll talk about here and there. And if you think people study ketamine the party drug, well that's true too, because both PCP and ketamine had legitimate uses and were created for legitimate uses like mini drugs, yeah, recreational drugs.
The Germans gave us both heroin and PCP. I think in nineteen twenty six, German chemists created PCP. I'm not sure what they were creating it for. I think this is a time of experimentation in chemistry where you just put stuff together and saw what happened. Sure, So it sat on the shelf for almost thirty years before Park Davis, a pharmaceutical company from the United States which is now part of Pfizer. I believe they came along and they said, Hey,
this would be a gangbuster's tranquilizer sedative something. Let's forget out what to do with this because I just smoke some out back and I feel like a million bucks.
Yeah, I gotta tell you, we should use this stuff.
So they looked at it as an anesthetic at first, and I think it first came to market in like the mid fifties, and by nineteen sixty five they had removed it.
From the market.
The reason they removed it from the market is one it showed very quickly it had a high potential for abuse, because the hippies in San Francisco started smoking it before there was even hippies in San Francisco. Yeah, and it had a slew of side effects that you just really don't want, which is one of the reasons why we'll say you probably shouldn't do PCP.
Yeah, we should have led with that. Sure, Like what if someone heard the first what is this four minutes of the episode.
It turned it out, they're like, I gotta go try PCP.
Yeah, because Josh and Chuck said it exists, right, Yeah, don't do PCP, everybody, you shouldn't do that. And this is not, you know, coming as a sort of satanic, panicky eighties you're gonna jump off a building because you think you can fly kind of thing. It's just not a drug you want to do. So, like you said, you know, uses, well, I don't think we've even said it. Yes, uses really dropped off over the years. It was a very much a bigger deal in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
I think stats that the Grabster found for US saw that between seventy six and seventy seven, use among high school students doubled. In a nineteen seventy nine study, seven percent of high school seniors reported having used PCP in the last year. In twenty thirteen that was down to less than one percent, and then in twenty twenty. Though the stats are a little bit different. I think it went down to like point zero zero zero two percent of the country, not just high school students.
So of adults.
Yeah, like fifty two thousand people. Well, adults, it's just twelve and over.
Hey, you're old enough to smoke PCP. You're old enough to be considered an adult.
That's right. But you can't vote.
It doesn't matter what age you are. If you smoke a lot of PCP, you probably shouldn't vote anyway.
Right. Oh, I thought you're gonna say, then you've earned the right to vote.
No, No, I think the opposite.
Maybe.
I don't know.
So all that to say, it used to be a pretty, you know, frequent recreation, recreational street drug, and it has really really gone out of fashion, in large part because ketamine is not the same exact thing, but it's it's largely the same thing, and that became I guess, the trendier drug to use.
Yes, but it has remained in fashion in certain pockets, especially like deep in the inner cities of Washington, d C.
Oh, yeah, Kansas City, Okay.
I believe it's a town in Connecticut, Hartford.
I don't know if it's Hartford, but there's at least two towns in Connecticut that have interesting a lot of PCP use and they think I read this really great article and vice about why America is the only country in the world basically literally where people use PCP still or ever ever, but it's still as well. Ever, yeah, it never really made it out of America. It was written by Max Daley and sam Irravani. It's definitely worth
a read. But they say, one of the reasons why it's so overlooked and one of the reasons why it's not that studied, and one of the reasons why you're just like, yeah, ketamine replace it is because the people who do use it tend to be marginalized. Unemployed, black inner city men ages mid twenties to mid fifties are typically the people who get busted for PCP. So it's kind of like this viewed as this drug that like a drug of inequality, I think.
Is how they put it.
And that'll come up late too, because some of the myths around it seem to be tied to the people who use it.
Now, I'm not a very smart person, but if if there are like two towns or two cities in Connecticut that are known for PCP, still doesn't that just mean there's someone in two towns in Connecticut that are making PCP.
So no, almost all of the PCP in the world, because it's almost all of the PCP in the United States are still controlled and made by black street gangs in LA, like crips, bloods.
It's weird.
Then, how does it get to these two weird specific places in Connecticut right now?
Those cities that still do and have always smoked PCP it's always been around, are cities that have like clearly some way or another, very deep ties to those same LA street gangs. Because it's really hard to distribute PC, really hard, So for it to show up in Connecticut from LA, there's some there's like somebody's cousin lives there and is controlling the PCP market.
They're getting it to actually from.
Somebody in LA who knows a chemist who will go out into the desert and make hm PCP all day long.
Oh oh, that makes sense because I just I don't know. It seems like there would be like a Walter Whitton Connecticut or something, but they're still out in the desert.
Yes, supposedly it's all coming out from LA.
All right. Well, in seventy eight is when the United States government said, all right, this thing is officially a scheduled to controlled substance, which means, you know a lot of things we've talked about the different drug schedules, but it means that its prevalence of abuse is a big deal, and that it can be addictive, and you know, it's ranked right up there with cocaine and crystal meth and stuff like that, which I think we've covered all those before.
Yeah, and in fact, it shares a precursor drug, pyrad dene, with crystal meth. But it's not that, No, it is not, and it actually does have anesthetic effects. Like one of the side effects of in ingesting PCP one way or another is like, not only do you not really feel pain, you don't experience pain because you're disassociated from your body.
It's a disassociative, hypnotic sedative essentially, and one of the reasons why, sure, you have to add the essentially though comma essentially sure, but one of the reasons why PCP and ketamine were first brought to market was because they produce sedative effects, like you don't really know what's going on after a certain dose. You're not really with it. You actually can fall into a coma with your eyes open, but it doesn't slow your heart rate or pulse or.
Anything like that.
So it really made a Ketamine in particular, found a great use as a battlefield sedative for surgery in like Vietnam, where somebody might have lost a lot of blood. They couldn't hand a traditional sedative or anesthesia, so they gave them ketamine and it did the same trick without dropping their blood pressure even further.
Yeah, and and what's good for the battlefield is good for the rave. But it makes total sense, you know because if you were like, as far as the rave culture goes or went, I don't think is that still a thing? Even I it's got to be somewhere.
It isn't.
It's it's coming back soon because the nineties are so hot right now.
Yeah, somebody's out there raven with their big they're not bell bottoms. Even did this have a name? No, it was just like the pants that had like like two foot what's it called there at the bottom with what's the bottom of your pants, like called the cuff cuff.
The bottom of those big pants.
Yeah, they didn't, but the whole leg was like that. Essentially, it was just the waste that was a generally normal size. The legs were huge. Believe me, buddy, I had more than one pair of those.
I thought they flared. Anything to see you in a pair of those.
I had some cool ones too, but I also had some uncool ones.
We used to when we lived in these warehouses in the West end of Atlanta and ninety nine two thousand would and this is that was a big rave loft over there, Like people would drive from different states to go to these things, thousands of kids, and we used to just sit around and play pavement and laugh and make fun of them in those pants.
And they were doing ketamine, ketamine, ketamine, and you're.
Like, like those losers probably, But where I was going with all this was I guess it makes sense why the PCP and ketamine and that kind of thing would have been because you know, you feel funky, but it doesn't like slow you down, essentially.
No, And in fact, it can actually increase your heart rate and do all sorts of other weird stuff to you.
And what's really odd about.
It is that it has a lot of paradoxical effects on humans. I say, we talk a little bit about how it impacts the brain, and I think that it'll become apparent.
What do you think, Yeah, let's do it.
So it's it's considered a N methyl d aspirate antagonist. NMDA antagonists and NMDA receptors are really important as far as things like memory formation, neuroplasticity, very important stuff. But what they they're triggered by glutamate. And what PCP does is it prevents those ndm A receptors from accepting glutamate and hence firing. And because there's either more glutamate or less glutamate in your body, I think less glutamate floating
around is what it is. A Whole host of other stuff happens, like dopamine and nourep and ephyrin get released, those two and serotonin their reuptake is inhibited, so they're floating around in your your brain even longer.
So that's all the good feely stuff, right.
Your opioid receptors are stimulated as a result, your nicotinic receptors, which control things like your neural muscular activity rapid neural transmission essentially, and then your muscarinic activity, which includes like breathing, your pupil's salivation. All these things are going haywire. And then what else is weird about it is that your central nervous system can be both depressed and excited by
this same drug. This is how this is how nuts and effect it has on your brain, so that you can cycle between like utter sedation to the point of catatonia, and between that and serious agitation where like you see you know, videos of people who are being arrested and they're not like hitting the ground even though they're getting sprayed in the face of bear spray because they're so
on like a rant. So it has like all these really crazy effects, but it all comes down to the fact that it affects your ability to receive glue tomate in your NMDA receptors.
Yeah, and we'll talk a bit more about that sort of reputation as like a superhuman strength, like you know, takes twelve cops to subdue someone on PCP thing. And a little bit what were those people on those videos that you sent me? Okay, so Josh sent me some videos and people I guess the next day or whatever on ketamine or I assume it was the next.
I think it was hours later. It was like hours afterwards.
Yeah, yeah, And they were almost all of them when they were walking like down the sidewalk or whatever, had this backward lean as if they were walking up like a very very steep hill, but it was on solid ground. And then the one guy if it was a very slight incline on the sidewalk and he would take a few steps up and then take a few back, and yeah,
he had. They were all having a hard time, and it was just I don't know, it's just sad to see someone in that sort of a stupor around in the daylight when people are going to work and stuff.
Right, Well, the thing that really kind of makes it worth watching is they're with it enough to know that they shouldn't be walking weird in public, and they need to tell they suspect that they might be.
So it's kind of funny in a way, but it's really not when you really think about it.
You know, well, watching.
Them play it off or try to play it off and just fail utterly at it, that's that's objectively funny to see it.
Well, And it doesn't help that they did the Staying Alive Beg's song cut to it. We used to there was my friend in college used to call not on drugs, but if you were drunk and you were trying to like play it off like you were super sober and walking around. He called that sugarfooting, like you're just you're not just like, oh, I'm just gonna walk down the street thinking left foot, right foot, everything's fine, exactly. You called it sugarfoot in, which always thought was kind funny.
Yeah, there's a term for that, a medical term for it, choreo something. I'm sure I'll turn it up at some point, But basically, it's unwanted muscle movement. So you're trying to just walk, but you're also doing like you're also just just like you're dancing, says, even though you don't mean to and you're trying really hard not to.
Yeah, exactly.
So one of the that's one of the side effects of it, is these unwanted muscle movements. And then also for that reason, in San Francisco, when it first started being abused on the street, the hippies called it wobble weed. Oh, yeah, which makes a lot more sense now that you you know a little bit more about it.
Yeah, And we'll talk about the association with marijuana too, uh, in a little bit. But why don't we take a break? Yeah, yep, all right, we'll put on staying alive and we'll stumble up the sidewalk and we'll you right back, all right. So we talked a little bit about what PCP does to you and sort of in the brain, and also how you can sugar foot up the street. But it's not like, uh, even though it was used as an anesthetic, that that association with sleepiness isn't accurate.
Right, No, it's not.
And like I said, you can go catatonic with your eyes open, but you're still able to move around and do things that you just shouldn't be doing. Like I saw that people will frequently, like try to get off a stretcher even though they're catatonic.
Yeah.
And the reason why it's it's a dissociate and you feel not connected to your body. Your senses are coming in hot and weird and not making any.
Sense to you. You know.
It removes ego boundaries, so your feeling of self and the distinction between you and other people and the rest of the world around you and the supernatural has kind of blurred or fallen away.
Right. I've heard dreamlike from well, to be honest, I've known people have done this and they've said dream like.
I can I could imagine that.
And then also, one of the other things I saw that I thought it was just fascinating is that it's it makes it difficult to tell whether an event has already happened in the past, is going to happen in the future, or is happening.
Now right, the whole time time jump thing, right, Yeah.
Isn't that nuts?
Yeah?
And then of course, because it's a hypnotic sedative that affects your your NMDA receptors that are involved in memory formation, you you frequently black out even though you're walking around doing stuff and even interacting, you probably aren't going to.
Remember most of it.
Yeah, big memory impacts. And the stuff comes on very quickly too, which is one of the I think the historically, like the most addictive kind of recreational street drugs are ones that are really fast acting, and PCP is definitely one of those. What I didn't see, or maybe I just overlooked it is how long it lasts.
It can last for twenty four hours.
Right, it's a long lasting deal. Okay, that's right. I did read that because I remember, like when we did the crack episode. I think I always thought that crack was some long term thing, but was shocked to learn it was just like a super quick high.
Yeah, and I think this can be, but it depends on how.
You take it, right, Should we talk about that?
Yeah, there's different ways you can take it, So let's talk about that.
Yeah, it used to be in the earlier days it was like a liquid PCP a lot of times that
you would take orally, but very quickly. The most recreational use users used it like it came in like a crystalline powder, and they would typically smoke it or snort it like a heroine or a cocaine, I guess, And that became sort of the main way aside from and again I said earlier we were going to talk about the Marijuana Association, that was dipping a marijuana joint or just a regular cigarette, and liquid PCP has you can do that with a lot of drugs are called wet drugs,
and it's it's a thing. And there was some confusion about the names because I heard I knew what SHRM was because I'd heard that in a movie from Tuarantina movie, which one was that really yeah movie. I think it was the one he wrote, only was it true romance or maybe it was pulp fiction. It was Sam Jackson, and he wasn't introu or.
No, I don't believe he was scared anyway.
You smoke enough sherms something something something was the line. And that's the first time I had heard that word. But that's a cigarette that was dipped in embalming chemicals and I think kind of like a prison drug a lot of times, because that was something that you could get apparently easier than you know, regular hard drugs. And I think for a time that was like PCP was sometimes mixed with embalming fluid. Sometimes the just names were
used interchangeably. There was a lot of confusion in the media about embalming fluid and PCP. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I read a lot about it today, and where I landed was sometimes it might have been mixed with PCP, but sometimes people were smoking inbalming fluid as well.
So what I found from my research is that so this is a big thing in like the mid nineties to the early two thousands. Oh really yeah, And that if you were smoking embalming fluid and you got high.
It's because there was PCP in that embalming fluid. Oh, so it was mixed, and that it.
Was yes, and that it was a that I read from somebody, a medical examiner, who said, like, there's there. You don't get high at all from embalming fluid. He's like, I used to mix it myself, and if anybody would have gotten high from it, I've spent more time around it than most people. Never got even the slightest buzz.
So it's the PCP that's making you highcha. And it might not even be embalming fluid in the first place, because PCP has kind of a very distinct chemically smell and taste, and it you could easily pass it off as embalming fluid to somebody who'd never smoked PCP before. The thing that I kind of landed on was that it was mistaken either among like recovery people or the GA or something. The slang term for PCP embalming fluid came to be accepted as Oh, teenagers are now smoking
embalming fluid. By the L seven's, it ended up in the and it became self perpetuating. I think some kind of particularly low intelligent drug dealers were like, oh, we can sell embalming fluid. We're gonna start robbing funeral homes and then actually started selling embalming fluid and it was all just a comedy of errors.
Yeah, that makes sense of why it's so hard to separate fact from fiction online today, because it's all over the place once you start looking into that thing.
Yeah, there's not really any drug ever. Crack used to come close in the eighties. People were hysterical about crack, Crack baby super Predators. Yeah, it was really bad. But as like for duration of like the hysterical moral panic over it, PCP has every other drug beat by a mile because not only is it like urban legend, but that urban legend becomes fact because the media reports it. Yeah, drug abuse organizations say the same thing, the cops say
the same thing. Everybody's saying these same things, like if you'll have superhuman strength, for example, that is not true. You don't get superhuman strength. We'll talk a little more about that. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but it's exactly what you said, is exactly right. There's so much disinformation on PCPs you just end up having to guess here or there about what's true and what's not.
Well, I mean, we can go ahead and talk about it. Some that was, you know, I invoked the Satanic panic.
It was sort of around those same times when we were kids in the late seventies where I mean, I remember PCP was like the scariest sounding thing on the planet, and it was sort of made out to be like, if you do PCP, there's a very good chance that you'll end up dead, and not from like overdosing on PCP, but because you've done something crazy, like you know, try to bake yourself in an oven or something because you
thought you were a cake. And every school, every region, every town had some story or set of stories that were passed around urban legend style. Well, there were urban legends about some friend of a friend or some friend's cousin who who they know for sure did this and they fought fifteen cops and ed used an example of some kid who at a hockey game fought like twenty cops or something. And it's just so funny how those things proliferate. And we're not saying like in PCP, it
was just great. There was no problem with it, but it wasn't what it was made out to be, which was this a lot of times an excuse for cops to beat down a person because all they have to do afterward to say, we suspected they were on PCP and they had crazy look in their eyes and they were super strong. Ye, I mean Rodney King was supposedly on PCP. You heard some cops yelling out the word dust at the beginning of that video. Yeah, he's dusted,
And that happens and happened all the time. I don't think it's quite as common now, but it was a very prominent thing back then.
Yeah, and then cops speak, he's dusted, is raising the alarm that this person is going to try to kill all of us and possibly could so go ahead and use excessive force, And it was used as a defense in the Rodney King trial. He didn't have any PCP in his system, by the way, but that fear, just the very fact that cops are scared of superhuman strength brought on by PCP is one of the things that got those officers off the hook in the Rodney King trial,
the Rodney King beating trial. But just the fact that PCP gives people superhuman strength. Yeah, he didn't know he wasn't on PCP. Ergo, they're not really guilty of using excessive force because he could have been on PCP. And if you strip away that argument, like these police officers were let off for beating a man in a circle, Yeah, because they were afraid he was on PCP, because PCP gives you superhuman strength. Even though that doesn't actually happen.
It's just a total myth that's perpetuated still today.
Oh yeah, it's still around. I think you found this meta analysis from a legal paper that really did some scouring and found two cases where PCP was the sole cause, the sole cause of like a violent behavior or violent episode.
Two out of like hundreds.
Yeah, and we're not saying that, you know, people do crazy, all kinds of crazy things and all kinds of drugs, So we're not saying no one's ever been violent because and had PCP in their system. But the key is did PCP trigger and cause that thing to happen? And the evidence just says that that's just not the case. No.
From what I saw, it amplifies your personality twenty times, I think, is what one person put it.
If you want to beat up people anyway aggressive anyway, then it might.
Then yes, that might be a problem, but you're not going to have superhuman strength. Potentially, the one the one explanation for that, because I did see videos of a dude on PCP who was getting bear sprayed in the face multiple times and just kind of wiped his eyes and kept walking around.
Was stay alive wing No, I had it on.
Mute, so as possible, it was, but he kept getting tased repeatedly and nothing. He didn't have superhuman strength. He was just disassociated from his senses, so he wasn't experiencing pain. So you will not move away from noxious stimulized stimuli like bear spray or tasers because it's not coming through.
And finally, not superhuman strength.
That is not superhuman strength.
And there's also a really really like widespread idea that at least one person on PCP is snapped perfectly good.
Handcuffs because of those superhuman strength.
Yeah, it's just probably not the case that that ever actually happened. So there's a lot of myths around this. And again it's like you kind of hinted at like we're not defending PCP. We're not saying like guys. PCP's got such a bad rap. There's a lot of really bad stuff that can come out of ingestion PCP. It's just that superhuman strength is not one of them. That's just a myth. And it has been used. It's been argued to target those marginalized communities who use PCP and used.
It's been used to justify excessive force. So much so I saw that the non or no less than lethal weapon industry, tasers, bear spray, all that stuff that did not exist until the cops started being criticized for using excessive force and they had the the decision to either use their police baton, their nightstick or their gun. That's all they had, and they they when they encountered PCP users, they needed another option.
So that's that's why we have that.
Yes, that is why to subdue PCP users. That's why that whole industry exists.
That's why it began.
Is that why I have bear spray hanging up at my camp on the wall.
That's right, because of PCP users in Washington, d C. In anatomy.
I don't want to spray a bear, even I don't.
I think you're okay if a bear's coming at you. You can. You can spray that bear.
I mean I would, and that's why it's there. I just said I don't want to.
Like.
My first line of defense at at camp is I have an air horn. Good so annoying my friends, drive away the bear, drive away my friends on Sunday morning. Yeah, and then the bear spray would be the last resort.
I'll tell you what you do. Chuck this way. Do you got a bear coming at you? You lay down? What is it prostrate when you're face down?
I don't remember.
Let's say it is. Okay, yeah, I think it is.
I don't remember. But you're laying face down, pretending you're dead. Wait till the bear comes over and kind of moves you with its paw and you roll over and spray it in the face with the bear spray. Kind of like that whole trope where you roll somebody over and they're holding like a bunch of grenades with the pins pulled out, same.
Thing, but with bear spray.
That's a great idea.
I think so too. I think we should go try it.
That Elizabeth Banks should have made PCP Bear instead of Cocaine Bear. I know we disagree about that, Yes, we do. But what we can agree is that the story about the crew of the Titanic movie, not the boat itself, but when James Cameron was making Titanic. This sounds so much like an urban legend, but it's actually true that at some I think it was another crew member that part. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it was another crew member.
The mystery still like they've never fully.
Okay, Well, they dosed some chowder with PCP and dosed everyone who ate that chowder, which was a lot or most of the crew, and it really happened, and I think different stories come out of that.
You know.
I think some people had a really hard time. Some people probably loved it.
Yeah they apparently there was a congo line and wheelchair racing in the er at the local hospital. But then other people, yeah, we're not having a good time at all. Jinks Cameron said that one of the crew members, I think he said a PA stabbed him in the face of a pen and oh wow, he said.
He was just.
Laughing, laughing, laughing about it, like like James Cameron was laughing about having been stabbed in the face of a pen.
The PA said this is for Avatar that hasn't even happened yet.
Right, But this is I think the the biggest star that got it was Bill Paxton because they were shooting those current day shots and like Nova Scotia or something.
Boy, I hope that that old lady Old Rose didn't happen.
Was at a restaurant.
She did not, Man, could you imagine?
No, that would be really bad. We don't want our senior friends taking PCP, especially not accidentally.
Her acting might have improved, you never know. I thought she did so, so she wouldn't very good in my opinion. So you want to take a break, Sure, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about some problems with getting high on PCP, Chuck. One of the things about PCP that makes it so vexing, yeah, is that the symptoms that it can produce are really undesirable, and an overdose threshold is not very high at all. It basically dances along the top end of a normal dose.
So a normal dose is between five and ten milligrams. I saw as low as one, yeah, but after.
About ten milligrams, or maybe even at ten milligrams, you might start exhibiting the exact same symptoms of somebody in the throes of a schizophrenic episode.
Yeah, and we'll talk about that in a second. But part of the problem there, I mean, that's a problem period. But part of the problem is the dosage, especially if you're smoking fry or churm or something like that. Is I'm sure the dosage isn't that accurate when you're dipping a joint or a cigarette and liquid, it's probably hard to tell how much is on there.
No, but I read that you can control it much more easily. You just take it hit and wait a couple minutes, and then sure if you if you start to come down, you take another hit. And I saw it like an old cop say, you can you know if you smoke it, you know with intent, I guess you can stay high for twenty four hours just from one one shurm.
Stick, right, Which means if you're if this is something that you know to do and recreationally do often, then you probably know what you're doing. But if someone's like, here, try this thing and then ed, you know, use the example of of you know, someone who like finds the joint on the street or something, and I'm sure that's happened.
But I kind of lump that in with that that eighties hysteria of like, you know, you might come across a cigarette that's been laced with PCP that you don't know about, or or buy a marijuana joints laced with PCP. I'm sure that really didn't happen very.
Much there, So, No, it does not happen very much. Those stories are, they abound, but they're also really really rare. But there are stories of people who have done horrific things on PCP. Sure the qualifier is though, that they already had pre existing mental disorders, and the PCP does not do any favors for you if you have a pre existing mental condition, even if it hasn't come out
yet or emerged yet, it'll make it emerge. And they argue that it's possible that even if you didn't have one that was going to come out eventually, PCP could conceivably, especially after prolonged use, essentially infect you with schizophrenia.
Yeah, that's the one I've seen more often than anything else. Is it will exacerbate something like that, but it can also Why cann't we think of the word install.
And still delivered, still produced.
Induce, produce produce schizophrenia. And you know, a little bit of a silver lining on that is they actually can use PCP now and do use PCP as far as studying schizophrenia, and you know how those two are related in humans.
Yeah, that's a big They give PCP to primates and study what happens to study schizophrenia, and then weirdly, they're also looking at PCP as a way to study or produce drugs that treat Alzheimer's because schizophrenia apparently is associated with a lack of glutamate. Remember, PCP inhibits glutamate and Alzheimer's results from they think an overabundance of glutamate in the in the brain. And so PCP has both of those effects that can induce schizophrenia. It could treat Alzheimer's conceivably.
So I think the fact that it has so many terrible myths around it has really made people cautious about suggesting doing research using PCP.
Yeah, it's not like researching microdosing mushrooms or something like that now.
But there is a there is a whole thread of inquiry into it to say like okay, there's there's this is doing some stuff to the brain that we should be studying.
Yeah. It can also induce seizures. It can really ramp up your heart rate. It can it can produce rapid involuntary eye movement. It's called nice stagmus.
Yeah, not just like side to side or up and down, but in rotary fashion is one of the ways. So your eyes are just going in a.
Cartoon style, yes exactly. Yeah. Uh. And it just seems to be sort of all over the map as far like a very unpredictable drug as far as its sedative qualities, and then it's sort of amping you up qualities.
Yes exactly.
That's what I was saying earlier, where you kind you can just vacillate between extremely digitation and catatonia essentially, and on the same trip over and over again. Really interesting, It is extremely interesting. One of the other big problems with it, And this is why I said you probably shouldn't vote if you are a frequent PCP user, not because you're a member of a marginal community, but because you probably have some really strange beliefs about yourself and your place.
In the universe.
Yeah.
One of the big.
Things that comes out of it is especially prolonged use and chronic use is a shift in your spiritual and religious beliefs. And typically it kind of comes down to, Oh, I'm a god, and I need to just be hanging out and not doing much because that's what gods do.
Yeah, And that's also kind of ties back into the even though it's not superhuman strength, just a feeling of invincibility. But I've also seen that it's not so much an invincive. Usually it's not an invincibility of like I can take anyone on who wants to fight me. It's more of like I'm invincible in a good way, like I can do whatever I want. Again, not suggesting that it's like a motivational tool or something like that, sure, but it's just one of the things that can happen.
And then conversely, if you are feeling, like say, socially anxious, you're probably going to experience profound paranoia. It will amplify it one way or another. It's the same thing with LSD that wholes set and setting thing right.
So what else is there, Chuck, Well, if.
You become addicted to PCP, there isn't like a sort of a straight ahead pharmaceutical treatment. It's gonna you know you're gonna have to wean yourself off of it through therapy and treatment. Basically, I think ed did find that chre prout here. I go chlor promozine core promisine, which is a drug. It can help reverse the effects if you're like like overdosing on PCP, but it's not like the kind of thing you used to break an addiction.
No, and you can get addicted.
It does have a high incidence of dependence because it's schedule too exactly. Not everything schedule two is actually addictive, But in this case it's actually correct that it stimulates your reward center so much it produces euph you that you want it again. But also it can physically alter your brain, not just to make you believe that you are a god or something on earth, but also to make that threshold for your reward system higher.
So it's harder to.
Feel good even a normal on a normal basis, and in turn, you end up having to ingest more and more amounts of PCP to get high. And that's a classic hall mark of dependency.
Yep, classic hall mark of many drugs, because you use more and more and then that's just becomes more and more dangerous.
Again, the withdrawal symptoms are really bad too. You can you can very frequently fall into major depression that can last weeks.
Yeah.
Uh, sometimes some of the symptoms don't ever go away, like you might have trouble talking or speaking. It's just not it's not a good thing to get into, especially long term.
Yeah, and it's not the seventies anyway. What are you doing with PCP these days?
Did you see that Saturday Night Live skit with Tracy Morgan and Will Ferrell and Matthew Broderick.
No, is that what you said? Yes, that that link took me straight to a clip of The Ladies Man.
Oh right, That's why I gave you the timestamp at the end. It's like at the end of the whole episode.
All right, I missed that. I was like, what has the Ladies Man got to do with this? I was like, I love the Ladies Man bit, but right.
No, it had nothing to do with it.
Although it was it was basically like, uh, inside the Actors Studio kind of type thing, but for comedy, so it was real highbrow. Matthew Broderick's the host, and he was focusing on drug based comedy that had been inspired by Cheech and Chong, and he featured Orbit and zach
or something like that. Who did PCP comedy. Yeah, Tracy Morgan was zach or or whatever, and Will Ferrell was Orbit, and they played little clips from their record, their hit records from the seventies, and it's just them like screaming about how there's snakes in the toilet and shooting the toilet with the shotgun. It's it's really funny, even if this stuffed mythical, it's it's just so easy to make really hilarious jokes off of PCP.
I mean, that's what comedy is. No one's going to come along and say, like, actually, and that's not what PCP does.
Right, exactly.
That's good stuff.
Yep.
And then one other thing, if you want maybe a less than accurate depiction of PCP, you can check out the movie from nineteen eighty two called.
Desperate Lives that the hell Hunt.
Yes, a teenage Helen Hunt smokes PCP, jumps out of a second story window in her high school and becomes paralyzed as a result.
Yeah, that was Was that an actual after school special or it's possible it had that stink?
Yeah, definitely it was definitely a made for TV anti drug movie, but I'm not sure if it came on after school or not.
I remember very vivid memories of that one, and then I know I mentioned it before, probably in one of the marijuana episodes the uh Chachi in Charge.
Who's the guy Scott Bayo.
Scott bo was in one on marijuana and I remember that's the first time I heard a bong because he smoked out of a bomb and had that bubbling and it's like, what is that? It was like it sounds like like rice crispies or something, and I was a little kid. I was just like, I've never heard anything like that. Yeah, So there you have it. Scott Bo and Helen Hunt, the kid, those two together.
Yeah.
Apparently Helen Hunt was in two anti PCP.
Okay, I thought that one was an LSD one two PCPs. Good for her.
Yeah, that's how her career started.
Yeah, and then she went on to star in the show Matt about PCP.
That's right, and then she did at a guest spot with Orbit and Zach Manta.
I gotta watch that.
Yeah, it's at the very end. I think it's the less Kid.
All right, let me cue it up.
All right, well, well Chuck's queuing it up everybody. That means it's time for listener mail.
Oh wait, so I can't watch it right now?
Sure we'll wait. Okay, it's pretty funny, but you can't turn it up. You have to put it on your headphones because we can't pay for the copyright usage.
Let me find me boys here, anyone funnier than Tracy.
Morgan, I don't think so.
I love that guy. So this is about manners. Hey, guys, it's been a million years at your old Canadian Palamanda Hear, who missed the Toronto Live show. So Amanda says, I remember Amanda many moons ago when stuff you should know was new, and my boy Grant was about eleven. Chuck sent me an email response that encouraged Grant to read more, and he did. Thanks for that. He's twenty seven and now, oh goodness, and a carpenter living in Calgary who read
your book. We are still avid listeners, and you guys kept the company on his recent drive from Toronto. You're the best companions on drives and while doing household chores, while doing so many other things. Anyway, about manners. My grandmother was a stickler for good manners, as were my parents. I passed out on to Grant and we have often been told how good manners make situations so much easier.
I was recently asking in a professional development setting what the best advice for life I ever received was, and obviously I responded with what I told my kid and now stepkids. Manners are free and they're a social lubricant. It always gets a laugh and then once considered a nod and oh, that's right.
And then everybody has a sandwich and goes their separate.
Wings the dining table. If someone forgets their napkin on their lap or cuts their food all at once instead of eating it bite by bite, my partner and I will say if you were invited to dine with the queen, And it always gets a big eye roll and giggle at the table and make sure that the napkins are also in lapse though, and the food is cut properly. It's a fun game for all. I hope you have a marvelous day. Can't wait to hear the next episode
after all these years. Stuff you should know is rock and roll nice?
That was Amanda, That was Amanda.
Manners are free, though, I like that. I don't know so much. The social lubricant part I might lose because manners are free is just so succinct.
So I kind of like that, you know, I was thinking, Remember, I was kind of railing about elbows on the table just being so dated and unnecessary. I've been thinking about it since then, and while I still agree that it's a great example of people being overly uptight about manners, as if their identity is associated with it, and if you violate it, you're somehow insulting them, I disagree with
that part. But I realized that being aware of whether your elbows are on the table or not makes you more aware of everything you're surrounding, the people with you, the food you're eating.
Yeah, it just makes you.
So I'm kind of done with you keeping your elbows up the table, not because somebody told you to, because you can do whatever you want as far as your elbows are concerned, as long as you don't put them in somebody else's space, but because it makes you more mindful.
Don't dip your elbows in your partner soup. But I do want to say there's a couple of elbows on the table methods though, if you're if you're in the middle of eating and you've got like your elbow on the table and your hunch forward and you're eating with the other hand. I think that's kind of the rule. But like, if you're eating and you're done and you're having conversation, to push the plate away and put both elbows on the table and pat your hands together in
a pensive way while you think of something smart and funny. Like, that's a whole different deal.
Yeah, well that's elegant.
So I've been training myself by putting the little dab of Momo's poop on each of my elbows right before dinner to make sure that I don't put them on the dinner table.
It's working really well.
That poop stays on your elbows belongs.
That was from Amanda, what was your son's name? The one you inspired.
Grant who has been listening since eleven and is now you know, sixty.
That's awesome.
Thanks for listening to us, Amanda and Grant, and thank you for listening to this episode.
And if you want to get in touch with us.
Like Amanda did and Grant by proxy, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.